My favorite essayist, when it comes to movies, is the Hulk*. Note that this is something entirely separate from my favorite film critic, which is Anthony Lane. Hulk is only okay when it comes to writing a film review. But as an explainer and explorer, he’s top notch, though I frequently disagree with him. Here’s […]
Continue reading →“If you’re new around here, this is how the script goes: I damn“The Avengers” with faint praise, observing that the (supposed) culmination of the long, laborious Marvel Comics movie franchise is a competent but pointless popcorn entertainment that’s being wildly overpraised simply for existing without being incoherent and terrible. Some readers sniff from behind their digital […]
Continue reading →“If Oklahoma City is going to become a great team, which is not in any way guaranteed but which is within their field of possibility, they’re going to have to get used to things being weird, and to dealing with enhanced pressure. They’re going to have to commit to playing defense on every possession, because […]
Continue reading →As a mere consumer of journalism, I tend to think that what’s necessary in journalism isn’t just an adversarial attitude but a universally adversarial attitude, that is, skepticism towards all parties in a given dispute. That doesn’t mean that you try to achieve a phony balance by pretending that the facts support all parties equally. […]
Continue reading →A webtext I wrote for the online journal Writing Commons has survived the peer review process and been published. WC’s webtexts are designed as resources for students to develop their writing and multimedia compositions; mine considers the effective use of the first person in academic writing. You can check it out here.
Continue reading →I’m going to tell you a story, or really, a paraphrase of someone else’s story. Richard Fulkerson, a compositionist and Professor Emeritus in the Texas A&M system, wrote a series of controversial articles (over a span of decades) that traced a history of formal composition study and the dominant theories within. The beginning of that […]
Continue reading →Well, I had a summer tutoring job in Chicago, but it fell through on account of we can’t sublet our place, so I’m on the lookout. If you know of anything telecommute-wise, or in the western-central Indiana area (including in Indianapolis), let me know. In happier news, my semester is wrapping up in a couple […]
Continue reading →Aaron Bady and Mike Konzcal
Continue reading →“In 1975, Derek Bok, president of Harvard, asked Dean K. Whitla, director of the Office of Students, to verify the widespread belief that undergraduates were leaving Harvard-Radcliffe as writers no better than when they entered. Whitla ran a meticulous study of first-year and fourth-year students at five institutions and concluded that the ability of Harvard-Radcliffe […]
Continue reading →I don’t like bloggers much. This might seem odd to you, given that I am a blogger. But that’s not really odd when you consider that I don’t like myself much. Still, category “blogger”: what exactly is that supposed to be? Why should I allow myself to dislike such a vague, meaningless category? And fair […]
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