Life at home was like any kid’s life — safe, numb, warm, days stretching out forever, no sense at all of the passage of time besides the markers of our heights, penciled next to the basement door, until she got sick. My mother, wild and warm as a spare sunbeam, a human presence of […]
Continue reading →Over the years I’ve become used to (and associated with) a certain style of pugilistic political argument. That style is fine by me, and I think indicative of a healthy political culture. For as much as people complain about hyperpartisanship and “the state of the discourse today,” there’s no halcyon past where everyone was civil […]
Continue reading →I got into another discussion of trigger warnings last night that really crystallized why that discussion is so immensely frustrating for me. First is the now-ubiquitous claim that trigger warnings are only warnings, and that they have no connection whatsoever to an actual censorship impulse. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been told, […]
Continue reading →We’ve entered late August. The days are growing shorter and cooler. Before you know it, the first leaves will start to change, and autumn will be with us. If you’re keeping your ear to the ground, though, you’ll note another season, just as certain and predictable, is coming near: Jonathan Franzen season. The internet does […]
Continue reading →Sometimes I think the slippery slope fallacy and the strawman fallacy are in a war to be the most misused. Here’s where a claim of a strawman argument is useful. You and I are arguing. I refute a point you haven’t made and don’t hold. I treat that as evidence that you’re wrong. That’s a […]
Continue reading →Gawker has just linked to Yasmin Nair’s interesting provocation “Your Sex Is Not Radical.” I’m happy more people will read Yasmin’s piece, as she’s a great writer that everyone should be reading, and that piece is her in fine form. In particular, it demonstrates her absolute refusal to trod a well-worn ideological path. Some have interpreted that piece […]
Continue reading →Jordan Weissmann’s piece today, discussing grad student loan debt today, is a bit of a logical pretzel. The piece is set up as a complaint about the fiscal damage grad students are doing to the budget, with a headline reading “The Newest Scourge of the Federal Budget: Graduate Students.” But as Weissmann points out, grad students are a […]
Continue reading →Hey guys, I’m in the Observer today, arguing that, rather than being a clear-cut win for social liberalism, today’s sexual culture is at once radical and profoundly conservative. Check it out.
Continue reading →Hello, fellow academic traveler! If you’re like me, you’ve often struggled to know how to format your CV, which as we know is the single most important document of your professional life. So many different people give completely contradictory advice, always expressed as absolute no-exceptions rules that, if broken, will result in potential lawsuit and […]
Continue reading →Unless we demand otherwise, that is. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: a significant majority of the advice that floats around out there for people on the academic job market — the people who will, someday, make up the professorial class, though more will fail to ever ascend to that rank than will […]
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