Every time I think about writing about something on Facebook that really matters, I think about how that is even possible to do. Marshall McLuhan was surely at some level correct in saying that the… Continue reading…
Staff are now testifying that the now-former president did indeed know more about the budget scandal than he let on. That the 4 people who were fired a few months ago were possibly fired… Continue reading…
Is Email Making Professors Stupid? is an article in the recent Chronicle of Higher Education. It talks about Donald Knuth, a computer scientist, who doesn’t use email and hasn’t since 1990. Instead, he has… Continue reading…
Test.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_Polytechnique_massacre#/media/File:Mtl_dec6_plaque.jpg 29 years ago today. I remember. 14 women dead, 15 injured, plus suicides reported after the massacre, directly tied to the stress of these events. I was teaching at Trent, in Peterborough, and… Continue reading…
A Chronicle of Higher Education article on English departments, discussing among others Julie Thompson Klein and Jonathan Kramnick (and, btw, I’d love to sit in on a discussion between these two on interdisciplinarity). It… Continue reading…
On next week’s US midterm election: 1. Advance polls are meaningless. Remember two years ago. Everyone has an advanced poll, and will claim accuracy after the fact depending on what happens. Yes, there is… Continue reading…
Everywhere I look in the past week it seems like there’s death and sadness. The big obvious ones – innocent Jews slaughtered in Pittsburgh, a plane crash in Indonesia. Small ones – one of our… Continue reading…
A truism of political morality is that we should take character seriously. This is, perhaps, more of a truism on the right than the left, but it would be rare to find someone who would… Continue reading…
NYT coverage of the primary elections in Florida and Arizona. It’s been noted before, but there’s a subtle (sometimes not so subtle) slant to their political reporting. Exhibit A:
“Mr. Gillum edged out Ms…. Continue reading…
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/25/opinion/sunday/college-professors-experts-advice.html What makes a good teacher, from a student’s point of view? The author here makes some fairly broad generalizations about researchers and teachers. He feels a bit like he cherry-picks examples to prove… Continue reading…
A report in the Atlantic tracks the decline of the humanities since the financial crisis of 2008. The decline is both in the number of students in classes and the number of majors…. Continue reading…
I’m generally not a huge fan of Ross Douthat, but I don’t dismiss him on principle the way I do some other columnists. When he talks about the humanities, though, he makes me want to… Continue reading…
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/upshot/election-2016-voting-precinct-maps.html The NY Times publishes a voting map of the US for the 2016 presidential election, showing how areas voted down to the polling station level. So, if you’re American you can see how… Continue reading…
My university is getting a new president, after 26 years of the previous one being in that position. The new president was our provost (there was a national search, but it’s pretty clear that he… Continue reading…
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/opinion/america-heimat-germany-politics.html
The columnist in this piece thinks that the English speaking world needs a new word from German: Heimat. This is a term which captures more than geographical place, but a state of belonging…. Continue reading…
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-21973-y
So, I’m looking at this paper (above), and what it looks like to me is that it is another way of thinking about the idea of the horizontal in the construction and expression… Continue reading…
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/16/robert-mueller-russians-charged-election This just dropped. So the grand jury found enough evidence to charge these with conspiracy to defraud the United States. That means that there’s enough evidence to go forward with a trial for… Continue reading…
Ten years ago today, my dad died. It doesn’t seem that long ago. I realized that it has been ten years just yesterday, when I was thinking about memory and how it works. Much has… Continue reading…
I imagine, as I work on the current book, some point in the future in which what I think is put on the page immediately, ready for me to edit, move around, and the rest… Continue reading…
I’ve seen several people raise the question of whether this American president is “my” president. Obviously, that is a question Americans are asking – the rest of the world is saying, you broke it, you… Continue reading…
https://www.chronicle.com/article/An-Insider-s-Take-on/242235?cid=wcontentlist_hp_5 My inclination in response to this article is to say, yeah, we’ve been making all these points for 10+ years to deaf ears. Lisa read parts of this to me this morning, interspersed… Continue reading…
I’m going to repost some of the posts I’ve made on Facebook over the last year or so, to this blog, so that they remain accessible. I’ll put up the original posting dates and links… Continue reading…
from Jan. 5, 2018
Going into a bank, any bank, is for me an exercise in carefully repressed rage. The people who work there are generally perfectly nice. But it is all against a… Continue reading…
From Dec. 17, 2017
The attached article (click on the above picture) is interesting, and gets at something I’ve been thinking for quite awhile, at least in part, which is that there is a… Continue reading…
from Dec. 15, 2017
http://quarterlyconversation.com/the-french-invasion
We don’t have many events in philosophy, not “EVENTS” at least, you know, those earth-shaking seismic changes in intellectual culture. The October 1966 Johns Hopkins conference that was the… Continue reading…
from Dec. 6, 2017
28 years ago, I was teaching at Trent University and finishing my Ph.D. In the years before the internet, when you couldn’t just turn on your iPad and get… Continue reading…
From Nov. 14, 2017
Who is this Cathy O’Neil person and how is it possible that she is this clued out? “Where’s academia when it comes to helping us make sense of this?” Um,… Continue reading…
from Nov. 11, 2017
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/12/women#.WgZ48EZa1Wo.facebook
Some specifics in this article about a report on womens’ experience in universities. Some of the comments add to the discussion, for a change, rather than being the usual… Continue reading…
From Nov. 9, 2017
http://induecourse.ca/affirmative-action-for-conservative-academics/
Problems with Haidt, and against affirmative action for conservatives in higher education. The categories of “left” and “right” are often not all that helpful, and especially in university settings…. Continue reading…