In the six years or so that I’ve been writing online, I’ve been motivated, more than anything else, by the emails of young lefties who write to me. They write to me, usually, because they’re facing some sort of crisis of conscience. These crises are inspired by particular events, particular political controversies. But almost always, […]
Continue reading →Well gang, it’s spring break for Purdue. I’ll be spending most of next week in Indianapolis– no airfare! no Greyhound!– at the Conference on College Composition and Communication. I’ll be filing some dispatches from there for this here blog. If my past two CCCCs experiences are any indication, it’ll be fun, frustrating, inspiring, depressing, an […]
Continue reading →Last year, I wrote a piece about ten of my favorite writers. I got an email that praised the piece, which I appreciated, but it contained a sentiment I find incredibly exasperating. The writer of the email complimented my list, particularly noting its diversity. Half of the people on my list were women; four were […]
Continue reading →Gang, I’ve got a new piece out for n+1 today about my old home, Hartford, Connecticut. It’s a subject of great personal and emotional commitment for me. You should read it. It’s really good.
Continue reading →Today, Hamilton Nolan argued that Twitter is public. That is true. I mean this in the old fashioned sense, that is, it accurately reflects reality. I know because I have a web browser open right now and it enables me to access public Twitter feeds. Predictably, some people are mad at Nolan, calling him condescending […]
Continue reading →This post contains spoilers for the first season of True Detective. The moderate, qualified disappointment being expressed about the ending of the first season of HBO’s True Detective, and with it the end of that storyline and characters, seemed highly predictable to me from the earliest stages of the show’s ecstatic critical reaction. You could argue […]
Continue reading →I have argued, for some time, that there’s a basic misunderstanding about why some schools and school districts are considered good. Many argue that, thanks to the vagaries of local districting and funding of public education through property taxes, the hardest to educate kids are systematically excluded from the best schools. They aren’t wrong to […]
Continue reading →One of the hardest parts of being a researcher is getting access to data. This is particularly acute if you, like me, work in research fields where there is very little grant funding available, making it difficult to give language users incentives to give you samples created under the controlled conditions that are necessary for […]
Continue reading →Like many people, I was both convinced and discouraged by this recent piece by Adolph Reed. Reed is one of the most eloquent and useful commentators we have today on the left, and a credible and intelligent critic of the kind of obsessive word policing that many now mistake for left-wing politics. Similarly, I was […]
Continue reading →A colleague of mine sent along this excellent piece by John Ewing of Math for America. It’s a very necessary and important critique of the use of value added models in education assessment. (It’s also– are you listening, Nick Kristof?– an excellent example of academic writing that is accessible and understandable.) I highly, highly encourage […]
Continue reading →