I had breakfast at a diner this morning. Yes, that's right, you heard me: an actual diner.  Indoors.  Unmasked.  I mean, I wore a mask when I came in, but for the meal I took it off.  Everyone...

Oh this is sort of fun—a close reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.”  But it is a tepid analysis of a great poem, missing some obvious things.

First of all, let’s allow that it’s not a great...

I'm reading a piece on Robert Merton, the great sociologist of science (and so much more--his On the Shoulders of Giants is a tremendous book that anyone should read).  The piece is about his writing...

32 years ago today, an iconic image of our era was committed to posterity: 

I wonder if we have fully recognized how iconic, how representative, it would be.  Resistance--yes.  But futile...

This spring I read Joel Isaac's Working Knowledge: Making the human sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Harvard 2012), and I have to say I found myself enjoying it quite a bit.  Not so much for the forest...

Just some Memorial Day Weekend links for you.  

Come to think of it, when was the last time I had an actual honest-to-goodness Memorial Day Weekend?  I hope this one is that.  May it be so for you...

This is a good skeptical assessment of what we can learn from Arizona State University—according to some, a model of the “fifth wave” of higher education—and what we cannot. Suffice to say that Brint...

Just taking this one day at a time.  

Hey--I read Jaron Lanier's Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now this weekend, and I found it very thought-provoking.  It's a brief...

Like Orwell's designation of his family as residing in the "Lower Upper Middle Class," I think May 23rd is not really late May--that would be like after May 25, I would say--but it's not simply the...

May always feels like it should be the entry into summer.  But it's the "entry" into summer in the same way that the sliding doors at the Wal-Mart open up at 2 AM on Black Friday and the hordes all...