In the Do As I Say, Not As I Do category: in a recent comment thread at Real Climate, here’s Eric Steig admonishing one of the more churlish climate bloggers: Eli, with all due respect (and I do have a lot of respect for you), and at the risk of your calling me naive again,…Continue Reading…
Better late than never. Hit & Run, wading into the textbook wars, offers up this equivalent of a libertarian koan: It is difficult to determine just what specific curriculum changes the Texas school board has in mind, though the ringleader of the revisionist faction, a creationist weirdo named Don McLeroy, strikes me as one who…Continue Reading…
Last week, a superb NYT investigation pulled the curtain back on the shady details of a bad Everglades land deal. I guess the findings were so ugly that the Times editorial board (presumably, Robert Semple, Jr.) had to look away while writing this love letter in support of the deal. I’d have grudging respect for…Continue Reading…
Michael Wilcox, a Stanford University archaeologist, has a new book that takes a fresh look at the Pueblo Revolt. A university press release captures some interesting themes of Wilcox’s post-colonial work in the Southwest, such as this quote directly from his book: Archaeologists and anthropologists have imposed disease, demographic collapse and acculturation as explanations of…Continue Reading…
Tobis fires a few wild shots, Lambert does recon, while Real Climate tries to keep the posse in check. It’s quite a spectacle, this latest variation of Shoot the Messenger. Here’s a fact: university press releases that tout scientific studies are routinely vetted by the principal researcher(s). Assuming And that’s the case here, as I…Continue Reading…
File this one in the Department of Unfortunate Headlines. The head in the Times story that the blog post references is obviously more apt. But it’s possible the blogger was simply trying to be clever.
Reason magazine is running a multimedia series, “Reason saves Cleveland.” One of the episodes is titled “Fix the Schools.” After Reason is finished saving Cleveland from urban decline, I propose that staffers head out to the Lone Star state and save Texas from theocrats, who have hijacked the public school curriculum. Nor is that abomination…Continue Reading…
Over at Savage Minds, there’s an interesting post on the merits of anthropologists hanging in the field with jihadists. It quotes Roxanne Varzi wondering how to contextualize jihadi videos: These strike me as a rich source of information about a culture that is otherwise inaccessible to anthropologists: jihadi martyrs. How would you go about developing…Continue Reading…
Here’s another dispatch from a decades-old war, in which the policy and politics never change. You couldn’t read this kind of story in the country where the war is raging, because of a virtual news blackout, enforced by fear of vicious reprisal. So what does that mean for the people caught in the crossfire? As…Continue Reading…
It’s been on public display this past week. As the NYT reports: After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely…Continue Reading…