This week’s links and reading cover apocalyptic trends and their cultural, psychological, and artistic/literary aspects; economic collapse in America and Europe, with attendant venality on the part of politicians and the wealthy elite; the rise of an über-surveillance state in America; epic protests in Canada; the decline and fall (and continued decline after falling) of…
Search Results for: colleges
Recommended Reading 7
This week’s collection of recommended articles, essays, blog posts, and (as always) an interesting video or two, covers economic collapse and cultural dystopia; the question of monetary vs. human values; the ubiquity of disinformation in America and the accompanying need for true education of the deeply humanizing sort; the ongoing debate over climate change and…
Recommended Reading 3
Topics this week include imperial and economic collapse, the true value of a college education, our troubled shift from physical to digital media, the nature of consciousness, a mysterious marine mammal die-off, the nature and quirks of the human religious instinct, and a new UFO documentary.
Rhode Island School of Design now requiring incoming freshmen to read H.P. Lovecraft
Is it really possible that a modern-day American college has actively taken steps to transform the experience and education they offer their students into an overtly Lovecraftian affair? Why, yes, it is, much to my jaw-dropped astonishment and delight. Cue the sound of stars aligning. First, the wide-scope background: As reported by The New York…
From Google’s “in-house philosopher,” a beautiful credo in defense of studying the humanities
Here at The Teeming Brain I’ve gone on at some length about the disastrous/dystopian trends in contemporary American education, including, especially, the rise of the techno-corporate consumer model that assigns a purely economic raison d’etre to higher education. (See, for example, my “America’s Colleges at a Crossroads” series and additional articles.) Today I’m fascinated, and…
Listen up, kids: More college DOES NOT equal more money
Diane Auer Jones, who in addition to being the president of the education-oriented policy institute Washington Campus is a former assistant secretary for postsecondary education in the U.S. Department of Education, recently wrote a blog post for The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s Brainstorm blog (“Straddling 2 Centuries,” April 29) that should be required reading for…
What I read in 2009
In 2009 I accomplished something in my life as a reader that I had never before accomplished: I kept a list — I’m talking about a full list — of everything I read. Not just books, but short fiction, poetry, and — in the most gargantuan category of all — articles, essays, and reviews. I…
Interview with Nick Mamatas
Let the Id Do the Writing Conducted by Matt Cardin, July 2009 INTRODUCTION Chances are you’ve heard of Nick Mamatas. Either that, or you haven’t. This isn’t just a ridiculous tautology; although as Nick himself states in the interview that follows, he’s “certainly not well-known,” since “no ‘average reader’ has heard of…
The last generation’s successes become the next generation’s problems
An interesting recent article from The Chronicle of Higher Education that explains one effect of California’s epic budget crisis on its college system spells out a principle with much wider applications for our culture and civilization at large. “California’s ‘Gold Standard’ for Higher Education Falls Upon Hard Times” (June 15) explains how the fabled California…
What kind of teacher should I be?
For most of this week I’ll be tied up with professional development training at my job. To tide over my high school classes during the interim (and to help prevent a nervous breakdown on the part of the substitute teacher), I came up with an assignment that should take awhile for my students to complete….