Around the Web

For the week of Saturday, January 30 through Friday, February 5.

1) In City Journal, Peter Sloterdijk on how "the modern democratic state pillages its productive citizens."

2) In the Chronicle of Higher Education, David Glenn on classroom multitasking:

A student today who moves his attention rapid-fire from text-messaging to the lecture to Facebook to note-taking and back again may walk away from the class feeling buzzed and alert, with a sense that he has absorbed much more of the lesson than he actually has.

3) Karen Wilkin of the WSJ discusses "The Drawings of Bronzino" on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through April 18.

4) In the WSJ, Lee Rosenbaum interviews Thomas P. Campbell, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

5) At Gramophone, the 2010 Grammys.

6) On Uncommon Knowledge, Peter Robinson asks Hoover fellows Richard Epstein and John Taylor, "Are we all Keynesians now?"

7) At The New Criterion: Anthony Daniels, Ayn Rand, and a raging debate. 

8) In Standpoint, Charles Saumarez Smith on the "civilizing servants":

We have got used in recent years to the idea of the professional bureaucrat as a term of abuse, as if all bureaucrats are intellectually second-rate, interested only in the perpetuation of systems of existing management and not in innovation. But these art bureaucrats of early Victorian England were something else: tirelessly hard-working, writing books in the morning, serving on committees in the afternoon, endlessly networking and socialising in the evening, with a dedicated sense of mission to create and reform institutions of art for the educational benefit of a broad public.

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