Category: essay
-
The future of the university, the bad part
When I posted on this subject a few days ago, I wish I had known this would be Mainstream Media Says College Sucks week. National Public Radio, the New York Times and the Economist have been discussing the ever greater burden of college tuition, the extremely poor guidance colleges give new students about the cost,…
-
Science blinded by vocabulary
The New York Times Magazine recently had a fascinating article about the quest to establish a scientific basis for bisexuality. It discussed the early work of researcher Michael Bailey, who first used studies of penile inflation while watching both gay and straight porn to conclude that there was no measurable bisexual response. Among the points…
-
American, in my genes?
Over the last few years I have begun to wonder how many of our human differences are actually heritable. Specifically: if Americans, both North and South, are and are growing biologically different from the descendants those who didn’t leave their home countries. It’s not as silly as it might first sound. We’re only beginning to…
-
The future of the university
My father recently put money in my son’s college fund. My son has more than a decade before he heads to college, but what a decade that might be. Already, online educational courses, from primary- and secondary-school initiatives like Khan Academy to university-level work, are not just spreading knowledge irrespective of distance and tuition, but inverting…
-
Hire the quirky!
David Brooks’s recent plea to our nation’s employers struck me deeply, resonating with both my personal history and my professional experience. Not that I want you to skip the column, but in case you’re pressed, Brooks asks our nation’s employers to seek new hires who are more passionate than perfect, who are singular and irregular…
-
A note on Aronofsky’s Noah (which I have not yet seen)
I have yet to see Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, and honestly I will probably wait for it to come to my living room — not that I wouldn’t love to see it larger, but we parents only get so many nights out. But I have seen all Aronofsky’s other movies and enjoyed them, maddening though they sometimes are.…
-
Russia, a cautionary tale
A short note, for those who read my last post: I made my goal, reducing my novel 10.2% down to 124,400 words. Not merely a slimming — at least ten passages, or one every 15,000 words, needed a complete rewrite just to make sense, and in some cases had to grow. It was a grueling…
-
More Edits
The heck with this, I know — but I am editing the book again. I thought I was done, or done for now. At 138K a little big but, you know, big-boned. It was fine. I could write new stories now, send out queries, sure that some kind agent would understand me. A major contest…
-
Two Riffs on Edward Snowden
1) The Great Success of “Operation Snowden” Three months ago, the Washington Post’s alpha-wonk Ezra Klein noted the double-think in Washington, that we could obviously create a vast enterprise to monitor all human information (using closed-source tools), but obviously the effort to provide healthcare to all was inevitably doomed by the same contracting procedures. Of…
-
Amish barn poo and the undoing of damage
I am loath to question scientists, who are vastly more informed than I am about their field of study. But even the smart can be unwise. A recent New York Times opinion essay, breathlessly titled “A Cure for the Allergy Epidemic,” described a search for allergy cures in the dust and offal in Amish farms.…