October 2011
5 posts
3 tags
From “School ‘Reform’: A Failing Grade” by Diane Ravitch
“The [school] reformers like to say that poverty doesn’t make a difference, but they are wrong. Poverty matters. The achievement gap between children of affluence and children of poverty starts long before the first day of school. It reflects the nutrition and medical care available to pregnant women and their...
5 tags
8 tags
WatchEponyms! Full story (“Wanna Live Forever? Become a Noun”) and NPR Morning Edition transcript here. Featuring Robert Krulwich (of Radio Lab) and Adam Cole.
3 tags
“A decade of college and grad school—boot camps of strategic fakery—immeasurably deepened my arsenal: Today I’m proficient in such feints as the stretched truth (“It’s funny, I’ve never actually finished that,” I’ll volunteer about War and Peace, of which I’ve read only the first paragraph), the misdirection (“Have you read Gravity’s Rainbow?” “You know what’s always bothered me about...
September 2011
1 post
2 tags
August 2011
2 posts
2 tags
4 tags
Teaching a mythical creature about gender performance, social norms, etc.:
http://www.viruscomix.com/page551.html
So much cultural commentary in one comic!
March 2011
1 post
5 tags
WatchTrailer for the proposed video “Directing Dissent” (if they raise enough money through Kickstarter). It focuses on the life and work of John Roemer, who was my high school Civil Liberties teacher (as well as the head of the Maryland ACLU and activist in the civil rights movement, among other things). More here.
February 2011
3 posts
5 tags
“All of this is to say that while Ken and Brad lost the battle, Team Carbon is still winning the language war against Team Silicon. The “war” metaphor, incidentally, had been playing out for weeks, stoked by IBM and Jeopardy! to build public interest in the tournament. The press gladly played along, supplying headlines like the one in the Science Times from Tuesday, “A...
4 tags
“But the goal is not universal veganism, which is pie-in-the-sky; it’s health and sustainability. And we get there by preparing real food, vegan or not. (Remember: Coke, Tostitos and Reese’s Peanut Butter Puffs — yum! — are all vegan.) […]
The truly healthy alternative to that chip is not a fake chip; it’s a carrot. Likewise, the alternative to sausage is not vegan sausage; it’s less...
3 tags
Watch“The typeface featured in this video was constructed from transparent acrylic and transparent elastic. All the characters were photographed 60 times at intervals of 6 degrees of rotation in order to produce the motion loop.”
January 2011
3 posts
4 tags
5 tags
2 tags
“But for my money, the one word that sums up the scrapheap of the past year is junk.
This was the year that Greece’s credit rating was lowered to junk status, sending global stock markets tumbling. The junk-bond business enjoyed a boom not seen since the 1980s heyday of Drexel Burnham Lambert. Meanwhile, in the Gulf of Mexico, a feckless work crew tried to plug BP’s underwater gusher with a...
December 2010
2 posts
5 tags
“As I have said before, I never had any large respect for good spelling. That is my feeling yet. Before the spelling book came with its arbitrary forms, men unconsciously revealed shades of their characters, and also added enlightening shades of expression to what they wrote by their spelling, and so it is possible that the spelling book has been a doubtful benevolence to us....
5 tags
November 2010
7 posts
4 tags
6 tags
An excerpt from a McSweeney’s imagined monologue from the perspective of The Invisible Thing that Holds Together the Two Halves of a Compound Word:
When I first came to town, they were all around me, the words. They waved at one another in the street and chatted at parties. I was careful then because I was a newcomer and it is not my personality to stride right into the center of things...
5 tags
4 tags
5 tags
4 tags
4 tags
Lucy Wainwright Roche’s cover of...
October 2010
4 posts
4 tags
WatchSO YOU WANT TO GET A PHD IN THE HUMANITIES…
(What does it say that at least five of my friends — including one of my professors — have posted this?)
4 tags
“Punctuation can go viral. Syntax is a meme.”
-Conor J. Dillon, “Colonoscopy: It’s Time to Check Your Colons” (the overall analysis isn’t as good as that line, and any serious reference to Truss loses credibility, but it’s an compelling idea)
4 tags
September 2010
4 posts
3 tags
Meta-textual analysis of mainstream science... →
The complete Guardian article is here: This is a news website article about a scientific paper (actual title of the article).
It begins: “In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding?”
3 tags
Echoing Light
by W. S. Merwin
When I was beginning to read I imagined that bridges had something to do with birds and with what seemed to be cages but I knew that they were not cages it must have been autumn with the dusty light flashing from the streetcar wires and those orange places on fire in the pictures and now indeed it is autumn the clear days not far from the sea with a small wind nosing over dry grass...
5 tags
August 2010
1 post
5 tags
July 2010
3 posts
1 tag
5 tags
7 tags
From David Mitchell’s interview with GoodReads about his upcoming novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (the whole interview is pretty interesting):
GoodReads: People often talk about science fiction writers building a world, and you’ve invented future worlds before. But here you’re writing about the Dutch encountering Japan about 300 years ago. Could you talk about...
June 2010
4 posts
3 tags
“We are distracted by the agility of my eight-year-old son Kevin as he clambers up the slick granite rock formation near Rocky Mountain National Park. He is fifty feet above us; we are a bit frightened by the risks he takes, the way he clings like a human fly to the sides of the rock. We all look up and watch one of Kevin’s handhold’s become a fingerhold and just when...
4 tags
5 tags
Gaiman on writers vs. literary critics
“Once you’ve written something it’s not yours any longer: it belongs to other people, and they all have opinions about it, and every single one of those opinions is as correct as that of the author — more so, perhaps. Because those people have read the work as something perfectly new, and, barring amnesia, an author is never going to be able to do that. There will be...
6 tags
Jonah Lehrer critiques Nicholas Carr
Remember Nicholas Carr? The guy who made waves with his Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”? He’s come back with a book called The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. It intuitively seemed wrong to me, but I couldn’t define why, so I was affirmed by Jonah Lehrer’s book review in the New York Times. Lehrer, author of Proust was a...
May 2010
2 posts
5 tags
5 tags
“In many ways, musical theater is the opposite of folk. The staging is formal; the audience is distant. The performers wear make-up, and are not themselves. And the distinct origin of song, lyric, and performance are clear, though attributed authorship is generally eschewed in favor of the shows from whence such songs came to us.
Where folk connects audience and performer...
April 2010
5 posts
4 tags
“But the dictats given in The Elements of Style range from the redundant to the insane. Anyone who read the book again and again and again, and took its edicts literally, would do disastrous damage to their writing.
Most of those who dip into it come out with some signs of a nervous cluelessness about grammar: they get edgy around adverbs and prepositions and instances of the verb be,...
3 tags
“Stop Thinking” (Lindsay Mac, cellist...
2 tags
March 2010
1 post
3 tags
February 2010
6 posts
4 tags
The Trouble with Academic Prose
Excerpted from Patricia Nelson Limerick’s essay “Dancing with Professors: The Trouble with Academic Prose”:
“In ordinary life, when a listener cannot understand what someone has said, this is the usual exchange: Listener: I cannot understand what you are saying. Speaker: Let me try to say it more clearly. But in scholarly writing in the late 20th century, other rules...
3 tags
