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Category Archives: Politics
The Cheese Stands Alone
The movement for higher education to divest from fossil fuel producers frustrates me. First and foremost in the way that participants in the movement are anointing themselves as sole moral paragons struggling through a wasteland of sin and sinners. I … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Politics, Swarthmore
5 Comments
Amendments
John Winthrop’s City Upon a Hill, amended for 2013: Now the onely way to ENSURE this shipwracke and to SCREW OVER our posterity is to followe the Counsell of Micah, to doe UNjustly, to SCORN mercy, to YELL LOUDLY ABOUT … Continue reading
Posted in Politics
7 Comments
Lashed to the Rack, or the Ideology of Incremental Improvement
I was walking through a poster session at a conference on educational and learning games some years ago and came across two very nice presenters who had created a game for students who were planning to study abroad in countries … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Games and Gaming, Politics, Swarthmore
6 Comments
War and Understanding
The violence at Kenya’s Westgate Mall over the weekend stirs something in me besides fear and sorrow and pain. There’s also the thump of righteous anger thudding away in me as I read the reports. I’m slower to let it … Continue reading
Posted in Politics
5 Comments
Procrustes’ Market
My knee jerks pretty hard when I read an argument that because a service or institution does not behave like a perfect model market in economics, it must be changed until it conforms to the model. There is wreckage strewn … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Politics
4 Comments
Suez Has Already Happened
The problem with “turning points”, as they’re commonly described in popular forms of historical storytelling, is that very few of them were recognized clearly as such at the time. When I’m in the archives reading past individuals writing to and … Continue reading
Posted in Politics
12 Comments
The Method
Obama’s new education policy neatly showcases the spectrum of choice we now have in our political system: to be ground down a bit at a time by technocrats who either won’t admit to or do not understand the ultimate consequences … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Politics
11 Comments
Denial Is a River In Egypt
While I’m broadly in agreement with Adam Frank’s op-ed about the grave political and social costs of the current state of scientific literacy in America, there is something about the way that he comes at the issue that feels like … Continue reading
It’s a Confidential Thing, You Wouldn’t Understand
I had a heated conversation a few years back with someone I know whose work for the U.S. government routinely involves classified information. We weren’t talking about the content of that work, because this person takes classification very very seriously. … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Politics, Swarthmore
6 Comments
The Codes of the Political Class
One of Benedict Anderson’s most famous insights into modern nationalism is the role he assigns to national newspapers in creating the sense of “simultaneity” that gave people across the national territory a sense that they were experiencing events together at … Continue reading
Posted in Politics
11 Comments