By Ilan Stavans. Books are no longer books, at least not what was meant by book a generation ago: an extensive work made of letters that build sentences shaped into paragraphs, written on pages glued together and bound in covers. That, at least, still describes the yellowish copy I bought in 1985, on the New York City streets, of Fahrenheit 451, which sits tightly in my personal library. More...

By Anne Curzan. An article about the benefits of standing desks in last week’s Washington Post highlighted a problem, and I’m not talking about the problem of sitting too long in a chair at the office (although this is a real problem). I’m talking about a different kind of chair. More...

By Allan Metcalf. So you’re ready to learn a new language. How about Wampanoag? 
You’ll find it useful if you plan to visit Massachusetts. That is, if you’re traveling by time machine to visit the Massachusetts of about 350 years ago. That was when Wampanoag (aka Massachusett) was the principal language spoken by long-time inhabitants of the region, though it (and they) were being displaced by English invaders. More...

By Chronicle Staff. Report: “Harnessing the Tax Code to Promote College Affordability: Options for Reform”|
Author: Joe Valenti, director of asset building; David A. Bergeron, vice president for postsecondary education; and Elizabeth Baylor, associate director of postsecondary education, all at the Center for American Progress.More...

By Ian Wilhelm. Does the head of a country’s higher-education system need a college degree?
That question is dogging the government of Narendra Modi, India’s newly elected prime minister. On Monday, Mr. Modi chose Smriti Irani to lead India’s Ministry of Human Resource Development, which oversees the country’s colleges and universities. More...

By Nick DeSantis. The number of controversies over speakers on college campuses has risen sharply in the last 15 years, says a report released on Wednesday by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a free-speech advocacy group known as FIRE. More...

By Megan O'Neil. The University of Maryland at College Park has a new Ferrari of a supercomputer, and it’s students who are taking it for a test drive. Some 60 students enrolled in the university’s high-performance-computing boot camp, now in its second of two weeks, are the first to make use of Deepthought2, the newest supercomputer in higher education. The $4.2-million machine has a processing speed of about 300 teraflops, meaning it can complete up to 300 trillion operations per second, and it has a petabyte of storage. It is the equivalent of 10,000 laptops working together simultaneously, university officials say. Read more...

By Jonah Newman. It’s commencement season, so it’s no surprise that the “Is college worth it?” question is making headlines (again) this week. Perhaps fueled by nervous graduates and parents wondering if they’ve just flushed four (or more) years and many thousands of dollars down the drain, a column on that question by David Leonhardt of The New York Times became the most-read and most-emailed article on the newspaper’s website. More...

By Jonah Newman. The Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics released on Thursday its enormous annual report on the state of education in the United States. “The Condition of Education 2014” is based on 42 national indicators, from preschool enrollment to degree attainment to labor-force participation. More...