A couple of things:
1) Went recently to the Kendall to see Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows, a late 60s film about the French Resistance. Superb. Somehow, Melville brings to bear all the poetic realism and existential beauty of the French gangster genre to the historical film. Simone Signoret gives a great performance as well. Go […]
Something tells me this guy isn’t gonna win.
I’m feeling a bit swamped today, but thought these posts worth a note:
Kieran Healy on cloning: "I’ve half-joked before that, purely because of this basic point, sociologists should welcome human cloning with open arms. Technically achieving the sort of things many people imagine they could do with cloning —recreate a lost child or relative, produce […]
Quote of the day:
A small economics department today is more likely to succeed by assembling a quality group of socialists than free-marketeers.
That’s George Mason’s Alex Tabarrok and Peter Boettke, the former of Marginal Revolution fame, writing in Slate on academic arbitrage. Well, they don’t use the word arbitrage, and it’s not exactly arbitrage, but […]
Everyone’s wanting to make the Larry Summers resignation to be simply another battle in the culture wars, and Alan Derschowitz is fanning the flames of that interpretation. HubBlog agrees that "the core opposition was comprised of 100 percent pure-octane lefties living in their own self-dramatized world."
I guess it’s one big Rorschach test, because humanities scholars […]
A lot of folks have careful, reasoned attacks on David Horowitz’s list of "most dangerous professors", not least dangerous profs Todd Gitlin and Michael Berube. I’ll add that if a conservative interested in the way mass media shapes debate can’t read a smart book like Gitlin’s Whole World is Watching or Habermas’s Structural Transformation of […]
At first I didn’t think I read this right, but, yep, it’s an unfunded postdoc:
Scholars must have their own financial support, but are provided with office space, library privileges, free computer time on Northeastern’s mainframe, limited support for photocopy, fax and postage expenses related to research.
At least they provide the stamps and ever-so-crucial access to […]
Via Crooked Timber, I see that Tim Burke has a downer of a discussion on whether one should go to grad school.
Graduate school is not about learning. If you learn things, it’s only because you’ve already internalized the habit of learning, only because you make the effort on your own and in concert with […]
I’m glad to have left the student phase of my life behind me, but it’s this back-to-school time when I see the syllabi professors have posted and remember how exciting it was to embark on new material. And would love to audit Kieran Healy’s class on social theory, which includes a piece on Adam Smith:
Although […]
I sure hope the following says more about the intellectual climate at NYU than the state of social science today.
Year 3 (2006-2007): Rethinking the Social
The possibility of something called "society" and its place as a dynamic element of human experience was once the founding problem of the social sciences. But the discipline came to take […]
I’ve been reading Borde and Chameton’s foundational book on film noir, and something in James Naremore’s otherwise good introduction stuck in my craw:
In their introduction, they try to solve the problem of definition by announcing that their book refers to “productions the critics have most often deemed to be ‘film noirs.’” This is probably as […]
The pendulum seems to be swinging the other way. A friend is preparing a manuscript for a university press and reports that they have been instructing her to remove all sorts of jargon, or else explain it at each turn. By “jargon,” I don’t mean nebulous critical theory terms that have debatable referents. Rather, terms […]
Many of the sources I used in my dissertation were understandably specialist — the previous scholarship of the social problem film, academic articles fleshing out particulars of the historical context, genre theory and criticism. And, too, there were the general theory, econ, and sociology books from Bourdieu, Habermas, Galbraith and C. Wright Mills that I […]
That seems to be the idea circulating on the new literary studies group blog The Valve as well on Crooked Timber. For instance, the Valve’s Daniel Green writes:
More than anything else, academic blogging (in its literary version) is going to have to muster up some enthusiasm for its ostensible subject–literature. In my view, such […]
Slate summarizes today a fascinating study on the effect that racially-readable names have on social and economic life chances. The authors remind us once again that correlation does not equal causation and have the California data to prove it. It’s a useful companion to the study of black names in resume success, though in debunking […]