The title today refers to a law suit filed in the state of Connecticut over twenty years ago by parents of students in the Hartford Public Schools, demanding that Connecticut either provide equal funding for all the state’s schools or allow students from inner city systems (like Hartford’s) to attend neighboring suburban schools (like those…

Well, I’d like to start by saying at I’m really impressed by Mique’s experiences quitting smoking.  My experience was hell on wheels.  Bill used to say that my quitting smoking was the hardest thing he ever did, including dealing with cancer.   I wrote an entire book I couldn’t remember, and I was a bitch on wheels…

Let me start by trying to address some of the issues Cheryl brought up. She says she’s never seen a number so low for the percentage of people who start trying to quit or enter rehab who actually end up clean and sober. The benchmarks for that are actually fairly straightforward.  Nobody says “cured.”  They…

Here’s the thing.  I’m a firm believer in the idea that everything that survives serves a function, even if it’s not the function we think it’s supposed to be serving.  But the fact remains that a lot of what we do does not serve the function we say we want it to serve, and not…

So–Lymaree thinks the system isn’t working, Robert and Mary think it is. I think it sort of is. First, Robert is of course right–to a large extent, the purpose of demanding a degree has nothing to do with anything the applicant has learned, and everything to do with the fact that a meritocracy needs to…

Well, to start, I want to say that I  didn’t mean to imply that the phenomenon  I was talking about–the tendency to do end runs around institutionalized systems of credentialing–was inherently American or inherently capitalistic.  It just is, and I think it’s an enormous advantage when we’re operating in a world where so many advanced…

I’m back again, sort of.  I’m finished blogging over at Moments in Crime, at any rate, but today I’ve been too messed up to actually get anything sensible written, or even thought about. So, a couple of things. First, the fortieth reunion of my high school class in coming up, organized largely by a woman…

I haven’t disappeared.  I’m blogging at http://www.momentsincrime.com this week.

Ah.  Great.  I’d forgotten that one, and it’s about the best introduction to what I see as The Problem in the Humanities as I can find. Sokal and his partner wrote a book about his experiences with Social Text, which was the journal that published his joke article, but even the name of the journal…

Over at Arts and Letters  Daily, there was a link today to an article about C.P. Snow’s famous essay on the mental and cultural divisions between “literary intellectuals” (in which he included all the Humanities) and “natural scientists.” Called “The  Two Cultures,” it outlined what Snow thought at the time were the major reasons for…