May 2012
“You Should Go To Graduate School If:
You Love to Read….
You Love to...”
– \Minds Like Knives//: Why You SHOULD Go to Graduate School.
You should read the full post if you want to get the whole argument, but let me just say that I desperately hope that none of my students who are contemplating graduate school read this. If nothing else, they need to understand that even...
“Yes, of course, everything about us, from the simplest sensation to the most...”
– Who’s in charge â you or your brain? | Science | The Observer
“At midnight tonight I will leave the internet. I’m abandoning one of my “top 5”...”
– I’m leaving the internet for a year | The Verge
April 2012
Goodman D——: Adventures in New Testament Greek:... →
gmd:
By Scott Cairns You could almost think the word synonymous with mind, given our so far narrow history, and the excessive esteem in which we have been led to hold what is, in this case, our rightly designated nervous systems. Little wonder then that some presume the mind itself…
“In our culture, we have all accepted the notion that the right to know is...”
– W. H. Auden, “The Joker in the Pack” (in The Dyer’s Hand)
“If we could use digital tools to estrange ourselves from our books, to...”
– where material book culture meets digital humanities » Wynken de Worde
“But Stanford’s entrepreneurial culture has also turned it into a place where...”
– Is Stanford Too Close to Silicon Valley? : The New Yorker
“The internet has changed who the gatekeepers are. For much of recent American...”
– Wonks and Blogs | Via Meadia
“Indeed, what Thomas Kuhn called “the paradigm effect” will make it...”
– Fors Clavigera: Once an evangelical…: On Balmer on Douthat
“Basically, we have three options for these kinds of words: “cooperate,”...”
– The New Yorker’s Umlaut Is Actually a Diaeresis : The New Yorker
After the End
runofplay:
Cue the End-of-an-Era music: Pep Guardiola has resigned. But from this vantage point what seems clear is that Pep’s departure, and all the accompanying verbiage — about the intensity of his personality, his perfectionism, the hardware his team has won over the past four years, the success of the Barcelona Way, Pep as the embodiment of the més que un club ethos, and on and on — are...
“I am living proof that conservatives’ and liberals’ values are worlds apart.
...”
– On telling parents to f*** themselves | The Righteous Mind. Actually, your account has nothing to do with liberalism and conservatism. Instead, you are living proof of the unassailable fact that the more absolute a jackass a person is the prouder he will be of his jackassery.
I quote this response...
“And why is competition important? Because it drives not just lower prices, but...”
– Who’s afraid of Amazon?
“The principal large mammals in Białowieża are the bison, moose, wolf, boar,...”
– Białowieża Forest (Idle Words)
“We can have what Turkle terms a “big gulp of real conversation” — through a chat...”
– Own It: Social Media Isn’t Just Something Other People Do - Alexandra Samuel - Technology - The Atlantic. The Turkle essay needs a critique, but the rousing peroration here makes me cringe. “We are only as alone as we choose to be”? Do we really want to blame lonely people for...
“Nothing inspires fear like the end of the world, and ever since Y2K, the media’s...”
– The Perils of Apocalyptic Thinking - Mathew Barrett Gross & Mel Gilles - Politics - The Atlantic
“In the last 50 years, the sheer density of the information environment has...”
– World Without Walls - Technology Review
“I would not speak of this dilemma if it were only mine, but I watch many others...”
– Stillness | Scott Russell Sanders | Orion Magazine
“Many web workers, having tasted of the A/B apple, can no longer imagine...”
– The A/B Test: Inside the Technology That’s Changing the Rules of Business | Epicenter | Wired.com
“We also know why optimists do better than pessimists. The answer lies in the...”
– How the Power of Positive Thinking Won Scientific Credibility - Hans Villarica - Health - The Atlantic
“If anything, social media is a counterweight to the ongoing devaluation of human...”
– Social Media’s Small, Positive Role in Human Relationships - Zeynep Tufekci - Technology - The Atlantic. I’d like to think this is true, but a number of studies have shown that television-watching has not gone down recently but has remained steady or risen. Perhaps we watch now while...
more on bad religion
I want to go back to say a few more words about Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion, a book for which I wrote a commendatory blurb, and some of the critiques of it. Ross begins the book with a kind of rough-and-ready overview of American religious history, but his chief concern is to look at the last sixty years or so, and the decline during that period of the broad cultural influence of orthodox...
“This past Tuesday night I took a bunch of Vicodin and went to see Wrath of the...”
– A trip to watch Wrath of the Titans - Grantland. Keep reading.
“If you ask on what grounds do I accuse rapists of having done wrong, then the...”
– Douthat on Secular Morality « Modeled Behavior. Okay — but at this point, don’t you have to continue, “To those who reply that a world with rape pleases them, or does not displease them, I say…”?
“I will state this as clearly as possible:
You cannot buy Japanese Kobe beef in...”
– Food’s Biggest Scam: The Great Kobe Beef Lie - Forbes
“A couple of years ago, I spent three months playing World of Warcraft – partly...”
– The Reader and Technology | New Writing | Granta Magazine
“During the past few years, I have come to fear that the United Kingdom and China...”
– The most important story in the world: Guardian reporter Jonathan Watts’ parting thoughts on nine years of environmental journalism in China | chinadialogue
“Just like Amazon Web Services have enabled thousands of scaleable web startups...”
– Go To Hellman: Publishing’s Amazon Powered Future
“Potato Head Blues” (1927). The song...
“But the aspect that boomed out most loudly was his relentless pursuit of secular...”
– Christopher Hitchens’ wit and warmth remembered as New York pays tribute | Books | guardian.co.uk.
Please explain: “ironically.”
“What really motivates elementary particle physicists is a sense of how the world...”
– The Crisis of Big Science
“There’s a theory that technology eventually subverts whatever rational ends it’s...”
– Grad school admissions: Grad Cafe exposes Gen Y’s job-search angst. - Slate Magazine. This is so, so sad.
“Over the past few decades it seems football has gone out of its way to alienate...”
– Footballers’ finely toned torsos have dashed a generation’s dreams | Harry Pearson | Football | The Guardian
“This, however, is not the most remarkable character of the sound of bells. This...”
– “How oft indeed,” as my friend and colleague Richard Gibson commented when reading this passage to me.
Chateaubriand, from The Genius of Christianity.
“A supreme author of critically gifted prose, [Dwight] Macdonald at his dazzling...”
– Clive James
“Why worry about what’s covered in newspapers and television when it’s possible...”
– The Wilson Quarterly: A Small World After All? by Ethan Zuckerman 