Last week I attended a panel at The Tank in New York City, where Ari Melber of The Nation, Democratic strategist Scott Shields, and erstwhile John Edwards blogger Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon were giving a talk on progressive politics, netroots political activism, and how to combat the right-wing noise machine.…
A sorority at De Pauw University booted out a bunch of its pledges and it made the news. Here is the link to the story.
Before I continue, I wish to make my own sentiments perfectly clear. I detest the notion of fraternities and sororities. They are, to me, childish things which people belong to out of some desire to be special without having to rely on their own abilities–special by association. Pass the initiation, become accepted as a member, and you then can “borrow” the prestige of the group.
Or be tainted by it, as with, say, the John Birch Society or the KKK.
This is not to say I see no reason for many of these associations to exist–unions are a very loose form of such things, and I would argue that they serve a positive purpose, although they share the same capacity for abuse of the individual as any large organization, corporate, religious, or social. They are, to put it in as simple terms as I can, a necessary evil.
My prejudice in this regard stems from one of the more persistent myths underlying American culture–that of the coherent and independent individual. I say myth because it is patently untrue–likely an impossibility–and yet we struggle collectively toward instantiating the model through our laws, our national ethos, and our image of ourselves as individuals.
Which makes joing a fraternity or a sorority a particularly perplexing contradiction.
One joins such organizations for numerous reasons all of which center or …
The practice of shifting clocks twice a year is an annoyance to everyone. Its roots go back to the Enlightenment, when such luminaries as Ben Franklin suggested the practice in part to keep urbanites, who lived by the clock, in better summertime sync with the rural majority who lived by…
“If I didn’t care about my kids, I’d have an easier time.”
“No real-life problem is ever actually solved, it seems.”
For three years, Geri Anderson has worked as a grade school art teacher. She wakes up every day, willing to try her hardest to make a difference in the lives of the students who attend Walnut Elementary School. “Geri” and “Walnut” are not real names; Geri and I decided to use these pseudonyms to allow Geri to speak freely. Everything else in this article is based on my recent interview of Geri.
Geri is a soft-spoken woman in her mid-twenties. Before being hired for her current job, Geri often substitute taught at expensive private grade schools. She took her first permanent job at Walnut to make a difference.
Geri teaches art to each of the 200 students who attend Walnut. They range in age from preschoolers to sixth-graders. The average class includes about twenty children, although some of the classes have almost 30 children. Not all of the teacher positions are filled at Walnut; for many months, the school has sought the help of adults from the community to fill in for the non-existent science teacher, for example.
Walnut is located in the urban center of a large U.S. city. 98% of the children attending Walnut Elementary are African-American. More than 90% of these students receive free or reduced price lunches. Based upon Geri’s observations, the great majority of the students live in single-parent homes. Classroom behavior issues, including …
I might owe some people an apology.
I recently posted about a song from “Scrubs the Musical,” a television episode that aired a few weeks ago. The title of this tune is presumably “Everything comes Down to Poo.” It is a clever and funny tune, but it is also dangerous.
For me (hopefully not for you) that song morphed into an “earworm,” another name for a song that can get stuck in one’s head. This crazy tune from Scrubs has been following me around relentlessly for the past two weeks. It has sometimes been distractingly annoying during the day. It even kept me awake one night last week.
What to do? I just happen to be reading a cogsci/music book: This is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel Levitin. Here’s what I learned from Levitin: There is relatively little scientific work done on the topic of earworms. What is clear is that
musicians are more likely to have ear worm attacks than non-musicians, and . . . people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) are more likely to report being troubled by ear worms—in some cases medications for OCD can minimize the effects.
Hmmm . . . This makes me wonder whether Walgreens carries any over-the-counter medications for OCD . . .
Levitin suggests that the neural circuits representing a song somehow get stuck in “playback” mode, but usually only a small fragment of a song (15 to 30 seconds) is involved. Ear worms are most likely “simple songs and commercial jingles.”…