I’m no stranger to making people mad on social media, but it’s very sad that one of the biggest bouts of anger that I ever managed to provoke was when I described how much we were assigned to read in my undergraduate program back in the early 2000s.
People go nuts and accuse me of inventing it, and I never even mentioned that all the reading we were expected to do was in a foreign language. And it was fine. I don’t remember anybody complaining or offering it as a topic of conversation that there was too much reading.
Apparently, there’s some new course at Harvard which requires students to read one book per week, and everybody is extremely impressed by how rigorous that is. It’s like that world of dusty, warm mom-and-pop shops. It was normal, it was real, and now it’s gone. People get angry and emotional when you tell them about this actually quite recent past because they know deep down that they have been robbed. But they don’t want to accept it.
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