Guns, Germs and Steel

Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel provides a provocative rebuke to what I think is a pervasive, almost irresistible conclusion for most of us, i.e., “The people in power wield it because we are superior.” Diamond contends instead that “the striking differences between the long-term histories of peoples of the different continents

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

I briefly tutored a ninth-grader a few years ago at an urban high school whose web site prominently displayed the tag line, “Where Every Student is College Bound.” On a tour of the school, the principal took our new group of tutors into a classroom and asked the students, “How many of you are planning