Just to offer a brief followup to my recent piece on the myth of a STEM shortage, I want to focus a bit more on the uncontroversial value of being a star. I think that maybe the essential point is the one my engineer friend was making: companies may be hungry for STEM workers, but […]
Continue reading →As an impossibly perfect coda to my recent argument about the impregnable social fortress of neoliberal brodudes, I leave you with this, a response to that wonderful George Scialabba interview I quoted from the other day.
Continue reading →I wrote a post over at Medium aggregating the evidence that there’s no STEM shortage. Happy Thanksgiving.
Continue reading →“My idea of the end of the world would be the hive, the hive mind. Sven Birkerts has a wonderful description of how the horizontal, linked world is gradually evolving in that direction, to where nobody is ever really alone. Nobody is able to just sink deep into his or her own imagination or feelings. […]
Continue reading →“I have been, for over twenty years, entirely persuaded by Garry Wills’s argument: that the Gettysburg Address, given by Abraham Lincoln on this day, exactly 150 years ago, was the great catalyzing rhetorical act in the–probably inevitable–transformation of the United States’s imagination of itself from a localized republican culture which accepted diverse, and unequal, communities, […]
Continue reading →Here’s two important ideas from statistics that I wish would filter out a bit more, so that people could better evaluate statistics that are in the news. 1. It’s not the sample size, it’s the sample mechanism. Well, OK. It’s somewhat the sample size, obviously. My point is that most people who encounter a study’s methodology are […]
Continue reading →Went to a great conference this weekend; was inspired by the plenary; discovered the speaker was a wonderfully generous and friendly woman; got to have lunch with her and the rest of my panel; had a fun evening in a great college town; met some cool people; hung out with good friends; came home and […]
Continue reading →The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy functions as both a joke and a warning. The idea is simple but powerful. A Texan decides he wants to prove his shooting prowess to his friends. He takes out his handgun and empties its magazine into the side of his barn. He then paints a bulls-eye where his shots are […]
Continue reading →… but, nevertheless, something I think is true: the one indispensable trait for a reader is humility. The one indispensable trait for a writer is arrogance.
Continue reading →There’s an old joke where three statisticians go hunting deer. The first one shoots at a buck and misses five feet to the left. The second one shoots at a buck and misses five feet to the right. The third one shouts, “we got ’em!” To me, that’s what politics is, more or less. Think […]
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