Just putting these out there.

I really like this piece, about why public stigmatization of many people who worked in the Trump administration is not only acceptable, and not only appropriate, but perhaps morally urgent.

The...

Just a few:

An interview with Jill Lepore, whose recent book If then is about the origins of “data science” and the emergence of “data” as a new ideology which implicitly, and sometimes more than implicitly, critiques and seeks to replace the humanistic study of the human.  It’s also about the way that corporate money, especially tech money, has flowed...

Just a few.  I've been busy, sorry about not dumping stuff on you guys!  I suppose you should be happy not to be dumped on, however.

An interview with Ariel Sabar about his new book Veritas, on the whole “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” scandal.  

I have long appreciated George Orwell’s little essay “Politics and the English language,” though I am not a fanatic about it, as some, mistakenly, are. What I admire about the piece is what I admire about a lot of Orwell’s writing: there is a willingness to see the fake pieties that we employ to hide ourselves from reality, and a fearlessness, on his part, at seeing through those pieties. A similar story can be told of Albert Camus at almost the same time, and also of Czeslaw Milosz just a few years after; some of Martha Gellhorn’s...

I have lots of small-essay ideas, but I'm dedicating what writing energy I have right now to my classes, and to a couple larger projects, so I'm not able to give it here.  Instead, these small links with a thought from me is all you get.  Sorry (probably it's better for you to be exposed to less of me anyway).  (Is anyone reading this at all?  Sometimes I wonder...Who'm I kidding, I wonder this all the time.)

It’s a list of...

A few links!  Just for you all.

The “gentrification font”: Neutraface.

A very dense, a very rich, piece about...

Some more stuff here, and my opinions thereupon:

This review does a good job of telling the story behind this book. But I also think the reviewer goes to great lengths to excuse the behavior of Prof Karen King, or to deflect attention from her behavior.  Has she...

Yesterday I had what, at the end of the evening, I thought was my most successful day so far of the semester; but then, my wife and I were awake for half of the night dealing with a mysteriously sick child.  So it feels like we're back to square one this morning.  Oh well!  Here are some links for you.  

“There is a big conversation to have about what to do about Turkey,” a senior European diplomat said. “But it’s not for now.”  After Trump leaves office do you have to walk in front of number of foreign policy...

Here, public school begins today. Our son starts seventh grade! Of course, it's all remote. What a year it will be. 

Meanwhile I have links for your own continued education: 

Using some advanced mathematics to talk about cryptology; most of this is just beyond me. But it seems pretty cool...

Some stuff for you all!

This is an incredible review—ten years old now—of Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, a book about post-war American fiction writing.  Elif Batuman really takes on the book in a serious way, from a position of strong dissent, but she does not, I think, slander the book, trash or disparage it; she just disagrees.  It’s very...