Awhile back, I watched the Central Park Five, the Ken Burns documentary about five black and Hispanic teens that were accused of raping and beating a white woman in Central Park, before finally being exonerated. The question that the film asks, again and again, is how did this happen? Why did no one ask more questions? […]
Continue reading →I really want to be completely on board with this brief post by Alan Jacobs and its longer followup, on creation and thinking and productivity tools. In the first instance, I am 100% in agreement with Jacobs when he says But whenever I am asked to contribute to this genre — the writerly-tips-and-tricks genre or […]
Continue reading →The funny thing about this Megan McArdle essay arguing that all of us spoiled academics should stop trying to be professors and get real jobs is that Megan McArdle lives a more profoundly professorial life than most professors I know, and wouldn’t occupy what she thinks of as a real job at gunpoint. But allow […]
Continue reading →Richard Haswell has used the term “the Bok Maneuver” to describe the tendency of people to respond to empirical research that does not confirm their expectations by simply saying that the research does confirm their expectations. I would like to advance the Rosin Gambit as a similar phenomenon. The Rosin Gambit is when you present […]
Continue reading →I feel like we’re finally getting broad acknowledgement that origin stories are terribly played out, at this point, after so many years of superhero and action movies that rehash the same origins that were been part of our collective memory already. From my viewpoint, it seems like movie execs are finally catching on to the […]
Continue reading →Since it seemed like everybody was writing some overwrought article about why they left such-and-such fancy city, I figured I would do my bit and contribute to the genre.
Continue reading →It’s not unusual to hear people wonder aloud about why certain behaviors that are rarely encountered in the physical world are encountered in online interactions. I believe a big part of the answer to that, and one of the keys to understanding online culture altogether, lies in the way in which social approval is made […]
Continue reading →“Schoolchildren who are asked to trace early overseas voyages on identical outline maps are likely to become absentminded about the fact that there were no uniform world maps in the era when the voyages were made. A similar absentmindedness on a more sophisticated level is encouraged by increasingly refined techniques for collating manuscripts and producing […]
Continue reading →One of my favorite resources that concerns writing the college admissions essay– an annoying task– has recently disappeared from the University of Virginia website. Written by Parke Muth, a UVa admissions officer, the piece discusses what makes for an effective or ineffective college essay. I don’t agree with it entirely– it states that good essays […]
Continue reading →I posted a comment on the indispensable blog by Alyssa Rosenberg at ThinkProgress that I’d like to expand on. The post is about DC’s plans to out one of their major characters as gay. I said in the comment that this doesn’t strike me as particularly moving, however enlightened, because comic book continuity changes so much. Another […]
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