Bookfox today blogs:

'So the seventeen-year-old kid [Alec Niedenthal] who wrote a letter to the New York Times about making way for the new generation of authors, whom he described as "the young, challenging, Facebook-and-MySpace-addled minds that you have so hastily jettisoned as literary jetsam," has not only been interviewed by The New York Observer but contacted by Grove/Atlantic and HarperCollins requesting manuscripts. If only it was that easy for the rest of us to avoid the slush pile. Then again, I'm not a wunderkid who had read William Vollmann, William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Scott Snyder, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, and David Foster Wallace before graduating high school.'

Bookfox via, in turn, The Elegant Variation

In the Basement of the Ivory Tower
 

-The idea that a university education is for everyone is a destructive myth. An [anonymous] instructor at a "college of last resort" explains why.
 

June 2008 Atlantic Monthly