So there’s been another spate of journalists complaining about academics lately, which is a cyclical exercise. This time, they’re really working the angle where they claim to show respect to academics in the abstract, but use this ostensible respect as a way to heap more disrespect onto actual academics. The latest flavor: how come academics […]
Continue reading →This post by Ann Larson discusses, briefly, the rise of the “rage of the adjunct” essay genre. I’m glad that it does, as it itself is indicative of my frustrated, conflicted relationship towards that genre. It’s profoundly necessary, and has finally generated some much-needed media attention for the plight of adjuncts, which is a moral […]
Continue reading →Austin Kleon’s 10 Ways to Share Your Work and Get Discovered Offered in sympathy and solidarity with makers, artists, and strivers everywhere. 1. You don’t need to be a genius… but it don’t hurt. 2. Think process, not product… but if you don’t end up with a product, you’ve got nothing to share. 3. Share […]
Continue reading →You are aware of the rules. You want people to think you’re smart, but you never want to be seen as a self-consciously intellectual. You benefited from great teachers your whole life but you represent yourself as self-taught. You loved college but you now argue that college isn’t worth it. You might have a graduate […]
Continue reading →I’m sorry if I am a grump about artificial intelligence. It just happens to be a subject on which our media frequently appears both insufficiently educated and unwilling to learn. My frustration stems from a basic category error, which can be boiled down to this: My cellphone is much better than my cellphone five years […]
Continue reading →So it seems to me to be straightforwardly and superficially the case that the Olympics, while a lot of fun, are a corrupt nightmare as an institution. Their apolitical stance, meanwhile, is absurd on its face; everything about their presentation is drenched in competing nationalism, and as usual, the denial that an event or expression […]
Continue reading →People get on me for being a curmudgeon about techno-utopianism. And I don’t doubt that there’s lots of great benefits to technology that I enjoy every day. But so many people who write about technology make it so, so hard. To wit, “The Dawn of the Age of Artificial Intelligence.” The advances we’ve seen in […]
Continue reading →This piece from Mike Konczal on the revelations that major tech firms colluded against their workers is, like most of Konczal’s work, a must-read, and I encourage you to really sink your teeth into what this says about the balance (or “balance”) between employers and employees in contemporary America. At the risk of descending into […]
Continue reading →You could go ahead and call this post self-indulgent. I wouldn’t mind.
Continue reading →I’ve mentioned in the past that I currently work for Purdue’s Oral English Proficiency Program, where we train international teaching assistants for the classroom. International grad students who have TA funding and whose TOEFL scores are below a certain cut score take a test that was developed internally here at the university, and which grad […]
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