man is the most dangerous game hardest variable to control

Posted on 14 September 2015 by Freddie

As in many other aspects of my intellectual life, when it comes to educational assessment I often play two contradicting roles, depending on my immediate audience. Speaking as someone whose primary scholarly interest is writing assessment, in the academy I’m surrounded by many people who are invested in the traditional values of the humanities, qualitative […]

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in which Aaron Bady just straight up lies about me

Posted on 14 September 2015 by Freddie

You know there’s a certain level of persistent dishonesty online that’s one of the most frustrating aspects of existing on the internet. You get numb to it. But this… this is AP Dishonesty, here. It’s next level. So. Here’s that thread, which you may read if you’d like, to encounter someone deliberately, directly, intentionally, and […]

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a few (dozen) notes

Posted on 13 September 2015 by Freddie

My piece on corporatism in the American university, and the ways in which it’s eroded intellectual and political freedom, is available today in the print edition of the New York Times Magazine, bundled with the Sunday paper. I have gotten a tremendous amount of feedback, the vast majority of it positive, and I really couldn’t be […]

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my piece in the New York Times Magazine

Posted on 10 September 2015 by Freddie

Hey guys, for those of you who don’t yet know, I’m excited to say that I have a piece in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine on the real source of campus restrictions on free expression: not coddled students, but corporatism. You can get it in print in the Sunday edition of the paper, or you can […]

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what’s happening, and why, and why does it matter

Posted on 7 September 2015 by Freddie · 1 Comment

A few times now I’ve praised a couple of pieces by Grantland’s Bryan Curtis, in which he reflects on the sudden way in which social progressivism became the default orientation of mainstream sports commentary. In one of the pieces, Curtis writes “Something pretty interesting has happened to sports opinionating in recent years…. A certain opinion — and I’d […]

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happy anniversary, Jeff Goldberg

Posted on 6 September 2015 by Freddie

Five years ago this month, Jeffrey Goldberg staked The Atlantic‘s credibility on a sensationalistic cover story proclaiming that an Israeli attack on Iran was imminent. The story included the typical weasel words and qualifiers, but the message was unmistakable: an Israeli attack on Iran was coming, and coming soon, which Goldberg knew because he had such […]

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welcome, o life

Posted on 5 September 2015 by Freddie

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how do I get out of this suicide pact

Posted on 3 September 2015 by Freddie

I have always rejected the David Horowitz-style argument that our universities are indoctrination camps for left-wing politics. These claims seem to draw extensively on innuendo, rumor, and myth, with very little in the way of concrete evidence. Long, detailed investigations of such claims, such as Michael Berube’s 2006 book What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?, often […]

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not lyric, but

Posted on 2 September 2015 by Freddie

This piece on Graywolf Press is charming and sharp, but I leave it feeling even more sure that the “lyric essay” is not much of a definable thing. Any genre that could include Karl Ove Knausgaard and Joan Didion and John D’Agata and David Foster Wallace just can’t be much of a genre. It’s a genre […]

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trauma

Posted on 31 August 2015 by Freddie

Life at home was like any kid’s life — safe, numb, warm, days stretching out forever, no sense at all of the passage of time besides the markers of our heights, penciled next to the basement door, until she got sick. My mother, wild and warm as a spare sunbeam, a human presence of […]

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