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 […]
Continue reading →I came to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series at probably the perfect age– I think 13 or 14, whenever my brother started to get the collections. I really loved them, and I still do, although they don’t move me quite as much as they once did. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’ve never been the type to feel […]
Continue reading →I thought this speech by Amy Schumer, the actor and comedian, was really poignant and smart, as well as very funny. But it also demonstrates again that self-confidence is bullshit and stupid and everybody should stop pursuing it. Schumer says, Now I feel strong and beautiful. I walk proudly down the streets of Manhattan. The […]
Continue reading →Online liberalism, as I’ve said many times, is not actually a series of political beliefs and alliances but instead a set of social cues that are adopted to demonstrate one’s class background– economic class, certainly, but more cultural class, the various linguistic and consumptive signals that assure those around you that you’re the right kind […]
Continue reading →This piece is a year old, but I’ve only just now discovered it. It’s by Pasi Sahlberg, an education expert from Finland who has a great deal of experience with Finland’s school system, widely considered to be the world’s best. Sahlberg makes an observation that, to me, is both elementary and enormously important: elite obsession […]
Continue reading →Is Twitter dead? Is Facebook dead? Is Google+ (lol yes) dead? Is the internet dead? Look. We’re all going to die. We briefly flirt with the idea that we’re not going to because the force that has enabled us to play Snood on our cellphone must surely mean we can beat death, and some of […]
Continue reading →So this piece in Time by Jess Zimmerman, I think, is a pretty good example of why the internet can be such a uniquely useless place to try and play politics. Zimmerman provides a brief history of the “not all men” meme, which is the new new hotness in the world of people who take their politics […]
Continue reading →Good news for me. I passed my French test! It was a selection from Camus, which is funny if you know the name of my old blog. Which was the final hurdle keeping me from being a PhD candidate! I have been awarded a fellowship by the Purdue Research Foundation for this summer, which means […]
Continue reading →It’s really to the credit of FiveThirtyEight that they’re making some of their data publicly available. That open access comes in part thanks to this wonderfully smart post by Brian Keegan, a postdoc from Northwestern. In it, Keegan advocates for availability of data by doing a replication of research by FiveThirtyEight’s Walt Hickey. In it, […]
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