Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Associated Press has a story up this morning about the Amethyst Initiative, a movement of university presidents and chancellors to promote a debate about lowering the drinking age back to 18.  This is an excellent idea.  Raising the age … Continue reading →

And, I’m back from vacation.  (See here, here, and here.)  There’s no better way to capitalize on the traffic spike from InsideHigherEd.com than to . . . have it come while on a week’s hiatus.  Damn.  It did give me … Continue reading →

There’s no easy way to say this: A & I went see Neil Diamond’s concert Thursday night. (Here’s the Courant’s review; the WFSB news producer liked the show.) It’s safe to say we differ on the Diamond: A has strong … Continue reading →

This is Kate Summerscale, describing textile factories in Trowbridge in 1860: in the morning the machines would start to pound and whirr, and the air would thicken with smoke, soot, the smells of urine (collected in tubs from public houses … Continue reading →

After a brief hiatus to get caught up in my project of re-reading Freud volume by volume, the PsychoSlut column is back in the August issue of Bookslut, reading The Psychopathology of Everyday Life: My five-year-old memorizes song lyrics like … Continue reading →

Bad: Nader Saleh, landlord of the Robert E. Sheridan apartment building at 75 Martin Luther King Drive, said Tuesday that he has been battling a bedbug problem in about a dozen rooms in his building for six weeks. It’s one … Continue reading →

This fall semester will mark, if my math is correct, ten years that I’ve been teaching courses of my own design.  (For one previous year, I taught composition courses from a department-chosen text, hewing closely to model department syllabi, culminating … Continue reading →

So, the boy has been reading the all-ages Marvel comic, X-Men: First Class: New Beginnings, which collects issues 1-4 of X-Men: First-Class. In issue 4, “Seeing Red,” the X-Men and Dr. Strange travel to another dimension in order to return … Continue reading →

Motoko Rich’s NY Times essay about the old books-vs-web chestnut, “Online, R U Really Reading?,” has generated a fair amount of attention.  While I don’t usually agree with Laurie Fendrich about a lot, her conclusion is correct: A new elite … Continue reading →

The boy found this picture–it’s my ID card for the British Library in the summer of 1999–a few weeks ago, and for a minute or two couldn’t figure out who it was:   For reference, here’s a pretty recent picture: … Continue reading →