I liked this summary and will share it with my students when we start Lepore in three weeks. The only thing I’d shift is that there is a difference between a craptastic textbook written to sell to school districts and a book published for a general audience.

This memorial is powerful.

This line stuck with me:

What he understood is the difference between charity and community — a difference founded in kinship, in recognizing that we all fall down, that sometimes it takes another hand to pull us up again. “All you have to do,” he once told the novelist Ann Patchett, “is give a little bit of understanding to the possibility that life might not have been fair.”

Renkl, Margaret. “Opinion | Proof That One Life Can Change the World.” The New York Times, August 14, 2023, sec. Opinion.

Here’s the NYT, with a collection of writers and folks talking about why we tell stories.

Here’s Parul Sehgal on stories from the new issue of the New Yorker.

Think I’ll use some mix of these in my second English unit — trying to get at the “why we tell stories” question and what the short story form means for that inquiry.

Great short piece here by David Leonhardt

As budgets to public universities consistently get slashed, their admissions offices have to find the money somewhere.

A small college without a monstrous endowment has to find the money somewhere too.

The hedge funds with schools attached… no excuse there.

This is a great article, one I’ll certainly use with my students.

If I had the time or the talent, I’d write the follow up:

Why are we so afraid of writing?

I’d talk about how Chat GPT feels like even more of a threat to writing as humans figure out how to cut out key intellectual components from the writing process. I’d talk about how I don’t want my students to grow up to be literary critics but how I do want them to always feel that sitting down to work at a piece of writing can help them figure out the world. I’d talk about the joy one can take from early bits of writing — throwing paint at a canvas — through the later bits — when you’re carefully re-shaping things.

Segregation and School Funding

Here.

No mention of The Graveyard Book.

Gaiman recites a Rudyard Kipling poem, a poem rooted in this quote from the Odyssey, I think:

“Oh for shame, how the mortals put the blame on us gods, for they say evils come from us, but it is they, rather, who by their own recklessness win sorrow beyond what is given…”

Oh, and The Sandman is that good. I thought it’d be hard to top the audiobook version, one I listened across a series of winter long walks, but this Netflix production is awesome.

I appreciated this entire interview as both a high school teacher and an adjunct.

This quote about life as an adjunct was money:

Also, adjunctification: The phenomenon in universities in this country today in which about 70 percent of teaching is done by non-tenure-track faculty means that 70 percent of those who are teaching basically don’t have academic freedom. Technically they have it, but they don’t have it in the sense that they don’t have job security. They’re dependent on student evaluations on the one hand and faculty approval on the other. What does that mean? They have to teach in a way that is entertaining. They can’t teach anything too challenging. They can’t teach the basic literacies that students need to understand the world in a deep way. 

As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about critical literacy/doing the reading for class, I was struck by how much of this essay represents a kind of demand for students to grapple with the readings. Most of us set up courses with a wide range of perspectives so that the reading can be the basis for the conversation, which gives a reason to limit things as Professor Brown suggests:

So in your view it’s a kind of category error to think of an academic classroom as a site for free speech? Yes. Not because there shouldn’t be openness for ideas to circulate but because it’s not a free-speech zone. You can’t just say anything. You come into my class on political theory, and we’re talking about John Stuart Mill or Plato, and you want to begin yelling about the Russians attacking Ukraine, I’m going to tell you that’s not appropriate. I’ve given you a kind of extreme example. To the student who starts denouncing Marx — clearly not having read the text, which is terribly common — I’m not going to say, “OK, you get your five minutes and the next student gets their five minutes.” No, it’s not a free-speech domain. It should be a domain in which all kinds of concerns that bear on the topic have a place, no doubt about that, but that’s not free speech.

College became the default

America’s culture wars distract from what’s happening beneath them