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The push to focus early and narrowly extends well beyond sports. We are often taught that the more competitive and complicated the world gets, the more specialized we all must become (and the earlier we must start) to navigate it. Our best-known icons of success are elevated for their precocity and their head starts—Mozart at the keyboard, Facebook

David Epstein • Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

Middleclass parents kept their kids in school instead of sending them off to the factory, and were discovering that the demographic between child and adult was a previously undreamed-of species.

Charles R. Morris • The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy

In its variety, the Substack corpus resembles the blogosphere. It is produced by a mix of career journalists, bloggers, specialists, novelists, hobbyists, dabblers, and white-collar professionals looking to plump up their personal brands. The company has tried to recruit high-profile writers, offering (to a select few) health-care stipends, design ... See more

Anna Wiene • Is Substack the Media Future We Want?

Fadeke Adegbuyi: The command and deep understanding of a subject has been decoupled from credentialism. Experts can be born and brought up on the internet, bypassing post-secondary institutions and other centralized forms of education and knowledge dissemination….Additionally, the rate at which the internet allows for information to be generated an... See more

future.a16z.com • 21 Experts on the Future of Expertise - Future

The generative intellectual environments that academic institutions house and foster are being recreated or entirely rethought online, outside of the brick walls of a university. Internet salons, writer collectives, open-source software, fellowships, and cohort-based courses are providing modern alternatives to those institutions. You don’t need an... See more

future.a16z.com • 21 Experts on the Future of Expertise - Future

Within the Context of No-Context

George W. S. Trow newyorker.com

These incidents of “political correctness,” amplified by right-wing media, whipped up hatred of elites out in Real America. The culture wars raged on, as bloody-minded and durable as the Thirty Years’ War, a full-employment program for pundits of every type. Some worried about a generation of ultra-sensitive children coddled by ultra-indulgent adul

George Packer • Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

Crow and Dabars don’t hold back in tearing down what they call the “Harvardization” of universities, where schools are responding to the higher education crisis by decreasing their acceptance rates and increasing their price tags, instead of trying to develop a better product that’s designed for the scale and type of demand we’re seeing today.

Nadia Asparouhova • The New American University

That passive mass audience on which so many political and economic institutions depended had itself unbundled, disaggregated, fragmented into what I call vital communities: groups of wildly disparate size gathered organically around a shared interest or theme.

Sublime

David Epstein • Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

Charles R. Morris • The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy

Anna Wiene • Is Substack the Media Future We Want?

future.a16z.com • 21 Experts on the Future of Expertise - Future

future.a16z.com • 21 Experts on the Future of Expertise - Future

Within the Context of No-Context

George Packer • Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

Nadia Asparouhova • The New American University

Martin Gurri • The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millenium