Ann Helen Petersen suggests the following:
Simply by posting the image above — the first “irrefutable” evidence of a romance between the two stars of Twilight — I will up my daily web traffic by as much as 1000 visitors a day.
That, of course, is an empirically testable hypothesis. This post is the test. Shall we see what happens?
From a ScienceBlogs post about good academic manners:
If you went to an Ivy League or other school you think is better than ours, you needn’t preface statements with, “when I was at BigBlatheryU. . .” Extra points deducted if you actually didn’t earn a degree there but still have to say you “were there.” Your insecurity will show and your colleagues will make up drinking games about how often or how early in a discussion you bring up the topic.
Now that’s a game I’d like to start playing.
Two universities running pilot programmes for the Kindle DX as a textbook reader have opted out of the divice. Reason? Accessibility issues. That is, because not all books will be available with text-to-speech capacity, there will be no guarantee that they’ll be useful to blind students.
Based on my very limited first hand experience with these things, this is a real disappointment. The alternative to electronically reading e-texts is endless, expensive and labor intensive OCRing of printed works, which generally destroys books (i.e., their binding has to be cut). This would have saves a tremendous amount of grief for visually impaired students. It’s a real shame.
More broadly and shallowly, it leaves armies of undergrads carting around overpriced textbooks that, most often, no one thinks are anything better than barely adequate to their purpose. Wait for the next round, I guess.
My two favorite commentaries on yesterday’s celebrations: one from the left, one from the right, both wondering if something wasn’t lost when so much was putatively gained.
First, Ross Douthat, conservative Boy Wonder at the Times:
Humankind fears judgment, of course. But we depend on it as well. The possibility of dissolution lends a moral shape to history: we want our empires to fall as well as rise, and we expect decadence to be rewarded with destruction.
…
Neither group [liberal or conservative] wanted the United States to lose the cold war. But they wanted to inhabit a world where America could lose, and pass into history, if we failed to live up to our ideals.
Perhaps, then, the sudden leap to ideology (neocon, radical Islam, etc) in the last decade or so: hard to get judged if you don’t take chances. Might also explain the ongoing power of religion, despite the putative end of ideological conflict (a la Fukuyama). Or, as Douthat suggests, perhaps that accounts for the continued internecin warfare in American politics: perhaps it’s an of fashioned fight over how to get (and by extension who gets) saved.
The point is, in its way, well taken. But then, doesn’t assume that we in the west were right? Not just kind of, better-that-Stalinist sort of right, but capital-R right, End of History right. Well, here is Slavoj Zizek, unaccountably also writing for the Times, to argue otherwise.
He rambles as much as ever here, but he comes to a good puzzle: why are there still anticommunists? And why are they found precisely where Soviet Communism was defeated?
Where does this resurrection of anti-Communism draw its strength from? Why were the old ghosts resuscitated in nations where many young people don’t even remember the Communist times? The new anti-Communism provides a simple answer to the question: “If capitalism is really so much better than Socialism, why are our lives still miserable?”
…
What these belated anti-Communists fail to realize is that the image they provide of their society comes uncannily close to the most abused traditional leftist image of capitalism: a society in which formal democracy merely conceals the reign of a wealthy minority. In other words, the newly born anti-Communists don’t get that what they are denouncing as perverted pseudo-capitalism simply is capitalism.
Well, give or take a poor average standard of living, this is probably true. No one said that everyone was going to get rich. That, after all, was Marx’s promise, not Smith’s. He comes finally to his point about 1989:
As many commentators observed, the ideals that led the protesters were to a large extent taken from the ruling Socialist ideology itself — people aspired to something that can most appropriately be designated as “Socialism with a human face.” Perhaps this attitude deserves a second chance.
The answer is not that we need to declare our post-ideological ideology–liberal democracy and neoliberal economics–the best, but that we need new one, always new ideas, to keep the wheels spinning, and we need radical thinkers to traffick in them:
They will have to invent their own ideologies. They will be denounced as dangerous utopians, but they alone will have awakened from the utopian dream that holds the rest of us under its sway.
In other word–echt Zizek point, this–only radical ideology can save us from the ideological swoon we currently find ourselves in. Without ideological conflict–shorn, we can only hope, of the guns-and-bombs conflict of the last century–we can never save ourselves from the horrors of ideology itself.
That might almost be a big enough idea to make events like yesterday’s make sense.
The good citizens of Bloody Discusting, a horror film news site, have a trailer up for a Thai horror flick called Haunted Universities. None of it makes much sense that I can work up (being as I don’t read or speak Thai), but it looks not to be missed.
Today is the aniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. I have nothing to add on this that hasn’t already been said at great length. For an exhaustive rundown, have a look at aldaily.
Wahoo. It’s non-binding, but the folks at Berkeley have passed a resolution demanding that college athetics pay its on way on campus (see yesterday’s post).
According to public policy prof Michael O’Hare: “The Washington Quarterly said that this is the best university in the world. Intercollegiate sports did not figure in that ranking.” Given that, $2 million in student fees being redirected to this stuff annually, and threadbare overall budget, it’s sort of hard to see why one would throw money at this stuff–social norms on the subject notwithstanding.
That said, the claim–and it’s an impassioned one–is that sports programs really do give back to the rest of the campus, somehow or other. And, being an equal opportunity couch potato about this, can one imagine anyone asking the English Department to turn a profit? Of course not–and it’s not much easier to see what the overall social benefit there is. I’d rather fund early modern lit and the like, but that’s hardly likely to be a majority opinion.
If there’s a lesson–and it’s a troubling one–it’s that college athletics may actually be in the lifeboat with the rest of us. Never thought I’d see the day.
When I was a kid, I had a recorded-in-a-weekend cassette by a local pseudo-punk band I knew. The final track–after a half an hour or so of really lovely racket–was called ‘Athletes.’ It was a kind of flailing middle finger to sports culture in general. At 17 or so, this did my heart good.
I’ve always been amazed that there isn’t more of this sort of thing on campus. Surely, institutions built by and (largely) for the folks that didn’t go to high school football games would find the emphasis on college athletics a little odd. But I’ve never heard of this happening–until now:
Although it is widely believed that the Department of Intercollegiate Athletics (DIA) earns a profit for the Berkeley campus, its financial statements reveal that it significantly outspends its revenues every year, depleting precious campus resources.”
So begins a resolution that will be taken up by the UC Berkeley Academic Senate today.
The resolution requests that the chancellor of the Berkeley campus require the school’s intercollegiate athletic program to become self-supporting.
Apparently even the NCAA doesn’t think collge sports bring in additional alumni donations. So it’s hard to see how throwing money at activities that aren’t demonstrably academic at all is, well, useful. Especially where US college endowments are in the toilet.
I suppose nothing will come of this. But it would be nice to see this at least geta decent public airing.