…with my apologies to Monty Python. But I need something completely different at the moment, so let me go with this. Some of you may know that I collect versions of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. I’ve got old versions and new ones, direct versions and adaptations in modern dress.  There are strange little versions…

I waited an entire day to write this post, because every time I thought of it, I found myself getting more and more angry, and more and more incoherent. So let me take a deep breath here, and I’ll try to stay calm enough here to make sense. First, I need to tell you that…

I’d like to start out here by saying that I was never not talking to any of you.  I was just not talking. But, some notes on the discussion thus far: 1) In terms of fundamental differences in intellectual ability by race, what may or may not be observable at, say, MIT or Caltech, is…

To the real post, just behind this one. This, from the New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/opinion/sunday/kristof-profiting-from-a-childs-illiteracy.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&adxnnl=1&ref=opinion&adxnnlx=1355065441-2vtb8vkg8XbsVsdDa08Acw

I went looking through the comments this morning, and, like Cheryl, I feel for Mique’s granddaughter–but one of those cases here and there will be inevitable in any educational system.  What is going on in the US, however, is not one or two cases, and it’s not “incompetence” in the  usual sense. It is the…

If you get me upset enough, I just can’t shut up. A while ago I posted about a book called Wannabe U, and complained–I believe legitimately–that the book had blinders on.  It  kept insisting that what was happening was the “corporatization” of the university, with the changes there driven by “corporate values.” I tried to…

So, for the past few weeks since I posted last, I’ve been t hinking. I’ll also been doing really draconian revisions, but that’s another story. And what my thinking has boiled down to is this: I really don’t have the stomach to be a censor, and I’m not going to do it. Unfortunately, that leaves…

So, a couple of days ago I published a post on the relative liberty of persons in the modern age of stridently defended rights and other ages with less in the way of rights talk and more in the way of personal liberty… In the process of doing that, I tried to defend myself from…

It’s Sunday, and on Sunday I have a ritual–actually, it’s less a ritual than a desperate attempt not to let myself burn out.  My instinct seems to be, for some reason or the other, to overwork.  What’s more, I don’t just overwork at writing, I overwork at everything.  This has a tendency, if it isn’t…

Well, it’s Saturday.  I just got a boatload of work done.  There’s a pot roast the size of Detroit in the slow cooker.  There’s Paganini in the background.  There’s tea right here beside me. And I have just finished reading a book. Unlike some of you, I am incapable of reading more than one book…