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The Pretty Good Gatsby.
Look, I’m not so stuffy that I think great books should not be handled by Hollywood. There have been some classic novels made into really good movies. But Baz Luhrmann? Handing The Great Gatsby to Baz...
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Happiness Is A Warm Gun.
Apropos Adam’s recent post on Rush Limbaugh and arming civil rights activists, and Dave’s on the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr.: The whole “if only African Americans/Japanese Americans/Jews had had...
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Django Uncensored.
I don’t want to make this blog all Django, all the time. But this recent issue-of-the-moment seems pretty relevant to our conversation, as the Larry Ward behind “What Would Django Do?” is the same...
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The Internet Destroying Society, p. A11.
There are likely many important lessons to learn from the story of Manti Te’o. This is not one of them. Timothy Egan is one of the few opinion writers at the New York Times worth reading, but his most...
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The Neoliberal Arts.
Robert Sternberg, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, is bullish on the future of colleges and universities. Doubters, he says, are “Chicken Littles.” Maybe. Or maybe Sternberg is a Pollyanna. “If...
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Oh, The Humanities!
I study history, but I’m not usually part of Team Humanities in the sense of claiming moral superiority over scientists. Team Humanities usually takes the form of bumper-sticker-ready quips like “It...
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Back To The Future.
The rapid pace of technological change has granted us, among other things, a crystal ball: we can now make pretty good assumptions about what new devices we’ll be using in the near future. If you hang...
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Black-And-White Movies.
Dave asks whether in the past ten-plus years the film industry has become more skittish about depicting any sort of revolutionary violence without an unequivocal condemnation of it. He asks, in other...
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Stenography.
Conservative writer Joshua Trevino has been getting paid lots of money to do public relations work under the guise of journalism. For nearly $400,000, Trevino has written columns and hired other...
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The Expendables.
I’ve already argued that liberals ought to be more willing to discuss violence in movies, television, and video games. The fact that media violence is an NRA talking point doesn’t mean that it’s an...
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What We Talk About When We Talk About MOOCs.
Everyone’s talking about MOOCs. The Chronicle Of Higher Education can’t go five minutes without using the acronym. We’ve discussed them at length ourselves. But while it’s always been obvious that...
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Wicked.
Admittedly, this is probably in bad taste: “A campaign by leftists to push the song “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead” from “The Wizard Of Oz” up the charts as a rebuke to Thatcher and her Conservative...
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The Echo Chamber.
The usually unflappable President Obama was pissed off today, after the United States Senate failed to pass any legislation reforming American gun laws despite overwhelming public support for such...
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Bullies At The Pulpit.
Commenter Matthew argues that one of the main reasons gun reform didn’t succeed is that Obama is a lousy negotiator. He cites Maureen Dowd’s recent column as a good summary of why. A few things to...
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MOOCs, Part II: This Time It’s Personal.
This has not been a good month for MOOCs. A couple of weeks ago Amherst College faculty members voted down an invitation to join edX, the nonprofit MOOC platform. A few days later, Duke University...
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Southern Fantastic.
Beasts Of The Southern Wild has to be the most overrated movie of last year. It was, yes, beautifully filmed and hypnotically acted. Quvenzhane Wallis in particular was pretty remarkable. But despite...
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Presto, Read the Communist Manifesto/Guerrillas in the Midst, a Guevara Named...
Scott Lemieux of Lawyers, Guns and Money is one of the better bloggers out there when it comes to law and political economy, but maybe less so rap music. Lemieux posted a brief item the other day...
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