Dressing Up as Biblical Figure for Halloween Creepy?
Halloween College Parking Special: Warning, Sobriety Could Result
In the spirit of Halloween, mischief its obligatory companion, it is only suitable to note the labyrinthine ways of parking instructions on college campuses all across America. In honor of one of the colleges from which I graduated, I will use it as an exemplar. I am certain many of you have your own spooky…
Political Polarization and Trust in Media Sources
The following chart is taken from a new report by the Pew Research Center, measuring public trust, by political ideology, in various media outlets. The takeaways from this survey are fairly obvious from the chart. On the whole, UK-based news sources are trusted by a broader range of Americans than U.S. news sources. Those who…
Upstairs/Downstairs
In Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010, Charles Murray argues that the “elite” ought to get out more. He has no quarrel with the idea or efficacy of an elite, he simply believes that its members in contemporary America have too little experience of the rest of the world. One of his acolytes,…
Ray Rice, Jameis Winston and Halloween All Year Round
It is not the toothless grin of the jack-o’-lantern, a name that will give even the most fastidious punctuators among us a shiver with its strange hyphen and accent mark combination, that scares me. Nor is it the light of a candle that illuminates just how far we have come from traditions of centuries ago…
Ranking the Worst Colleges and Universities in the U.S.
This month’s issue of Washington Monthly includes a thoughtful article by Ben Miller in which he attempts to compile such rankings and, in fact, provides several alternative lists of the twenty worst colleges and universities in the U.S. For analyses of the rankings, see the full article, which is available at: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2014/features/americas_worst_colleges051752.php?page=all. Most of the…
America Re-Imagined, in Retrospect: Fifty Notable American Novels about the “West”: 15-17.
Growing Up: Boston’s Colleges and Universities and the 2024 Summer Olympics
The US Olympic Committee has selected Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington and Boston as finalists for the US bid for the 2024 Olympics, with a decision announced in 2017. While the pundits have already had their field day in the local press, the vast overruns that defined Sochi suggest that developed global cities with significant…
The "Slow" Decline of the Elite Scholarly Journal
The elite scholarly journals, long the gatekeepers of the ivory tower, have been losing their effectiveness this last decade or so–in their gatekeeping role, at least. As these journals increasingly become profit centers in the corporate publishing industry, their real impact is constricted to only those who can afford the toll. At the same time,…