Chris Hedges at truthdig recently criticized the liberal tendency to retreat into lofty conferences as the America of our imaginations becomes harder to square with an increasingly disturbing reality.
(To the tune of John Cooper Clarke’s classic, “Evidently Chickentown.”
Warning: Foul Language Ahead.)
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I wondered what kind of person she would have been had she used the thing. She definitely would have been more relaxed: she was a compulsive worrier. She would have had a better appetite. Even though Grandma had lost interest in men by the time she was forty, she still maintained her figure. If she had been a stoner, she would have ditched the whole Slim Fast gig and broken out the Oreos.
At a recent conference of the Council of Independent Colleges, college presidents expressed their growing fear that liberal arts colleges are facing terminal illness. This is particularly ironic given new data from the Social Science Research Council that says: “Students majoring in liberal arts fields see “significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study.” Students majoring in business, education, social work and communications showed the smallest gains… “
For a brief moment following the shooting in Arizona, it really seemed like a consensus was forming within the liberal (and parts of the mainstream) media and blogosphere; that the violent rightwing rhetoric which has become standard feature of our political discourse had finally gone too far, and that we as a nation were finally due for some rhetorical climate change.
We had organized our days for sightseeing. First on the agenda was taking the girls to see the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. Instead of hippies, the place was full of skateboarders. There was still a lot of tie-die shirts and psychedelic art. Our plan was to start at Buena Vista Park and make our way past the Victorian mansions, the Magnolia Brewpub, and the former headquarters of the Symbionese Liberation Army toward Golden Gate Park.
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I just finished reading a piece of fiction that had been misfiled by the editors of the New Yorker under a category – feature? expose? – that is commonly associated with non-fiction. i.e. truthful reporting. The article, by Jon Lee Anderson …
Update: Here is the text and video of Malinda Seneviratne’s testimony.
Yes, on to Chicaco.
cross-posted at The G Bitch Spot See Teachers’ Unions or Teachers’ Unions? for Canada’s answer to Colbert’s question. from Ultimate $uperpower: Supersized dollars drive Waiting for Superman agenda Board of Trustees, HARLEM CHILDREN’S ZONE Geoffrey Canada, President and CEO Stan Druckenmiller, Chairman, is the President,…
At the beginning of my teaching career, delighted by class discussion of readings, yet appalled by the quality of my students’ essays and unsure how to explain concepts that I had assumed were intuitive to young writers, I set about grimly, devising a means of teaching them, these embodiments of the “crisis in literacy,” casualties of the Reagan era, MTV addicts, as I often heard them described in faculty meetings, calibration sessions, and the mail room.
“Thanks to a sharp uptick in the company’s investment assets, State Farm still managed to post after-tax profits of $777 million. Too bad you can’t buy shares of State Farm — the insurance giant is owned by its policyholders. But you can purchase just about any kind of coverage from them. And thanks to its burgeoning financial operations, consumers can now borrow money and buy an assortment of mutual funds as well.”