“If you’re new around here, this is how the script goes: I damn“The Avengers” with faint praise, observing that the (supposed) culmination of the long, laborious Marvel Comics movie franchise is a competent but pointless popcorn entertainment that’s being wildly overpraised simply for existing without being incoherent and terrible. Some readers sniff from behind their digital […]
Continue reading →A webtext I wrote for the online journal Writing Commons has survived the peer review process and been published. WC’s webtexts are designed as resources for students to develop their writing and multimedia compositions; mine considers the effective use of the first person in academic writing. You can check it out here.
Continue reading →I could, if I felt like it, take this latest anti-university screed from the Atlantic apart. Laura McKenna’s piece is one of the most tired, cliched articles I’ve read in years, a collection of the classic warmed-over complaints about ivory towers and uninterested professors. It works purely on argument by assertion, speaks only in generalizations […]
Continue reading →So you can file this one away as random, picayune, pointless, of interest to almost no one, etc. Years ago, when it came out, I read the book The Gatekeepers by Jacques Steinberg. The book was an (at the time, anyway) unprecedented look inside the admissions process of an elite college. I read it for […]
Continue reading →“’I ended up with a dream job,’ he says from behind a desk decorated with a massive grizzly skull and a glass statue of a bear. But the last few months had been more like a nightmare.”– Jessica Grose, in a cliche so pure I almost wonder if its some sort of code
Continue reading →Pop culture has become inescapable. I have no historical context with which to compare the current dominance of pop culture in our media, so I will restrict my consideration to its status today. I can only say that, if you consume digital media at all, you read about pop culture. Sites and publications devoted specifically […]
Continue reading →Serial pedant and curmudgeon Jonathan Franzen has come out against Twitter, and engendered the typical reaction. I don’t agree with Franzen on almost anything, despite our shared anti-Twitter stance, and would not define Twitter’s problems in the same way as Franzen. As is so often the case, it strikes me that the counter-arguments are more telling than […]
Continue reading →Via this post on Splitsider, I read this interesting account of the State’s doomed move to network television. Written by David Lipsky, it’s a well-researched piece of immersive journalism, one made rather poignant with the benefit of 16 years of distance. (The State and its members have had a ton of success, and yet there’s always […]
Continue reading →Which isn’t, I’ll hasten to say, a big problem. Last week, I was invited to a bull session about a new, tablet-based ebook version of a writing textbook. The publisher had asked the authors to get creative with brainstorming; they feel, as do the authors, that e-textbooks have not really begun to explore the possibilities […]
Continue reading →John Holbo, in the lead up to an enjoyable dismantling of Ross Douthat’s views on the Catholic hospital birth control controversy, paraphrases a curious criticism of Corey Robin’s Reactionary Mind: Some reviewers have complained that Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind seriously overreaches when he writes stuff like this: Conservatism is the theoretical voice of … animus against […]
Continue reading →