By Matt Reed. They share something other than propinquity.  Many students and staff are also parents of school-age children. When the K-12 schools declare a snow day, some are able to make alternate arrangements for childcare, but many can’t.  For employees, that can mean needing to take personal days; early in the year, that’s usually not a crisis. For students, though, each individual professor sets her own attendance policy, so the risks of missing class when the college is officially open may vary from one course to another. Read more...

By Matt Reed. Nerdiest lede ever: Is interdisciplinarity becoming a class prerogative?
January term had a distinct feel at my small liberal arts college. In that residential setting, intersession was a time for unusual, interdisciplinary, or otherwise unusual classes. My favorite was a class on Gay and Lesbian Politics, which I took in the late 80’s. Read more...

By Matt Reed. One night in my freshman year of college, several of us were hanging out in a dorm room. We had the stereo tuned to the campus radio station, and we were doing the urgent/overlapping conversation thing that happens at that age. At a pause in the discussion, one of my friends said, from out of nowhere, that I should be on the radio. Read more...

By Joshua Kim. Austin Carr has a great article on The Real Story Behind Jeff Bezos’s Fire Phone Debacle And What It Means For Amazon’s Future in Fast Company.
Why has the Fire Phone been such a disaster? Carr reports that Bezos modeled his behaviors around the phone design on Steve Jobs. Every decision about the phone’s design went through Bezos. Read more...