Monthly Archives: August 2011

The Evitable Future of the Digital

I don’t think anyone will be surprised that I agree to a large extent with Virginia Heffernan that education needs to prepare contemporary children for the world of work and citizenship as it is and will be rather than as … Continue reading

Posted in Digital Humanities, Information Technology and Information Literacy | 3 Comments

Seven Days in the World of Books on Fire

I said it on Twitter but I’ll say it here. The relief for a stupid book review in which someone says something that is not only evaluatively stupid but actually empirically wrong is to say so. It’s not a 65,000 … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Books, Information Technology and Information Literacy | 10 Comments

Culture Fears

I’m completely in agreement with Claire Potter, writing at her blog Tenured Radical, that mocking Governor Rick Perry for his college grades and using them to explain Perry’s policies on education is a bad idea on several levels. As Potter … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Politics | 2 Comments

More on Going to Graduate School

Notes for further revisions and additions to my old essay about whether graduate school is a good idea. Thanks to Paul Musgrave for helping me to think through some of these points, some of which involve the academic job market … Continue reading

Posted in Academia | 8 Comments

Weighing the Market

Maybe it’s time for me to update my old essay on graduate school. In my old essay, I emphasized that the institutional culture of academia makes it very difficult to evaluate whether an academic career is a good idea or … Continue reading

Posted in Academia | 4 Comments

Some Weeds

I got into an unedifying dispute some years ago about the term “Eurocentric”. Some conservative cultural critics seem to think that any mention of the term marks you off as a crazed member of Sendero Luminoso or some such. I … Continue reading

Posted in Books, Generalist's Work | Comments Off on Some Weeds

Out, Out Damned Spot

Is there anything more grating than an interpretation whose language slips and innocently anoints its analysis with the status of a fact? I’m sure I noticed this pattern in the letters to the editor in this week’s New York Times … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Games and Gaming, Popular Culture | 6 Comments