By Ben Yagoda. Words matter. An obvious proposition, but never so obvious as in the agreement recently adopted in Paris by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Deconstructing Paris, a New Zealand website devoted to analyzing the various drafts leading up to the agreement, noted that the penultimate draft contained more than 1,000 sets of brackets, offering alternative wordings from which the delegates had to choose. More...
Year-End Reflection
Personalizing Bulk Emails: MailMerge for Gmail vs MailChimp
Looking Back at the Year in Ed Tech
By Jeffrey R. Young. Concerns about Yik Yak and analysis of MOOCs and online teaching were among the most popular stories this past year on our Wired Campus blog. Each year we run the numbers to see which items drew the most reader attention, and this year’s list highlights a continuing interest in understanding how technology — and online education, in particular — might change college as we know it. More...
Clear the Way for More Good Teachers
I attended a recent meeting at my university where we talked about ways to retain students. The usual suspects were offered as solutions — all of them already in use at colleges around the country and most of them only mildly successful, if at all. A few years ago we tried one of the new standards — a computer program students could log onto and answer questions concerning their time at school. More...
For International Students Enrolling in Graduate Schools, Master’s Programs Rule
The number of foreign students enrolling in American graduate schools rose this fall, but, at 5 percent, the rate of growth was "considerably slower" than in recent years, according to a new report from the Council of Graduate Schools. More...
Empire of Letters
Los Angeles Review of Books, or LARB, which popped up on Tumblr in 2011 and on its own site in April 2012. More...
I first heard it from my graduate students. They keep me current, and it seemed that every other day they’d forward me a piece from theWhat It's Like to Be Noam Chomsky's Assistant
Tupperware and Terror - The rise of ‘chick noir’
True stories of straight female academics: A scholar of Continental political theory briefly drives around the West with an Italian in his Alfa Romeo then divorces her husband; a novelist debates breast reduction or adoption and chooses the latter; an artist pursues her female collaborator, but the project — and their relationship (though not the artist’s marriage) — falls apart; a poet moves to Europe in pursuit of a married lawyer yet ultimately returns home to her family; a feminist professor dreams up scenarios to run off with two of her male students, but nothing happens; an archivist considers dumping husband and children but decides on Prozac instead. More...
The Male Gaze in Retrospect
In 1975, the avant-garde filmmaker Laura Mulvey published her landmark essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" in the journal Screen. Bringing feminist theory to bear on a new wave of psychoanalytic film criticism, the essay set out to demonstrate how the structure of Hollywood films — camera angles, lighting, editing — foisted a masculine point of view on audiences watching passive, eroticized female objects. Mulvey’s notion of the "male gaze" made waves not just in film studies (four members of Screen’s editorial board resigned in protest of it and other psychoanalytic criticism) — but also across much of the humanities. More...