R.R. Reno wrote about Allan Bloom’s book, Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, on its twentieth anniversary in 2007.

The most important question in peoples lives—that is to say, the question of how they should live—remains largely unconnected to the sophisticated intellectual training that continues to take place in the classroom. I can often get students to “share” their moral “opinions,” and often with a certain warmth of conviction. I can also get students to analyze classical arguments for or against various accounts of the good life. But I find it difficult to induce students to take a passionate and rational interest in fundamental questions.

I am most interested in the students who are wounded and unmoored by the this kind of training or the atmosphere in which it takes place. Some students may be able to withhold their moral convictions in college and keep them intact, but some lose those convictions through a lack of exercise. If they do not actually lose them, they may find them shifted by the many sympathetic voices for immorality among their peers.

Quoting John Paul II, Reno states, “We should beware ‘an undifferentiated pluralism,’ he writes, for an easy celebration of ‘difference’ undermines our desire for truth and reduces everything to mere opinion.”

The Language Log is talking about whether the language used in threats issued by the hackers of Sony Pictures reflects a particular native language or is a hoax. “Kevin McCready surmises that the hacker threat was ‘…written by someone who has strong command of English but is pretending they don’t. In particular it would be interesting to see if grammatical errors conform to those a Korean might make.‘”

The text of the original threat isn’t uniform. Here are the second and third sentences: “Soon all the world will see what an awful movie Sony Pictures Entertainment has made. The world will be full of fear.”

A commenter claiming to be a native Korean speaker says it looks Korean to him. He writes, “Some people seem to be saying that ‘Soon all the world will see what an awful movie Sony Pictures Entertainment has made’ seems to be too good to have been produced by the same writer of some of the other lines, but this sort of expression (‘all the world will see’) would not be out of place in Korean either.”