who, as they have in the past, threaten to take down civilization itself.
For many of us, the second biggest expense we will ever make, after a home purchase, is our kids college education. A four year education at a private or even a State University, can cost well over $160,000. For the first time in this country student debt has outpaced credit card debt. Lately much has been written about the cost benefit analysis of that education. We know that among the college educated unemployment has only been around 5% compared with the non college educated at well over 10%. Yet many question not only the value of that education, but most of all the processes that has become both an American ritual, and a right of passage for both kids and parents; a process that Andrew Ferguson says can make us a little bit crazy. Ferguson is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard, and the author of Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College
.
.
Regardless of your political views about Reagan, it was a seminal historical moment.
gives us a DiMaggio much more nuanced and arguably much more human.
Who are we but the sum total of all that we remember? What if we had total control over what we choose to remember? Imagine if there was a kind of valve to control memory? How much of what we think we have forgotten is still lodged permanently within our memory? Would more control of our memory allow us to alter our personality or even how we see the world around us? Certainly it would help us remember names at cocktails parties and help us to find our car in the parking garage, but what other impact might it have? These issues of memory are dealt with in a bestselling new book by Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
.
Most of us have grown up thinking that Airports are at best a nuisance. Living near an Airport has been seen as negative, and we've consistently built our Airports far outside urban area.
Almost three years after the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, many people still are asking how did it happen, why did it happen and could it happen again? Also, as was asked at this year's Academy Awards, why has no one payed any kind of a price for such irresponsible and some would say corrupt, Wall Street behavior? 
is just out in paperback. Today, with the benefit of some hindsight and distance he gives us some clear explanations.
.
Normally great cities change. Even Paris and New York have gone through radical transformations. Jerusalem it seems, has remained true to its roots, troubled and seeped in violence though it may be. Perhaps, it is because the city has become a kind of religious and philosophical Rorschach test, on to which we project so many of our dreams fears and hopes? Is there really some special power to Jerusalem, as that "shinning city on the hill," or is it simply its historical context that gives it its unique power? James Carroll, the brilliant former Catholic Priest, former chaplain at Boston University, and author of Constantine's Sword, An American Requiem and House of War, reaches deep into the history of Jerusalem to give us both the real and the fantasy City.
