I could go through this Graeme Wood piece on Minvera, the latest in the hoary old industry of disruptive innovators disruptively innovating in education, and offer my rebuttals. Wood is so hopelessly infatuated with the Silicon Valley hero-libertarian narrative that he doesn’t even begin to question the company or its Ayn Rand-dweeb founder, Ben Nelson. […]
Continue reading →Hey gang, I’m writing to let you all know that I’ll be blogging for Andrew Sullivan while he’s on vacation next week. Feel free to come and check it out, starting Monday morning. I’m excited.
Continue reading →Dear Dr. Wise, I am writing to ask that you please reconsider the decision made by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to rescind an offer of employment to Dr. Steve Salaita. As an academic and a public writer, I am deeply disturbed by the consequences for intellectual and academic freedom when scholars are judged […]
Continue reading →Here’s The New Republic‘s Hillary Kelly, ostensibly talking about how you shouldn’t say you’re from the city when you’re really from the suburbs, and really about how Hillary Kelly is a cool and interesting person, and therefore also about how Hillary Kelly feels like she has to sell everybody on the idea that she’s a cool […]
Continue reading →My all-time favorite blogger and true mensch Jacob Bacharach has a conversation with liberaltarian writer and cartoonist Will Wilkinson on Bloggingheads. I can’t wait to go check it out. You come, too.
Continue reading →While putting the finishing touches on a draft chapter of my dissertation recently, I happened to go digging around in the research archives one more time. I felt that one section, about the earliest advocates of large-scale assessment of higher education, was missing that killer quote. I happened to find an unpublished dissertation that considered […]
Continue reading →In a piece about the concept of “relatability,” inspired in part by Ira Glass’s dopey complaints about Shakespeare, Rebecca Mead writes: to demand that a work be “relatable” expresses a different expectation: that the work itself be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer. The reader or viewer remains […]
Continue reading →The whole “I’m not even going to link to/quote from/respond to X thing that somebody wrote….” deal. 1. Not linking to, quoting from, or responding to that thing does not mean it does not exist. 2. If you’re writing those words, you already are responding to it.
Continue reading →So in our recent Bloggingheads, Conor Friedersdorf and I talked about my claim that journalists and pundits, once they reach a particular career rung, seem to enjoy life-long tenure that makes them totally unaccountable for mistakes. Conor was singularly unimpressed with this line of reasoning. Well, look at his colleague at the Atlantic, David Frum, and […]
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