When I was an undergraduate, I remember one of my (English Lit) professors saying on the first day of class: “There is no such thing as a stupid question.” Obviously, this was a warm-and-fuzzy attempt to impart some measure of confidence to students, to encourage us to voice our questions and concerns without reservation, and…
Read MoreAnd, in this case, the “good deed” was my pedagogical experiment with (now, regular practice of) blogging in the classroom. I’ve been featured on The Dean’s Blog: Celebrating Teaching and Learning at my college, in a story hyperbolically entitled “Philosophy in the 21st Century.” I am, of course, really honored by the recognition… so, what’s…
Read MoreAbout a month ago, I started watching the television show “24” from its beginning. I was immediately hooked, as I wrote in my initial post on the subject (“24” Is Like Television Crack), and this week I just began Season 5. My general impression is that the quality of the show declined after the first…
Read MoreIt snowed yesterday in Memphis. Not “real” snow, just some flurries in the air, but it added an unreal sparkle to the morning… a morning in which so many other things seemed so unreal. I watched the Inauguration ceremonies in our campus pub, surrounded by rapt colleagues and students. People cheered and clapped and laughed,…
Read MoreSo, there’s a thing going around on Facebook that asks people to list 25 random things about themselves. I usually delete messages like this immediately, but for whatever reason I actually filled out the list this time. I suppose that the point of this exercise is to show something revelatory about what the author finds…
Read MoreIt’s funny how a simple and arbitrary change in the calander date can give us all the impression that something has really started over, that we have begun a new project that is in some way really distinct from the one we were in only a couple of days ago, that the weight of 2008’s…
Read MoreThere’s an article in the current issue of Newsweek by Joshua Alston entitled “Too Much of a Bad Thing” (without a question mark, but I’ll come back to that later) that claims we are all suffering from “Antihero Overload” and bemoans the fact that “no one on TV can be merely good or evil anymore.”…
Read MoreI recently discovered wordle.net, which generates “word clouds” from text that you enter. The program gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently, thus producing a kind of shorthand-image of what is emphasized in the original text. I know that readers of this blog probably don’t need yet another Internet distraction, but this one…
Read MoreOver on KHG’s blog, there’s a really interesting post (Titillating Food) about her experiment with trying to make “caramel sea salt.” Reading it, and amazing at all of the care and thought that went into such a project, got me thinking about that odd-variety of human being that we call the foodie. The foodie differs…
Read MoreI’ve mentioned my fascination with medical mysteries before on this blog (see: my post on Apotemnophilia). I suppose that part of that fascination is simply grounded in the strangeness of some of the conditions, but I am also particularly interested in the way that medical knowledge is stymied. A couple of years ago, I read…
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