Almost a week after the Superbowl, I learned that there had been a shooting at the victory parade for the Kansas City Chiefs. What struck me about the story, however, wasn’t that it happened; what struck me was that it took me three days to learn about it.
Read MoreI was at the doctor’s office the other day and was struck by a paradox of modern medicine: on the one hand, we have truly miraculous cures that testify to the collective genius of the human species, while on the other hand, this genius is often wielded by people who exhibit all of the shortcomings of our species, like callousness and ignorance. It was a good lesson in the promises and perils of technology.
Read MoreI don't really have a stake in the situation in Ukraine, and have mostly avoided conversations about it, because I'm pretty clueless about the region. But the conversations about Ukraine - and the divisions in opinions about it - are sometimes frustrating for me. I wasn't sure why, but I think it might be because of the tendency to conflate moral responsibility with causal responsibility. It's not a problem that's limited to Ukraine, but it's certainly become inflamed by it.
Read MoreLike many of you, I grew up reading fiction. I just consumed it, devouring everything I could get my hands on. In junior high, it was tons of fantasy and sci-fi, and it seems like I'd whip through entire series in no time flat (Piers Anthony was a fave), so that I was always searching for something new.
In high school it got trickier because I was looking for headier material, and I didn't really have anyone to suggest the kinds of things I wanted to read. I still read a lot, but running into authors like Vonnegut and Kundera were godsends, and I read just about everything they wrote.
Read MoreOn October 14, 2021, the workers at John Deere went on strike. While they had many demands, among them was the demand to halt the introduction of a two-tier pay and benefit system. Under such a system, existing workers would get to keep their existing rates of pay and benefits, but new hires would be brought in under a new tier, in which both their pay and benefits would be lower. On November 17, workers approved a new contract that had eliminated this tiered provision. And on this day, the John Deere workers demonstrated that they knew something that my colleagues in academia do not: a tiered employment system decimates the power of workers.
Read MoreThe Philosophers’ Magazine published an article of mine that defends the validity and necessity of ad hominem arguments. I think it makes a compelling case for why we need to embrace them. The link is here. The full text also follows
Read MoreIt’s syllabus time again and this had me thinking about one of the recent initiatives in higher education, OER or Open Educational Resources, which is an initiative to replace expensive textbooks with free alternatives. As with so many such initiatives, they’re cloaked in compassionate rhetoric (OER helps cash-strapped students) but this veneer also hides the underlying dismantling of our universities. It’s an interesting example of how the attacks on our universities (or on other institutions) often appear as their exact opposite; how your enemy approaches in the guise of a friend.
Read MoreHaving been raised in Canada, I wasn't raised with any of the jingoistic patriotism that is pretty common in the United States, and that cuts across all partisan divides. If anything, growing up in Canada inoculated me against it. So I've never had much of anything invested in the idea of “the future of America.” Whether it's great or not, I care little, except insofar as this is the place where I live and I'd prefer my life to be better rather than worse (and I hope the same for my fellow Americans too).
But whether America exists in the future, whether it rises to greatness or fades into obscurity, is a question about which I am indifferent. Truth be told, I’m probably pretty hostile to it
Read MoreWhen the show Shark Tank premiered, I made the mistake of watching the first few episodes. Everything gross about capitalism was on display: gaudy displays of wealth, poor people begging rich people for the chance of a life other than a destitute one, rich people condescending to those poor people under the guise of tough love, and all of this was packaged under the most familiar of capitalist motifs - the rags to riches story. Here was a show that offered proof positive that a good idea and hard work was all you needed to get ahead. As you might guess, I didn't last more than a few episodes.
The reason I gave it a try in the first place was because I had been watching the British version, Dragon’s Den, for years. And I didn't find that show off-putting in the same way.
Read MoreIt strikes me that there's something self-defeating about the way that some climate change experts have started talking about emissions goals. For a while, 1.5C was seen as a critical benchmark that would serve to minimize some of the most devastating effects of climate change, even though many catastrophic effects would still have been "baked in" to our future. But over the past little while, I've noticed that the discourse seems to have changed; rather than talking about the importance of hitting the hard benchmark of 1.5C, scientists have softened the narrative, arguing that the closer to 1.5C the better. For instance, I just listened to a radio interview in which a scientist reaffirmed the importance of 1.5C, but then spoke of how even if we don't hit 1.5C, 1.6C is better than 1.7C, and so on. So, from the "hard" benchmark of 1.5C, we are starting to "soften" our goals into more of a gradation.
This change in narrative will no doubt serve to embolden climate change denialists.
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