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 there’s been another spate of journalists complaining about academics lately, which is a cyclical exercise. This time, they’re really working the angle where they claim to show respect to academics in the abstract, but use this ostensible respect as a way to heap more disrespect onto actual academics. The latest flavor: how come academics […]
Continue reading →Austin Kleon’s 10 Ways to Share Your Work and Get Discovered Offered in sympathy and solidarity with makers, artists, and strivers everywhere. 1. You don’t need to be a genius… but it don’t hurt. 2. Think process, not product… but if you don’t end up with a product, you’ve got nothing to share. 3. Share […]
Continue reading →I would like to recommend that you read this essay, written in tweets, by Latoya Peterson.
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 →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 →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 →So probably my best instinct is just to point out that this long post by Tom Scocca on smarm was followed, just a few posts later, by a post titled “Monkey Teaches Man to Play His Favorite Game.” It’s a perfect argument in and of itself, and if I were smarter, I’d just leave it […]
Continue reading →I disagree with Matt Yglesias on many things. (I would say “we disagree on many things,” but I’m sure he doesn’t spend any time thinking about me at all.) I’m also not a fan of his writing as writing, as craft. So I might be expected to be the natural audience for this takedown of […]
Continue reading →“I have been, for over twenty years, entirely persuaded by Garry Wills’s argument: that the Gettysburg Address, given by Abraham Lincoln on this day, exactly 150 years ago, was the great catalyzing rhetorical act in the–probably inevitable–transformation of the United States’s imagination of itself from a localized republican culture which accepted diverse, and unequal, communities, […]
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