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Grassroots and Astroturf School Reform
September 05, 2014
If you were asked to list the great leaders of education reform in America, would many of the names belong to people who achieved riches and fame in some other field? What nascent education reformers Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Bloomberg, and Mark Zuckerberg all have in ...

A Screen-Only School in San Francisco
August 27, 2014
It’s the start of another school year, and soon the same thought will pass through the minds of many college students: “Where is all my money going?” Ben Nelson, former CEO of Snapfish, is trying to prove that the answer to that question has little to do with education by ...

Laurie Penny Speaks the Unspeakable
August 25, 2014
The title of British writer and feminist Laurie Penny’s forthcoming book Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution is somewhat curious. Surely nothing is truly unspeakable these days, provided that it attracts clicks and revenue: the market doesn’t much care what ...

What’s the Matter with New Atheism?
August 14, 2014
  Taken in its original context, Nietzsche’s famous dictum “God is dead” sounds more like a warning than a triumphant boast. When the line appears in The Gay Science, Nietzsche places it in the mouth of a village madman who soon realizes the world is not yet ready to hear ...

Anne Manne and the “Asshole Effect”
August 13, 2014
In a recent article in Aeon, Eric Schwitzgebel suggests that in order to fully understand the problem of “moral ignorance,” we need “a theory of jerks.” In her new book The Life of I, Australian writer Anne Manne gives us one: late capitalism breeds jerks, rewards ...

The Assassin’s Fate: Paul Berman Shoots and Misses (Again)
August 08, 2014
  We Sicilians are connoisseurs of malevolence. So I approached Paul Berman’s hatchet job on Alexander Cockburn (The New Republic, August 1) with an alacrity tempered only by my apprehension that Berman wasn’t quite up to the job. His previous attempts at character ...

Bulldozing the Humanities
August 01, 2014
By now, denizens of Facebookistan are familiar with its ever-proliferating “You know you’re from…” groups. Reuniting people dispersed by the winds of commerce and time, these hometown pages are drenched in shared nostalgia for local businesses, buildings, ...

Amway Journalism
July 28, 2014
Like uninsured New Agers afflicted by terminal illness, journalists facing the collapse of their industry are turning in desperation to faith healers, quacks, and hucksters of all sorts. The new media charlatans’ latest cure-all is a toxic concoction of marketing-seminar bluff ...

The Partial Promise of Feminine Hygiene Patenting
June 03, 2014
In 1926, the nascent sanitary napkin industry was in peril. Women, all a-flutter about their rights and whatnot, were proving resistant to giving up their maternally derived tendencies to make their own sanitary products. Traditionally, women sewed pads from castaway fabrics, ...

TV Noir: The Saddest Cliche in the World
September 20, 2013
Are we witnessing the crystallization of the saddest cliché in the world? With one episode left in the first season of the addictive British series Broadchurch, the audience still doesn’t know who killed young Danny Latimer and time is running out for both the detectives and, ...

A Pax On All Your Houses
September 11, 2013
The Internet got off to a great start this week! It killed a man. Saw, acknowledged, then scalped him. He is dead, for now. We can all rest. The era of Pax Dickinson being-employed-while-having-an-offensive-Twitter is over. Pax Dickinson, the erstwhile chief technology officer ...