The Atlantic publishes a lot of good stuff; I’ve linked to some of it, here. But it’s disappointing how poor their education coverage can be, and usually for the same reason: a failure to apply appropriate skepticism to self-interested actors making grand claims about the future of education. This interview with Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds is […]
Continue reading →It’s a frustrating fact of life that arguments that are most visible are always going to be, for most people, the arguments that define the truth. That’s certainly the case with Academically Adrift, the book by Richard Arum and Joseph Roksa that has done so much to set the conventional wisdom about the value of […]
Continue reading →So I hate to sound like a broken record with this stuff, but it keeps being necessary, so…. My argument about the current rage for essays decrying the working conditions of adjuncts has been consistent: I think it’s very necessary to be having a conversation about the plight of adjuncts, which is immoral and untenable, […]
Continue reading →Since arguing against the notion of a STEM shortage is apparently something I’ll be doing either until there really is a shortage or until I’m dead, I’ll recommend this brief blog post by Beryl Lieff Benderly at ScienceCareers. …a drop in the average starting salaries of new college graduates with computer science, engineering, and chemistry […]
Continue reading →Here’s a post by Tim Marchman on Deadspin addressing the continuing, exhausting Alex Rodriguez saga. It’s one of many that Deadspin has run on the issue. I am in broad agreement with Marchman, with Deadspin generally, and with the site’s many commenters, who side against Major League Baseball and Bud Selig in great majorities. But […]
Continue reading →Awhile back, I watched the Central Park Five, the Ken Burns documentary about five black and Hispanic teens that were accused of raping and beating a white woman in Central Park, before finally being exonerated. The question that the film asks, again and again, is how did this happen? Why did no one ask more questions? […]
Continue reading →Check out this piece from xkcd, the beloved and influential web comic. I think it’s a good example of how important how you position your argument is relative to the arguments you’re fighting against, how desperately people want to be the underdog. (I share this comic via a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License. The creator […]
Continue reading →I don’t want to belabor this any more than I already have, especially because as I said then, I counsel people against going to graduate school constantly. But Megan McArdle responded, and I just want to make a simple point. Megan argues that the problem with going to graduate school, rather than with trying to […]
Continue reading →I really want to be completely on board with this brief post by Alan Jacobs and its longer followup, on creation and thinking and productivity tools. In the first instance, I am 100% in agreement with Jacobs when he says But whenever I am asked to contribute to this genre — the writerly-tips-and-tricks genre or […]
Continue reading →So I’m getting some pushback about this prior post that compels me to clarify what I wasn’t arguing. Here’s what people seem to think I meant: Megan McArdle is only a successful journalist because she’s a woman. I don’t think that, didn’t write that, and in fact I thought I had gone out of my […]
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