Will Wilkinson has a short and sweet and lovely appreciation of old-school blogging up on his reborn personal blog. I dig it a lot, and I entirely endorse his point about writing and the self. Blogging has always been described as being egalitarian or democratizing in an entirely bullshit way. Maybe in, like, 2000 blogging […]
Continue reading →So I enjoyed this piece by Clive Martin & Nathalie Olah about the weird, timeless lameness of Friends and how it’s influenced our culture. I particularly like the point about the profoundly unhip, achingly white New York City life these creative 20-something professionals live. It’s fun to look at pictures of the Friends cast now because their clothes are so impossibly […]
Continue reading →When I first read that Sean Wilentz piece a few days ago, about halfway through I settled on the notion that he was actually just doing a favor for someone at the magazine. Wieseltier or Foer or Hughes called Wilentz into his office and said, “Look, this isn’t gonna be pretty, but you’ve gotta be […]
Continue reading →I thought that this intervention into the sad, enraging Essay Anne Vanderbilt/Grantland saga was useful, in several ways. First, simply because Tom Scocca is a brilliant writer and a thoughtful guy. But second, because Scocca is the author of the smarm essay, and I think that interacts with this controversy in a useful way. Scocca […]
Continue reading →Here in the university, we have become used to a common form of argument calling for our replacement via online-only education. It goes something like this: yes, we may concede that early returns on online education are discouraging, but that even if we never get to the same quality of education, a large enough decrease […]
Continue reading →That’s me, in the picture, or me in my old alter ego, Philip D. Bag. Philip D. was the brainchild of some private contractor working for some Connecticut state environmental agency. This would have been sometime in summer 2007. This was after I’d come home from a fun but ultimately directionless couple years living […]
Continue reading →So I got a heated email last night from someone who describes himself as “about as liberal as it gets.” He did not respond to my request to reprint his email, but to summarize, he was taking me to task for my attitude on education reform. This is not an unfamiliar position for me, to […]
Continue reading →So I want everybody to check out this post by Adjunct Nate Silver at Rebecca Schuman’s blog, because it is perfectly emblematic of everything wrong with how people talk about the adjunct crisis. It presents a entirely convincing argument that the job market in German has been uniquely bad since 2008, despite some who say […]
Continue reading →The Atlantic publishes a lot of good stuff; I’ve linked to some of it, here. But it’s disappointing how poor their education coverage can be, and usually for the same reason: a failure to apply appropriate skepticism to self-interested actors making grand claims about the future of education. This interview with Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds is […]
Continue reading →It’s a frustrating fact of life that arguments that are most visible are always going to be, for most people, the arguments that define the truth. That’s certainly the case with Academically Adrift, the book by Richard Arum and Joseph Roksa that has done so much to set the conventional wisdom about the value of […]
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