Tomas

Plato's conception of being was dualistic: There is an imperfect world of things around us, and a higher-order world of pure mind, or forms. Chronically late people live in the imperfect world, but believe they can travel inside their own minds. If their house is 11 minutes away from the campus, without traffic or stoplights, then they assume that they can actually travel from their home to the meeting room in 11 minutes. Of course, there are school buses, problems with parking, garbage trucks blocking the alley, and so on.

I would add that expectations matter -- you get to know the expectations of your department culture and adjust to that.

I still think that PointPoint is a scapegoat of sorts, that bad pedagogy that uses PowerPoint was bad before PointPoint or even personal computers were involved in higher education. That said, I think Carolyn Blogs and her commenters pretty well nail what’s scandalous about some common uses of PowerPoint by professors: basing entire classroom sessions around reading off pre-made slides sold by textbook publishers is the kind of practice that a student who is paying tuition should be furious about. But it’s safer to keep your head down, finish a requirement, get your degree, and move on. If there aren’t many professors around in a given program who are teaching in a much more professional, committed way, what’s the point in protesting?

Teach naked, my friends.

This is the most pernicious aspect of the analysis by Pollan and others. If junk food is everywhere and people are naturally drawn to it, those who resist it must have heightened powers. When Pollan waxes poetic about his own rarefied, distinctive eating practices, the messianic, self-satisfied tone is not accidental. In describing his ability to overcome King Corn, to conceive, procure, prepare, and serve his version of the perfect meal, Pollan affirms himself as a supersubject while relegating others to objects of education, intervention, or just plain scorn.

Even if it were true that obesity is a public health threat, even if it could be proven that it results from fast-food consumption, and even if we didn’t care about stigmatizing obesity or treating fat people as objects, is Pollan’s way the way out? At the end of a book whose biggest strength is a section that lays out the environmental history and political economy of corn, his answer, albeit oblique, is to eat like he does. The meal that he helped forage and hunt and cooked all by himself, as he puts it, “gave me the opportunity, so rare in modern life, to eat in full consciousness of everything involved in feeding myself: For once, I was able to pay the full karmic price of a meal.” To what kind of politics does this lead? Despite his early focus on corn subsidies, Pollan does not urge his readers to write to their congressional representatives about the folly of such subsidies, to comment to the Food and Drug Administration about food additives, or, for that matter, to sabotage fields where genetically engineered corn is grown.

So Michael Pollan is not god after all?

Guthman was at the University on Friday, giving a more statistical version of this same critique. Personalistic change only goes so far.

It does feel nice to bash Pollan a little, but I'm not sure exactly what answers Guthman would offer . . . sabotage some fields, perhaps?

Snitch: Informants, Cooperators and the Corruption of Justice by Ethan Brown (2007)

Brown got a lot of press for his 2005 book, Queens Reigns Supreme: Fat Cat, 50 Cent, and the Rise of the Hip-Hop Hustler, about hip-hop and murders. Predictably, his next book, unconcerned with 50 Cent and his secrets, didn’t get as much attention—but it was much more important, investigating the culture engendered by the War on Drugs. If there were no War on Drugs, I sincerely believe that within a single generation, there would be no perceptible “crisis in black America,” and this book shows much of why that’s true. The War on Drugs turns whole neighborhoods against the cops—with no discernible benefit after more than 30 years. Brown’s book is very The Wire–except the people he writes about are real.

This was me after my first year of college, except my language was more theological.

They had a way of making you wish that you had known them and yet feeling at the same time that you did. Their music captured an acute longing for eternity, the tension of being almost there but not yet, faith without fear or pretension, and a wonderful balance of truth and grace.

Harrod and Funck: the soundtrack to my college life.

Sigh.

you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is born.

from the Didache

Ludicrous as it may seem in some ways, Barry O. is far from the weirdest choice the Nobelniks have made. After hall, he was preceded in Oslo by the likes of Henry the K., who bombed his way to the Vietnam peace table in 1973, and then, of course, in 1994 there was the former terrorist Yessir You’reaFart, who reigns unchallenged as the ugliest Nobel laureate ever. Obviously the Nobel Peace Prize has gone to some fairly pugnacious folks over the years and never more so than when it was bestowed on President Theodore Roosevelt (the first American so honored), who was one of the most war-like people who ever traipsed the planet.

Puts Obama's prize in historical context . . . Nobel not so noble, after all.

(Cobb is one of the favorite professors at UGA)