Tag: social mobility
Revolutions Take Generations – The Atlantic
The Bastille looms large in the revolutionary imagination. When Paris crowds seized the French king’s fortress in July 1789, they unwittingly created a model for every subsequent upheaval. From the Russian Revolution through the “color revolutions” of the early 2000s to today’s calls for an “intifada revolution,” would-be revolutionaries imagine their movements as versions of the one in 1789: brusque, often violent ruptures in a nation’s political life that incise a line of demarcation in time, dividing the old-regime
The New Case for Social Climbing
I was born to be a social climber. The Evita score was ever present on my grandparents’ stereo when I was growing up, and I idolized Eva Perón, who made her way from poverty to the highest echelons of government and society. She was a woman who, at least from the musical’s point of view, saw clearly where she was in life and decided she wasn’t going to stay there. What did a tiny thing like class background matter to
Stop Donating to Your Elite University
During the peak of the pandemic, John Katzman and I had a standing phone date at 7:30 on Friday mornings. Katzman usually walked along the beach near his house in the Hamptons while we spoke. I’d sit in my office, try to visualize the beauty of Long Island’s southeastern shore, and listen.
Katzman is astonishingly knowledgeable about the American educational system. He founded Princeton Review, the test-prep behemoth, in the early 1980s, and has founded several other start-ups since.
A World Without White People
A man wakes to find himself transformed. He looks around, seeking his bearings as he tries to come to terms with what has happened to him overnight, perhaps after uneasy dreams. He looks at his hand, which he knows like … well, like the back of his hand. It is unfamiliar, the hand of another. He seeks out his reflection. The man who looks back at him is a stranger.
These are the opening beats of Mohsin Hamid’s latest novel,