A piece I wrote about international students at American universities has been published at the Huffington Post. It’s worth saying that I wrote this piece before both this story in the New York Times and the horribly bigoted Pete Hoekstra Super Bowl ad came out. Were I to write the piece now, it would likely […]
Continue reading →My brother, inspired by Kat Asharya, has written a Valentine to the Virginia Woolf novel Jacob’s Room. It is a good idea, and bears repeating. So: how do I love thee, The Westing Game? I suppose I’m guilty of lapsing into self-parody when I say that the dominant impression of the book, for me, is […]
Continue reading →At this point, I find it hard to imagine a more incongruous marriage of strength and weakness than the cross-Google combination of power and versatility with perpetual annoyance and technological fussiness. This isn’t an argument about Google’s recent missteps re: privacy and user rights. That’s a separate issue. It’s just a whinge about the fact […]
Continue reading →Woodrow Wilson’s speech asking Congress to declare war against imperial Germany and bring the United States into World War One is, in many ways, a remarkable document. I’ve taken several classes of freshman composition students through a rhetorical analysis of the speech, and though at times it’s a slog, I find it a very generative […]
Continue reading →I’m sure you’ve had the conversation, at some point in your life, where you’ve discussed the fact that some words have prefixes or suffixes that indicate an antonym, but no antonym exists. For example, we say someone or some act is uncouth, but not couth; our hair can be unkempt, but not kempt; you can […]
Continue reading →You can fairly accuse me of being absurdly quotidian here. And that’s okay! You’ve been warned. So, I take attendance. It’s just necessary for a writing class, in the age of the process model. If you don’t establish the importance of attending class, and lay out clear negative consequences for missing a lot of class, […]
Continue reading →I was asked to write a piece on Obama’s recent tuition proposal for Consider Magazine, and was happy to provide one. You can check it out here. The format of the magazine is point-counterpoint, which requires a certain degree of tunnel vision. Also, the word count limit was a constraint. I will just add this: […]
Continue reading →John Holbo, in the lead up to an enjoyable dismantling of Ross Douthat’s views on the Catholic hospital birth control controversy, paraphrases a curious criticism of Corey Robin’s Reactionary Mind: Some reviewers have complained that Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind seriously overreaches when he writes stuff like this: Conservatism is the theoretical voice of … animus against […]
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