I have always been a trivia buff. This interest has had some professional usefulness. For almost a decade, I have written the questions for the annual middle-school and high-school scholastic bowls held at our campus. I wish that I could also say that some bit of trivia has inspired a scholarly article, even one that…
Tidyman, Ernest. High Plains Drifter. New York: Bantam, 1973. An award-winning screenwriter, Ernest Tidyman won an Academy Award, and Edgar Award, and a Writers Guild of America Award for the screenplay of The French Connection. He also wrote the screenplays for the film adaptations of the series of novels that he wrote about the…
The federal data that will be presented in this series of posts was analyzed by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting (NCIR) in collaboration with the American Institutes for Research. The NECIR story on the data and its implications, written by Jon Marcus, who is currently an editor at the Hechinger Report, is available…
This is a guest post from an instructor at Louisiana Tech, who writes anonymously for fear of retribution. I see so many of my colleagues suffering, mostly in silence because what else can they do? They fear losing their job every day as it is. Their stories are painful to hear—increasing debt, depending upon parents to…
In what passes for “business” these days, institutions of any sort become potential cash cows for those at the top, structures allowing extraction of wealth while providing a minimum in return. Until, say, twenty years ago, educational entities were somewhat exempt, operating on a slightly different paradigm. Their mission was not to enrich those at the…
This is what Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley said on the Senate floor on the proposed TransPacific Partnership: “We are creating a structure of a group of seven very poor nations with very low wages, five affluent nations with higher wages, and think about the difference between running an operation in Malaysia or Mexico, with a…
The Conversation is an Australian website that seeks to synthesize academic and journalistic inquiry in order to provide very thoughtful commentary of Australian and international issues. Its mission statement includes the following principles: to inform public debate with knowledge-based journalism that is responsible, ethical and supported by evidence; to unlock the knowledge of researchers and academics to…