Ornaments

“I felt when we were fighting that she was kicking my ass …”  Just one of the memorable quotes to be found among Sandy Nicholson’s photos of second-place winners.
It’s “an advanced course in drowning:” Scott McLemee has read all four (!) books that Antonio Negri published this year.
“That conservative, classicisizing, slightly self-satisfied, mono-cultural image that [...]

This is What Science is About

Churm directs us to this wonderful science blog, where I scroll down to find that Benjamin Cohen has been reading Steven Shapin’s new book about modern scientists.  Cohen writes:
One common thread in most of [Shapin's] work is the role of virtue and character in the history of science. In The Scientific Life, the first few [...]

Treasures

“I hear an army charging upon the land;”  at MIT, a group of students have put Ezra Pound’s Des Imagistes project online, including James Joyce’s remarkable poem.
“What pure motives, and purely carried out:”  My Life in Books has been reading Willkie Collins’ The Moonstone.  You should read it, too.
Remember my itty bitty jab at Mark [...]

Doggerel

Elizabeth Alexander has been selected to write and recite a poem to mark the occasion of President-elect Obama’s inauguration.  Sounds nice, right?  Particularly in light of a certain other much more boneheaded inauguration choice?  How much controversy could there be about a little timely turn of phrase?
Plenty, if you ask George Packer, who is hoping [...]

New and Fireproof

I’ve been neglecting my series on handwriting – along with this whole blog, really – as I’ve just been finishing my Ph.D. dissertation.
It’s done now, so here’s something special:

It’s a set of notes about vacuum-tube radio technology by Lee De Forest, whose earlier invention of the audion made it possible to build radio sets that [...]

Heavy

Three articles for your consideration.
1.  At Liberal Education, Ethan Kleinberg proposes a few ways to save interdisciplinary scholarship from itself:
We should work to usher in an era when interdisciplinary departments, programs, and centers do not supplant or replace the traditional disciplines but serve instead to create pathways and intersections, bringing faculty and students together for [...]