One of those ten-second underwriter promo spots on NPR just now was touting the virtues of Teach for America, which was described as a program that works to help “underresourced” schools. In fairness, though, this is actually more defensible than the ubiquitous but nonsensical use of “underprivileged” as a synonym for “poor.”

[Read more →]

Richard Powers is one of my favorite living novelists, but I’ve been finding one of his tics hard to understand. He routinely alludes to a familiar company or institution, making it clear beyond any doubt which he’s referring to, but then either scrupulously and pointedly avoids naming it, such that the absence of the name […]

[Read more →]

As a legal matter, the case of the North Carolina couple arrested for “flag desecration” seems awfully clear-cut. The Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly and unambiguously that political speech is constitutionally protected, even if a flag is folded, spindled, or mutilated in the course of making a point. There’s actually something weird and surreal about […]

[Read more →]

Dana has a pice at the Prospect on racial essentialism in the Harry Potter books. There are some interesting points in there—about how, for instance, J.K. Rowling makes her villains advocates of a kind of wizardly racial purity, but still bows to the convention of the fantasy genre by making Harry descended from magical nobility. […]

[Read more →]

Eugene Volokh defends his right to use the word “homosexual” against a reader who regards it as a shibboleth for bigotry, which leads him to repost an interesting analysis originally prompted by an argument over the relative merits of “handicapped” and “disabled.” A commenter links to John Aravosis’ recent brief against the term, characterizing it […]

[Read more →]

Did I miss the memo specifying that the Britishism whinge would be supplanting the more familiar whine this year? I feel like I’m suddenly seeing this once-obscure variant everywhere. Is that extra “g” adding some special nuance?

[Read more →]

Those of you who, like me, haven’t cracked the spine of The Canterbury Tales since the tenth grade were probably as puzzled as I was when, in the wake of Jerry Falwell’s death last month, Christopher Hitchens repeatedly described him as a “Chaucerian fraud.” Well, I finally looked it up, so as a public service […]

[Read more →]

Cory Doctorow reports that SciFi.com will be pulling their extensive science fiction archive, comprising both classic stories like Norman Spinrad’s “Carcinoma Angels” and original contributions from the likes of Bruce Sterling, Greg Benford, and Ursula Le Guin. Fortunately, this is the Internet, so omnia mutantur, nihil interit.

[Read more →]

Even by the prolix standards of Unfogged, there’s a huuuuuge comment thread at this post on the news that bookies have stopped taking bets on whether teen wizard Harry Potter will live or die in the final book of his series, as the bets are all but unanimously against his survival. (Opinion is so dramatically […]

[Read more →]

A public service announcement: Meme is an extremely useful word/concept, and its mainstreaming is all to the good. However, if you’re not specifically calling attention to how some idea, belief, or behavior spreads in the population as an abstract replicator, or discussing the selection processes to which they’re subject, there’s an excellent chance you just […]

[Read more →]