Blog Stats
- 2,840,772 readers since June 2008
Recent Comments
- Green on What, Exactly, Is Wrong With Bestiality?
- Green on What, Exactly, Is Wrong With Bestiality?
- Green on What, Exactly, Is Wrong With Bestiality?
- Green on What, Exactly, Is Wrong With Bestiality?
- Green on What, Exactly, Is Wrong With Bestiality?
- Joshx45 on Feminism for Beginners
- Roger lynn mason on Blogging UFOs: What Do You Make of Professor Robert Jacobs’s Bizarre UFO Testimony?
- geoenergymath on On the Far Right, Ann Coulter and Mitt Romney Are Not Conservative Enough!
- John Mack on Would Friedrich Nietzsche have admired Ayn Rand?
- Can We Learn From History? – Critical News Autoblog on Howard Nemerov and Learning from History
- Mathilde on Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- Manly Man Joe on Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- Robert Stewart on David Berlinski defends God’s role in the Holocaust: “God did not protect his chosen people…[but] did…smite their enemies, with generations to come in mourning or obsessed by shame.”
- David on Clit Rubbing Bonobos: A Clue to the Evolutionary Origin of Human Homosexuality?
- Philosophers on Evolutionary Psychology - Assignment Ninjas on Feminism for Beginners
Top Posts
- Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- What, Exactly, Is Wrong With Bestiality?
- Walt Whitman: "To be indeed a God!"
- Clit Rubbing Bonobos: A Clue to the Evolutionary Origin of Human Homosexuality?
- Ludwig Wittgenstein for Beginners
- Adam Smith and Capitalism for Beginners
- Bearing Witness to the Holocaust: A German Jewish Girl Who Was Part of the Kindertransport (1939)
- Lord Byron's pro-war poem?
- Lee Smolin's Time Reborn: Physics, Evolution, Atheism, and Buddhism
- Charles Darwin's Thinking Path
-
Recent Posts
Recent Haiku Tweets
- @abrahampiper Yahweh as a frustrated deity, much to be pitied! Abraham Piper's insight here, if thought about as a… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 6 months ago
- RT @tbonier: More than 80M votes cast and we're not done yet. Thoughts: - It's too late for an "October surprise" to have a significant imp… 11 months ago
- RT @RachelBitecofer: 1. Want to thank @DanielNewman for using his HUGE platform for this work. I want to clarify what this is. In the voter… 1 year ago
- RT @RachelBitecofer: Tell me again about how old and feeble Joe Biden is??? twitter.com/ProjectLincoln… 1 year ago
- RT @RachelBitecofer: Remember when you had a chance to choose country over party and you chose party @SenatorCollins? Well, @ProjectLincol… 1 year ago
Tag Archives: college
Absent Good Reasons and Evidence, Trust No One
I don’t like this t-shirt. It cheer-leads obfuscation, mystification, authority. A better statement would be, “I’m a professor. If I make a claim, doubt it and ask for the reasons and evidence I have in support of the claim. I … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheism, college, critical thinking, Dostoevsky, psychology, reason, The Grand Inquisitor
1 Comment
A Good Thing a Catholic Congregation is Doing in South Africa
Congregants recently pulled together enough funds to send to university 31 promising students from some of the poorest townships in South Africa: __________ I personally know of a Catholic priest in Southern California who is doing something similar (raising tuition … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Catholicism, college, education, life, peace, South Africa
Leave a comment
Read
At The Daily Beast, academics and writers were asked to name “one book that [college] students shouldn’t escape campus without having read.” MIT professor and Pulitzer Prize winner, Junot Diaz, picked Toni Morrison’s Beloved because it “stabs straight at the heart … Continue reading
Entered Emory, Fell Out of Emory, $60,000 in Debt
A cautionary tale of students from lumpen proletariat American families (families that sell their labor but have no assets to speak of) in the New York Times recently: Angelica Gonzales marched through high school in Goth armor — black boots, chains … Continue reading
David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” 2005 Kenyon College Commencement Address
Wallace is totally the Buddha in this speech, preaching attentional choice, vigilance in looking, and imaginative awareness. It’s a shame he hit bottom in 2008 and, in the grip of a severe depression (a recurrent scourge that plagued his life), … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Buddhism, college, david foster wallace, experience, life, literature, seeing, work
4 Comments
Evolution Outside of the Science Classroom
If you’re a college instructor, and the subject of evolution comes up in a class, and you are not a scientist yourself, what should you say about it to your students? Here are some things that might help you think … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheism, college, critical thinking, Darwin, evolution, God, philosophy, science, teaching
Leave a comment
Do MOOCs Spell the End of the Traditional College Experience?
At The American Interest Nathan Harden, playing prophet, makes a pretty alarming prediction: In fifty years, if not much sooner, half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist. The technology … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged college, education, Harvard, MIT, MOOCs, online education, professors, teachers, universities
Leave a comment
Cooperation, Collaboration, and Imitation for Intellectual Success
In a New York Times science article from March 10, 2011 titled “New View of How Humans Moved Away from Apes,” an astonishing finding was reported: a study of numerous hunter-gatherer peoples discovered “that the members of a band are not highly related.” Why is this … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged business, college, cooperation, critical thinking, Darwin, evolution, imitation, success
Leave a comment
Look
Really. Look. __________ No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged art, college, George Orwell, life, music, poetry, seeing, thoreau
Leave a comment
Jonathan Rauch Powerfully Defends Free Speech
“We’re not delicate flowers.” __________ I like Rauch’s distinction between purism and pluralism: purism, on his account, protects from offensive speech, presuming that the community must be kept clean from the public expression of certain ideas; pluralism protects dialogue, presuming that … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged college, dialogue, free speech, freedom of speech, life, racism, sexism, university, woody allen
1 Comment
The Next Financial Cliff
Troubling. Disconcerting.
Not Waving, But Drowning
At the Daily Beast, Megan McArdle sees college as the American middle class’s last desperate bet for economic security in the fast-shifting global economy: If employers have mostly been using college degrees to weed out the inept and the unmotivated, then … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged America, China, college, critical thinking, education, jobs, the middle class, universities
4 Comments
Ask an Interesting Question, Get an Interesting Answer. Stephen Knapp and Walter Benn Michael’s Anti-Critical Theory Question: What Happens if We Don’t Separate Meaning from Intention and Knowledge from Interpretation? Will This Kill Critical Theory?
Within the humanities, contemporary critical theorizing typically entails political commitments, predominantly from the left, accompanied by some line of attack or qualification on Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle (his idea that every communicative act necessarily requires a speaker or author, a message, … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged college, critical theory, God, literature, meaning, philosophy, reason, the author
Leave a comment
Ask an Interesting Question, Get an Interesting Answer. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Question: Who Wins and Who Loses Under Globalization?
Some globalism questions for the object or subject of your contemplation. Of nature: How is this natural object or ecosystem affected by globalization? Of art, literature, architecture, goods-for-sale, photography, advertising, or media: How is this object of human fashioning changed … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged art, college, globalism, literature, Politics, psychology, questions, seeing, vision
Leave a comment
Christopher Hitchens’ Advice to Young People
A powerful appeal from Hitchens when he was clearly in decline. Carpe diem. _____ Hitchens would have had his 62nd birthday this past week, and Charlie Rose did a powerful roundtable discussion with four of his closest friends—Salmon Rushdie, Martin … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged advice, aging, atheism, cancer, carpe diem, children, chrisopher hitchens, college, death, life
Leave a comment
Creative and Critical Thinking Watch: Susan Cain on the Power of Solitude
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged college, creativity, critical thinking, introversion, psychology, reason, solitude, susan cain
Leave a comment
Blessed are the Ignorant: Rick Santorum Adds a Beatitude to the Sermon on the Mount
“Blessed are ye who lack degrees, for such is the Party of God.” And they applauded. What manner of man is this? _____ “But woe unto those that are educated, for they art snobs.” Here’s a transcript of Rick Santorum’s exact … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheism, college, education, Harvard, Jesus, rick santorum, rush limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Sermon on the Mount, snobs, UCLA, university
3 Comments
The Bright American Future
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged America, college, education, geography, globalism, high school, history, illiteracy, school
Leave a comment
Salman Khan’s TED Talk and Website
______ And here’s his exciting website.
Parallel Universe Watch (the Evangelical One)
In the New York Times recently, evangelical Karl Giberson makes the following diagnosis on his own community, in response to advancing secularism: [M]any evangelicals [have] created what amounts to a “parallel culture,” nurtured by church, Sunday school, summer camps and … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheism, charles sanders peirce, college, critical thinking, faith, God, Jesus, Karl Giberson, reason, tenacity
Leave a comment
