What I'm Reading
Three books
I just finished The Technological Republic, by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska, CEO and head of corporate affairs, respectively, at Palantir Technologies. I was most of the way through the book when I saw it reviewed in the WSJ, a review which discloses hardly anything about what is actually in the book.
I will not review it here. I will say that the authors refer to and/or quote Thomas Hart Benton, Jackson Pollock, Jack Kerouac1, Rene Girard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Isaiah Berlin, Herbert Hoover, and John Dewey. . .and that is just between pages 156 and 161. So the book reinforced my belief that one can find plenty of broad intellectual curiosity in the business community.
Remember what I wrote in my White Paper for a Network-Based University?
Many of the faculty will be in business. They may teach subjects about which they are passionate but that have no connection with their jobs. Or they may teach courses that convey skills that they use in their workplace. Some of their motivation will be to participate in the network, attracting students to join their firms. Some of their motivation will be a desire to teach and to connect with young people.
Speaking of new approaches to education, I’ve just started what I call “outside-in” reading of Who Needs College Anymore? by Kathleen deLaski. With non-fiction, first I read the cover material, then the introduction, then the conclusion or last chapter. Then I scan the table of contents and jump into the parts that seem most intriguing to me. Only after that do I read the book linearly, if I do so at all.
The good news is that deLaski seems willing to re-think higher education from the perspective of what young people need. But I may be more biased toward blowing up the current system than she would be.
The third book is Day of Infamy, by Walter Lord. First published in 1957. It interests me because I think of the October 7 attack by Hamas as more analogous to Pearl Harbor than to 9/11.
I wonder how Kerouac got in here. His Beat Generation opus, On the Road, came out in 1957, before even Boomers were old enough to read it. I read it in 1969, inspired by references in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Karp, the more senior of the two authors, was 2 years old in 1969, the year that Kerouac died as a forgotten icon. So what the ????
For some reason, Jack Kerouac is pretty well-known in european academic/intellectual spheres. Karp having studied in Germany, maybe it’s where he picked it up.
Arnold wrote: "So the book reinforced my belief that one can find plenty of broad intellectual curiosity in the business community." Many academics suppose that this quality is found only among themselves, but they are mistaken. Before retirement as a tax and business lawyer I worked closely for years with business executives and found that a good many of them were far more intellectually perspicacious than academics or for that matter media figures recognize.