Look, I won’t belabor the current fight about Young Adult fiction, because anyone who’s read me on these topics before probably already knows more or less where I stand. I will say that I am an unabashed fan of some YA fiction. Diana Wynne Jones remains my favorite author. Ever. I wrote, a long while […]
Continue reading →This tweet is just one of many. It’s just an example, and not a particularly egregious one, and one with the right intentions at heart. I like Ta-Nehisi Coates’s writing. A lot. And I loved his case for reparations, for a lot of reasons, but mostly because of what it brings to the public consciousness, or […]
Continue reading →I have a set of concerns about FiveThirtyEight and data journalism in general, but I also think that there’s a lot of interesting work being done there, and that there’s lots of reasons to be excited about some of the developments in how people are disseminating and reacting to research online. I want to endorse […]
Continue reading →Someone called Jonah Shepp at the Dish says that, in this piece where I criticized Reihan Salam for his wrong and insulting piece on public school funding, I “lost it.” Honey, if you think that’s me losing it…. Look: read Salam’s piece. Then read mine. Reihan Salam’s piece was far, far more aggressive and insulting […]
Continue reading →Do you want to know how material, structural solutions to our racial inequalities become part of the vague, useless “conversation about race” that we have been having and talking about having for years and years? When a piece advocating those material, structural solutions is misrepresented as just another salvo in that conversation about race– by those praising […]
Continue reading →Via Alexis Madrigal, this piece by Beau Cronin on what it means to say a machine “thinks like a brain” is required reading, particularly if you enjoyed my Bloggingheads chat with Alexis. (You haven’t watched it yet? What are you waiting for?) This piece by Tressie McMillan Cottom on the economic limits of education and […]
Continue reading →I really had a ton of fun with this one, chatting with Alexis Madrigal of the Atlantic about the technology media, online education, and artificial intelligence. Please check it out, and feel free to share.
Continue reading →I like Bob Dylan’s music a lot, and I do agree that there’s a history of lifting from other musicians in the folk and blues traditions that have inspired him. However, it makes me squeamish how many people in this article are working overtime to excuse Dylan for lifting large portions of his (National Book […]
Continue reading →This Molly Ball piece on the fight over GMO labeling is a perfect example of how culture war gets into everything, and more, how that culture war is ultimately operating at a different level than partisan or ideological politics. I don’t really care about this issue. It seems, from my perfectly amateur vantage, that there’s […]
Continue reading →The end of the semester is upon me. I’ll have an update about how I did in my stats class as soon as I have a final grade, given that you guys are stakeholders in that class. It’s a strange situation, as I am feeling the typical end-of-semester relief, and yet in fact work, and […]
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