Remembering Andrew Sarris
Sad news. One of my favorite professors from my undergraduate days, Andrew Sarris, has died. I think Pauline Kael has ended up much more widely known, but Sarris’s reviews from back in the day were...
Author: Rose Woodhouse
Dance 10, Looks 3 – Inequality of Talent and Looks
Note: This post is part of our League Symposium on inequality. You can read the introductory post for the Symposium here. To see a list of all posts in the Symposium so far, click here. The...
Why I am not an attachment parent
Time Magazine deliberately started an uproar with its cover photo of a woman confrontationally breastfeeding (seriously, if you can breastfeed confrontationally, she’s doing it) a preschooler. And so the backlash against attachment parenting begins....
Finally, the fried chicken proof you’ve been searching for
Russell, my co-blogger over at Blinded Trials, and I text each other…rather frequently. Since we’ve been doing our sub-blog (which is a total blast!), a continual source of texting delight for us is the search terms that people...
Marginal cases and virtue
Children are marginal cases. Talking about ethics in terms of autonomy, or rights — Kantian ethics — famously leaves children, especially very young children, in an odd place. I have addressed this elsewhere in...
The Moral Treatment, Hygiene, and Education of Idiots
The Moral Treatment, Hygiene, and Education of Idiots and Other Backward Children is perhaps not the most auspicious book title. Nor is Idiocy: and Its Treatment by the Physiological Method. Recently I’ve had the opportunity to...
Classic TV is Bad TV
TV isn’t better, just different. And someone in the future less swayed by the fads of today will see today’s TV as just different, but not better.
A very cautious guess about the spike in autism
The CDC yesterday released a study showing that autism rates have spiked. 1 in 88 kids are affected. What the hell is going on? People have speculated about possible environmental cause, as the president...
Log in, glaze over, tune out
One of the several bees who are long term residents in David Brooks’s bonnet is that a certain kind of love between teacher and student is what really spurs learning. Today’s iteration of the theme occurs...
Jane Austen, philosophical psychologist
Here’s kind of an odd, but very interesting post, arguing that Jane Austen is a better moral philosopher than a writer, and she’s not a writer with much psychological insight. I think the contrast between...
