Are classic essays like Swift’s still being written, or has the elegant thoughtfulness that is the essay’s legacy been winnowed away by its rapacious bastard offspring, the blog? And will the Internet generation, suffused by the blogosphere, lose the ability to write essays altogether? (The plethora of essays for sale online to students portends they…
For those of you who don’t know what Mono is… let me explain. It is known to most ignorant people as “The Kissing Disease.” This, of course, makes anyone who has it appear to be a whore or a gameshow host. But, this isn’t a proper representation of how the disease is actually spread. I…
We are prudent, practical, common-sense people. And what could be more common-sense — more downright American — than chopping down vast acres of trees, loading them onto trucks, driving the trucks to paper mills where the trees are ground into paste and reconstituted as huge rolls of newsprint, which are put back onto trucks and…
It’s cute that those friends think the academic job search is anything at all like other job searches, in which you have a reasonable hope of living in a region you find desirable and getting work commensurate with your qualifications. They don’t realize how someone intelligent, competent, and disciplined enough to earn a Ph.D. can…
Every grader of blue books was once a writer of blue books, so it might help to think about the process from that end. I remember, with particular shame, a certain undergraduate essay exam of my own for a course in “Modern Moral Philosophy.” The professor was Philippa Foot, who must have been in her…
Young women and mothers with the distinctive headscarves share the pedestrian areas with blond girls in leather jackets and jeans. Sometimes you see girlfriends walking arm in arm, one demurely wearing the headscarf and the other letting her hair go free to drive men wild with passion. Rebecca West wrote in the 1930s of the…
I fancy myself a pretty good sadist when it comes to generating shame and self-loathing in the tardy. If I spot a repeat offender in the hallway before class, and find that they’re not in attendance even after I’ve given them a comfortable buffer of time, I might push trashcans and desks in front of…
Some of my offices have had peculiar shapes: 6 feet wide and 30 feet long with a sloped ceiling (once part of an attic); 8 feet square and — if you peeked above the suspended ceiling — perhaps 50 feet high (a ventilation shaft). I once had an office that was like that strange floor…
Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set…
I am still trying to sort out how much of the difference with this conference was due to the Hawai’ian setting as opposed to the presence of my kids. Obviously it’s configurational, and in that way it makes little sense to try to distinguish the independent impact of either of those factors in anything except…
I used to love routines, particularly the way they allowed life’s more mundane aspects to slip into the background, removed from conscious decision making. Before becoming a dad, my mornings began with a predictable sequence. Coffee. Bagels. NPR. But with a newborn, routines are constantly at risk. You put your hand to her little forehead.…
The sonneteer is the wedding singer of modern poetry: a member of the bride’s party by way of technicality, he is never embraced and rarely photographed. More entertainer than poet, more trickster than artisan, he welcomes the casual onlooker and –in a supreme affront to the “vitality” of the art– will don a bright red…
Administrations and faculties need to stop caring how much someone writes or publishes or says, or even how important what they?ve published is according to some measurable or quantifiable metric. Not only because trying to measure productivity in terms of scholarship destroys scholarship, but because it detracts from the truly important kind of productivity in…
All my life I have struggled to succeed. I have toiled at the wheel of journalistic ethos, logic and wisdom. And do I get any credit for this? Oh, no. All I get is, “Hey, better call Tim because there’s a streaker at Wal-Mart.” I have a mind, folks. I can talk intelligently about Social…
I don’t have many positive associations with any sport, beyond lots of “quality time” with Dad in kiddie leagues. In high school I once accidentally caught a pop fly ball in my baseball cap. I somehow managed a flabby toss to a teammate, who tagged a passing runner for a double play. But traumatic run-ins…
A few months into my new job as a “new media journalism” teacher at Seton Hill University, a small liberal arts school in southwestern Pennsylvania, I was at a fancy on-campus dinner event, where the university president was working her way through the crowd, laying on the charm. I heard her relate a slightly off-color…
On the eve of Schulz’s induction into the Army, his mother died of cancer. She was forty-eight and had suffered greatly, and Schulz later described the loss as an emotional catastrophe from which he almost did not recover. During basic training, he was depressed, withdrawn, and grieving. In the long run, though, the Army was…
As Cicero put it, Socrates was always “pretending to need information and professing admiration for the wisdom of his companion”; when Socrates? interlocutors were annoyed with him for behaving in this way they called him eiron, a vulgar term of reproach referring generally to any kind of sly deception with overtones of mockery. The fox…
From then on, I never had another forlorn afternoon. And to think, from that first fateful day when I decided I would be known as the half-elf wizard Vendel, I was joining a revolution. But what exactly were we transforming? To put it simply, Dungeons and Dragons reinvented the use of the imagination as a…
More and more, we Americans like to watch (and not to do). In fact watching is our ultimate addiction. My students were the progeny of two hundred available cable channels and omnipresent Blockbuster outlets. They grew up with their noses pressed against the window of that second spectral world that spins parallel to our own,…