Back in the stone age when I was an undergraduate major in English lit at Pundit U, we read two kinds of texts.  There were poems, which we read quite slowly and deliberately, and there were novels and plays that we read in great gulps.  In history, back in those halcyon days of yore, we also read whole books in big gulps.

The big gulp approach was one reason I liked the subjects I did. Foxes tend to like long and rambling books, and hedgehogs like denser, more compact texts as a general rule.  That’s a matter of personal preference and learning style; for vulpine readers like me, sitting down with a nice long history that will open up new vistas or give you a rich, detailed new perspective on old ones is among life’s great pleasures.  I would far rather read a book of history than a dense and compact philosophical treatise. For that matter, I spend more time reading novels than poems, and I like opera better than art songs, narratives better than lyrics.

But apart from this matter of personal learning style, what I’ve found is that many of my students don’t know what to do when confronted by a whole book.  Some try to study it as intensively as they would try to study a chapter in a work of philosophy or political theory.  They spend hours and hours on their reading, and often end up angry and unfulfilled.  They’ve spent an inordinate amount of time preparing, but they rarely feel they have mastered the text.  And when the discussion in class focuses on other aspects of the book in question, their frustration grows.

Others read through an assigned book the way they get through their casual reading.  They read at forty to sixty pages an hour, take no notes, and give little thought to the content beyond the impressions of the moment.  If they are diligent, their eyes have indeed scanned every word in the whole three hundred-page book, but anything that sticks in the student’s memory got there by chance and two days later he or she won’t be able to say anything coherent about the book’s content or point of view.

The easy thing to do for a grumpy old professor when faced with these reactions is to throw up his hands in the traditional gesture of professorial despair, and launch into one of those eloquent and ever-popular rants, ancient already in the days of Socrates, about how young people today have no attention span, don’t know anything and don’t know hard work.

It is all true, and has been true since Socrates was a sprout, but repeating traditional laments doesn’t help either students or professors wrestling with big fat books in political studies seminars.  As I’ve reflected on this problem, I’m increasingly aware that reading serious books – not textbooks and not tracts of theory or philosophy – is a skill that not everybody learns.  I’ve been reading dozens and even hundreds of books a year for so long that these reading skills are second nature to me; I don’t think about how to read serious books that aren’t textbooks anymore than I think about how to ride a bicycle.

As I teach, though, I see that not everybody learns how to do this in high school.  Through no fault of their own, many students are raised on textbooks and treatises rather than novels and history. You aren’t born knowing how to ride a bicycle and you aren’t born knowing how to read big books effectively for seminars. On the other hand, the basic skills required, either for bike riding or book reading, aren’t all that hard to learn — and once learned, they stick.

A history book is different from a book of political theory or logical argument, and it needs to be approached in a different way.  When approaching a history book, the first thing to do is to ask the Winston Churchill question.  At a dinner, Churchill once criticized the dessert: “This pudding has no theme.”  Most puddings and books have a theme.  In the case of a book, this is a big idea or subject.  Your first job as an analytical reader is to figure out what that is: you must answer the Pudding Question.

What does the author think is the big story the book is trying to tell – and what does the author think is the point of that story?

For some readers, this is hard.  History books present a torrent of information: Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer, for instance, is a book I’ve recently taught.  This remarkable and effective book tells readers about everything from the type of boats used on the Delaware River in 1776 to the recruiting practices of Hessian mercenary regiments in 18th century Germany.

It’s easy to be overwhelmed by this flow of information.  Many readers end up reading history books fairly passively, letting the narrative carry them along through a chronological story, hoping at most to remember a few facts about who did what to whom.

However, historians generally do not write books at random.  Every history book you will ever read is the product of an intense process of selection and of winnowing out extraneous material. A great many things happened in the past.  Even a subject as “narrow” as the American revolution, a relatively small war involving limited casualties in 13 colonies with a combined population of less than 4 million people, was much more complicated than any single narrative account can account for.

One of the gospel writers throws up his hands at the difficulty of getting everything written down:  “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen.”

Amen to that.  What is true of the life of one man is true of even the simplest historical events.

Historians select; they choose which subjects out of an almost infinite number of alternatives to write about.  They choose what kind of evidence to use and what to ignore; they decide that some details are important and others are not.  Those choices are not made at random; they reflect the historian’s beliefs about what matters.

Every history book is more than a collection of names, dates and details.  It is a philosophical and political statement about how the author thinks the world really works.

In a work of political theory or philosophy the author comes right out and tells you what he or she thinks about how the world works.  People are selfish, people are generous, chance rules, people are masters of their fate: whatever.

When historians write, these considerations aren’t usually up front.  Historians rarely come out, so to speak, on stage and lecture the audience.  They do something subtler.  They construct a picture of the past based on their assumptions about how the world works and what motivates people, and invite you to accept their presuppositions because you find their narratives effective and convincing.

Your job as an analytical reader of history is to figure out the assumptions and the ideas behind the picture the historian is painting.  In one sense, you are fighting the historian.  Instead of sitting there passively drinking it in, you are challenging and questioning.  But by reading the book in this way, you are engaging much more fully with the author than the passive reader.  You are thinking seriously and deeply about exactly the questions that the historian thinks are most important.

Getting an answer to the Pudding Question involves unpacking the argument that shapes and informs the historical narrative.  It is a bit like solving a crime: the historian rarely gives you the answer up front, and even when the historian speaks directly about his theme he doesn’t always tell the whole truth.  You have to follow clues.  Often, it is the “dog that doesn’t bark” that provides the most interesting hints – what the historian chooses to omit from the story can be even more telling than what is on the page.

Of course, the more you know about a particular historical era or person the easier it is to think about what the historian omits or highlights and compare one historian’s account of the Battle of Trenton, for example, to another story.  But even when you are reading your first book about a particular episode or era, you can interrogate the book in ways that provide some revealing answers.  (I’m told that Chuck Norris doesn’t read; he just stares at a book until it breaks down and tells him everything it knows.  Good readers know how to make books confess to more than the book intends.)

Some of the questions to ask a text like Washington’s Crossing would include the following:

Why does the author select this moment in US history?  The Battle of Saratoga is often seen as the turning point of the revolution.  Why does Fischer choose the New Jersey campaign of 1776-77?  What are the explicit arguments he makes in support of this choice?  Do we have confidence in those arguments after reading the text?

The author disaggregates the armies on both sides.  This isn’t a story about how the Americans fought the British.  It is a story about how two quite different armies, composed of very different elements, were organized.  Many histories spend less time looking at, for example, the cultural and organizational differences between Massachusetts and Maryland regiments.  Why does this book highlight these questions – on both sides of the conflict?  What light does this approach shed on the events described, and what does this choice imply about the author’s views on strategy and politics?

Additionally, the author writes in some detail about the political situation on both sides, the social position and personal backgrounds of the leading officers, and what might be called the political rather than the tactical dimension of strategy.  What is he implying about the relationship between politics, culture and war – and how does this comport with other works you have read on this subject?

The battle scenes are recounted in great detail, and often told from the standpoint of individual units and soldiers.  At the same time, the individual episodes are connected to a detailed analysis of the battles as a whole: we swoop from a description of a maneuver to a close up of one soldier trying to ford a creek.  These battle scenes are unusually detailed.  Clearly they make for a gripping story and give life to an account that could otherwise seem very dry.  But what does this approach to writing about combat seem to tell us about the nature of combat itself?  How does combat as it appears in Fischer relate to the ideas of, for example, Clausewitz?

Another way to interrogate a book is to put its ideas in juxtaposition with other books you have read.  Many of my students have read Machiavelli’s The Prince.  In Fischer’s book, George Washington is doing exactly what Machiavelli hoped that the ideal reader of The Prince would do: he is driving foreign enemies and armies out of the country in order to build a united republic.  The parallel between Washington and Machiavelli’s ideal ruler was striking and obvious to many of Washington’s colleagues and contemporaries in part because both Washington and Machiavelli consciously invoke the history of the Roman Republic.  If we read Washington’s Crossing as a commentary on Machiavelli, in what ways is it a critique and in what ways does it support Machiavelli’s ideas?

Readers can push their interrogation farther in space and time.  Students who know something about ancient Greek history can make interesting comparisons between Great Britain at the time of the American Revolution and the Athenian empire at the time of the Peloponnesian War. Britain was a (sort of) democratic and very maritime empire engaged in a long and bitter contest with France, a land based enemy with autocratic institutions.  The revolt of Britain’s American colonies presented it with strategic issues not entirely unlike those Athens faced.  Are there any meaningful conclusions to be drawn by thinking about the similarities and differences between their approaches to these problems?  Do British leaders like the Howe brothers resemble Pericles? Cleon? Nicias?

This kind of reading is a middle way between the page by page note-taking and the breezy once over.  I think of it as active reading: rather than sitting back and let the words flow over you, you wrestle with the book and work to see how it fits or doesn’t fit with other books you have read or experiences you have had.

It’s been my experience that students who learn to read books this way are very well prepared for seminar discussions.  They have insights and ideas into the book that will make sense no matter where the seminar discussion heads. Their ideas about the theme of the book and the world view of its author prepare them to discuss the beginning, middle or end of the book.  They will also find it much easier to translate their reading and reflection into good term papers when the time comes.

But the value of reading books like this goes far beyond the classroom.  By reading new books in the light of your knowledge of other subjects and other books, and by wrestling with each author you encounter, putting their ideas and assumptions in context and testing them against other approaches that you’ve seen at work elsewhere, you are deepening your understanding of past books you have read as well as absorbing the new one.  You are building a tapestry of learning in your mind, weaving books, ideas and historical eras together in a way that will gradually become a rich treasure for you: a source of information and insight that will be of great use in daily life as well as in your intellectual pursuits.

Very soon, this way of reading books becomes a habit — something you don’t even need to think about.  You will have trained your mind to become actively engaged with the information it takes in, and this skill will carry over into the way you ‘read’ people and situations in real life. Reading books in this way won’t just make you smart; it will help you become wise.

Learning to read actively is one of the most important things you can do; get this right and a lot of other things fall into place.

According to a recent analysis in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune by Mark Haveman (Executive Director of the Minnesota Taxpayers’ Association), Minnesota’s pension plans, even after recent mandatory increases in employee contributions, are essentially hollow.  Even using the state’s extremely aggressive ‘assumed’ rate of 8.5 percent annual return on its investments, the pension fund is about $10.5 billion short of being able to pay off its future obligations. For every $1 the state has promised to pay retired civil service workers and teachers, it expects to have about 79¢.  The good fairies and the wood elves are responsible for coming up with the rest of the money.

Most of us think of Minnesotans as a little dour and down, but when it comes to estimating future performance of their investment funds, they turn out to be a bunch of cockeyed optimists: much more Ted Baxter than Lou Grant. Minnesota projects that its investments will average 8.5 percent growth year after year; this is the highest projected rate of return of any state in the country.  Using the more common (and perhaps still a bit optimistic) rate of 8 percent, the fairies and the wood elves will have to come up with another $2.9 billion. (In fact, Minnesota’s investments have done pretty well over the years, averaging 9.7 percent over the last thirty years. But those years were an unusually benign period in financial markets; the two longest economic expansions in the US occurred back to back with only a very mild recession in between. Few expect such calm waters ahead.)

The fairies and the wood elves may have to work even harder. There has long been concern among accountants and finance experts that states use skewed assumptions and tweaked numbers to understate the true cost of their pension liabilities.  For politicians, this is a convenient Ponzi scheme: they can promise the moon to future retirees and then cook the books to avoid raising taxes to cover the benefits they have promised. Mounting concern about the horrors lurking in the murky waters of state accounting has led to pressure to adopt a national set of accounting standards; if proposed new standards are accepted, most state pension funds will have to face the unpleasant fact that they are even more in the hole than previously thought.

According to this Boston College Retirement Research report (full text available as PDF) the average state pension fund will see its shortfall rise from 23 percent to 47 percent of the funds needed. That money will have to made up from higher taxes, higher employee contributions, lower benefits, or tribute from the fairies and wood elves.

The lesson for public sector employees should be obvious: your personal retirement planning should assume that you will only receive about 75 percent of your state-promised pension benefits. In some states (Illinois and California spring to mind) you are likely to receive even less.  The farther you are from retirement, the higher the discount rate you should apply; this is a classic Ponzi scheme, and those who get out early tend to get out ahead. It’s the late investors who lose the most: younger workers and new hires, this means you.

You should also be fighting for defined contribution rather than defined benefit plans. In a defined contribution plan, you pay into your pension fund and the employer matches all or part of your contribution.  Your income at retirement will be based on the amount you and your employer put into the fund, and the performance of the assets in which the money was invested.  The biggest risk is that poor investments or bad luck could mean that there won’t be as much money as you had hoped.

The other kind of pension plan is known as a defined benefit plan.  In these plans, you and your employer pay in, but (in theory) your final pension is based on some formula based on your number of years on the job and your annual earnings. Under some circumstances, these programs can be safer than defined contribution programs because you are protected against investment risk.  If the funds in the pension kitty aren’t enough to pay your pension, the company is supposed to make up the difference.

These days, those defined benefit plans aren’t as safe as they used to be.  In the old days, companies like Kodak and Chrysler were believed to be safe; in effect your defined benefit pension was a claim on the earnings of a blue chip company.  But these days, fewer companies are such safe bets for the long term, and many workers have been hit hard when their past employers folded or, desperate to stay alive, used bankruptcy or other methods to cut pension payouts.

With state governments the risk is that when the funds run short, voters will balk at higher taxes to make up the gap. This is almost certain to happen going forward; states are cutting school, university and health care funding as it is.  Voters were never told how much these obligations would cost; they won’t feel responsible for honoring what many will see as fraudulent contracts.

Under modern conditions, for younger workers especially plans where you make contributions matched by your employer are safer bets than defined benefit plans.  In defined contribution plans, they can’t touch your money to pay pensions for older workers; in other plans they can suck you dry to keep the better connected and better organized geezers happy.  Your union reps and state legislators won’t tell you about this, but it’s true: badly funded defined benefit programs will be looted to pay the oldsters in full as long as possible, and younger workers will be stiffed when the bill finally comes due.

Save more on your own, and fight for defined contribution plans that will let you keep what you save.  Otherwise, expect to be eating acorns and drinking bark tea with the wood elves.

More than 1.2bn apps were downloaded on to mobile phones and tablet devices during Christmas week, according to a new study, marking the first time that more than a billion app downloads have been recorded in a single week[...]

The bulk of downloads originated in the US [...] accounting for 509m or 42.3 per cent of the total. The second largest number, 99m, were in China which is seeing rapid increases in smartphone use.

App production is a cottage industry gone viral. It doesn’t take a Silicon Valley pro to come up with a good idea. Any enterprising, smart, tech savvy adult can develop and sell an app from home. Compared to full scale business start-ups the thresholds for investment, time and talent are low. There’s also less drudgery involved: selling online cuts out everything from storefront shifts to being a street vendor.

If you’re young, the window of opportunity is especially wide open. You likely have fewer obligations, more leisure, are short on income and have prime familiarity with the market. If you’ve just graduated from university, job prospects are lean, student debt levels are high and further schooling may do you no good. All the better if you’ve acquired additional niche skills like another language. You can develop a Russian language app in Moscow, Idaho or an Egyptian one in Memphis, Tennessee. There’s even potential for film history and gender studies grads.

Apps are also low footprint: you can make the world a greener place as you come up with ideas that will generate enough cash to get you out of your parents’ garage.

For most people profits will be modest, but that’s the gamble of entrepreneurship. Fortunately the market is burgeoning. Many members of the millennial generation are going to get rich in businesses that didn’t exist when their parents were young.  It’s called progress and, on the whole, it’s a good thing.

Here it is: enjoy — and let one of your New Year’s resolutions be to get smart in 2012.

To those of you out there nursing your hangovers, Merry Christmas!  While most of American society considers today to be the last full day of the holiday season, the traditional Christmas won’t end until January 6.

For some people Christmas hasn’t even started yet.  In some of the Eastern Orthodox churches, the twelve days of Christmas don’t actually start until January 7; these churches still use the old Julian calendar, adopted in 45 BC by Julius Caesar.  Since the earth revolves around the sun in roughly 365.25 days, ensuring that the dates on the calendar correspond with the actual seasons is tricky.  The Julian calendar introduced the concept of leap years, adding an extra day to one out of every four years; this helped, but wasn’t exact. Over the centuries the seasons and the calendar began to slip out of alignment once again; in 1582 Pope Gregory XIII introduced what has since become the common civil calendar used in much of the world.  The Gregorian calendar, which drops leap years in years divisible by 100 (1700, 1800, 1900) unless they are divisible by 400 (1600, 2000) was enough of a tweak to keep the calendar mostly in balance and over time it has won acceptance pretty much everywhere although, the Wall Street Journal notes, problems remain.

Neither Protestants nor the Orthodox liked it in the beginning; proposed by the Council of Trent and proclaimed by the Bishop of Rome, the new calendar was obviously some kind of papal plot.  The British resisted it until 1752; Wednesday, September 2 of that year was followed by Thursday, September 14.  When I was a kid they taught us in school that protesters rioted against the reform under the slogan “Give us back our eleven days!”  This, they now tell us, was a myth: one of those stories that elites tell themselves to underline how stupid are the great unwashed, and how much they need the wisdom and leadership of their natural superiors.

Russia only changed over after the Bolshevik Revolution; Greece held out until 1923 when it came to the civil calendar for government offices and business.  The church calendar in many Eastern Orthodox countries still sticks to the old system. All this causes endless frustration and confusion for historians, who need to know when each country adopted the new calendar before they can figure out when anything happened.  The Soviet Union managed to take the confusion to a higher level still, celebrating the Great October Revolution every November, as the Bolshevik Revolution began on October 25, 1917 on the ‘old style’ or Julian Calendar, and November 7 in Gregorian time.

There’s a lesson here for world politics.  If it took Europe 350 years to adopt something as simple, utilitarian and benign as a useful calendar reform, how long will it take the world’s countries to agree on more complex, divisive and expensive questions – ranging from global warming to nuclear disarmament to financial regulation?

I’ve sometimes thought about shifting to Orthodox Christmas myself.  You’d save money by buying all your decorations and gifts at the post-holiday sales.  You could shop at your leisure after everyone else was out of the stores, and you could reflect peacefully on the meaning of Christmas without the distraction of a million department store Santas.

For now at least I’m sticking with the Gregorian Christmas, despite the inconvenience, and Christmas blogging will continue at this site through January 6. Today, though, I want to take a break from the heavy theological blogging; after a post on the Trinity I think we all need and deserve a rest.  It’s also just possible that some of you aren’t at your sharpest this New Year’s Day.  We’ll get back to the meaning of Christmas tomorrow; today let me just share with you a Christmas and New Year gift: Walter Mead’s Top Ten Ways For Students and Young People To Get Intimidatingly Smart in the New Year.

This list won’t teach you everything you need to know; no top ten list can do that.  But it will teach you a lot about how the world works.  My list of reading suggestions and information sources is heavily tilted toward British and American history, political economy and ideas.  Whether you like them or not, agree with them or not, this is the history and these are the ideas that have played a leading part in the making of the modern world.

You may be a young revolutionary burning with the desire to destroy this cruel and unjust world system before it buries us all in an ecological or social catastrophe of some kind.  Very well: but you need to understand it before you can work effectively against it.

You may be a proud young American from a non-Anglo background determined to make your mark on American society and change it for the better.  Excellent; we need you and I hope you succeed.  You, more than anyone, will benefit from learning the Power Secrets of the Wasps – and then turning that knowledge to your own advantage.

Whatever kind of person you are, reading the Mead List in 2010 is guaranteed to make you wiser in council and more fearsome in debate.  One of my Bard students once told me after he began with this program that after a couple of months he noticed that he was “winning more arguments with my father.”  Another student once told me that this list helped him ace his interview for the Rhodes.

So here, in ascending order, is the Mead List.  This isn’t all you need to read, but you have to start somewhere.  Get this done and by the end of 2010 you will amaze your friends, impress your professors and frustrate your foes.  Enjoy!

10.  Read The Economist every week.  This really is the best weekly news source in English, and it is generally written in the best English of any weekly source.  Trust me on this: following this magazine is the best way to stay plugged in to world news.

9.  Read the front section of the Financial Times every day.  What the Economist is to the weekly news, the FT is to the daily papers.  It offers better international coverage than any American newspaper, and it is written for busy people with no time to waste.  Read the back sections on business and finance if you are a budding tycoon; but the front section of this excellent paper should be part of your daily routine.   On the weekends, read the excellent book reviews and essays in the Arts section.

8.  Read two books by Adam Smith: The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations.  The Theory of Moral Sentiments is shorter and easier to read than the more famous Wealth of Nations; reading it first will make the second book easier to understand — and help you understand why Smith and so many other people consider capitalism ultimately a moral system.

7.  Read at least the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  Classical scholarship has come a long way since this book was written in the late 1700s, but it remains a major landmark in historical writing, a fantastic read and an extraordinary example of English prose style.  There are six volumes in the set; George III’s younger brother Prince William Henry thought this was too many and Gibbon proudly presented him with the first two volumes the Prince commented  “Another damned thick book.  Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?”

6.  Read all the John Milton you can.  Start this Christmas season with his magnificent Nativity Ode, then sample his shorter poems.  Go on at least to Paradise Lost and the greatest work against censorship ever written, the Areopagitica.  It won’t be easy but it will make you smart.

5. Read The History of England by Thomas Babington Macaulay (the Amazon link is to a $0.99 Kindle version; the complete five volumes are harder to find in print and I haven’t the heart to recommend an abridgment).  This is a history of the 1688 Glorious Revolution that made Parliament supreme in England.  The American Founding Fathers believed that our Revolution of 1776 was a defense of the principles of the Glorious Revolution in England.  Macaulay’s history is sometimes smug, unfair and one sided, but he captures the spirit of this world shattering event magnificently, and his prose is sublime.  Macaulay was also a British administrator in India; Indian education and law today still bear his imprint.  Read this book to know where your freedoms come from and to see what your language can do.

4. Read The Federalist Papers.  These short essays were originally written something like blog posts.  Intended to persuade Americans to ratify the proposed constitution, the Federalist Papers will make you smarter about the American political system and help you think more clearly about how the world works.

3.  Read The Bostonians by Henry James.  This is James ‘light’; it’s much more accessible than a lot of his later work.  Unlike much of his work it’s also set in the United States.  Set in the years after the Civil War, it’s a novel that investigates the relationship between North and South and between men and women.

2. Read The French Revolution, by Thomas Carlyle.  (Book link again is for a $0.99 Kindle edition.)  This may be the most challenging book on the list, but if you stick to it and work at it, The French Revolution will teach you more about world history and the human condition than most people learn in four years of college.  Carlyle was hugely influential on both sides of the Atlantic in the nineteenth century.  It often seems to me that Moby Dick should be read as a kind of homage to and adaptation of Carlyle’s French Revolution; certainly Melville learned a lot of his prose style from Carlyle – as they both borrowed from Shakespeare.  The book will violate your expectations of a history book; read it as more of an epic poem in prose and you may find it easier to follow.  It’s also helpful to refer to simpler histories of the French Revolution as you go – or check in Wikipedia to get the background on events and characters that confuse you.

1.  Read the Bible, cover to cover.  Some of it will make you think; some of it will make you angry; some of it will make no sense whatever.  But this book, more than any other, has shaped American and western history and culture.  You should know this book.  There are plenty of excellent translations; though a bit PC at times the New Revised Standard Version is used in many mainline churches and has been approved by Catholic scholars.  It is the version I most often use.  The New International Version, more favored in evangelical churches, also has a high scholarly reputation.  Both owe a large debt to the greatest of English translations, the King James Version.  The KJV as it is known was read by English speakers everywhere and for more than 300 years was THE English-language version of the Bible (among Protestants; Catholics read the Douay.)  You should read some of the Bible in the KJV just to know what the fuss was about, but the newer versions are often more accurate and understandable to contemporary readers.  Start with Genesis 1:1 and read right through Revelations 22:21 a few chapters at a time.  Don’t try to read this book in large chunks; it will frustrate you.  A few minutes a day, a few pages at a time is the way to do it.  Harry Truman read the Bible cover to cover five times while he was president: if he could do that while winning World War II, demobilizating the US from its greatest military effort ever, and laying the foundations of America’s strategy during the Cold War, you should be able to fit this into your busy day.

Others date from the Golden Age of British Drinking, which began in the days of Boadicea shows no sign of stopping.

The hair of the dog seems to be the most common ingredient of these cures; looking at the list of celebrity hangover researches, one is mostly struck by the havoc that alcohol wreaked in the lives of these gifted and sensitive people.

It was almost exactly ten years ago that I discovered the best hangover cure of all: it costs nothing, is easily made, and unlike other supposed cures, it is 100 percent effective.

The Mead surefire hangover cure?  Prevention.

In ten years it has never let me down.

A New Year’s thought: if you spend a lot of time thinking about or checking into hangover cures, your problem is more likely to be about the night before than the morning after.

I talk with a surprising number of college students who wonder whether they are developing a serious alcohol problem.  Alcoholics Anonymous has an (anonymous) test you can use to help you decide whether you have a drinking problem or just had too much to drink last night.  (They are not the same; many people who aren’t alcoholics have overindulged at various times in their lives.  Young people especially experiment with a lot of things, and alcohol can be tricky even for people who end up living very comfortably and successfully as social drinkers.)

The website is here: below are the questions, along with some AA comments about them.  According to the AA folks, if you answer ‘yes’ to more than four, you might have something more serious than an occasional hangover to think about.

1 – Have you ever decided to stop drinking for a week or so, but only lasted for a couple of days?

Most of us in A.A. made all kinds of promises to ourselves and to our families. We could not keep them. Then we came to A.A. A.A. said: “Just try not to drink today.” (If you do not drink today, you cannot get drunk today.)

2 – Do you wish people would mind their own business about your drinking– stop telling you what to do?

In A.A. we do not tell anyone to do anything. We just talk about our own drinking, the trouble we got into, and how we stopped. We will be glad to help you, if you want us to.

3 – Have you ever switched from one kind of drink to another in the hope that this would keep you from getting drunk?

We tried all kinds of ways. We made our drinks weak. Or just drank beer. Or we did not drink cocktails. Or only drank on weekends. You name it, we tried it. But if we drank anything with alcohol in it, we usually got drunk eventually.

4 – Have you had to have an eye-opener upon awakening during the past year?

Do you need a drink to get started, or to stop shaking? This is a pretty sure sign that you are not drinking “socially.”

5 – Do you envy people who can drink without getting into trouble?

At one time or another, most of us have wondered why we were not like most people, who really can take it or leave it.
6 – Have you had problems connected with drinking during the past year?

Be honest! Doctors say that if you have a problem with alcohol and keep on drinking, it will get worse — never better. Eventually, you will die, or end up in an institution for the rest of your life. The only hope is to stop drinking.
7 – Has your drinking caused trouble at home?

Before we came into A.A., most of us said that it was the people or problems at home that made us drink. We could not see that our drinking just made everything worse. It never solved problems anywhere or anytime.
8 – Do you ever try to get “extra” drinks at a party because you do not get enough?

Most of us used to have a “few” before we started out if we thought it was going to be that kind of party. And if drinks were not served fast enough, we would go some place else to get more.
9 – Do you tell yourself you can stop drinking any time you want to, even though you keep getting drunk when you don’t mean to?

Many of us kidded ourselves into thinking that we drank because we wanted to. After we came into A.A., we found out that once we started to drink, we couldn’t stop.
10 – Have you missed days of work or school because of drinking?

Many of us admit now that we “called in sick” lots of times when the truth was that we were hung-over or on a drunk.
11 – Do you have “blackouts”?

A “blackout” is when we have been drinking hours or days which we cannot remember. When we came to A.A., we found out that this is a pretty sure sign of alcoholic drinking.

12 – Have you ever felt that your life would be better if you did not drink?

Many of us started to drink because drinking made life seem better, at least for a while. By the time we got into A.A., we felt trapped. We were drinking to live and living to drink. We were sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Most older readers haven’t saved enough; most younger readers will need to save more (as government retirement programs hit the wall and unavoidable cuts must be made).  McArdle shows you how much you need to save and, more importantly, helps you figure out how it is done.  Warning: she also dismantles some common excuses for not saving.

The blue social model is a consumption model.  Government debt and private householder debt are the keys to making the blue system work.  From the thirty year mortgage to the student loan to the ubiquitous credit card, the blue social model aimed to facilitate and promote consumer debt.

That needs to change.  We have overextended ourselves as a nation and as families and individuals, and we need to get back to sane and sustainable patterns of spending and consumption.  We need to define ourselves less as a people and as individuals by what and how we consume, and derive our identity and self confidence from what we produce and invest.

McArdle offers some important advice on how you can begin, whatever your age, to begin to embrace the values of thrift and prudence we are all going to need as time goes by.

Read the whole thing.

A couple of them, we hasten to observe, look both useful and good.  The MIT course taking first year mechanical engineering students through the entire process of toy design seems a bit out of place on this list.  And we also note that the actual classes may have more substance than our chipper journalist reports.  But some “awesome” courses look like the kind of academic malpractice that help so many American kids emerge from four years of “education” with massive debt loads, major attitude problems, and no marketable skills.  Consider:

“Staging American Women: The Culture of Burlesque”. Burlesque is a complex and alluring underground culture — and sexy, too, of course. Think about tassels for a moment — are you blushing? Then you might want to skip out on a course that involves discussing pin-ups and early sexploitation films. Your loss.

It is hard to know which is more disturbing, here: that a college can accept student loan money for a course like this without being charged with financial fraud or the vapid thinking and limp prose that Globe editors evidently think belongs in their newspaper.  Or consider this piece of awesomeness from the same college (Emerson, where tuition and fees run to more than $30,000 a year, and almost half of those who apply are admitted):

“Puppetry”. “The course culminates in the construction of puppets for in-class presentations,” which is really all you need to know. Plus, puppets are pretty popular right now. I’ll be the first to say it: This class will make you a hit with the ladies.

Or there is our fatuous writer’s top suggestion, a useful course on the history of surfing:

“Surfing and American Culture“. As a Massachusetts native, I have a bit of trouble picturing the impact surfing has had on American culture beyond that Beach Boys song and Point Break. This class will take the uninitiated through the history of surfing up to the present day, as well as examine its role as a major economic force. And include field trips? Just a suggestion.

(Again, one wonders when the Globe decided that soggy, tasteless mush like this was publishable content.  Either the writer or the editor of this piece and quite possibly both clearly spent much too much time in college taking classes like the ones being praised here.)

As Via Meadia looked at these course descriptions, and reflected that all over America students are borrowing tens of thousands of dollars a year to attend expensive schools and then blowing the money on glittering fripperies like these, we were reminded of a book title we came across in our long vanished youth: How to Make Yourself Miserable.  It occurs to us that there is an infallible recipe for making yourself miserable, and that many young people in this country are following it — some, perhaps, without knowing that that is what they are doing.

So, inspired by this list of awesome courses, here is a sure-fire way to make yourself miserably unhappy in your twenties.

First, enroll in a college that you cannot afford, and rely on large student loans to make up the difference.

Second, spend the next four years having as good a time as possible: hang out, hook up, and above all, take plenty of “awesome” courses.

Third, find teachers and role models who will encourage you to develop an attitude of enlightened contempt for ordinary American middle class life, the world of business, and such bourgeois virtues as self-reliance, thrift, accountability and self-discipline.  Specialize in sarcasm and snark.

Fourth, avoid all courses with tough requirements, taking only the minimum required number of classes in science, math and foreign languages.

Fifth, never think about acquiring marketable skills.

Sixth, when you graduate and discover that you have to repay the loans and cannot get a job that pays enough to live comfortably while servicing your debts, be surprised.  Blame society.  Demand that the government or your parents or evil corporations bail you out.

Seventh, expect anyone (except for other clueless losers who’ve been as stupid and wasteful as you) to sympathize with your plight, or to treat you with anything but an infuriating mixture of sorrow, pity and contempt.

If you follow this recipe faithfully, Via Meadia promises that you will achieve all the unhappiness you want.  And don’t worry; anytime you feel sad and blue, just read some “lifestyle” journalism in the Boston Globe.  It will be sure to cheer you up.

It was the weekly meeting of The New Inquiry, a scrappy online journal and roving clubhouse that functions as an Intellectuals Anonymous of sorts for desperate members of the city’s literary underclass barred from the publishing establishment. Fueled by B.Y.O.B. bourbon, impressive degrees and the angst that comes with being young and unmoored, members spend their hours filling the air with talk of Edmund Wilson and poststructuralism.

While the crusty old antediluvians at Via Meadia would probably not endorse all the views that these young people expound, every intellectual needs and deserves the right to be passionate, judgmental and wrong in his or her twenties; in any case we applaud them for their obvious love of ideas and their devotion to the life of the mind.

Circles like these are where real writers come from, or at least where many of them put in time while trying to find their voice and their viewpoint. Universities are stocked with uncounted throngs of tenured professors who ascended from undergraduate degrees to MFA programs to professorships by publishing another literate, fashionable and largely unread novel or poetry collection every two or three years. (Not that there aren’t some smart and innovative thinkers coming up through the regular ranks.)  But F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner never graduated from college and Ernest Hemingway never even attended.

On the more modest field of blogging and policy writing, I got my start as a writer arguing with friends in cheap apartments in New York, reading journals in bookstores, and haunting the shelves of the Strand.  Rather than looking for jobs that would lead to a stable and secure career, I fled them, looking instead for jobs that would pay the bills but not consume the energy and imagination I wanted to go into my study and my work.

There are always people who come up through the system in the normal way and make great contributions.  You do not have to be a bohemian to have something to say — but society needs its nonconformists and, even more, its non-careerists, people who care more about figuring things out than about fitting in.

Most writing careers end in failure, but if you want to say something new, you can’t let yourself be deterred. Possessing the specific combination of talents for having something to say and saying it in a way that makes people want to listen is rare. But if you try to learn in the echo chamber of a university classroom, all you will learn is how to echo well.

You have to avoid the temptation to become an empty suit, even though these temptations are sometimes enticing: the top liberal arts college, the top graduate program, the top internship. Instead, you have to engage your society and see it from unusual angles. The Golden Path of elite colleges, graduate fellowships at top schools, discreet introductions to powerful patrons has its charms, but that isn’t the way to learn what your country is really like, how most people see the world, or to get a gut sense about what needs to change.  It is also not a very good way to get to know your own character.

The unconventional path is always rough but always important; it is more important than ever in times like ours in which great changes are upon us. The conventionally educated and the well connected are experts in the functioning of a model which is falling to bits.  They are great blacksmiths in a world that needs car mechanics: what they know is to a large extent what the future must kill.

You will encounter problems if, as they say in the great gospel hymn, you are coming up the rough side of the mountain. You probably won’t be barbequing pigeons for dinner as Hemingway used to do in Paris, but you might have to subsist on ramen noodles and use the public library for internet access.  You will have to invent your career and scramble from spot to spot rather than climbing the organizational chart.  It will be scary at times; there will be months when you don’t know how you will get the rent paid.

Many people who set off on this path fail; there are no guarantees.  But few are bored — and many of those who do not manage to fulfill all their dreams don’t regret the time they spent chasing rainbows.  Via Meadia is glad to see that committed and intense young people are debating the nature of art and the future of politics, publishing low budget journals and deriding the complacent voices of conventional scribes.

We need you.

Many of the fraudulent test-takers’ parents were community leaders:

The suspected test takers came from prominent, respected families, some of them in financial distress — among the five facing felony charges were the sons of a well-known lawyer, the president of the local library board and a wealthy philanthropic family.

Maybe the parents rather than the kids should be standing there in handcuffs, facing jail time.  As there are not many high school students in this country who a) have $3,600 in spare change on hand and b) are willing to pay that kind of money for an SAT score, it is obvious that in virtually every case the parents of these young people did more than stand by.  These parents are bad; they are ruining the moral character of their own kids while doing their best to steal a place in a prestigious college from honest ones.

They need to feel the ugliness of their behavior — for their own sake, for their kids’, in justice to those they wronged, and for the sake of community morals and national health.  One hopes some of them go to court on charges of contributing to the delinquency of a minor; there may well be other charges to file and Via Meadia wouldn’t cry if that happened. Large fines, enormous legal bills, harrowing anxiety, public humiliation, perhaps some jail time: a suitable lesson both for parents and offspring that cheating is wrong. Prosecutors who follow up on this will be doing public service; if outbreaks of mass fraud like this aren’t stepped on, hard, others will yield to temptation.

These parents should be sweating bullets.  If any of them are involved in custody battles with exes, they should be ready to help their kids pack.  No court in America would ignore this kind of behavior in making custody decisions; parents who do this are completely unfit.  An ex unhappy with current custody arrangmenents now has the perfect opportunity to seek redress; children need to be removed from homes where lying and fraud are OK.

They should worry about their jobs (as should the teachers and officials who turned blind eyes to this mess).  People who behave in this way are not fit to exercise public or private jobs involving character or trust.  If parents teach their own children to bribe, to lie and to cheat, what else do they think is OK?

I would advise any plaintiff’s lawyer in the region to follow this story closely; if an employer has employees who do this kind of thing and that employer keeps them on staff after this, the employer is arguably showing negligence that could result in extremely large legal judgments down the road.  To fire these people also sends a strong message to your other employees that dishonesty cannot be countenanced.

Certainly no financial firm can keep somebody like this on staff; disbarment would be an appropriate penalty for lawyers who push their kids down this road.  It is also unclear that a person who behaves in this way should be allowed to practice medicine.  There is a lot of Medicare and Medicaid fraud in this country; we’ve just uncovered some suspects.

For the rest of us, this should be a reminder of the importance that faith in God is the best foundation for a happy and peaceful life.  Faith in God is not just about keeping people honest when no one is looking.  It is also about the belief that God has a plan for your life and that if you do your honest best, whatever comes is where you were meant to be.  Going to Podunk in accordance with God’s plan will have a better outcome than cheating your way into Harvard.  Material success is a good thing but not the only thing, and a life built on fraud won’t be happy.

All this said, it is still true that the scandal points to the absurd overvaluation that America gives the imprimatur from blue chip schools.  Via Meadia wants national exams that would allow students from less famous or non-traditional schools to demonstrate that a hardworking kid at Wayne State can come out of college better educated than a lazy wastrel from the Ivy League.  The absence of such recognized credentials is what gives prestigious degrees excessive weight in the job market, and this system is not only dysfunctional but morally wrong.  (Of course those exams would have to have procedures in place to discourage and punish cheats.)

America’s greatest treasure is the integrity of our people; without that both our liberty and our prosperity will not last.  That integrity must be vindicated and defended in every generation; if it isn’t, the whole country will go down the tubes.

The NYT has a story about the quantum leaps first class service on international airlines has taken in recent decades, mentioning that first-class on Emirates Airlines, for instance, offers showers at 36,000 feet. It seems like just yesterday when first class simply meant a few extra inches of legroom. The changes in coach, Via Meadia is told by reliable informants, have mostly been in the other direction, where microwaved food nourishes the masses as they get intimate with their neighbor in a war over the armrest.

The growing disparity between coach and first class may set off a predictable alas and alackaday session of breastbeating by the equality police, but on planes as on the ground, the rich do at least a little something for the poor.  Because first class makes 40-50% of an airline’s revenue yet only accounts for about 5% of all seats on “long-haul” routes, coach fares are substantially cheaper than they would be without the rich folks up front.

This isn’t much comfort to thirty and forty year old road warriors still stuck in the back of the plane, but it is great news for the young.  Today’s kids are much better traveled than past generations of Americans, and despite high fuel prices and taxes, fares remain a great bargain by historical standards.

The Via Meadia advice: ignore the cramped discomfort and the lousy food.  Book the cheapest seat you can find on Skybus Express and go see as much of the world as you possibly can.  If you are young and broke, you might as well be learning something.

And don’t glare too hard at the people lounging in those first class seats.  If they weren’t where they are and paying what they pay, you probably wouldn’t be on the plane.