Quote

Diminished circumstances had no effect on his sense of what was honorable: after The Spectator sent him a check for a piece it had accepted but was unable to run for a lack of space, he refused to write for the magazine again.

Louis Menand

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Louis Menand
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: January 21
Academic
Historian
Writer
Syracuse
New York
Pieces
Checks
Refused
Space
Magazines
Spectators
Write
Accepted
Magazine
Sense
Lack
Honorable
Running
Effect
Unable
Writing
Piece
Check
Effects
Sent
Spectator
Circumstances
Journalist
Diminished

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The short story is not as restrictive as the sonnet, but, of all the literary forms, it is possibly the most single-minded. ...at the end there has to be the literary equivalent of the magician's puff of smoke, an outcome that is both startling and anticipated.
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The job of the critic, as it might have been conceived in the 1950's or 1960's, was some kind of role of moral arbiter for people, not a huge number of people, but people who were, you know, fairly educated, well-placed people.
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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.
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I don't think that you want to see universities in any way trying to have any kind of quota system about political views, or views in general. You want the market to work in the way the market works.
Louis Menand
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My own view is that the general education curriculum that a college picks has to be appropriate for the kind of student body that it has.
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We have much wisdom to gain by learning to understand other people's cultures and permitting ourselves to accept that there is more than one version of reality.
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A person whose financial requirements are modest and whose curiosity, skepticism, and indifference to reputation are outsized is a person at risk of becoming a journalist.
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Quotable quotes are coins rubbed smooth by circulation.
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Universities are set up to get people to work together by having them disagree with each other.
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It’s all in the genes”: an explanation for the way things are that does not threaten the way things are. Why should someone feel unhappy or engage in antisocial behavior when that person is living in the freest and most prosperous nation on earth? It can’t be the system! There must be a flaw in the wiring somewhere.
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The difficulty with coming up with a curriculum is mainly that faculty aren't trained to think in terms of general education. They're trained to think in terms of their own discipline, or their specialty.
Louis Menand
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If you write for the New Yorker, you always get people critiquing your grammar, you can count on it. So, because a lot of New Yorker readers are kind of, you know, amateur grammarians and so you do get a lot of that.
Louis Menand
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Obviously input is helpful to faculty in trying to come up with a curriculum, but ultimately it's the faculty's job to know what students need to know. Make a decision about it and present it.
Louis Menand
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Just in higher education alone, more people go to college now, by enormous amounts, than went to college in the '50's and '60's. So that represents a whole new literate public that's a consumer of literature, of news, of print, of, you know, opinion. And that's a bigger audience and much more diverse audience than it used to be.
Louis Menand
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Cognitive science is a rapidly developing area, so it could be that there are some surprises around the corner. That does seem to be kind of where the trend line is leading.
Louis Menand
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I think that the idea that there's such a thing as a national literature that's somehow uniquely expressive of a national soul or culture or mentality is probably also something that nobody really believes in anymore.
Louis Menand
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I don't think the same curriculum fits every student body.
Louis Menand
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I'm not one of the people who has a kind of scholarly hat and writes in a certain way for an academic audience and then puts on a public intellectual hat and writes a different way for a different kind of readership. I generally write the way I write, no matter what and it seems to have worked for me.
Louis Menand
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You want diversity in any intellectual organization. I mean, that's how good ideas arise.
Louis Menand
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Harvard 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 Menand