Macheney's Favorite Links from Diigo

'The Last Stand' As Meta Comeback for Arnold Schwarzenegger | Film School Rejects

Sun May 19 23:05:49 +0000 2013

Tags: schwarzenegger film movies action

If The SAT Were A Key To All Mythology

Sat May 18 17:41:32 +0000 2013

This distinction, between complex thinking and right-answer thinking, increasingly defines the difference between elite educational opportunity and the education of the rest. Standardized test-based curricula are easier to implement on a large scale, while the apprehension of complexity is not. It seems that one of the pivotal challenges American education faces today inheres in how the middle classes manage to demand educational equality. When we talk about democratizing access, it seems to me, it isn’t about designing “fair” tests that measure rote right-answer abilities. It is about insisting on curricula that matter, about providing the education we want all students to experience, not just the already-entitled.

Tags: tests education teaching politics

Study: Women in movies have less than a third of speaking roles - UPI.com

Sat May 18 15:43:10 +0000 2013

Tags: movies film women Feminism gender representation

The Cartography of Bullshit – Africa is a Country

Sat May 18 13:03:35 +0000 2013

But the problem here isn’t the “finding” that the Anglo-Saxon West is more tolerant. The problem is the pseudo-analysis. The specialty of foreign-affairs blogging is explaining to a supposedly uninformed public the complexities of the outside world. Because blogging isn’t reporting, nor is it subject to much editing (let alone peer review), posts like Fisher’s are particularly vulnerable to their author’s blind spots and risk endogenizing, instead of detecting and flushing out, the bullshit in their source material. What is presented as education is very likely to turn out, in reality, obfuscation.

Tags: cartography race information research culture

Revenge, ego and the corruption of Wikipedia - Salon.com

Fri May 17 23:11:05 +0000 2013

Obama's Cronkite moment

Tags: wikipedia research information

Hard Hats, Hippies, and the Real Antiwar Movement - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Fri May 17 13:46:39 +0000 2013

The overheated class-war rhetoric of the Vietnam era helped create an impression of a chasm between the movement and the working class that constrained possible alliances and solidarity. Emphasizing the actual class diversity of the movement and the varied political actions and attitudes of workers—black, brown, and white—should create an analytical bridge between what might otherwise appear to be the contradictory expressions of hard-hat workers raging against antiwar protesters on Wall Street in 1970 and hard-hat workers actively supporting the Occupy Wall Street protesters in the current period. They are not now, and have not been, as far apart as we might think.

Tags: war history historiography politics culture class Vietnam

What We Mean When We Say 'Race Is a Social Construct' - Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Atlantic

Thu May 16 14:17:03 +0000 2013

Tags: race society culture history historiography

Six Reasons Why Race-and-IQ Scholarship is an Intellectual and Moral Dead End |

Wed May 15 14:23:51 +0000 2013

Tags: race racism science eugenics history culture politics

Jim Linderman Collects It All, Vintage Sleaze to Baptism Photos - NYTimes.com

Tue May 14 23:15:02 +0000 2013

Tags: popculture internet sleaze digital

Seitz: How to Direct a TV Drama -- Vulture

Mon May 13 12:18:51 +0000 2013

I like to tell people that TV, as both business and art, is at roughly the same place in its development as cinema was in the late fifties, around the time that the French floated the auteur theory. We’re still figuring out who the “author” is on TV shows.

Tags: tv cinephilia auteur culture popculture

Britain destroyed records of colonial crimes | UK news | The Guardian

Mon May 13 12:09:59 +0000 2013

Tags: history UK colonialism imperialism politics Kenya africa

Bernard Porter reviews ‘Histories of the Hanged’ by David Anderson and ‘Britain’s Gulag’ by Caroline Elkins · LRB 3 March 2005

Mon May 13 12:07:18 +0000 2013

Tags: Kenya MauMau africa UK history colonialism imperialism

Los Angeles Review of Books - Hollywood Bigfoot: Terrence Malick And The Twenty-Year Hiatus That Wasn't

Mon May 13 00:45:39 +0000 2013

Tags: hollywood movies film malick

Don’t make fun of renowned Dan Brown - Telegraph

Sat May 11 14:48:55 +0000 2013

Renowned author Dan Brown woke up in his luxurious four-poster bed in his expensive $10 million house – and immediately he felt angry. Most people would have thought that the 48-year-old man had no reason to be angry. After all, the famous writer had a new book coming out. But that was the problem. A new book meant an inevitable attack on the rich novelist by the wealthy wordsmith’s fiercest foes. The critics.

Tags: writing writers humor

A Reader's War : The New Yorker

Fri May 10 16:05:20 +0000 2013

by Teju Cole

Tags: obama literature reading morality war violence

The Fixation of Belief - Charles Sanders Peirce

Fri May 10 12:21:19 +0000 2013

Tags: philosophy thinking critical_thinking logic ideas belief

Is Social Science a Joke? - Waggish

Fri May 10 12:17:14 +0000 2013

Tags: science statistics research sociology academia

Singular 'They': a Footnote - Lingua Franca - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Fri May 10 12:12:00 +0000 2013

I tell students that they are welcome to use singular they in writing for my class, but they should footnote it the first time they use it and in the footnote explain their rationale for using singular they. And students do, both in my class and in other classes... This footnote accomplishes at least three things: It shows readers that the author is consciously making a choice to use singular they; it informs readers about legitimate reasons for using singular they, even if they disagree with its use in this context; and most importantly, it asks students to be careful, self-conscious writers, reflecting on and explaining their choices in their writing.

Tags: grammar style pedagogy teaching writing language

The Thoreau Poison: Shane Carruth's 'Upstream Color' : The New Yorker

Thu May 09 14:19:04 +0000 2013

Tags: movies film Thoreau writers Transcendentalism history science Philosophy

snopes.com: 4th Grade Science Quiz

Thu May 09 11:39:47 +0000 2013

A+ on a creationist quiz in a science class

Tags: religion science knowledge teaching