One of the oddities about responses that you get to what you write, if you get a fair number of them, is that people have very different ideas of what you said.
Louis MenandFor the kind of places I've written for and the kind of writing that I've done, the general way to think about your audience is to think about somebody who's like yourself, but in a completely different discipline.
Louis MenandHarvard has something that manages, I think, to provide a lot of options for students, but still fairly prescriptive about the kinds of subjects that the courses ought to cover.
Louis MenandLiterature is being taught as though it were only political medicine or political poison-a view that is not only illiberal but illiterate.
Louis Menand