Monthly Archives: May 2005

Fisk’s List, Jargon, and Conceptual Brevity

Sharon Howard has a great response to Robert Fisk’s raving about academic jargon. I can only echo it. I’m very friendly to the regular complaint that scholars in the humanities and the social sciences use unnecessary jargon and communicate poorly … Continue reading

Posted in Academia | Comments Off on Fisk’s List, Jargon, and Conceptual Brevity

“Demonstrably False”

I don’t even want to read various weblogs this morning about the Newsweek “Qu’ran in the toilet” story. I know what most of them are going to say, and I’m bored in advance with what I know. Various anti-war blogs … Continue reading

Posted in Politics | 1 Comment

And Then What Happened?

The pull of narrative is very strong. Once I’ve started a story, I need to know what happens next even when the story becomes quite bad or irritating. I stuck with Robert Jordan’s awful, awful fantasy series for six books, … Continue reading

Posted in Popular Culture | 23 Comments

Built to Last

One of the few blog discussions that I followed pretty closely during my blog-vacation was the spiralling conversation that came out of initial reactions to The Valve. It drew a number of comments from me at various sites, and I … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Books, Popular Culture | 3 Comments

A Case of One

I’m planning to watch “Alien Planet” on the Discovery Channel tomorrow: it looks like fun. But I was struck by a quoted opinion from the show that appeared in today’s New York Times review of the show, that should we … Continue reading

Posted in Miscellany | 3 Comments

Pandora’s Plan

The low rumble of discussion over the last few years about the process of assessing the needs in various departments has finally broken out into an invitation to faculty to send in their own thoughts about future needs to the … Continue reading

Posted in Academia | 6 Comments

The New Thing

So. Here I am more than a month later with a WordPress blog with comments and all that new-fangled stuff. What took me so long? Well, partially I found myself at the time I went on hiatus just plain crazy … Continue reading

Posted in Blogging | 13 Comments