I have been told, in all seriousness, by people who argue vociferously not only for the passage of the bill in question but that the bill in question is such an obvious good that those questioning it are deluded or acting on ulterior motives: That the bill does not at all specify explicit verbal consent but simply […]
Continue reading →There’s a lot of meat in the 2014 High School Benchmarks Study from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, and I encourage you to dive in yourself. I’m just digging into it now. I want to flag something fairly simple: in terms of both college enrollment rates immediately following high school graduation and the crucial […]
Continue reading →Ezra Klein has a piece out about affirmative consent laws that, in many ways, belongs in a time capsule. I can hardly imagine a document that is a better encapsulation of the performative morality of the educated media class that dominates our national conversation, wedded to the broken economics of online journalism, wrapped up in […]
Continue reading →I’m excited and grateful to share with you the news that my article “Evaluating the Comparability of Two Measures of Lexical Diversity” has been accepted for publication in the applied linguistics journal System. The article should appear in the journal in the next several months. I would like to take a minute and explain it in language […]
Continue reading →No offense to my loyal readers, but I’m going to be turning comments off by default for the time being. Just frustrated by the quality of comments lately. I’ll turn them back on at some point I’m sure.
Continue reading →My brother and his wife have moved to Guam for at least a couple years, and they asked me to look after their two cats until the either decide to stay permanently or come home. So when you add their cats, Trapito and Mia, to my cat Suavecito (who is one of their kittens) and […]
Continue reading →There were two takes on Shel Silverstein’s simultaneously beloved and derided The Giving Tree in the Times recently, one from Anna Holmes and one from Rivka Galchen. Holmes, though characteristically well-expressed, joins a recent history of “provocative” takes on the book that misunderstand not only its text but its purpose. Galchen is closer to the mark, but suffers from the […]
Continue reading →Just saying.
Continue reading →Shikha Dalmia wrote some things about affirmative consent laws. I agree with some of it, some of it I am troubled by. Jezebel and Erin Gloria Ryan responded, in contrast, by sex-shaming her for the crime of having a different opinion about a controversial law. I don’t have any right to dictate what it means to […]
Continue reading →As I pointed out the other day, many people have reacted to the “alt-lit” rape scandal by blurring the lines between their natural disgust at those accusations and their aesthetic and stylistic annoyance with the alt-lit culture. That’s gross and misguided. Being annoyed by someone else’s style and culture should not be confused with feeling […]
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