Another travel-disrupted weekly roundup, here. Kate went to Wiscon over the Memorial Day weekend, so I took the kids down to my parents, and unsurprisingly didn’t end up finding the time there to do any blogging. So you get two weeks’ worth of stuff collected here, rather than just one.
Me on Substack:
— The Rhetorical Power of Meritocracy: There’s an argument for diversity in hiring that’s based on a meritocratic ideal that has fallen out of favor in recent years, and I think that’s a real mistake.
— End of an Era: Some thoughts on the passage of time, occasioned by giving away the playset that the kids have outgrown.
— Most People Aren’t Authors: Modern technologies don’t actually enable everyone to write a book, but that’s not a bad thing.
— On Fallibility: Hopefully the only thing I will write that’s explicitly about the shooting in Uvalde, TX.
— Academic Odds and Ends: Four stories about issues in academia that end up having a vague common theme of students doing things they’re not particularly interested in.
Me Elsewhere:
I did talk to a reporter this week, but the story hasn’t run yet.
Links Dump:
— Cops, Crime, and Class at the Graham Factor: Like all monocausal explanations, this is a bit too pat, but there’s probably some truth to it.
— "There Is No Moral Imperative to Be Miserable" by James Greig: Blaming everything on vast impersonal forces can be paralyzing.
— In the Fight Over How to Teach Reading, This Guru Makes a Major Retreat by Dana Goldstein: Phonics is baaaack.
— Playing the Excruciatingly Long Game on Guns by Jeff Maurer: Way more sensible than most of what’s out there.
— Losing It by Freddie deBoer: A nice piece of writing that walks right up to the line of being cringe-y (though, obviously, YMMV).
— Uncertainty isn’t an excuse not to work on existential risk by Simon Bazelon: A good explanation of a particular kind of long-termism.
Pseudo-Random Photo of the Week:
As noted above, I took the kids down to my parents’ for the Memorial Day weekend. The Pip and both of my parents are recently recovered from Covid, so we kept things pretty low-key. This is the kids playing with my dad’s yellow Lab, Argos, in a kiddie pool they bought so he can cool off without needing to be walked a couple of miles to the lake. He wouldn’t really stay in the pool, but loved biting at the stream of water from the hose.
Pseudo-Random Song of the Week:
Steven Hyden plugged this dreamy power-pop band from South Korea in a recent podcast or email newsletter, and I was intrigued enough to check them out. It’s good stuff, available on Bandcamp with British pricing for some reason.
And that’s the last couple of weeks in digest form. If you like this, here’s a button:
And the comments will be open, should you feel so moved.