Thursday Reading

Who doesn’t hate meetings? Fortunately, Reid Hastie, a behavioral-science professor at the University of Chicago, has some suggestions in this New York Times column for how to make meetings less boring and more productive.
Elsewhere in the Times, Stanley Fish reviews a new book on his blog that argues that higher education isn’t what it used to be and that humanities departments, in particular, are dying out.
Ever wonder why bureaucracy begets more bureaucracy? Check out this article in The New Scientist on physicists’ efforts to confirm Parkinson’s Law, which states that “work expands to fill the time available for its completion” and that “there is little or no relationship between the work to be done and the size of the staff” doing it.