Tag: stories
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A Tuesday morning twelve years ago…
I generally hate the hyper-patriotic memorialization of this day, as I’d prefer to forget. But today saw many on social media sharing their stories, so I thought I’d share mine, too. I was in the subway, headed to work at the Civilian Complaint Review Board a couple blocks south of the towers, in the financial district.…
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Stories of Decline, Stasis, and Progress
Peter Levine asks, “Why do we feel compelled to argue from decline?” in areas where objective measures suggest progress or growth: You can care deeply about public education, civic education, teenagers’ behavior, or–if you must–gun rights, but there is no basis for arguing that these things are worse than they used to be. I am…
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The Fetishization of the Dying
Bronnie Ware was a palliative care nurse who decided to blog about her patients’ dying thoughts and regrets. The blog became a book, and now it is being advertised on the Guardian’s website as an odd list of desert island favorites: “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.” I wish I’d had the courage to…
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Deciding Whether or Not to Tell a Story
When I was an undergraduate, I took a class called “Truth and Beauty” with the poet Ann Lauterbach. It was basically a class on reading and writing essays, but I took it because I was a philosophy major and I thought it would be about aesthetics, i.e. about whether judgments about beauty can be true…
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The Growing Field of Julian Assange Secondary Scholarship
If you haven’t read Assange’s own self-justifications, then you can read this summary of them to get a sense of what worried me. Now, Peter Ludlow does a proper study of Assange’s political theory: this is conspiracy in the sense of the original etymology of ‘conspire’ – as in “breathe with” or “breathe together”. The individuals are acting in…
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The Walking Dead
Last year, I wrote: I’d like to see what a surviving-a-day-at-a-time hero looks like. Whatever collection of writers can come up with that story and characterization will make a lot of money breaking with the current anti-hero conventions. More to the point, it might be good for us. Though we may [not] have had too…
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Earthquakes and Providence
My old boss Ted Kinnaman has a piece in the Huffington Post on Pat Robertson’s claim that Haitians deserved the recent earthquake because they made a pact with the devil in order free themselves from colonial slavery. Others have developed the historical case for such a pact. Where many have taken Robertson to task for…
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Philosophy as Arbitrage
Arbitrage is the practice of exploiting price differentials for a profit. Arbitrage is based on the Law of One Price: “in an efficient market, all identical goods must have only one price.” From the arbitrageur’s perspective, price differentials are violations of the law, and they profit from correcting the differences. The most basic form of financial arbitrage…
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Veterans return to the Academy
My friend Dr. J recently wrote about the various transitions in the faculty, and noted in passing that we should be careful not to push the 60’s era faculty out before we’ve had a chance to pick their brains on instructing war veterans. I had a passel of veterans at MTSU (10-12?) and it was…
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On Beauty and Being Just Good Enough
Zadie Smith indicts herself for the failure that characterizes almost all writing: Bad writing does nothing, changes nothing, educates no emotions, rewires no inner circuitry – we close its covers with the same metaphysical confidence in the universality of our own interface as we did when we opened it. But great writing – great writing…