A Dictionary of Academic Terms That Is Also a Meditation on Work

But they’re not wrong: from the ethos of self-improvement to the supposedly self-evident good of American greatness, “excellence” is in the air. And the pursuit of being better than all comers, the authors argue, fosters callousness, impatience, an obsession with competition, and “a widespread and barely concealed disdain for weakness, failure, doomed gestures, tragedy, paralysis, fragility, mediocrity, and the ordinary in all its forms (this despite there being excellent evidence that this litany epitomizes much that is essential to human being).”