Category: education

• February 11, 2011

  So far, I don’t mind aging…

  So far, I don’t mind aging. I still have my health. No major injuries to report. No illnesses of which I’m aware (mental illness?). Nothing chronic yet. But then I don’t have health care. Haven’t had it for 8 years. (Has it been that long?) I’m sure the illnesses and injuries and catastrophes are all…
• February 5, 2011

  On Bloomberg’s self-love and our narrow political imagination

  Update: A revised version of the essay is available here at Counterpunch. * * * Mayor Bloomberg is featured on the cover of the Feb. 7 New Yorker. Entitled “Bloom in Love,” the watercolor depicts our vain mayor smitten with his image. It is Valentine’s Day (or perhaps, it’s implied, every day for Bloomberg is…
• February 3, 2011

  Rita Koganzen heaps scorn on “emerging adulthood”

  In her polemic entitled “Slacking as Self-Discovery,” Rita Koganzen calls into question the view that “emerging adulthood” is a vital exploratory period in the life of twenty somethings. I think Koganzen’s article is smart, albeit one-sided. Smart: Like Michael Sandel, she argues that the conception of the “voluntarist self”–a self unencumbered by external influences and concerned…
• February 1, 2011

  On Plath’s muscular owl

  It could have been 1962 when Sylvia Plath, then 30, set down in her journal a very dark thought: “I am now flooded with despair, almost hysteria, as if I were smothering. As if a great muscular owl were sitting on my chest, its talons clenching & constricting my heart.” 1963 was the year her…
• January 30, 2011

  Stepping off the self-preoccupation machine

  As a child, the great Bertrand Russell was very unhappy. He remained unhappy until he hit upon a rather old idea: forget about the self. He realized that self-absorption was an obstacle to genuine happiness. As the years went by, Russell tells us, he seemed to be getting more and more happy for he had…