Author Archives: jbj

Some of you will have seen this already, but Tom Franklin is administering a survey about the use of web 2.0 in teaching [“we” in the paragraphs below = Tom Franklin]: We are undertaking an international study of the use of … Continue reading →

At Cult of Mac yesterday, Leander Kahney wrote about a new Japan-only feature of the iPhone 3G: The iPhone 3G in Japan has a special feature unique to that country: The camera always makes a conspicuous “shutter” sound when a … Continue reading →

A week or so ago I bought a Flip video camera–after an amusing exchange at Best Buy in which a sales associate claimed never to have heard of this trendy popular camera despite standing in front of a display of … Continue reading →

More details will follow soon, but it looks like A & I will be taking classes to London during the 2009 Winter Session.  There’ll be 200- (suitable for nonmajors) and 400-level courses on American modernist expats, and a 400-level class … Continue reading →

Earlier this summer, I wrote up a short paper based on my wikified class notes assignment, and sent it off to WikiSym 2008 as a research paper proposal.  This was, in retrospect, overly ambitious: The “research paper” section really is … Continue reading →

The Hartford Craigslist is apparently primarily read by people who say, “yes, I’ll pay the full asking price for item X,” only to write back a few hours later and say, “actually, can you take 60% of the asking price?” … Continue reading →

First, Kevin Carey’s terrific op-ed on the changing role of student loan debt in today’s InsideHigherEd.com, as well as the comment thread, is terrifying, though sadly familiar.  A &I mordantly refer to our student loan debt as our second, nicer … Continue reading →

So, maybe you’ve read my post on going from the dissertation to the book, but you don’t know whether the final outcome is any good.  Lost Causes has gotten several reviews so far–in Novel, Clio, and The Dickens Quarterly–and they’ve … Continue reading →

One of the unexpected joys of parenting has been the extent to which pediatricians seem to feel comfortable raising all sorts of hellish worries based on scant or flimsy evidence. It’s especially exciting when they do this in front of … Continue reading →

The July issue of Bookslut also has my review of Ciaran Carson’s book of poems, For All We Know.  Here’s a taste: The final poem in the collection, “Zugzwang,” captures this perspective eloquently. Zugzwang means “compulsion to move”: it names … Continue reading →