“Spying and novel writing are made for each other,” John le Carré once wrote. “Both call for a ready eye for human transgression and the many routes to betrayal. Those of us who have been inside the secret tent never really leave it.” Le Carré’s enigmatic gift as a writer wasn’t simply that he could draw on his experience of having once been a British spy. He brought a novelist’s eye into the secret world, and the habits of espionage to his writing. Far more than knowledge of tradecraft, this status—at once outsider and insider—enabled him to uncover truths about the corrupting nature of power: His novels are infused with the honesty of an outsider, but they could only have been written by a man who knows what it is like to be inside the tent.
During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent, Townsend found. What’s going on? The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade. But that brings little comfort to American scholars, who have begun to wonder what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before.
“Wisconsin Death Trip” is 50 years old this year, and it’s an anniversary worth heeding. Lesy’s unclassifiable book earns its portentous title, and its tone has influenced many disparate works of art. It is a haunting backdoor into history and a raw experiment in feeling. It has never been, as the fissures in American life deepen, more relevant.
In 1999, MIT made the shocking admission that the university had discriminated against its women scientists … and promised to do better. The 16 women who had challenged the status quo, most notably Nancy Hopkins, the reluctant de facto leader, were thrilled but eager to return to their roles as elite scientists.
They largely moved on. So did the Boston Globe reporter who broke the story, Kate Zernike, trading her higher education beat for a national correspondent role at the New York Times. But nearly two decades later, the #MeToo movement compelled her to revisit the moment for a new book, “The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science.”
I don’t care to remember what you call,
inaccurately, the fine old days.