This blog started in political disappointment. I started blogging in the days running up to and immediately after the 2000 election that essentially destroyed America. I hated seeing the Democrats going after the staunchest defenders of progressive values in attacking the Nader campaign, I hated seeing Bush take the White House despite his clear lack of an electoral mandate (losing by a loophole in the rules is even more unsatisfying than losing outright!). [Continue reading]
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I’m mulling the idea of starting a new site devoted to writing and technology. I’ve got a name, a likely domain name, and am building a nice chunk of content to launch with. The idea is to discuss the particular technology needs of writers (of all sorts) using the web to promote their work and develop their audience. The question is, am I better off starting a new blog devoted solely to that niche or to start integrating that content into this site? The advantage to posting it here is that I already have a decent amount of traffic, I have a good position in Google, and I wouldn’t be splitting my attention and time off to yet another project. [Continue reading] I read a lot of other people’s writing, in both my role as a teacher, grading papers students hand in, and as an editor at lifehack.org, preparing contributors’ work for publication on the site. Lately, I’ve been noticing a strange phonemenon: the gratuitous Capitalization of random Words. It’s as if suddenly we’ve returned to the days of Pilgrim’s Progress, where Words are capitalized to show that they represent Important Concepts — except the words That are capitalized are often not All that important. Or it’s like we suddenly adopted German Grammar, where all the Nouns are capitalized — except it’s not Just nouns. In fact, I’ve searched in vain for a pattern, and can’t find one. [Continue reading] I’m starting to regret having built this site with Drupal. Don’t get me wrong — Drupal is amazing software. But it’s a little bit overkill for my humble blog and portfolio, and I’m not sure I can easily maintain it as new releases come out. Wordpress I know much better, having used it for various projects for years, and I know how to do complex stuff like moving it to a new server or re-importing the database. Break’s over, classes are back in session as of today. This semester I’m doing something a little different — 5 sessions of “Gender, Race, and Class” in Women’s Studies. I’m teaching no anthropology classes at all, for the first time in 4 1/2 years. I’ll still be at the community college, though — 2 of my WMST sections are community college classes. I’m really looking forward to teaching the stuff I’ve been teaching at the university to the students I get at the community college. For one thing, I can virtually guarantee my classes will be a lot more diverse, and likely not a white majority, which should change the dynamic considerably. [Continue reading] This paper tells the story of a colonial encounter. Between 1880 and 1915, some 3 million East European Jews migrated to the United States, fleeing from the violent pogroms and repressive policies of Czarist Russia under Alexander III. For these immigrants, America represented an uneasy mixture of di goldene medine (the Golden Land) and di treyfe medine (the Non-kosher Land), a country in which freedom of religion was a guaranteed right, if not always a practiced one. Already poor in the Old Country, for the most part they arrived in America penniless and made their new homes in the growing tenements of America�s major cities–Chicago, Boston, Denver, Philadelphia, and especially New York City, where over one-and-a-half million Jews settled over those 35 years. [Continue reading]
Without making any general announcement, my partner decided to put a couple of presents aside as “Christmas Eve” presents. Given the thorough inspection that every package put out for Christmas gets from the kids, of course it only took them .04 microseconds to realize that a couple of packages were marked “Christmas Eve Present”, and even less time to figure out that meant they would get to open a present Christmas Eve. So, of course, [Continue reading] This semester is officially finished for me! [Continue reading] |
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