The day after Alex Pretti’s death, I sat down with a cup of coffee beside a woman who was finishing her lunch. When I mentioned my shock over the young man’s killing, she said she’d heard the news on NPR and found the incident too upsetting to discuss.   A book she was reading

The United States is both practical and idealistic writes Siva Vaidhyanathan as he paraphrases the conclusions of Thorstein Veblen, a sociologist and economist who wrote at the turn of the 20th century.   Almost from the start, our educational system represented those polarities: Ha