Administrative Bloat? Numbers Need Context

A currently popular explanation for the increasing price of higher education is that all those tuition dollars are being soaked up by bloated bureaucracy– that is, that there are too many administrators for the number of faculty and students involved. While I like this better than the “tenured faculty are greedy and lazy” explanation you […]

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann

Back when I reviewed Mann’s pop-archaeology classic 1491, I mentioned that I’d held off reading it for a while for fear that it would be excessively polemical in a “Cortez the Killer” kind of way. Happily, it was not, so when I saw he had a sequel coming out, I didn’t hesitate to pick it […]

Project Shiphunt

I get a lot of publicist-generated email these days, asking me to promote something or another on the blog. Most of these I ignore– far too many of them are for right-wing political candidates– but I got one a little while back promoting a program airing tonight, called Project Shiphunt, which included a link to […]

Links for 2011-08-30

Sometimes I Take a Great Notion to Jump in the River and Drown | Alas, a Blog "Now, it’s true, the storm did not particularly batter New York City. And I think anyone with an ounce of compassion and decency would view that as an overwhelmingly good thing. A major hurricane battering the largest city […]

Home, After the Storm

As previously noted, I was in Denver for a long weekend with friends from college. I spent a fair bit of time checking the projected storm track and airport closings, but they kept saying Albany was going to stay open until late Saturday, when there wasn’t time to do anything about it. Yesterday morning, every […]

Links for 2011-08-25

A Higgs Setback: Did Stephen Hawking Just Win the Most Outrageous Bet in Physics History? | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network Overblown anti-Higgs hype, just for balance. News: Breaking Bread – Inside Higher Ed "For the project, students were asked about their views on the state of race relations on campus. Not surprisingly (as […]

Pseudonymity Is the Wrong Solution

I don’t think my point quite got across the other day, so let me try phrasing this another way. I think a lot of what’s being written about pseudonymity on blogs is missing the real point. The really important question here is not so much whether blog networks should allow pseudonymous blogs as whether employers […]