links for 2008-02-28

Overcoming Bias: My Favorite Liar
“Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures … one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day.” And thus began our ten-week course. (via robin)
(tags: awesome funny [...]

Read Full Post »

thoughts on teaching

I taught my first undergraduate class on causation & explanation in history last week, having never done so before in my life. It wasn’t as harrowing as I was dreading, and though I noticed a marked difference between my first-years and third-years — namely a sort of hardened shell of disinterest in the latter and [...]

Read Full Post »

links for 2008-02-15

Poems in Prose by Oscar Wilde
insofar as one can like that which pains one, I like the ‘House of Judgment’.
(tags: beautiful literature)

The ‘Problem of Evil’ in Postwar Europe – The New York Review of Books
on how overremembrance can make us forget; and on how hyperbole can dilute (for, after all, “if we see evil everywhere, [...]

Read Full Post »

happy birthday; or, bookporn #27: old circular library, paris

26 bookporn(s?),* 161 posts, 462 comments, 5,886 spam comments and 33,169 views later, AHC is one year old! thank you all for your support & feedback, and all the totally esoteric knowledge you’ve shared over the year — I’ve loved being in conversation with you & hope it will continue.
ok, 27 bookporn(s) — for who [...]

Read Full Post »

links for 2008-02-12

Easily Distracted » One-A-Day: Oona Strathern, A Brief History of the Future
on the woeful whiggishness of bad intellectual history, or What Not To Do (via cshalizi)
(tags: historyofideas future bookreviews)

Keunwoo Lee : Fractal Wrongness
“It is as impossible to convince a fractally wrong person of anything as it is to walk around the edge of the Mandelbrot [...]

Read Full Post »

race, race, nothing but race

I’m kind of perturbed by this article in the New York Times on rising ethnic discontent in Malaysia that’s said to have been largely set in motion by the huge protest last November organized by ‘Hindraf’, the Hindu Rights Activist Force. The article says absolutely nothing about the other huge protest in November (indeed twice [...]

Read Full Post »

links for 2008-02-07

The Lost Archive – WSJ.com
an archive to yield a critical history and edition of the Qur’an? not with this attitude: “Please ensure that these scholars are not given further access to the documents…Allah, help us against our enemies.”
(tags: islam koran archives history academic religion)

The Koran As Philological Quarry: A Conversation with Christoph Luxenberg
on the Syro-Aramaic [...]

Read Full Post »

links for 2008-02-06

Times Higher Education – A takeaway delivery
British academia slated to sink into a slavish morass of corporate butt-kissing. Simon Blackburn, as always, knows best. (via cshalizi)
(tags: academic cullstupidpeopleplease terrible fools humanities)

3quarksdaily: Leading Minsk Newspaper Endorses Candidates in US Presidency
This might be the most hysterical thing I’ve read in a while. No summary possible; you must [...]

Read Full Post »

thoughts on texts

there doesn’t seem to be a critical edition of the Qur’an, at least from within the Muslim community: by that I don’t mean exegesis, of which there is plenty, but investigation into the Qur’an itself as a text, as a historical event, as a heroic marshalling of fragments; or even research into whether or not [...]

Read Full Post »