November 2011
1 post
February 2011
1 post
December 2010
1 post
Poem to Share: Canvas and Mirror
by Evie Shockley
self-portrait with cats, with purple, with stacks of half-read books adorning my desk, with coffee,
with mug, with yesterday’s mug. self-portrait with guilt, with fear, with thick-banded silver ring,
painted toes, and no make-up on my face. self- portrait with twins, with giggles, with sister at
...
September 2010
2 posts
March 2010
7 posts
February 2010
10 posts
November 2009
2 posts
October 2009
4 posts
June 2009
5 posts
Sad
“Holden [Caulfield] is somewhat a victim of the current trend in applying ever more mechanistic approaches to understanding human behavior,” Ms. Feinberg wrote in an e-mail message. “Compared to the early 1950s, there is not as much room for the adolescent search, for intuition, for empathy, for the mystery of the unconscious and the deliverance made possible through talking to another person.”
...
Gail Collins (in response to David Brooks)
But do you think you could assure the graduates that there’s good education to be had in a multitude of places, many far from the Ivy League? I’m really disturbed by having a Supreme Court made up entirely of people who went to Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Columbia. (O.K., John Paul Stevens went to Northwestern. This was so long ago that it’s possible he did it on the advice of Abraham Lincoln.)
...
David Brooks
At the moment, I’m thinking of talking about the chief way our society is messed up. That is to say, it is structured to distract people from the decisions that have a huge impact on happiness in order to focus attention on the decisions that have a marginal impact on happiness.
The most important decision any of us make is who we marry. Yet there are no courses on how to choose a spouse. There’s...
“As it stands, every single white person on earth either owns, has owned, or is...”
May 2009
3 posts
Words of Wisdom from an Unlikely Source
“Every graduation speech ever written starts with a simple fact: “commencement” means something beginning, not ending. You see it as the endpoint of something, because it’s the end of the whole world that you know. And every grownup and parent and teacher in the room knows it’s the opposite, so they enlighten you with a little vocab. They’re not wrong. But...
“This won’t be easy. For humans, cooperation and competition are already in...”
Scanwiches →
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
From the Wall Street Journal: Rejection: Some...
Here, based on my own highly unscientific survey of actual letters, student interviews and message boards, are my picks for this year’s most noteworthy college rejection letters — and the liveliest response by a student.
Toughest: Bates College, Lewiston, Maine. Most rejection letters, in an effort to soften the blow, follow a pattern: We’re sorry, we had a huge applicant pool,...
April 2009
11 posts
“[On Russia] “They’re a kleptocracy. They’ll steal your teeth...”
– BL
“I don’t know what makes Italy run, other than good will.”
– BL
One of the best historian-created words I’ve seen this year: “globaloney”
Yes, that is a combination of “global” and “baloney.”
Only one of many unbelievable moments in class...
CA: That's good that you got that [war is bad] out of my book but I should point out that I'm not a pacifist. I believe in just-war theory.
EW: Name one war other than WWII that was just!
CA: That's a big exception, E*****
“The [American] middle class has been running away from manual work…The...”
– BL truthing it up as always
Kumar Goes to the White House →
Seriously…I am loving this.
From Where the Girls Are: A pretty good...
When I open Vogue, for example, I am simultaneously infuriated and seduced, grateful to escape temporarily into a narcissistic paradise where I’m the center of the universe, outraged that completely unattainable standards of wealth and beauty exclude me and most women I know from the promised land. I adore the materialism; I despise the materialism. I yearn for the self-indulgance; I think...
March 2009
2 posts
Student fees: Sophomoric behavior
University of Massachusetts students did their reputation no favors at last week’s Board of Trustees meeting. As the trustees debated a $1,500 fee hike to offset a projected $100 million shortfall in the university’s budget, a group of 150 or so repeatedly interrupted with protest chants, alienating even their allies. When the students applauded trustee Jennifer Braceras’s...
February 2009
8 posts
“This difficulty, however, is not limited to race. There are few issues of any...”
– Stephen L. Carter