I don’t save many magazine articles anymore (I filled up too many file cabinets that way while working as an Utne Reader editor), but I intend to save Jeannine Ouellette’s very fine feature on the death of the American imagination [2] from the November 2007 Rake.

This is the kind of sweeping, thorough thought piece that is much easier for an editor to assign than for a journalist to actually report and write. Ouellette did such a beautiful job of it that by the article’s end I was inspired, despite its somewhat dire assessment of the state of things.

Too bad The Rake couldn’t have included a sidebar about Waldorf education (Ms. Ouellette is a veteran Waldorf teacher), which although no panacea, is at least one strong counter-cultural trend to the soul-deadening typical American education.