I’m excited and grateful to share with you the news that my article “Evaluating the Comparability of Two Measures of Lexical Diversity” has been accepted for publication in the applied linguistics journal System. The article should appear in the journal in the next several months. I would like to take a minute and explain it in language […]
Continue reading →No offense to my loyal readers, but I’m going to be turning comments off by default for the time being. Just frustrated by the quality of comments lately. I’ll turn them back on at some point I’m sure.
Continue reading →My brother and his wife have moved to Guam for at least a couple years, and they asked me to look after their two cats until the either decide to stay permanently or come home. So when you add their cats, Trapito and Mia, to my cat Suavecito (who is one of their kittens) and […]
Continue reading →There were two takes on Shel Silverstein’s simultaneously beloved and derided The Giving Tree in the Times recently, one from Anna Holmes and one from Rivka Galchen. Holmes, though characteristically well-expressed, joins a recent history of “provocative” takes on the book that misunderstand not only its text but its purpose. Galchen is closer to the mark, but suffers from the […]
Continue reading →Just saying.
Continue reading →Shikha Dalmia wrote some things about affirmative consent laws. I agree with some of it, some of it I am troubled by. Jezebel and Erin Gloria Ryan responded, in contrast, by sex-shaming her for the crime of having a different opinion about a controversial law. I don’t have any right to dictate what it means to […]
Continue reading →As I pointed out the other day, many people have reacted to the “alt-lit” rape scandal by blurring the lines between their natural disgust at those accusations and their aesthetic and stylistic annoyance with the alt-lit culture. That’s gross and misguided. Being annoyed by someone else’s style and culture should not be confused with feeling […]
Continue reading →So I’m not one of those pedants who thinks a misplaced comma invalidates an argument or ruins an essay, but seriously, you guys. There is no Disney movie called The Rats of NIMH. There is a movie made by Don Bluth, who had a notorious falling out with Disney and left to form his own studio, called […]
Continue reading →I’ve been banging on against the STEM shortage myth for a long time now, but this is only part of a broader argument. We’re living in an age where a lot of chin-scratching econ types a) blame people for their own unemployment on the theory that what they studied is frivolous/impractical/whatever, and b) push them […]
Continue reading →Been waiting for this one for a long time. Review as soon as I’m done.
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