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the whole thing is a corrupt enterprise doomed to collapse in a spectacular, real-estate-market-circa-2008 fashion. The media lapped it up, and soon enough Thiel was featured in long New York and New Yorker profiles.

What Happened to the Future? We Wanted Flying Cars, Instead We Got 140 Characters.”

Investors have chased after clever short-term innovations and looked for quick profit, which is not only bad for the world but bad for most investors—since 1999, according to the manifesto, venture capital has lost money on average. Only the top 20 percent are any good.

There is a great deal of money and power at stake now. We may not know who and we may not know when, but someone is going to write the software that eats higher education.

most of the first adopters won’t be American students forgoing the opportunity to drink beer on weekends at State U. Instead, they’ll be students like Bali, among the hundreds of millions of people around the world with the talent and desire to learn but no State U to attend.

Political pressure will continue to grow for credits earned in low-cost MOOCs to be transferable to traditional colleges, cutting into the profit margins that colleges have traditionally enjoyed in providing large, lecture-based college courses.

They could always get rid of their outdated toys on eBay.

Their TV screens keep getting smaller as their parents’ screens grow ever larger.

Plasma has never been just a bodily fluid.

Jurassic Park has always had rides and snack bars, not free-range triceratops and velociraptors.

With GPS, they have never needed directions to get someplace, just an address.

As they slept safely in their cribs, the Oklahoma City bomber and the Unabomber were doing their deadly work.

Their favorite feature films have always been largely, if not totally, computer generated.

They have never really needed to go to their friend’s house so they could study together.

They have always been able to plug into USB ports

Their parents’ car CD player is soooooo ancient and embarrassing.

We attended church at the Grace & Truth Gospel Hall on 14th Avenue South, where a preacher clutched his suspenders and spoke glowingly of Eternity, and I grew up one of the Brethren, the Chosen to whom God had vouchsafed the Knowledge of All Things that was denied to the great and mighty. The Second Coming was imminent, we would rise to the sky. We walked around Minneapolis carefully, wary of television, dance music, tobacco, baubles, bangles, flashy cars, liquor, the theater, the modern novel—all of them tempting us away from the singular life that Jesus commanded us to lead.

For days after Frankie drowned, I visited the death scene, trying to imagine what had happened. He was paddling a boat near the shore, and it capsized, and he drowned. I imagined this over and over, imagined myself saving him, imagined the vast gratitude of his family. I don’t recall discussing this with other boys. We were more interested in what lay ahead in seventh grade, where (we had heard) you had to take showers after gym. Naked. With no clothes on. Which turned out to be true. Junior high was up the West River Road in Anoka, the town where I was born, 1942, in a house on Ferry Street, delivered by Dr. Mork. That fall of seventh grade, he listened to my heart and heard a click in the mitral valve, which meant I couldn’t play football, so I walked into the Anoka Herald and asked for a job covering football and basketball, and a man named Warren Feist said yes and made me a professional writer. Ask and ye shall receive.

For instance, how often do most adults encounter a situation in which they need to solve a quadratic equation? Do they need to know what constitutes a “group of transformations” or a “complex number”? Of course professional mathematicians, physicists and engineers need to know all this, but most citizens would be better served by studying how mortgages are priced, how computers are programmed and how the statistical results of a medical trial are to be understood.

Imagine replacing the sequence of algebra, geometry and calculus with a sequence of finance, data and basic engineering.

Traditionalists will object that the standard curriculum teaches valuable abstract reasoning, even if the specific skills acquired are not immediately useful in later life. A generation ago, traditionalists were also arguing that studying Latin, though it had no practical application, helped students develop unique linguistic skills. We believe that studying applied math, like learning living languages, provides both useable knowledge and abstract skills.

In math, what we need is “quantitative literacy,” the ability to make quantitative connections whenever life requires (as when we are confronted with conflicting medical test results but need to decide whether to undergo a further procedure) and “mathematical modeling,” the ability to move practically between everyday problems and mathematical formulations (as when we decide whether it is better to buy or lease a new car).

“At our house, there are signs, 'No Facebook from 7 to 9:30,'” Angus King said. “Part of it is supervision, he said. You don't hand the keys to your car to your teenager without rules.

“My contention is that status is on everybody’s mind all of the time, whether they’re conscious of it or not,”

“new journalism” combined the emotional impact of a novel, the analysis of the best essays, and the factual foundation of hard reporting. He mingled it all in an over-the-top style that made life itself seem like one spectacular headline.

pointed look at fund-raising for the Black Panther Party by Leonard Bernstein and other wealthy whites.

And no one more memorably captured the beauty-and-the-beast divide between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones: “The Beatles want to hold your hand,” he wrote, “but the Rolling Stones want to burn down your town!”

s a child, he did rewrites of the Authurian legends and penned biographies of his heroes.

unsuccessful pitching tryout with the New York Giants before

The Washington Post, where he won Washington Newspaper Guild awards in 1960 for his coverage of U.S.-Cuban affairs and a satiric account of that year’s Senate civil rights filibuster.

The next year, Wolfe was assigned to cover a “Hot Rod & Custom Car” show. He completed a story, the kind “any of the somnambulistic totem newspapers in America would have come up with.” But he knew there was a much richer, and longer story to tell, one about a thriving subculture that captured the post-World War II economic boom and the new freedom to “build monuments” to one’s own style. No newspaper could contain what Wolfe had in mind, so he turned to Esquire magazine, wrote up 49 pages and helped give birth to a new kind of reporter. “For the who-what-where-when-why of traditional journalism, he has substituted what he calls ‘the wowie!'” according to a 1965 Newsweek story.

“A Man in Full” turned Wolfe’s smirk to Atlanta society. His 2004 novel, “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” looked at life on a fictional elite college campus rife with drinking, status obsession and sex.