A generation ago, small, independent operations defined the entire industry. Today, the businesses of beef, pork, and poultry slaughter are all dominated by four giants at the national level. But that greatly understates the problem, as in many regions, a single corporation holds a complete monopoly. Two firms, Dean Foods and the Dairy Farmers of America control as much as 80-90 percent of the milk supply chain in some states and wield substantial influence across the entire industry. As our Food & Power website details, the story is much the same in food-processing, egg production, grain production, and produce farming.

Monopolists have captured control over many lines of manufacturing as well. Corning, an American glass manufacturer, sells 60 percent of all the glass used in LCD screens, and Owens Illinois holds a near monopoly over market for glass bottles in the US. Rexam, a British company, holds a dominant position over the international supply of bottle caps and pharmaceutical bottles.

Hospital corporations across America have also been buying up physician practices in recent years. Hospital ownership of physician practices more than doubled between 2004 and 2011, from 24 to 49 percent. In drug stores, meanwhile, the pending takeover of Rite Aid by Walgreen’s would reduce the market to two giants, along with CVS.

Pharmaceutical companies have been merging at a record pace in recent years, and drug makers often use their concentrated market power to raise the prices of generic drugs, such as Digoxin, Daraprim, Naloxone, and standard vaccines.

Whirlpool’s takeover of Maytag in 2006 gave it control of 50 to 80 percent of U.S. sales of washing machines, dryers, and dishwashers and a very strong position in refrigerators. Maytag also controls the Jenn-Air, Amana, Magic Chef, Admiral, and KitchenAid brands and holds a dominant position over supply of Sears Kenmore products.

The FTC successfully blocked a proposed merger of Staples and Office Depot, but the market is still highly concentrated after Office Depot’s 2013 acquisition of Office Max. Collectively, the two firms control 69 percent of the entire office supplies market.

China’s vitamin cartel controls 100 percent of the market for U.S. Vitamin C, which is also known as ascorbic acid and which is used in almost all preserved foods.

Indeed, the rise of hyperindividualism has fragmented our connections, scattering our relationships across the country. Even today’s modern self-care trends turn us inward, convincing us to “hyperfocus on ourselves at the expense of connecting with others.” And the numbers don’t lie: Americans are spending more and more time alone and less and less time with their friends.

One such example is Amazon, whose RTO plan was admittedly prompted by the feelings of senior leadership, not hard data. “It’s time to disagree and commit. We’re here, we’re back—it’s working,” Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, reportedly said of in-person work. “I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better.”

On one hand, remote work is proven to be between 10% and 20% less productive and can weaken morale and bonding, especially among younger workers and new workforce entrants. But people still overwhelmingly prefer at least a few days per week at home, arguing that physical office presence is more trouble than it’s worth and is rarely necessary to complete a task.

Ideally, a mix of both options—at the workers’ discretion—should fix the problem. Workers are flocking to jobs with flexibility, which has quickly become a must-have for most white-collar industries rather than a nice-to-have.

. Perhaps you see the liberal-arts idyll, removed from the pressures of the broader world and filled with tweedy creatures reading on quadrangle lawns. This is the redoubt of the idealized figure of the English major, sensitive and sweatered, moving from “Pale Fire” to “The Fire Next Time” and scaling the heights of “Ulysses” for the view. The goal of such an education isn’t direct career training but cultivation of the min

Or perhaps you think of the university as the research colony, filled with laboratories and conferences and peer-reviewed papers written for audiences of specialists. This is a place that thumps with the energy of a thousand gophers turning over knowledge. It’s the small-bore university of campus comedy—of “Lucky Jim” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”—but also the quarry of deconstruction, quantum electrodynamics, and value theory. It produces new knowledge and ways of understanding that wouldn’t have an opportunity to emerge anywhere else.

English professors find the turn particularly baffling now: a moment when, by most appearances, the appetite for public contemplation of language, identity, historiography, and other longtime concerns of the seminar table is at a peak.

“Young people are very, very concerned about the ethics of representation, of cultural interaction—all these kinds of things that, actually, we think about a lot!” Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and an English professor, told me last fall.

In a quantitative society for which optimization—getting the most output from your input—has become a self-evident good, universities prize actions that shift numbers, and pre-professionalism lends itself to traceable change

One literature professor and critic at Harvard—not old or white or male—noticed that it had become more publicly rewarding for students to critique something as “problematic” than to grapple with what the problems might be; they seemed to have found that merely naming concerns had more value, in today’s cultural marketplace, than curiosity about what underlay them