Longtime readers will know that I’ve spent a lot of time arguing against race science, the claims that intelligence is distributed unevenly between races, with black and Hispanic people tending to be less intelligent and Asian people tending to be more intelligent. I think this claim is flat wrong, and in multiple dimensions. I also […]
Continue reading →I for one am shocked that a website predicated on mob justice, thinly-sourced evidence, easily manipulated images, and an intentional, existential lack of accountability and due process would have ugly unintended consequences. It’s great that the truth came out about poor Brianna Rivera but she’s gonna have racist images associated with her name online for […]
Continue reading →So this Bluetooth Ring deal turns out to be yet another crowdfunded apparatus that over-promises and under-delivers This is a particularly embarrassing case, but it’s only one in a whole litany of Kickstarter failures. It’s standard practice to rush to say that crowdfunding produces a lot of successes too. (This Gizmodo write up of Ring […]
Continue reading →Writing about affirmative action, as I did the other day, invites some tricky questions about race and socioeconomic equality. I want to take a moment and respond to a little pushback I received along those lines. 1. As Andrew Sullivan himself notes in that piece I was reacting to, despite widespread conservative insistence, Asian Americans […]
Continue reading →I’ve learned a lot in six and a half years of writing online, but the single most consistent, most powerful message is this: people care much more about you being part of their culture than about the things you actually believe, politically, morally, conceptually. I can write 2,000 words against affirmative action, with data and […]
Continue reading →Well gang, Thanksgiving is here again. It’s not hard for me to be thankful. I get about as much of what I need as most anybody I know. Big changes are coming for me, for good or for bad, and I will be ready for them. For now, I’m enjoying where I am and […]
Continue reading →One of my perpetual frustrations with Andrew Sullivan’s work is that he tends to talk about race through so many layers of abstraction that it’s impossible to see actual people and their actual, real-world needs. This frequently strikes when he is flirting with race science again, and then can’t quite understand why people get so […]
Continue reading →… and we need to factor that into our worries about plagiarism. While I appreciate the concern of the eagle-eyed tipster who pointed this out to me — do I think funny and talented writer Jeb Lund plagiarized a goofy joke I told in the comments on Deadspin five months later? I do not! Of […]
Continue reading →You will have already been deluged with analysis about the grand jury’s refusal to indict the police officer who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, so I’ll be brief. I guess the essential thing that has to be repeated, again and again, is that this outcome, and so many like it, are the result of a […]
Continue reading →There are many commonplaces in teaching and pedagogy. One of these commonplaces is accessible templates or forms that students can use to gain control over complex and intimidating learning tasks. These consistent formats demonstrate the essential “moves” of particular learning tasks, which the students can apply to their own work. Ideally, they will then let […]
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