Academia
Google maps said it would take 2.5 hours to drive from our place in the Blue Mountains to Hill End. Maybe we’re slow. And sure, we stopped to check out nearby gold mining village Sofala on the way. But we left home shortly after 8am and arrived at Hill End in time for us to […]
One my betes noires has been in the news lately. Jonathan Haidt has been annoying me since at least 2012, when I was critical of his bothsidesism on the culture wars. At the time, he was a concern troll, posing as a liberal worried about other liberals who were, he claimed, misunderstanding Republicans. Whereas liberals […]
Last week Australia’s central bank (Reserve Bank of Australia, RBA) raised interest rates. Again. Political economists have been talking for decades about the RBA’s tendency to redistribute wealth from the bottom upwards. But now it seems most people understand that the latest interest rate rises requires ordinary people to hand over more of their cash […]
Academics, especially in the humanities, produce texts, and they teach students to produce text. This is a standard assumption, often taken for granted, and maybe not too surprising in times in which productivity is a supreme social norm. Think of the relief – by students and faculty alike – when a text has been submitted […]