If you repeat “mocked raped threats” or “minimized rape” or whatever on Twitter enough times, people on Twitter will believe it’s true. Because people are dumb. So: you must keep insisting on the truth. Here is what Amber A’Lee Frost actually wrote: “And I just don’t think the diminutive label of ‘bro’ should be used […]
Continue reading →Jacobin published an excellent piece by Amber A’Lee Frost. I would love to discuss the piece, because it has a ton to say about empiricism and the left-wing and how we talk about research. But I can’t, because it’s been swallowed by yet another bullshit controversy. In her piece, originally, the line “And I just […]
Continue reading →Last fall, I worked as a research assistant for the late Linda Bergmann. Linda was a brilliant academic and a great mentor; her particular area of of expertise was writing centers, where students of all levels come to work on their writing with expert tutors. I’ve long felt that writing centers are a symbol of […]
Continue reading →Look, I won’t belabor the current fight about Young Adult fiction, because anyone who’s read me on these topics before probably already knows more or less where I stand. I will say that I am an unabashed fan of some YA fiction. Diana Wynne Jones remains my favorite author. Ever. I wrote, a long while […]
Continue reading →So I’ve been meaning to write something in response to conservative dweeb Kevin Williamson’s dweeby screed against Laverne Cox for dweeb magazine The National Review, but Jacob Bacharach pretty much beat me to it: the Internet bravely rushed in to declare that scientifically she is. “He doesn’t understand the complexity . . .” And we were […]
Continue reading →It’s a real pleasure to see a thorough and effective definition of a term that is frequently contested or confusing. Here’s Batia Laufer and Tina Waldman’s definition of collocation from their article “Verb-Noun Collocations in L2 Writing” from the June 2011 issue of Language Learning. “We regard collocations as habitually occurring lexical combinations that are characterized […]
Continue reading →I appreciate the many responses to my piece on traditional masculinity. The hate mail was interesting, in the way that hate mail is always interesting. A few emails and many, many comments that I refused to unleash from the filter were illustrative, and not just in their many creative spellings of the word “faggot.” They […]
Continue reading →Sometimes you just kind of can’t wrap your mind around it all. I mean just look at recent stuff. Thomas Piketty’s book provides a mountain of empirical evidence that wealth grows faster than income and that wealth inequality tends to get worse over time. Gregory Clark shows that wealth persists within particular families for as […]
Continue reading →You know I started my old blog on a public computer at my local library. At the time, I was poor, directionless, and terribly unhappy. (Today, I’m poor, somewhat directed, and happy.) I knew no one in media, had no professional resume to speak of, and had no reasonable expectation that anyone would read me […]
Continue reading →The Dish has been considering the topic of college assessments and government rankings of universities. It happens that I am right now writing my dissertation on the Collegiate Learning Assessment and its successor, the Collegiate Learning Assessment+, one of the major competitors in the effort to establish a common test of college student learning. It also […]
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