Monthly Archives: August 2009

Running on Empty

Ah, the sport of online champions: bashing Maureen Dowd. She makes it so easy. Today’s Dowd breaks down like this: 1) I don’t read the Internet! 2) Neither does Leon Wieseltier! 3) But I hear that someone abused anonymity on … Continue reading

Posted in Blogging | 5 Comments

Eeyore and the Unintended Consequence

I don’t expect much to come of John Holbo’s careful breakdown of the non-philosophy underlying Megan McArdle’s blanket antagonism to all health care proposals, but there’s one point buried in there that’s worth pulling out for its general usefulness. Namely, … Continue reading

Posted in Politics | 3 Comments

The Limits to Shill

I continue to feel pretty diffident about the controversy among anthropologists about the Human Terrain Team and other uses of qualitative social science by the U.S. military over the past decade or so. The issue for me is not whether … Continue reading

Posted in Information Technology and Information Literacy | 5 Comments

Ghosts in the Machine

Every once in a while, I’ll catch a colleague from the natural sciences playfully tweaking a humanist for the volume of prose they lavish on a routine task like writing an email or a committee report. (Or, yeah, a blog … Continue reading

Posted in Academia | 2 Comments

How to Read a Curriculum

We already know that higher education applicants and their families have some difficulty decoding the information available about colleges and universities to find the institutions that they want to apply to. That’s the major reason that higher tuition prices in … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Swarthmore | 15 Comments

The Right Firewood

Back from an extended camping trip where I was blissfully out of range of digital technology for most of the time. (Though I weep now looking at my email inbox.) A good time was had by all. One interesting experience … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Domestic Life | 1 Comment

Putting Syllabi Online

I kept meaning to get around to this last week, but I was snowed under with two other things that needed to get done before the academic year starts up again. Adam Kotsko asks an eminently sensible question: why don’t … Continue reading

Posted in Academia | 14 Comments