PolyArchive

Fall is upon us once again. A new crop of students will begin doctoral studies, and many more will take classes in preparation for applying to PhD programs. It seems the ideal moment to share an old favorite. Matt Might, a professor in Computer Science at the University of Utah, created The Illustrated Guide to […]

  “I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure, which is: Try to please everybody.”  – Herbert Swope

“Spring passes and one remembers one’s innocence. Summer passes and one remembers one’s exuberance. Autumn passes and one remembers one’s reverence. Winter passes and one remembers one’s perseverance.” –Yoko Ono

Working in higher education, I deal with helicopter parents and lawnmower parents on a daily basis now. Overparenting is an incredible disservice to children and young adults. Not only do they experience setbacks, negative feedback, and garden-variety frustrations of life as insurmountable failures and barriers, they often lack the savvy to safeguard themselves from actual […]

One of  the first TED talks made available online in 2006, Sir Ken Robinson’s “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” remains the most-watched talk on the TED.com website. In addition to the speaker’s excellent rhetorical techniques (which, indeed, have helped set the tone for many future TED and TEDx events), the subject matter, if anything, rings even […]

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”— G.K. Chesterton, “On Running After One’s Hat.”

I thought, on the train, how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes & barrens & wilds. It still dwarfs & terrifies & crushes. The rivers […]

You Want a Social Life, with Friends Kenneth Koch You want a social life, with friends. A passionate love life and as well To work hard every day. What’s true Is of these three you may have two And two can pay you dividends But never may have three. There isn’t time enough, my friends– […]

“Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.”–Paul Valery

from Anima Hominis (Chap.5) William Butler Yeats We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing amid our uncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the most […]