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“... schools – popularly known as ‘No Child Left Behind’. As the American historian Jerry Muller reports in his hair-raising analysis of this and similar schemes: ‘Under NCLB, scores on standardised tests are the numerical metric by which success and failure are judged. And the stakes are high for teachers and principals, whose raises in ...”

“... Sometimes, when I’m feeling dyspeptic, I wonder why psychologists have such a down on minds. Psychologists, of all people. In philosophy, ever since Plato, the mainstream opinion has been that the mind is the organ of thought; thinking is what the mind is for, and we act as we do because we think what we do. But psychologists, for the last hundred years or so, have mostly viewed that sort of ‘intellectualism’ as an embarrassing remnant of the Enlightenment: behaviourists say that the question of what minds are for doesn’t arise, since there aren’t any ...”

“... friend’ is a phrase that announces its awkwardness every time it appears. ‘I’ll call him Jerry’ would be preferable, getting the awkwardness over with. Julius refers to himself in passing as being mixed race, and some of his encounters with the world are filtered through perceptions of his status. He spends a lot of time exploring New York on ...”