A good liberal education has three dimensions—learning, teaching, and citizenship building—each of which the journalist Fareed Zakaria has mishandled enough in his own academic career so that he misrepresents them for the rest of us in In Defense of a Liberal Education. I review that book in Bookforum’s summer issue, but before the predictable coronation gets too far along, here are a few anticipatory observations that I hope will give Zakaria and his admirers some pause.

In 2010, when houses and jobs and retirement accounts were vanishing in a vapor of financial abstraction, Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, a book about the pleasures of skilled manual labor, seemed more epochal than he’d probably anticipated. It pled a straight and lucid case: In our obsession with the “knowledge economy” we denigrate the trades, but the trades instill their own kind of knowledge, teaching reverence for the physical world. A motorcycle mechanic with a Ph.D. in philosophy, Crawford appeared in the New York Times wearing rolled-up sleeves and looking uncannily like Dominic West. One hundred and

One could say, with no snark intended, that back in the year 2000, twenty-nine-year-old Mohsin Hamid was the ultimate bourgeois bohemian. He had just published a well-received first novel. He lived on lovely Cornelia Street, in a corner of the West Village once inhabited by artists and writers but, by the dawn of the twenty-first century, affordable mainly to investment bankers and management consultants. As it happened, this debut novelist was also a management consultant. And in a deal of sugar-shock sweetness, his employer, McKinsey & Company—famous for overworking its bright young climbers—allowed this graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law

Within the American Left, there’s a growing consensus that the gains won by postwar liberalism have been squandered or otherwise lost. A famous set of graphs by UC Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez depicts a return to pre–New Deal levels of economic inequality, and commentators have bemoaned the advent of a second Gilded Age. The American working class is squeezed tight, while a tiny ruling elite lives larger than ever. And this time, proletarian institutional counterweights—labor unions, populist political organizations—have degraded to the point that they appear unable to do anything but lose ground. The ruling class now seems to rule

If you like the idea of efficient markets, then Bob Swarup’s Money Mania is not the book for you. Swarup, who has a Ph.D. in cosmology but has spent most of his career in the world of high finance, delivers this scabrous appraisal of those who cling to the misconception that humans are rational: “The dedicated economist is a learned nymphomaniac in theory, his or her virginity still intact due to never having actually met a real human being on their academic travels.” In his view, we are not so much Homo economicus—the ideological construct much beloved by those selfsame

In the American-history textbook I used in my public high school, the chapter that covered Reconstruction included a photo of Thaddeus Stevens, the nineteenth-century radical Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, who appeared, to judge by the evidence of this daguerreotype, to have been in a foul mood. I distinctly remember how the photo’s caption referenced Stevens’s glowering, stormy countenance as an outward and visible sign of his spiteful scorn for the vanquished Confederacy. As far as the textbook’s authors were concerned, such vengeance—and only such vengeance—accounted for what they seemed to believe was overly harsh and restrictive federal rule over the

Fanaticism has an unerring ability to undermine its most cherished values. The fanatic’s fog of irrationality and rage typically renders him (and the most powerful fanatics are reliably hims) not only incapable of successfully pursuing imagined goals, but often only effective in damaging or destroying them. The thugs who broke into the offices of the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo yesterday and murdered twelve people in the name of God and religion no doubt imagined that they were “avenging blasphemy.” But in reality, they committed an act of supreme blasphemy. They insulted, traduced, and denigrated the Prophet Muhammad, Islam, and

I doubt any writer has suffered longer over the plight of American unions or described their troubles more vividly than Thomas Geoghegan. His first book, Which Side Are You On? (1991), managed to make the struggle to revive what he called the “dumb, stupid mastodon” of organized labor seem heroic, even as the author feared it might be hopeless. Mixing personal anecdotes with his deep knowledge of history and law, Geoghegan, who has been toiling in Chicago as a union-side attorney since Jimmy Carter was a failing president, narrated the movement’s decline through a series of poignant and/or outrageous tales: