“”There were two ‘Reigns of Terror’, if we could but remember and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passions, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon a thousand persons, the other upon a hundred million; but our […]

the issue I have with the callout is that personal reactions to it are coded as irrelevant defense mechanisms.  when the personal is totally and only political, it ceases to exist as a category worth paying attention to.  so the only valid response to a call-out that you think is unfair or cruel is to […]

“My idea of the end of the world would be the hive, the hive mind. Sven Birkerts has a wonderful description of how the horizontal, linked world is gradually evolving in that direction, to where nobody is ever really alone. Nobody is able to just sink deep into his or her own imagination or feelings. […]

(Ten to go, on account of I go to one so I can’t rightly visit it.) So here I am at “the Horseshoe,” Ohio State’s football stadium. I’ve decided to make a goal of visiting all of the Big Ten schools while I’m a grad student at one of them. Summer break is here for […]

“In 1975, Derek Bok, president of Harvard, asked Dean K. Whitla, director of the Office of Students, to verify the widespread belief that undergraduates were leaving Harvard-Radcliffe as writers no better than when they entered. Whitla ran a meticulous study of first-year and fourth-year students at five institutions and concluded that the ability of Harvard-Radcliffe […]

I don’t like bloggers much. This might seem odd to you, given that I am a blogger. But that’s not really odd when you consider that I don’t like myself much. Still, category “blogger”: what exactly is that supposed to be? Why should I allow myself to dislike such a vague, meaningless category? And fair […]

via Flickr user Amalia D

“I have to side with those who believe that emotions are indeed complex enough to merit 600-page novels, and cannot be fully conveyed in an emoticon. I don’t think emoticons and 600-page novels are mutually exclusive; it appears that the universe is capacious enough to include both these phenomena, and I don’t intend to choose […]

In the New York Times: Gail: You may be right that the big issue for America now is class, not race or gender. But in this presidential campaign, gender rules. Really, sex rules. Who’d have thought? David: Class is gender. Specifically men. [emphasis mine] The wage stagnation and inequality stories are largely stories about how badly […]

“A normal educated adult speaker of English has an active vocabulary– i.e., words that he actually uses in everyday speech– of about 30,000 words. A speaker makes the the right choice from among those 30,000 or so alternatives not just once but, in fluent speech, continuously two to five times per second– a rate that […]