A pair of recent New York Times features asked political thinkers on both sides of the aisle what the other side gets right. The columns are each fascinating: I enjoyed the recognition of key conservative principles in “What the Right Gets Right,” and I can easily agree with most of “What the Left Gets Right.” [...]
Archive for January, 2012
What the Left and Right Both Get Right
Posted in Politics and Society, tagged conservative, liberalism, New York Times on January 28, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Just Another Excuse to Talk About Aardvarks
Posted in Education, Humor on January 25, 2012 | 2 Comments »
Sometimes, school work will include questions where the correct answer is “none.” For example, “Identify any subordinate clauses in this sentence: The movie was too long.” Today, I started telling my classes that workbook assignments that ask them to write “none” as the answer to a question are boring. Instead, I asked them to start [...]
A Case Study in Lazy Political Complacency
Posted in Politics and Society on January 25, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
My last post a few minutes ago was about an essay at the wonderful education blog Brainstorm. However, one author there is so insufferably, pedantically narrow minded, she doesn’t even make me upset, just bored. In a recent post, she bemoans the fact that the current GOP campaign has not yet produced a critical witticism [...]
The Value of Term Papers
Posted in Education, Language and Literature, tagged Mark Bauerlein, teaching, writing, writing process on January 25, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
The brilliant professor Mark Bauerlein scores yet another direct hit in a recent post about the value of those old-fashioned writing assignments: In my classes I include both types of assignments, short, one-page writings and longer 7-page papers (I rarely go over 10 pages these days, but I try to make the class have 25-30 [...]
Heavenly Choir Gets Etta James “At Last”
Posted in Arts, tagged "At Last", Etta James, music on January 23, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Divine R&B diva Etta James died a few days ago. Especially for anyone whose musical experience begins with Bieber and ends with Swift, enjoy this beautiful view of what more music is capable of.
Catholic Scholar at First Things Gives Book of Mormon Backhanded Praise
Posted in Religion, tagged apologetics, Book of Mormon, First Things, Hugh Nibley on January 22, 2012 | 2 Comments »
A new article up at First Things recounts a Catholic professor’s experience reading the Book of Mormon. Although he does not have a spiritual experience with it, he finds much to praise in its insistent focus on Christ, and some to criticize in its drabness. I rejoice whenever anyone recognizes the former, and frankly have [...]
NPR’s Fresh Air Praises Mitt Romney’s Faith
Posted in Religion, tagged Fresh Air, Mitt Romney, NPR on January 22, 2012 | 4 Comments »
The NPR program Fresh Air interviewed the authors of a new book about Mitt Romney a few days ago. The authors, two reporters for the Boston Globe, did a lot of homework in digging into Romney’s life. The surprising thing about what they concluded–and how the NPR show presented it–was that it was mostly very [...]
Missionary Reality Check
Posted in Religion, tagged Book of Mormon, missionary work on January 22, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
My family read Alma 21 in the Book of Mormon this week ; a zealous young missionary teaches in a hostile city, encountering intensely reflexive skepticism, then: 10 And it came to pass as he began to expound these things unto them they were angry with him, and began to mock him; and they would not [...]
10 Things I Love About Las Vegas
Posted in Living well, tagged Las Vegas on January 20, 2012 | 3 Comments »
I’m a rarity–a native Las Vegan who was born before 1990. However, I’ve always been pretty crusty about my hometown–few bandwagons are as easy to climb on around here than the one for grousing about Sin City’s failings. One of my lifelong goals is even to go live somewhere else–anywhere quite the opposite of Las [...]
The Global Genocide of Baby Girls
Posted in Politics and Society, tagged abortion, family, genocide on January 18, 2012 | 1 Comment »
All abortions are not created equal. The numbers are chilling: around the world, babies prenatally identified as female are far, far more likely to be aborted than male babies. This has resulted in many major societies now having a huge imbalance in genders: there are way too many young men and not nearly enough young [...]
Occupy Camelot
Posted in Humor, Politics and Society, tagged Monty Python, Occupy Wall Street on January 18, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Managing Time When You Don’t Have Much Left
Posted in Living well, tagged Last Lecture, Randy Pausch, time management on January 12, 2012 | 3 Comments »
To start a unit on time management with my Leadership class this week, I showed them Randy Pausch’s lecture on the subject. First, I had to show them his Wikipedia page to explain why he was famous, then I told them about The Last Lecture, and then I showed them a clip of his cameo in [...]
Why I Never Bothered Finishing Eragon
Posted in Language and Literature, tagged book reviews, Christopher Paolini, Eragon, Eric D. Snider, George Lucas, Star Wars on January 12, 2012 | 5 Comments »
I’ve started many books which I’ve stopped reading before they were finished–some after only a few chapters, others when I was halfway through–but there has only been one where I read far more than half and then decided that I had wasted enough time on it. That was Eragon; I only had 50 pages left when I [...]
Sunset Regret
Posted in Living well, tagged Las Vegas, sunset on January 11, 2012 | 1 Comment »
Two mornings ago, I saw one of the most beautiful sights of my life. As I walked out to my car at six a.m. to leave for work, just as the sky was barely starting to turn from black to blue in the east, I saw the full moon, radiant, hovering just over the western [...]
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