Would-be internet sleuths are filling social media with theories and misinformation surrounding the University of Idaho killings. CNN's Gary Tuchman reports.

“I’m not going to sit here and tell you we did everything perfectly. We haven’t,” Lori Lightfoot, Chicago’s mayor, says in a campaign ad released late last year. “But we’ve tried our darndest to make sure we got it right, and when we haven’t—you pick yourself up and you listen and you’re humble and you learn from your mistakes.”

That might not be the most triumphant message for the incumbent to send Windy City voters as they decide whether to reelect her. But it is perhaps an honest one. Poll after poll has shown Chicagoans to be in a “sour” mood: A mere 9 percent believe that the city is headed in the right direction. Underwater on her approval rating, Lightfoot is not expected to win reelection next month.

It’s not just her. Eric Garcetti was term-limited and could not run for reelection in Los Angeles last year, but Angelenos probably would not have voted him in again even if he had been eligible; his approval rating had sagged nearly 20 points in the prior two years. In New York, Eric Adams’s approval rating fell more than 30 points in his first six months in office, though a majority of city voters said they still liked the guy’s style. Just a quarter of San Francisco residents rate London Breed’s performance as excellent or good, per a Chronicle poll in September; her popularity has “plummeted.” And in New Orleans, where the public is more dissatisfied with city leadership than at any time since the Hurricane Katrina era, LaToya Cantrell is facing a potential recall.

[Read: How to run for president while you’re running a city]

The Anna Karenina principle applies here: Each of these unpopular big-city mayors is unpopular in his or her own way. Yet sweeping national trends are stirring up public dissatisfaction with city executives across the country, driving down favorability ratings, ginning up recalls, and increasing retirements. Indeed, what had been one of the best perches in American politics is becoming one of its worst. The overwhelmingly liberal denizens of the country’s cities are disaffected and are holding their local leaders accountable for problems far beyond any one officeholder’s capacity to repair. That’s a trend that might get worse in the coming years.

Mayors, as a general point, have it good. They’re often well-liked, and not infrequently beloved. Their approval ratings tend to run high. Many of them have more formal power than, say, members of the House of Representatives do, and your average mayor has much more influence over the city she leads than the president has over domestic policy. They frequently win reelection. “Once a mayor’s in office, unless something disastrous happens, it’s hard to get rid of them,” Katherine Levine Einstein, a political scientist at Boston University, told me, discussing the frequency of long tenures among big-city executives.

Yet, at the moment, any number of mayors are struggling. Adams, Breed, and Lightfoot all have significantly lower approval ratings than the governor in their respective states, for instance, as did Garcetti before he left office. Even many well-liked mayors, such as Muriel Bowser of Washington, D.C, have watched their approval ratings drop of late.

In surveys, mayors themselves have expressed frustration as their community’s problems have become more intractable. They “feel like they’re being forced to deal with these big, macro problems, whether it’s crime, inflation, homelessness, housing costs, COVID, climate change,” Einstein told me. “They’re struggling with these issues. Their citizens feel really frustrated by these issues. But they often can’t do a whole lot about it.”

The early phase of the coronavirus pandemic burned a lot of mayors out, leading to a wave of retirements. City executives felt tasked with managing a public-health disaster far outside their normal purview; many struggled to design and implement masking-and-distancing mandates, initiatives to help small businesses, and educational policies that worked for parents, kids, and teachers’ unions. Those pressures might have eased, but new ones have taken their place.

The coronavirus crisis drags on. In big cities such as New York and San Francisco, the shift to working from home has left downtowns empty, destroying local businesses, making homelessness more conspicuous, and deepening residents’ sense of their vulnerability to crime. That exodus, now seemingly permanent, has decreased property-tax revenues and sapped public-transit systems of funds too, something urbanists are warning might turn into a “doom loop” of declining service and declining ridership.

At the same time, mayors are struggling with a surge in certain kinds of crimes. Homicides increased sharply in many American cities in 2020 and 2021, a trend that generated lots of media coverage and dampened many local officials’ favorability ratings. (Thankfully, the homicide wave has crested in many cities.) One study focused on New York found that an increase of 20 homicides in the city reduced mayoral approval by half a percentage point. “Successive months of increasing homicides could seriously damage a mayor’s standing with the public,” the authors note, with sustained increases proving “devastating.” Yet elected officials—including mayors and district attorneys—have a very limited impact on crime rates; even the police have less of an effect than you might think.

A third problem is the long-simmering housing crisis. Rents have increased relentlessly in big cities over the past two decades as a result of an undersupply of millions of units, squeezing residents’ budgets and leading to surges in homelessness while also jacking up the cost of services such as day care. Urban life has become an incessant, unaffordable grind, even for people with healthy incomes.

[Annie Lowrey: The U.S. needs more housing than almost anyone can imagine]

Mayors do seem to have some effect on housing prices, and they often have some control over real-estate development. But city executives cannot conjure up transitional housing units and affordable apartment buildings for low- and moderate-income residents. They often need to work, slowly and painstakingly, with planning commissions, city-council members, and neighborhood groups to get projects approved. And because cities typically must balance their budgets and have many claims on their dollars, mayors can’t easily raise billions to get their constituents off the streets. In Boston University’s latest Menino Survey of Mayors, three in four mayors said they were held accountable for homelessness, but only one in five said they had much control over the issue. “Limited funding is a serious obstacle to effectively reducing local homelessness,” the survey found.

The politics of housing development is tricky for mayors too: Although many city residents are desperate for more apartment construction to bring prices down, many others are NIMBYs who do not want to see their property values stagnate, long-term residents who do not want to see their neighborhoods change, or both. Stopping development makes people angry. Pushing development makes people angry. And mayors get held to task one way or the other.

Some mayors, of course, add to their own burdens: Adams recently faced criticism for having left his city for the Caribbean during a deadly winter storm, and Lightfoot has engaged in a bruising fight with the city’s teachers’ union. But mayors’ burdens are great, and have gotten greater. The overwhelmingly Democratic residents of America’s cities have high expectations. And mayors have limited resources and power to meet them. Until these places become more vibrant, cheaper, and more livable, a mayor’s job won’t be getting any easier.

Happiness, people will have you think, does not come from possessing things. It comes from love. Self-acceptance. Career satisfaction. Whatever. But here’s what everyone has failed to consider: the Ooni Koda 12-inch gas-powered outdoor pizza oven.

Since I purchased mine a year ago, my at-home pizza game has hit levels that are inching toward pizzaiolo perfection. Like Da Vinci in front of a blank canvas, I now churn out perfectly burnished pies entirely from scratch—dough, sauce, caramelized onions, and all. By merely looking at a pie, I can tell you whether the cornicione is too puffy or just right, if the crust could use a bit more leoparding, and whether the dough should have spent another day in the fridge. I am now, in a word, pizza-pilled.

But enlightenment is not without its consequences. The pies from my usual takeout spot just don’t seem to taste the same anymore. They’re still fine in that takeout-pizza way, but a certain je ne sais quoi is gone: For the first time, after opening up a pizza box and bringing a slice to my mouth, I am hyperaware of a limp sogginess to each bite, a rubbery grossness to the cheese. The cardinal rule of restaurants is that to-go food is never as good as the real deal, but even when my homemade pizzas sit around for too long, they don’t taste anywhere near that off.

Pizza delivery, it turns out, is based on a fundamental lie. The most iconic delivery food of all time is bad at surviving delivery, and the pizza box is to blame. “I don’t like putting any pizza in a box,” Andrew Bellucci, a legendary New York City pizza maker of Andrew Bellucci’s Pizzeria, told me. “That’s just it, really. The pizza degrades as soon as it goes inside,” turning into a swampy mess.

A pizza box has one job—keeping a pie warm and crispy during its trip from the shop to your house—and it can’t really do it. The fancier the pizza, the worse the results: A slab of overbaked Domino’s will probably be at least semi-close to whatever its version of perfect is by the time it reaches your door, but a pizza with fresh mozzarella cooked at upwards of 900 degrees? Forget it. Sliding a $40 pie into a pizza box is the packaging equivalent of parking a Lamborghini in a wooden shed before a hurricane.

[Read: The 3 big advances in the technology of the pizza box]

And yet, the pizza box hasn’t changed much, if at all, since it was invented in 1966. Then, boxes were shallow cardboard squares with flaps to lock them into place. Today, boxes are shallow cardboard squares with flaps to lock them into place. You’ll see the same design both in dinky spots for drunken college students and in the country’s most sought-after Neopolitan joints. Since the introduction of this corrugated vessel, humanity has landed on the moon, rolled out the internet, created cellphones, and invented combination air fryer–instant pots. But none of that matters: Ye olde pizza box refuses to die.

The problem with the pizza box starts with the pie itself. Let’s consider what makes the pizza so perfect—not the alchemy between sauce and cheese, but the texture. A classic hot pizza will have a tender and gooey center with a crust that’s as dry and crispy as an eggshell. Even a single slice of freshly cooked budget pizza can deliver a textural kaleidoscope that is unparalleled for its price.

None of these qualities fares well in a box. Unlike a tupperware of takeout chicken soup or palak paneer, which can be microwaved back to life after its journey to your home, the texture of a pizza starts to irreparably worsen after even a few minutes of cardboard confinement. “You’ll never get a pizza out of a box that tastes as good as it would have before it went in,” Scott Wiener, a New York pizza-tour guide and the author of Viva la Pizza!: The Art of the Pizza Box, told me.

The basic issue is this: A fresh pizza spews steam as it cools down. A box traps that moisture, suspending the pie in its own personal sauna. After just five minutes, Wiener said, the pie’s edges become flaccid and chewy. Sauce seeps into the crust, making it soggy. All the while, your pizza is quickly losing heat. After 15 minutes, the cheese has congealed into dollops of rubber. And after 45 minutes, your pizza deteriorates into something else entirely. “It’ll be chewy and dry at the same time,” Anthony Falco, a pizza consultant and the author of Pizza Czar, told me. “And there’s nothing you can do to fix it.”

How to get a hot pizza from the oven to your doorstep is a centuries-old dilemma. When pizza was merely winter sustenance for paupers in 19th-century Naples, pies were loaded into stufas, copper containers that young lads would balance on their heads. Things got weird fast when pizza made its way to the U.S. At Lombardi’s in New York City, perhaps the country’s first pizzeria, lore has it that lukewarm pies were rolled up with twine and reheated on factory furnaces by famished laborers. After World War II, when to-go pizza began to take flight, we finally got the progenitor of the pizza box: flimsy paperboard containers similar to today’s cake boxes. By 1949, when The Atlantic sought to introduce America to the pizza, the package was already something to lament: “You can take home a pizza in a paper box and reheat it, but you should live near enough to serve it within twenty minutes or so. People do reheat pizza which has become cold, but it isn’t very good; the cheese may be stringy, and the crust rocklike at the edges, soggy on the bottom.”

[Read: The art of pizza-making]

And then came the modern pizza box. In 1966, the owner of a small Michigan pizza chain called Domino’s enlisted a local packaging company to construct a box out of corrugated cardboard that would better withstand takeout and delivery. Think about any recent Amazon box you’ve gotten in the mail, and you’ll see what makes this box different: Corrugation produces a layer of wavy cardboard between a top and bottom sheet, sort of like a birthday cake. The design creates thick, airy walls that both protect the precious cargo within a pizza box and insulate the pie’s heat while also allowing some steam to escape.

This new take on the box ushered in a takeout-pizza revolution. “It was a pleasure to hand one to a customer and feel confident that it wouldn’t sag open and drop the pizza on his porch,” Tom Monaghan, Domino’s founder, wrote in his 1986 autobiography, at which point the chain already had several thousand stores worldwide. And these boxes do have a lot going for them: They are dirt cheap to mass produce, can stack on top of one another without compromising the pizza within, ship flat to nestle into cramped shops, and are deceptively easy to fold. (At the World Pizza Games 2022—yes, a real thing—the first-place winner folded five boxes in 20 seconds.)

We’ve gotten a couple of pizza-delivery innovations in the past few decades: the insulated heat bag—that ubiquitous velcroed duffel used to keep pies warm on their journey—those mini-plastic-table things, and … well, that is mostly it. No pizza box in widespread use today is significantly better at keeping a pizza fresh than the one Domino’s invented all those years ago. Indeed, if any pizza holds up well in the old-fashioned box, it’s the chain variety. These pies run drier to avoid a case of the pizza slops. But there is a lot more to pizza than Domino’s and Pizza Hut.

With no better options, some pizzerias are now rejiggering their recipes to better survive the box, dropping their oven temperatures and adding the cheese beneath the sauce. “Every single pizza that I put in a box I know is going to be, let’s say, at least 10 percent not as good as it could have been,” Alex Plattner, the owner of Cincinnati’s Saint Francis Apizza, told me. Others dream of better days. “After smoking a lot of weed, I have come up with a lot of ideas for a better box,” said Bellucci, the New York City pizza maker.

If there is a single food item poised for some technological ingenuity, it’s pizza. Food trends come and go, like Quiznos and kale, but to-go pizza is timeless, even immortal: When the pandemic wrecked the restaurant industry in 2020, pizza sales managed to tick up; billions of pizzas are delivered in this abomination of a box every year. In other words, the pizza box is a market failure that is screaming to be, well, disrupted. We are simply eating a worse version of one of the most popular foods around, all because of the deficiencies of something that seems so eminently fixable.

The thing is, though, an improved box exists. “There are products out there that are better,” said Wiener. “But all of them have problems.” And he would know. Wiener’s Brooklyn apartment includes a Guiness World Record–winning collection of 1,750 pizza boxes. They’ve been meticulously cataloged by spreadsheet and stuffed into a closet. Just about all of these boxes are the common corrugated kind, but a special few are honest attempts to move beyond it. “Some of them are weird prototypes—I have an inflatable pizza box from Denmark,” he said. “I have a pizza box that becomes a spatula. It’s the weirdest.”

Corporate America and garage inventors alike have sought to pioneer a better box. In 2015, one cash-flush Silicon Valley start-up, Zume, created the Pizza Pod™️: a round, two-piece spaceship of a container made from compressed sugarcane fiber. Let a pizza sit inside it and the fibers will absorb the errant moisture better than cardboard, keeping the pie crisp. Last year, the German brand PIZZycle debuted the tupperware of pizza containers, a reusable vessel studded with ventilation holes on its sides. Even Apple—that Apple—has patented its own round pizza box exclusively for its famished Cupertino office workers. And perhaps the most ingenious container I’ve found is from an Indian company called VentIt. The box takes the normal corrugated vessel and thins out part of the cardboard at the top and bottom, creating venting channels that, at least according to VentIt’s own research, achieve something miraculous: reducing 25 percent more steam inside the box while also maintaining the pizza’s temperature.

A better pizza box is not science fiction. Even Apple filed a patent for its own version in 2010. (United States Patent and Trademark Office)

So we know it’s not a question of ingenuity: We can construct better pizza boxes, and we already have. The real issue is cost. No superior pizza box—from VentIt, Zume, wherever—can come close to matching the price of simple corrugated cardboard, and in a restaurant industry with such tight margins, the math is hard to deny. Until customers overcome their Stockholm syndrome, why would pizzerias fork up more money for something that immediately lands in the trash? “The problem is that everybody expects this box and nobody’s too offended by it,” Wiener said. “There hasn’t been enough push for something different.”

[Read: Nothing is cooler than going out to dinner]

For now, we’re still waiting for the perfect box—one that is as cheap, stackable, foldable, and sustainable as its corrugated brethren. “When ALL factors are considered, corrugated cardboard has proven to be the best available material for packaging pizza,” John Correll, a pizza-packaging inventor with 43 patents, told me over email. “For years, other materials have been suggested and tried, but they each have problems.”

There are other issues too. Five companies control 70 percent of the cardboard market in the U.S., a level of consolidation that is rampant across the American economy. Independent pizzerias are everywhere, but the pizza chains still dominate takeout and delivery. Domino’s alone accounts for nearly 40 percent of delivery-pizza sales in the U.S.—on par with all regional chains and mom-and-pops combined. Perhaps these big companies are stifling real pizza-box innovation. “We have a solution that, for the most part, delivers the hot product to a customer in a way that also works for our operations,” Zach Halfmann, Domino’s director of operations innovation, told me. “We haven’t found a need to rethink it.”

And so we must find peace with this cursed container. Its simplicity is its value, and precisely why it’s so hard to give up. Like a Christmas tree or a cast-iron pan, what the pizza box lacks in perfectly engineered function, it makes up for in familiarity, tradition, and even populism.

Your life is different from your grandparents’, but this is quite literally your grandparents’ pizza box—and also Elon Musk’s pizza box, and Joe Biden’s, and Oprah Winfrey’s. It is a custom that brings us together in a kind of communion—sogginess and all. “There’s no wealthy-person version of the pizza box,” Carol Helstosky, a University of Denver professor and the author of Pizza: A Global History, told me. The pizza box is just the pizza box. But hey, at least we’ve moved past the stufa.

Healthier chocolate that feels just as good to eat could be developed, researchers say.

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After declining to renew the contract of an adjunct professor, the president of Hamline University issued a statement that underscores the need to defend academic freedom in American universities.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The gas-stove debate exemplifies the silliest tendencies of American politics. Are our immune systems stuck in 2020? Netanyahu’s betrayal of democracy is a betrayal of Israel.

Student Drivers

Unless you follow academic politics, you might have missed the recent controversy at Hamline University, a small private college in St. Paul, Minnesota. The short version is that a professor named Erika López Prater showed students in her global-art-history class a 14th-century painting depicting the Prophet Muhammad. Aware that many Muslims regard such images as sacrilege, she warned ahead of time that she was going to show the picture and offered to excuse any student who did not want to view it.

Professor López Prater’s contract has not been renewed, and she will not be returning to the classroom. The university strenuously denies that she was fired. Of course, colleges let adjuncts go all the time, often reluctantly. But this, to me, seems like something more.

I began my 35-year teaching career in the late 1980s and was once a tenure-track faculty member at an elite college, where I was one of a handful of registered Republicans among a mostly liberal faculty. I have been denied tenure at one school and granted it at two others. I have been an adjunct, contract faculty (that is, working on a long-term contract but without actual tenure), a department chair, and a tenured full professor. I have led a tenure committee, and I have written tenure and promotion letters for candidates at other schools at the request of their institution. I have been a faculty member in a U.S. government institution, where I had to balance my right to self-expression against important and necessary legal restrictions on politicking in the classroom.

So I think I have a pretty clear idea of what goes on in classrooms. I know what academic freedom means. I think I know what “fired” looks like, and it seems to me that López Prater was fired—a conclusion that seems especially likely in the wake of a highly defensive public letter the school’s president, Fayneese Miller, wrote about the whole business.

After a piece about the controversy appeared in The New York Times, Miller issued a statement in which she decried how Hamline is now “under attack from forces outside our campus.”

Various so-called stakeholders interpreted the incident, as reported in various media, as one of “academic freedom.” The Times went so far as to cite PEN America’s claim that what was happening on our campus was one of the “most egregious violations of academic freedom” it had ever encountered.

It begs the question, “How?”

Allow me to interpret. By “so-called stakeholders,” Miller, I think, means people who believe this issue affects them, but who should buzz off and mind their own business. (And while I’m at it, stakeholders is a bit of jargon that should be banned from education.) About López Prater, Miller said, “The decision not to offer her another class was made at the unit level”—I assume here she means the department in which López Prater worked—”and in no way reflects on her ability to adequately teach the class.” Oh? Then what prompted “the decision at the unit level”?

Miller then lists the impeccably liberal credentials of Hamline as a school, none of which have anything to do with this case. After all of this throat clearing, she gets to the real questions she thinks should have been raised about academic freedom.

First, does your defense of academic freedom infringe upon the rights of students in violation of the very principles you defend? Second, does the claim that academic freedom is sacrosanct, and owes no debt to the traditions, beliefs, and views of students, comprise a privileged reaction?

This makes no sense. The “rights” of students were not jeopardized, and no curriculum owes a “debt” to any student’s “traditions, beliefs, and views.” (Indeed, if you don’t want your traditions, beliefs, or views challenged, then don’t come to a university, at least not to study anything in the humanities or the social sciences.) Miller’s view, it seems, is that academic freedom really only means as much freedom as your most sensitive students can stand, an irresponsible position that puts the university, the classroom, and the careers of scholars in the hands of students who are inexperienced in the subject matter, new to academic life, and, often, still in the throes of adolescence.

This, as I have written elsewhere, is contrary to the very notion of teaching itself. (It is also not anything close to the bedrock 1940 statement on the matter from the American Association of University Professors.) The goal of the university is to create educated and reasoning adults, not to shelter children against the pain of learning that the world is a complicated place. Classes are not a restaurant meal that must be served to students’ specifications; they are not a stand-up act that must make students laugh but never offend them. Miller is leaving the door open for future curricular challenges.

I myself have issued warnings for materials I show in class, notably the gory British nuclear-war movie Threads. I have offered to excuse students who might be disturbed by it, and I would not want someone to interfere with my class on nuclear weapons any more than I would interfere with anyone else’s about art history. There are, to be sure, plenty of times when professors do go off the rails, which is why their performance and syllabi—especially those of untenured faculty and outside adjuncts—are reviewed, in most schools, by a departmental or divisional committee. That doesn’t seem to be what happened here. A student complained, which apparently set in motion several events, including López Prater being summoned by a dean and a Hamline administrator sending an email to campus employees saying that certain actions taken in an online class were “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.”

Noting the school’s traditional Methodist mission that includes doing “all the good you can,” Miller adds, “To do all the good you can means, in part, minimizing harm.” Again, this is risible: The most effective way to avoid harm would be to walk into the classroom and ask the students what they’d like to talk about, let them vote on it, and give a veto to anyone who might be offended by the class’s choice.

Academic freedom is not an open invitation to be a jerk. It is not a license for faculty to harass students or to impose their will on them. But if all it means is that professors keep their jobs only at the sufferance of students, then it means nothing at all.

A significant part of the problem in American universities is the attack on tenure. López Prater was an adjunct—instructors who are far more vulnerable to dismissal at will. But that subject is too big to tackle today; I’ll write more on it here soon.

Related:

Academics are really, really worried about their freedom. How to fix the bias against free speech on campus

Today’s News

The annual inflation rate continued to slow in December, a new report shows. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to investigate the handling of classified documents that were found at President Joe Biden’s former office and his Delaware home. A judge set a new preliminary hearing date in June for the University of Idaho shooting suspect.

Evening Read

Tyler Comrie / Getty; The Atlantic

A Society That Can’t Get Enough of Work

By Lily Meyer

Work is not going well lately. Exhaustion and burnout are rampant; many young people are reconsidering whether they owe all their energy to their jobs, as seen in the widespread popularity of “quiet quitting.” An ongoing wave of unionization—including at Amazon and Starbucks—has led to victories, but has also been met with ferocious resistance from management. In this context, or perhaps in any context, it might feel absurd to imagine a society in which workers can’t get enough of work. It certainly would have seemed ludicrous to readers of the French firebrand Paul Lafargue’s satirical 1883 pamphlet, The Right to Be Lazy, in which he invents a Bizarro World where workers cause all kinds of “individual and social miseries” by refusing to quit at the end of the day.

Lafargue, a onetime doctor who became a critic, a socialist, and an activist, was a politically serious man, but in this recently reissued text, he uses humor to cut through the noise of political debate. His made-up work addicts are meant to help readers see the very real dangers of a system in which many have no choice but to work until they reach their breaking point. Lafargue’s mordant approach is still effective 140 years later. Mixed with the longevity of his ideas, it gives The Right to Be Lazy the angry, hilarious wisdom of a Shakespearean fool.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Can we talk about how weird baby mammals are? The Last of Us makes the apocalypse feel new again.

Culture Break

Netflix

Read. Try a classic book that lives up to its reputation: Almanac of the Dead, by Leslie Marmon Silko, is an epic with action spread skillfully across continents and years.

Watch. Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, on Netflix. It’s sharply funny, eerily timely, and confounding—but not unrewarding—to watch.

P.S.

I know I sound curmudgeonly and old-school about academic freedom (wait’ll you see what I have to say about tenure). I am deeply concerned, however, that changes taking place on American campuses are not so much a matter of left-right politics but rather the result of the growth of entitlement and narcissism, and the subsequent emergence of a client-servicing mentality in education and in many other areas of American life. This is a pretty large claim, so forgive me if I point you to a much fuller treatment of these issues in two books I wrote: The Death of Expertise and Our Own Worst Enemy.

In the meantime, step back and enjoy some laughs about higher education by watching Back to School, a 1986 comedy in which Rodney Dangerfield plays a vulgar clothing tycoon—think of a nicer version of his character from the raunchy 1980 film Caddyshack—who follows his son to college and then buys his own way in with a giant donation. It’s a good send-up of everything about college: snooty faculty, arrogant athletes, and big  money. (Watch for the Oscar-winner Ned Beatty’s classic line, as he defends admitting Dangerfield: “In all fairness … it was a really big check.”) As someone who studied political science and then worked in politics, I especially like Dangerfield disrupting a business class by telling the professor how things actually get done out in the real world. (And don’t miss the cameo by, of all people, Kurt Vonnegut.)

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.