After graduating college, I worked for a bit, then went into grad school for an MA in a field in the humanities. About 60% of the grad students there were female. I have no stats on that field, but I gather those numbers were not atypical. The number of female tenured professors was certainly lower than that, but one sensed it was rising and would continue to rise as more grad students came in. Then I switched to philosophy. Which, ...
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I must be losing my mind, or strangely jealous of all the fun, fun comments Rose got in her circumcision post, because I’m going to opine about one of those fraught subjects that tends to be intensely emotional and controversial. Contemplating what I would write, several times the part of my brain in which my much-ignored common sense resides would remind me that I could spare myself the potential headache and just post about something else. But it seems cowardly ...
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When the guilty verdict was handed down in the Dharun Ravi trial a couple of months ago, I expressed some concerns. Like many people, including many gay rights activists and writers, I felt very uncomfortable with calling loutish behavior a bias crime. I have mixed feelings about hate crime laws in the first place, and I feared the repercussions and potential for backlash if the definition of hate crimes became too broad and unclear. From everything I had been able ...
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The other day I was taking a break from NPR, which (pace certain respected commenters) I generally enjoy a great deal. Even the most ardent fans need a break from the news, and as much as I try to pretend to be interested in Greek austerity measures at a certain point my humanity asserts itself and I desire something a little catchier than the mellifluous voice of Terry Gross. As it happens, there’s a really great independent radio station in ...
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I am no great fan of the contemporary Republican Party, certainly not as it is expressing itself in Congress these days. But Andrew Sullivan, in his inimitable manner, does nothing to help with trenchant analyses such as this one (presented in toto): When You Ask For Dumb You might just get some. If you thought some of the GOP freshmen were from the Palin mold, you weren’t wrong. If you click through that link, you get an article in Huffington ...
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I’ve been teaching undergrads now for seven years (with a semester off here and there for maternity leave). A semester has not gone by when I haven’t noodled around with some property of my teaching or other. I’ve been super-strict, I’ve been super-lenient. I’ve chalked and talked, I’ve discussed. I’ve PowerPointed, I’ve blackboarded. I’ve required group work, I haven’t required group work. I’ve written syllabi that were basically contracts, I’ve written ones that were brief and open-ended. I’ve banned laptops, ...
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I have family visiting for the summer. In addition to the pleasure of their company, I am also treated to tidbits of gossip news from my hometown and state. It is thanks to them that I was apprised of this delightful development: Conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh was inducted into the Hall of Famous Missourians on Monday during a secretive ceremony in the state Capitol as police stood guard to keep out any uninvited political opponents of the sometimes divisive radio ...
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Here’s a lovely op-ed that speaks clearly to my experience, and with whose basic premise I have some disagreement. The writer, Patricia Bauer, is the mother of a daughter with special needs. She argues against abortion for reason of disability. (Reading this op-ed actually comes on the heels of hearing about someone who had an abortion because her unborn was diagnosed with my son’s syndrome. I found that pretty upsetting.) Much of Bauer’s description of life with her daughter relates to ...
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With one hand I (implicitly) praise the Gopnik family, with the other I take it away. Rarely do I have the pleasure of reading a piece in the popular press that overlaps with my area of expertise, is completely fatuous, and is very effectively taken down in the comments. Thus it is with this claptrap (NB: when I read it, it had only 7 comments). Adam Gopnik is critical of a book that suggests that storytelling is adaptive, evolutionarily speaking. ...
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My residency required each of us to do a presentation on the topic of our choice as a “senior project.” (I suspect this is probably common practice with most residencies.) For some strange reason, I decided to do mine on bioterrorism. I focused primarily on anthrax and smallpox, and had a little quiz that I gave out all about those diseases, how they might spread within a population, and what might be done if they were weaponized. In my memory, ...
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Russell Saunders is a pediatrician in New England. He has a husband, son, cat and dog, though not in that order. He enjoys reading, running and cooking. He would have warned the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that James Franco was a bad idea, if only someone had asked.
Rose Woodhouse is ABD in philosophy. She will totally get that dissertation done soon, really. She teaches and is mom to a few very young 'uns, one of whom is disabled. She loves TV as more than a friend.
