We're in an era in which we want to believe people have roughly equal potential. IQ gives the lie to that.

I believe that a core problem with undergraduate education, especially at research universities like Harvard, Stanford, NYU, etc, is that most teaching is done by PhDs, who by temperament, training, interests, and rewards are researchers first. So they spend most of their time and energy probing a snip of a field's cutting edge. In my view, the attributes needed to be a transformative undergraduate instructor are pretty orthogonal to that. It would seem that undergraduate education would be superior if there was a separate track for teaching faculty.

I believe the personal essay is underrated for both writer and reader. It affords the writer great freedom: to speak personally yet invoke others' ideas, to be rational and/or emotional, to be confident or admit doubt.

Some parents let kids "learn on their own skin" and many of those kids end up, as adults, languishing on their parents' sofas.

Liberalism's key principle is to redistribute wealth from the haves to the have nots. That takes money from the entities with the greatest potential to improve society (for example, corporations that create jobs, invent life-saving medicines, etc.) and redistributes it to the people, whom on average, will never contribute more to society than to hold a menial job.

I think people's feeling the need to be more dependent on others is caused more by the lack of good-paying jobs and by today's zeitgeist that insists it takes a village. That's disempowering although possibly true for many people.

Entrepreneurship may be the most under-taught subject.