Month: June 2024

30 Day Song Challenge, Day 2: Your Least Favorite Song

First, see yesterday’s post for my caveat about picking “favorite” and “least favorite” songs. The category “least favorite song” is a weird one, since it presumes there is something at least minimally favorable about the pick. It needs to be a song that is not so awful that you actively avoid hearing it, but still…

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Lone Wolves, Together: On Trump’s Curious Farrago

Like many people, I’ve found myself referring to “Trump supporters” in the last several weeks as a conceptually coherent, identifiable category of voters/citizens and, correspondingly, referring to the things “they” do as the actions of that collective. And every single time, I feel the words slipping, grinding, and catching, as if the very transmission system…

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Adulting

As a general rule, I’m not a fan of the contemporary obsession with gerunding (#seewhatIdidthere), i.e., turning words that were perfectly fine being nouns, perfectly fine accepting the assistance of helping verbs to make sense of some phenomenon, into stand-alone verbs themselves. My allergy to this practice is, for the most part, a consequence of countless, maddening…

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Fumbles

I got behind a bit on this #BloggingEveryDayFebruary project, so I’m playing catch up right now.  If I’m being completely honest, I knew this would happen at some point during the month. Blogging every day is hard. It doesn’t take a lot of time to write a post each day, but it takes a lot…

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Email

I can’t quite remember exactly when email became such a nuisance in my life, but it must have been a long time ago now since I can barely remember it not being a nuisance anymore.  I think I got my first (AOL) email address in 1994.  Then, the familiar modem-screeching and you’ve got mail! alert were the…

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Horror

I do not enjoy horror films. Not even a little bit. They genuinely terrify me. I hate them, I won’t voluntarily go to them, and no amount of cajoling or ridicule will change my mind about that. Now, I should note here at the start that I don’t believe that ghosts or spirits or devils…

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Motivation

It’s Saturday, the hardest day of the week to find motivation to get things done.  Luckily for me, I have almost unrestricted access to all the music ever written (thanks, Google Play!), a stereo with a volume dial that goes all the way up to 10 (thanks, technology!), and neighbors who don’t mind my loudness because…

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Forgetting

I dedicate a significant amount of time in my courses to thinking with students about our “digital selves” and our “digital lives.” Most students– most people, for that matter– tend to think of the aggregate data that constitute their digital selves (social media profiles, Google searches, Netflix or Amazon preferences, banking transactions, medical records, online…

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Purposiveness

I thought I might slip in a somewhat “technical” philosophy post, since I’m blogging every day this month and those of you not interested in such things can just hold on until tomorrow. Today, I’m going to say a bit about Kant, and a tiny little thing that has been nagging about his Critique of…

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