Monthly Archives: August 2015

Is There a Desert or a Garden Underneath the Kudzu of Nuance?

I like this essay by Kieran Healy a lot, even though I am probably the kind of person who habitually calls for nuance. What this helps me to understand is what I am doing when I make that nearly instinctive … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Generalist's Work, Oh Not Again He's Going to Tell Us It's a Complex System | 1 Comment

Don’t Panic! Leave That to the Experts

In many massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), players who are heavily invested in the game (sometimes just in terms of time, but occasionally both time and money) often group together in organized collaborations, usually called guilds. Guilds pool resources and … Continue reading

Posted in Politics | 4 Comments

We Are Not Who We Will Become

One of the things about the reaction to Allison Bechdel’s Fun Home by a small subset of incoming Duke undergraduates that is important to grasp is that I think it’s a deliberate–and possibly even coordinated–re-deployment of activism about the content … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Politics, Swarthmore | 10 Comments

Joke’s On You

Here’s my contribution to the DONALD TRUMP HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE sweepstakes: Donald Trump is polling well for the same reason Bernie Sanders is polling well. Sort of. They’re not at all the same in the sociology of their attraction, … Continue reading

Posted in Politics | 3 Comments

In Media Res

Ta-Nehisi Coates tweets (approvingly, I think) that historians are “not the most hopeful bunch”. I’ve said as much myself. Among the many problems with David Armitage and Jo Guldi’s The History Manifesto is the authors’ belief that historians once had … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Politics | 2 Comments

Peforming the Role

The short summary of the way that UIUC’s administrative and board leadership (and some of their closest faculty supporters) handled their reaction to Steven Salaita is that they screwed up and that serious professional consequences are completely appropriate. And not … Continue reading

Posted in Academia | 1 Comment