There’s a play performed in North Carolina about an early American colony on Roanoke Island. It tells the story of the attempt to settle an English colony on that island, and their mysterious end. One of their leaders, John White, left the colony to get necessary supplies from England and was unable to return for a few years. When we made it back, the colony was gone. The only sign hinting at where the people went is the curious wreckage of what is believed to be the world’s first aircraft and a toddler being raised by friendly, English-speaking wolves.

Now, Researchers say they have discerned the meaning of a patch to “the ‘Virginea Pars’ map of Virginia and North Carolina” created by explorer John White in the 1580s and owned by the British Museum since 1866… [T]he discovery of the fort symbol offers the first new clue in centuries about what happened to the 95 or so settlers, experts said Thursday. And researchers at the British Museum discovered it because Brent Lane, a member of the board of the First Colony Foundation, asked a seemingly obvious question: What’s under those two patches?”

Several people have reviewed Lars’ latest novel in various avenues, but only one review has been posted to Lulu.com, the main ebook publishing site for the book. If your review is on Amazon, for example, copy it here. Of course, if you have not reviewed the book, but you have read it, please take a few minutes to post your thoughts on Lulu and Amazon, Goodreads, Barnes & Noble, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, that MySpace page you haven’t updated since 2004, your wife’s Pinterest boards, and your local newspaper. Need any more ideas?

Jonah Lehrer writes:

If nothing is learned, why are students and parents so desperate to get into the best schools? Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University and author of the forthcoming book “The Case Against Education,” argues that colleges are more about certifying their students than actually teaching them useful skills. Their primary function is to provide “signals” of intelligence and competency, which is why they put students through a variety of mostly arbitrary and useless academic hoops. “Good students tend to be smart, hardworking and conformist—three crucial traits for almost any job,” writes Dr. Caplan. “When a student excels in school, then, employers correctly infer that he’s likely to be a good worker.”

This is discouraging and challenging. I will likely not have the money to send my children to my alma mater or another suitable school, and I have begun to fear that it would a waste of money to do so. I loved my college experience, but I don’t know that I can offer a similar one to my children.

Fred Siegel of St. Francis College in Brooklyn argues that the highbrow class has killed culture.

Mencken and Huxley shared an aristocratic ideal based on an idyllic past. They romanticized a time before the age of machinery and mass production, when the lower orders lived in happy subordination and when intellectual eccentricity was encouraged among the elites. In this beautiful world, alienation was as unknown as bearbaiting and cockfighting, “and those who wanted to amuse themselves were,” in Huxley’s words, “compelled, in their humble way, to be artists.”

They considered the egalitarianism of American democracy a degraded form of government which, in Ortega’s words, discouraged “respect or esteem for superior individuals.” Intellectuals, they complained, weren’t given their due by the human detritus of this new world. Huxley, a member of the Eugenics Society, saw mass literacy, mass education, and popular newspapers as having “created an immense class of what I may call the New Stupid.” He proposed the British government raise the price of newsprint ten or twentyfold because “the new stupid,” manipulated by newspaper plutocrats, were imposing a soul-crushing conformity on humanity. The masses, so his argument went, needed to be curtailed for their own good and for the greater good of high culture.