In the comments of Gawker’s obituary for Joan Rivers, I pointed out that nobody seems to be remembering the fact that just a month or two ago, Rivers claimed that Palestinians deserve to die. This is about as gross and racist a thing as someone can say, but is permissible in American media because Arabs are […]
Continue reading →I quite liked Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essay on learning French (and intend to write long on it soon), and I don’t agree at all with Rod Dreher’s take on it. So I appreciate Phoebe Malz-Bovy’s defense of Coates’s essay. But in an oddly underwritten ending, Bovy goes badly wrong. Taking Dreher to task for pointing out […]
Continue reading →Alright, I give up. Throwing in the old towel. I’ve had a good run. I’ll be at the bar if you need me.
Continue reading →1. Given the economics of current professional online journalism and commentary, blanket condemnations of what is conventionally called clickbait are essentially arguments that paid online writing should contract substantially. You don’t have to like clickbait and SEO stuff– I don’t– but if there’s gonna be such a thing as professional writers whose work appears online, […]
Continue reading →So a study came out saying that social media causes conformity. 1. I actually almost avoided talking about this story, because it would seem to play too much to my biases, and that’s always boring. 2. I’ve seen people complaining (on social media, naturally) that this study can’t possibly be right because they see plenty […]
Continue reading →So since I’m talking about the Atlantic‘s biases: today Jeffrey Goldberg, the credulous Iraq war shill, contributed more to his long history of attacking critics of Israel by equating such criticism with anti-Semitism. Indeed, even by Goldberg’s incredibly low standards, this is pretty ugly: many protesters are challenging Israel’s very right to exist, not its policies in […]
Continue reading →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 →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 →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 […]
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