John Dickerson remembers his mother, this Mother’s Day. It’s lovely. I think of my own mother, gone 25 years, somehow, this year. To me, my mother now is all old feelings, vague impressions, dim images in a fogged mirror. But all love, all love. I think of her now as those parts of her that […]
Continue reading →Should I go to grad school? Almost certainly not. Are you living a hellish existence as a grad student? I have never been happier, more comfortable, more challenged, or more fulfilled. Won’t I end up a bitter, disgruntled mess if I go to grad school? You’ll end up a bitter, disgruntled mess anyway, unless you […]
Continue reading →The injustice that really gets to people has changed from “bad things happen to good people” to “good things happen to bad people.” I dunno, seems like a recipe for unhappiness and dissatisfaction to me.
Continue reading →Jill Barshay of the Washington Monthly is disappointed with the performance of our high school seniors on the latest NAEP results: When you look at top achieving students in the top 75th and 90th percentiles. Their scores are FLAT. … High achieving students aren’t improving at all. So you can’t blame the infusion of more low performing students […]
Continue reading →I would really like to let all this go, but I’ve been repeatedly challenged, so here goes. After this, no more of this stuff for awhile. I consider myself a socialist. In that, I mean that I don’t believe that our problems can be solved by more or better capitalism, but by systemic reform that […]
Continue reading →Via the Daily Dish, Natasha Loder in the Economist: Although Asian Americans do often come from better educated and higher income families, socio-demographic factors could not explain the achievement gap between Asians and whites. … Being brainier isn’t the answer either. When the pair looked at cognitive ability as measured by standardised tests, Asian-Americans were […]
Continue reading →I am not a shrinking violet. In my time writing online I’ve had people email my professors to yell at them about my politics, I’ve had an ex-girlfriend be harassed at a bar, I’ve had people post my address in the comments at other sites, I’ve had people post anti-Semitic and racist remarks using my […]
Continue reading →Let’s pull out a section from this long piece on Pikkety, inequality, and education from David Leonhardt. It’s a perfect example of how the unsupported presumptions of our media elites have created the destructive conventional wisdom that we need to educate our way out of our economic problems. When a society becomes more educated, many […]
Continue reading →So some guy at Salon wrote a piece saying that we aren’t in a Golden Age of TV. And if you do a little Twitter search for that link you find that the people were not pleased. Seriously, what has happened to our species where we are in a position to worry about this stuff? […]
Continue reading →It’s a cliche at this point that the past decade of American foreign policy has been dominated by the idea of humanitarian intervention. The idea of aggressively deploying the American military to save people from the world’s (very real) troubles has outlived the war it is most deeply associated with, our second Iraq excursion, now […]
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