Many of us who publish in Academic Questions are emeritus professors with memories of our work and concerns about the future of scholarship. So it is exciting to witness the youthful energy and methodological experiments of the newer hires at AQ’s parent organization, the National Association of Scholars. David Randall, who joined the NAS staff in 2015 and became Director of Research two years later, recently got my attention as a bumptious, risk-taking writer when he tried the sonnet mode with two poems in the summer, 2019 issue, “Conversation” and “The Concept of Conversation.” These skillful exercises persuaded me to look at his scholarly work on the same topic of polite and rational “conversation” that is just out, The Concept of Conversation: From Cicero’s Sermo to the Grand Siècle’s Conversation.
Now Randall is busy producing long reports and
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