French Reflections

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The French Republic and Muslim Schoolgirls
The French are yet again in an uproar over the clothes that girls can wear to school. Unlike in the United States, where such controversies might focus…
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David A. Bell
1
Why We Need University Courses in Public Speaking
The endless, ongoing debates about admissions to elite universities have had many unfortunate effects. One is that they have focused attention so…
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David A. Bell
2
Playing Around with Machine Translation
There’s an old, old joke about machine translation. Supposedly, in the early 1960’s, IBM unveiled a computer program that could translate between…
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David A. Bell
August 2023
July 2023
Biden’s Charisma Deficit, and Why it Shouldn’t Matter (but Does).
Back when he was running for president, Joe Biden came to give a speech at my university. It wasn’t a particularly memorable appearance, but one part of…
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David A. Bell
7
The Death of the Magazine
Marty Peretz, the former owner of The New Republic, has just come out with a memoir, and it prompts some nostalgia, and some melancholy thoughts about…
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David A. Bell
Two New Opinion Pieces
Two New Short Articles During college, and for a couple of years afterwards, I hesitated between two career paths: academia and journalism. I spent a…
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David A. Bell
June 2023
Drawing Historical Parallels
And the perils of apocalypticism
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David A. Bell
3
On the Writing of History
I have a new review essay in The New York Review, principally on the critic Enzo Traverso’s excellent new book Singular Pasts: The “I” in…
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David A. Bell
6
May 2023
What a French Middle School Reform Tells Us About How to Improve our University Admissions System
Several decades ago, French educators noted an unusual development in middle schools (collèges), mostly in well-to-do neighborhoods: record numbers of…
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David A. Bell
6
Score One for the Evil Empire
My Search for the Ideal Reading Tablet
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David A. Bell
2
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