Bryce Taylor, a junior at Silliman College and my son Gabriel’s roommate, writes an occasional column titled *Untimely Meditations* for the Yale Daily News. Hat tip to Matt Gerken. What does Gabe know?

Black metal spears, their tips pointed skyward, line Grove Street in legions. They form a fence, and behind them are graves. One might wonder, trudging along the sidewalk, what invisible army it is that holds these spears. One might feel grateful that they protect us from the dead.

On occasion, though, it is well to seek out the dead, to convene with their humble silence. More perspective, as it is called, can perhaps be gleaned from an hour in the cemetery than from a whole semester abroad. England and China have their charms, but in a cemetery you are looking at your certain destiny. Dust.

I approached the gate and found it closed. There was a bench nearby. I took a seat and looked past the sable spears to clusters of tombstones, some standing proudly erect, others leaning as if to bow. The bodies beneath them lay starkly parallel amid the dirt of the earth. “The scepter, learning, physic, must/ All follow this, and come to dust.” Shakespeare. A leaf dropped to the ground. Fall was encroaching… .

Students with their books and backpacks paced along the sidewalk. Why — if learning comes to dust — do they work so hard to learn? What are we doing here? “Gathering rosebuds while we may,” one might propose. But if rosebuds, too, amount to dust, they are rubbish, they are empty. Something there is that wants immortality.

How bizarre a cemetery is! How strange that men should bury one another, should entertain superstitions about ghouls and souls and afterlives. What is it in men that induces them to dream of infinity? What is it that prompts Hamlet to fear the next life? How is it that feeble-bodied brutes evolved from apes should have in common — whatever their culture, whatever their historical period — some sense of that dimension transcending their momentary dust-bound lives.

I rose from my seat. Along the sidewalk, I passed beneath the shadow of the entrance gate. It towers high above the ranks of black spears. On another day I will enter the gate. For now I study its proclamation. THE DEAD SHALL BE RAISED. What absurdity! What a scandal, what an embarrassment to our enlightened campus!

I marched along the sidewalk, happy to think that the worm, very soon, will thrust its head out of the dirt and into the sunlight.

To be a Christian is to engage in a kind of combat, and Lent mirrors that ordeal. A time of preparation for baptism on Easter, Lent is a commemoration of Christ’s fast in the wilderness for forty days. Jesus is driven by the Spirit into the wild to do combat with the adversary who, in a garden, tempts a woman to eat the fruit and see what happens. Satan is the inventor of the world’s oldest profession: advertising. “See this apple? You need this apple. Price: one soul. You can afford it.” We fall for it. Jesus doesn’t. If we come to Holy Saturday recognizing that, we will have observed a Holy Lent.

Here’s a tool I use that virtually eliminates adverts from my screen reading.

The best way to understand why I.Q.s rise, Flynn argues, is to look at one of the most widely used I.Q. tests, the so-called WISC (for Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children). The WISC is composed of ten subtests, each of which measures a different aspect of I.Q. Flynn points out that scores in some of the categories—those measuring general knowledge, say, or vocabulary or the ability to do basic arithmetic—have risen only modestly over time. The big gains on the WISC are largely in the category known as “similarities,” where you get questions such as “In what way are ‘dogs’ and ‘rabbits’ alike?” Today, we tend to give what, for the purposes of I.Q. tests, is the right answer: dogs and rabbits are both mammals. A nineteenth-century American would have said that “you use dogs to hunt rabbits.”

“If the everyday world is your cognitive home, it is not natural to detach abstractions and logic and the hypothetical from their concrete referents,” Flynn writes. Our great-grandparents may have been perfectly intelligent. But they would have done poorly on I.Q. tests because they did not participate in the twentieth century’s great cognitive revolution, in which we learned to sort experience according to a new set of abstract categories. In Flynn’s phrase, we have now had to put on “scientific spectacles,” which enable us to make sense of the WISC questions about similarities. To say that Dutch I.Q. scores rose substantially between 1952 and 1982 was another way of saying that the Netherlands in 1982 was, in at least certain respects, much more cognitively demanding than the Netherlands in 1952. An I.Q., in other words, measures not so much how smart we are as how modern we are… .

The psychologist Michael Cole and some colleagues once gave members of the Kpelle tribe, in Liberia, a version of the WISC similarities test: they took a basket of food, tools, containers, and clothing and asked the tribesmen to sort them into appropriate categories. To the frustration of the researchers, the Kpelle chose functional pairings. They put a potato and a knife together because a knife is used to cut a potato. “A wise man could only do such-and-such,” they explained. Finally, the researchers asked, “How would a fool do it?” The tribesmen immediately re-sorted the items into the “right” categories.

Gladwell