Ironic turns of phrase
From a friend who goes as kestrel’s nest: The phrase [“building a Red America”] caught me up short, remembering the jingos of my adolescence, one of which was “better dead than red” in reference to Communism. Back then, “Red” was synonymous with evil, anti-democratic, “anti-American” politics. Now it is used to mean “Republican, right-wing ‘ultra-American’ […]
Tough lessons
Paul Tough’s What It Takes To Make A Student is the cover story in this week’s New York Times Magazine. Plenty of things to talk about here, plenty of things to quibble about, but Tough’s central point—and one that should resonate for most people—is that the failure to educate children is a political failure, and […]
Draft of Accountability Frankenstein completed
The manuscript is done, or at least the initial drafting is done. It’s a relatively short MS—approximately 68,000 words, excluding references. In revision, that will probably stretch to 70,000, but it’s unlikely to get much larger. (December 28 update: The revised manuscript is about 73,000 words, with 12,800 words in the references section.) In contrast, […]
Lit-review frustrations, part 397
The next time I read someone claiming to derive postmodernism from quantum mechanics and chaos theory, I’m going to scream. This misunderstanding of physics usually ruins what otherwise would be interesting reading.
Brief gloss on pragmatism vs. sociology of knowledge
I’m now done with drafting everything in Accountability Frankenstein except one section, on the problem of expertise in society. For a variety of reasons, I’ve been thinking about this in connection with John Dewey, Walter Lippmann, Karl Mannheim, and William James. And I’ve figured out the difference between the sociologist of knowledge and the pragmatist […]