A new rubric

“Because I can no longer claim with any credibility that reading, writing, and critical thinking are essential skills for 21st-century success, I have revised the grading rubric for your papers accordingly”: Daveena Tauber, “Post-Election College Paper Grading Rubric” (McSweeney’s).

But shouldn’t it be “Post-Election College-Paper Grading Rubric”? Or “Post-Election College Paper-Grading Rubric”? I guess I just wasn’t made for these times.

A related post
Matthew Crawford on making judgments (Against rubrics)

Thanks, Elaine, Jim, and Luanne.

Lies and inconsistencies

At Daring Fireball, John Gruber unpacks the lies and illogicalities in a three-sentence statement from the president-elect’s transition team: 235 words to parse just 42.

I recall the long-infamous 2002 statement from “a senior adviser” to George W. Bush, widely reported to be Karl Rove:

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.”

And we know how well that worked out through eight years of W. “We create our own reality,” or more recently, “There‘s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore of facts”: it’s postmodernism with a vengeance.

See also George Orwell on historical truth and totalitarian history.

For Nancy Ritz

[Nancy, June 13, 1949. Notice the deep-focus camerawork.]

A post with some perhaps unobvious bits of advice: How to do well on a final exam. A comment on the post: “This teacher is amazing :) I listened to him and got a 90 on my final exam!”

[To the commenter: Thanks. Your check is (still) in the mail.]

Christian music

“Wholly Cats” (Benny Goodman) and “Royal Garden Blues” (Clarence Williams–Spencer Williams). Benny Goodman and His Sextet: Goodman, clarinet; Georgie Auld, tenor sax; Cootie Williams, trumpet; Count Basie, piano; Charlie Christian, electric guitar; Artie Bernstein, bass; Harry Jaeger, drums. November 7, 1940.

I’m still making my way through my dad’s CDs: Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, Ivie Anderson, Louis Armstrong, Fred Astaire, Mildred Bailey, Count Basie, Tony Bennett, Art Blakey, Ruby Braff and Ellis Larkins, Clifford Brown, Dave Brubeck, Joe Bushkin, Hoagy Carmichael, Betty Carter, Ray Charles, and now, Charlie Christian.

Also from these CDs
Mildred Bailey sings “Georgia on My Mind” and “Honeysuckle Rose” : Tony Bennett sings “Sweet Lorraine”

[Damn those YouTube ads: there’s no way to avoid them when embedding.]

From the Saturday Stumper

A beautifully clever clue from today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Frank Longo. It’s 28-Across, seven letters: “Inflationary spiral?” No spoilers: the answer is in the comments.

I find that I increasingly prefer the plain difficulty and flashes of wit in Newsday puzzles to the strained humor of The New York Times.

The Netflix DVD problem

It can be summed up thusly:

Queue: twenty-nine movies, some of which we don’t really even want to see.

Saved: fifty-eight movies, twice as many, all of which one or the other or both of us would really like to see, all with availability “Unknown.”

What’s not available from Netflix on DVD is often more interesting to us than what is available.

John Glenn (1921–2016)

[“Fish eye view of Project Mercury astronaut John Glenn training in a mock up of the planned space capsule.” Photograph by Ralph Morse. 1959. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

The New York Times obituary: “John Glenn, American Hero of the Space Age, Dies at 95.”

Windrip’s universities

In the new United States of Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, scores of small private colleges are shut down, and state schools are “absorbed” into “central” universities. No Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, or Hebrew allowed. Philosophy and other subjects are taught only with new textbooks written under government supervision. As for modern languages and literature:


Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here (1931).

At the university where I taught for thirty years, there is now talk of doing away with foreign-language study and philosophy (and much else). And “so-called ‘literature’” has become an increasingly peripheral element in English studies, with reading and writing about literary works no longer a part of the first-year composition sequence. One branding-minded faculty member has suggested that each of the university’s colleges pick some specialty and “market the hell out of it.” A claim to be a university, however, requires very different kinds of commitments.

Quit

The New York Times reports that even one cigarette a day is bad for your health:

A person who habitually smokes just one cigarette a day is nine times as likely to die from lung cancer as a nonsmoker, and even if he or she quits at age 50, still has a 44 percent increased risk of premature death.

It would be especially awful to smoke just one cigarette a day and die from a smoking-related illness, no? Quit.

Related reading
All OCA cigarette posts (Pinboard)

[Four or five cigarettes a day was my habit, many years ago.]

Ann Patchett’s favorite bookstores

The novelist and bookstore co-owner Ann Patchett writes in The New York Times about her favorite bookstores. I am happy to see the Corner Bookstore and Three Lives & Company among her recommendations. Great inventory and friendly booksellers.

Related reading
All OCA bookstore posts (Pinboard)