Monthly Archives: July 2007

Should your grading patterns be public? In how much detail?

Back when I was a Brittain fellow at Georgia Tech, I was struck by the fact that students had full access to a faculty member’s grading history.  As I recall, you could look at the overall distribution of grades, but … Continue reading

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Odd things people say about psychoanalysis as if they were self-evident

First in an occasional series. In this week’s New Yorker, David Denby has a feature-length article on the “slacker-striver romance,” or movies that feature a male slacker and an ambitious woman who’s out of his league. While leaving the film … Continue reading

Posted in psychoanalysis | 1 Comment

Review/Interview: Angus McLaren’s Impotence

Over at PopMatters’s Re:Print, I’ve begun what I hope will be a series of reviews and interviews highlighting work from university presses that might interest general readers. The first such post, about Angus McLaren’s splendid new book, Impotence: A Cultural … Continue reading

Posted in books, elsewhere, review | 1 Comment

Et tu, copyeditors

I know typo-blogging is a bit unfair, but this one’s pretty funny.  From today’s New Britain Herald: The story, of course, is deeply unfunny.  While I’m prepared in theory to agree that throwing money at problems isn’t always a good … Continue reading

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Things that probably make conservatives go “huh.”

Thursday’s e-mail brought the AAUP‘s monthly e-newsletter promoting the contents of Academe.  Here’s a screen shot of one of the news items: I don’t want to defend either ACTA or Anne Neal, but I do think it’s weird to conflate … Continue reading

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RBOC: Friday edition

Yesterday’s post at Blog of a Bookslut was later than usual, but did make it up. I’m excited about a mini-interview with Angus McLaren (author of Impotence: A Cultural History) that I’ll be posting Monday to Re:Print. Also, yesterday I … Continue reading

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Review: Otherwise Normal People: Inside the Thorny World of Competitive Rose Gardening

This morning PopMatters posted my review of Aurelia C. Scott’s Otherwise Normal People: This book delivers almost exactly what the title offers: A sympathetic, perhaps even sentimental, look at the slightly crazy people who organize their lives around rose competitions. … Continue reading

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Requiescat: Sterling E. Lanier

As I noted just now on PopMatters, Sterling E. Lanier died two weeks ago. If you’ve not read his Hiero novels, and you are, or have been, a fan of sf+fantasy, then doing so would make a lovely tribute to … Continue reading

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A book that could have changed my life . . .

. . . if only it had been around when I was an undergrad: Christopher A. Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic (Harvard UP, 1999) If, at 19, I’d known the classics were so awesome . . . I’d probably be … Continue reading

Posted in books, silliness | 1 Comment

Collex

At the Academic Commons today, I have a post introducing Collex, a search- and tagging- tool that allows researchers to move seamlessly among most of the major 19th-century digital collections.  Collex is one of the coolest early fruits of Jerome … Continue reading

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