“I have been, for over twenty years, entirely persuaded by Garry Wills’s argument: that the Gettysburg Address, given by Abraham Lincoln on this day, exactly 150 years ago, was the great catalyzing rhetorical act in the–probably inevitable–transformation of the United States’s imagination of itself from a localized republican culture which accepted diverse, and unequal, communities, […]
Continue reading →Here’s two important ideas from statistics that I wish would filter out a bit more, so that people could better evaluate statistics that are in the news. 1. It’s not the sample size, it’s the sample mechanism. Well, OK. It’s somewhat the sample size, obviously. My point is that most people who encounter a study’s methodology are […]
Continue reading →Went to a great conference this weekend; was inspired by the plenary; discovered the speaker was a wonderfully generous and friendly woman; got to have lunch with her and the rest of my panel; had a fun evening in a great college town; met some cool people; hung out with good friends; came home and […]
Continue reading →The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy functions as both a joke and a warning. The idea is simple but powerful. A Texan decides he wants to prove his shooting prowess to his friends. He takes out his handgun and empties its magazine into the side of his barn. He then paints a bulls-eye where his shots are […]
Continue reading →… but, nevertheless, something I think is true: the one indispensable trait for a reader is humility. The one indispensable trait for a writer is arrogance.
Continue reading →There’s an old joke where three statisticians go hunting deer. The first one shoots at a buck and misses five feet to the left. The second one shoots at a buck and misses five feet to the right. The third one shouts, “we got ’em!” To me, that’s what politics is, more or less. Think […]
Continue reading →So I thought this was funny. Now, I don’t know how an august thinkfluencer and popular internet celebrity like Barro happened upon this little academic blog, but that’s not important. What is important is that this Tweet is flagrantly, straightforwardly, unambiguously dishonest. You can read the piece here. I said that, to me, Barro becomes […]
Continue reading →In his Life is Hell comic, Matt Groening once did a series on education where he went through the various stages. He titled the comic about grad school “Grad School: Some People Never Learn,” which I always thought was funny. Self-mockery aside, it’s interesting to think about how long I’ve been a student, and how much of being […]
Continue reading →[View the story “The Tao of Neoliberal DudeBros” on Storify] Part of the nice thing about the rise of new left media like Jacobin is that there are spaces for left-wing economics, rather than just the cultural and political analysis that lefties have always had forums for. The problem, though, is that a forum is only […]
Continue reading →I’m writing this from the Ninth Biennial Feminisms and Rhetorics conference, at Stanford University, where I’ll be presenting a paper on archival research. I had a situation this morning where I was genuinely unsure of the best way to be better a feminist (or feminist ally). I attended a panel in the first session on […]
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