A colleague of mine sent along this excellent piece by John Ewing of Math for America. It’s a very necessary and important critique of the use of value added models in education assessment. (It’s also– are you listening, Nick Kristof?– an excellent example of academic writing that is accessible and understandable.) I highly, highly encourage […]
Continue reading →So it seems to me to be straightforwardly and superficially the case that the Olympics, while a lot of fun, are a corrupt nightmare as an institution. Their apolitical stance, meanwhile, is absurd on its face; everything about their presentation is drenched in competing nationalism, and as usual, the denial that an event or expression […]
Continue reading →After our conversation for Bloggingheads the other day, I chatted with Michael Brendan Dougherty about the enormous increase in the values of baseball teams. The Los Angeles Dodgers were sold for a shocking $2 billion a couple of years ago. This value is reflected in the staggeringly high salaries teams can afford to pay to […]
Continue reading →Having argued online for going on six years now, I’m always a little surprised by who bothers to get mad. Despite getting in a scrap or two in my time, I’m never really able to predict why some people get upset and some don’t. Today’s case in point: Deadspin’s Tom Ley, a bright guy and […]
Continue reading →I would like to recommend that you read this essay, written in tweets, by Latoya Peterson.
Continue reading →I would forgive you if you didn’t remember the brief, bright flame that was the #smackcam Twitter controversy of 2013. The Twitter outrage cycle is now, quite literally, on a daily rotation. It’s amazing that anybody can keep up with it. As far as these things go, the #smackcam storm was minor, in scope though […]
Continue reading →I like Seth Ackerman and his work, but this is a particularly, and peculiarly, poor effort. I’ll expand on this, but I think essentially everything it argues can be rejected with a simple point: it is not required for political actors to be perfectly righteous in their beliefs or associations for them to contribute to […]
Continue reading →Some of the motivations behind this character creation are the same or similar for everyone who blogs: we want our online persona to appear smarter, funnier, wiser, better-read, and more articulate than we are in real life. Some of them are more unique to my own situation and adopted persona: I want to appear richer, […]
Continue reading →So I enjoyed this piece by Clive Martin & Nathalie Olah about the weird, timeless lameness of Friends and how it’s influenced our culture. I particularly like the point about the profoundly unhip, achingly white New York City life these creative 20-something professionals live. It’s fun to look at pictures of the Friends cast now because their clothes are so impossibly […]
Continue reading →Here’s a post by Tim Marchman on Deadspin addressing the continuing, exhausting Alex Rodriguez saga. It’s one of many that Deadspin has run on the issue. I am in broad agreement with Marchman, with Deadspin generally, and with the site’s many commenters, who side against Major League Baseball and Bud Selig in great majorities. But […]
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