10,000 Page Hits of Harvard.
After a few audio-only teasers, David Fincher releases a wonderfully melancholy trailer for The Social Network, with Jesse Eisenberg, Justin Timberlake, Andrew Garfield, Joseph Mazzello, Armie Hammer,...
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10,000 Megs of Harvard
As the post-Inception zeitgeist film of the fall, David Fincher’s moody, ambitious, and entertaining The Social Network, a.k.a. the story of Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook, has already...
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The Tell-Tale Five.
“The National Archives gave the document prominent display, putting it on tour along with other important Lincoln documents. But for several years, archivist Thomas Plante had been troubled by the...
View ArticlePiled Higher and Deeper.
“At latest count, we have 1.5 million university professors in this country, 1 million of whom are adjuncts. One million professors in America are hired on short-term contracts, most often for one...
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Uphill all the Way.
“‘The whole era,’ concluded Bourne in disgust, ‘has been spiritually wasted.’” Let’s hope, down the road a-ways from 2012, the last few years won’t feel the same. Anyway, that line’s from the first...
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Aperture Science.
“With a portal at each university, students can stand in front of a vertical 50-inch high-definition monitor and communicate with the help of a webcam, microphone, speakers and a computer running a...
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Poor Life Decisions, Graphed.
“Politicians and businessmen are fond of talking about America’s scientist shortage — the dearth of engineering and lab talent that will inevitably leave us sputtering in the global economy. But...
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Five Men of Harvard…
…gained victory today. (Sung to the tune of this.) Per tradition, I was out in Seattle over the past weekend for my college group of friends’ annual March Madness festivities. And, for the first time...
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Discontinuity and Rupture.
‘Many music critics still believe in magical black people: “Oh, they’re making crazy, avant-garde music in Chicago, and it’s called juke”,’ he says. ‘But at the same time, the privilege of being a...
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PhDon’t. | JD’s a Bust too.
“[W]hat if I told you that by ‘five hours’ I mean ’80 hours,’ and by ‘summers off’ I mean ‘two months of unpaid research sequestration and curriculum planning’? What if you’ll never have time to read...
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Adjuncting Gets Even Worse.
“Allison G. Armentrout, an adjunct instructor at Stark State College, doesn’t get paid by the hour. She earns $4,600 to teach two English composition courses…On a recent week, she spent three hours...
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America By Coach.
“You may have heard that the highest-paid employee in each state is usually the football coach at the largest state school. This is actually a gross mischaracterization: Sometimes it is the basketball...
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Welcome to the Machine.
“We end up with a question of just how long the slow decay of existing systems (many of them admittedly dysfunctional) will go on without anyone, technocrat or otherwise, having to deal with the fact...
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Academia: A Sucker’s Gambit.
“The de-professionalization of the faculty is another long-running tragedy that gets a little sadder every year, as teaching college students steadily becomes an occupation for people with no tenure,...
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Leave This Academic Factory.
“I am what’s called an adjunct. I teach four courses per semester at two different colleges, and I am paid just $24,000 a year and receive no health or pension benefits. Recently, I was profiled in the...
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Great Strides in Nonsense.
“According to Nature News, Cyril Labbé, a French computer scientist, recently informed Springer and the IEEE, two major scientific publishers, that between them, they had published more than 120...
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Where It Began, I Can’t Begin to Knowin’.
“‘This is the oldest fortified settlement in the present United States,’ said historian and Florida State University alumnus Fletcher Crowe. ‘This fort is older than St. Augustine, considered to be the...
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When the Last Light Warms the Rocks.
“Wilderness is a constant threat to order in True Detective. Neglected weeds grow between the cracks, along deserted freeways and in the broken pavement of abandoned parking lots. Orphaned bikes rust...
View ArticleDead-End Street.
“Fulltime faculty jobs have not been easy to come by in recent decades, but this year the new crop of Ph.D. candidates is finding the prospects worse than ever. Public universities are bracing for...
View ArticleAcademe: Fun While It Lasted.
“Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that...
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