Category Archives: Politics

Do Liberals and Elites Hate Teachers?

Posted on September 13, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Corey Robin thinks so , and explains liberal disdain towards the Chicago strike as a spill-over of elite belief that teachers are socioeconomic losers doing a job that anyone could do. I think he’s on to something, though in many … Continue reading →

Posted in Politics | 11 Comments

Our Mamluks

Posted on August 24, 2012 by Timothy Burke

I’ve been in an interesting conversation at Facebook about steadily rising suicide rates in the US military. Thirty-eight Army soldiers killed themselves in July 2012, the highest monthly rate that the Army has ever recorded. 2012’s grim statistics are just … Continue reading →

Posted in Politics | 4 Comments

A Scholar, An Expert, An Intellectual

Posted on August 21, 2012 by Timothy Burke

…walk into a bar and…. More seriously, though, I’ve been thinking a lot about the minimum qualifying attributes of these three roles. There’s a big Venn diagram overlap of all three in the labor they perform and the sensibilities that … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Politics | 14 Comments

The Independent’s Daydreams

Posted on August 13, 2012 by Timothy Burke

For a portion of my voting life, I was registered as an independent. (I’m presently registered as a Democrat, having switched my registration in 2007.) I’ve never been a “typical” independent, if you go by what the political analysts say, … Continue reading →

Posted in Politics | 2 Comments

Journalism, Framing and Value

Posted on August 9, 2012 by Timothy Burke

I’ve long been skeptical about the strongest claims made about the consequences of framing effects in public media and discourse. Not claims about the phenomenon itself, which is very real, but about arguments by George Lakoff and others who hold … Continue reading →

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Hacker Job

Posted on July 30, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Before I get to worrying about algebra, Andrew Hacker’s essay in the Sunday NYT made me worry about writing and research. As in, “This is poorly written” and “I don’t think he did much research”. If I were marking the … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Politics | 16 Comments

Don’t Bring Policy to a Culture Fight

Posted on July 26, 2012 by Timothy Burke

E.J. Dionne suggests that gun control advocates have given up and are “rationalizing gutlessness”. I’ve moved in my own life from being intensely certain that comprehensive restrictions on gun ownership were an important political objective to being indifferent to the … Continue reading →

Posted in Oh Not Again He's Going to Tell Us It's a Complex System, Politics | 6 Comments

Would You Rather Be a Mule?

Posted on June 19, 2012 by Timothy Burke

I have a soft spot for the song “Swinging on a Star”, first sung by Bing Crosby in the 1944 film Going My Way. Crosby’s character, a sort of proto-Vatican II priest who ends up befriending a group of wayward … Continue reading →

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Discharging Responsibilities

Posted on May 21, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Luke Mogelson’s excellent New York Times Magazine profile of emergency medicine in Afghanistan is in some ways an exercise in indirection. At first, it looks like it’s going to be entirely an admiring profile of the admirable Italian NGO Emergency … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Politics | Comments Off

Crashing the Pity Party

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Timothy Burke

If you’re genuinely interested in a critique of Black Studies (or similarly constructed interdisciplinary or identity-based programs of study), don’t give into the temptation of making a martyr out of a blogger whose real mistake was a lack of intellectual … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Africa, Politics | 10 Comments