November 30, 2017

From The New Yorker:

In 2007, the legislature in Des Moines created the Generation Iowa Commission, to study why college graduates were leaving; two years later, a fifth of the members of the commission had themselves left the state.

From The Economist:

"The most important thing is not meeting the demand but creating the demand,” says Alibaba’s Mr Zhang.

From The New York Times (on Elizabeth Strout's Anything is Possible):

This audacious novel is about small-town characters struggling to make sense of past family traumas.

From Harper's:

People who desire to undergo an elective limb amputation are likeliest to choose the left leg.

From The TLS (Clare Carlisle on Books of the Year 2017):

Each year yields a fresh crop of Guides, Handbooks and Reassuringly Short Introductions to philosophical thinkers and topics. The best of these cheerful paperbacks are the unsung heroes of academic life: they are read widely, and as profitably by professors as by undergraduates. This year I learned a lot from Simon Oliver’s Creation: A guide for the perplexed (Bloomsbury), which begins with Genesis and ends with the contemporary environmental crisis – but its heart is an account of Thomas Aquinas’s profound theological vision that is almost dazzling in its lucidity. In a different genre, yet equally adept in combining depth and accessibility, is Francis Spufford’s True Stories and Other Essays (Yale), a delightfully intelligent collection of writings on polar exploration, Soviet Russia, literature and Christianity. Most of these essays have appeared elsewhere, but reading them together felt both stimulating and luxurious, and left me with renewed admiration for Spufford’s agility, range and insight.