Please compare and contrast these two excellent essays, written many decades apart, on the value of “useless knowledge.” The first is Albert Jay Nock’s classic “The Value of Useless Knowledge,” first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1934; and the second essay is “We Need More ‘Useless’ Knowledge,” by Robbert Dijkgraaf in the March 2, 2017 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education. The need for such critical literacy or independent disinterested reflection has never been more timely and compelling than in this present age of stultifying ideological conformity and political correctness.

The Best of Charles Burris