culture and communication
C.S. Lewis and the Great Divide
C.S. Lewis via last.fm
Recently, I’ve been reading as much of and about the British author C.S. Lewisas I can, as you can see from my Amazon reading list in the right-hand sidebar. My original reason was to inform myself as I will teach two of his Narnian stories next academic year. I found Selected Literary [...]
Book Notes – The Shadow University (2)
Following on…
Catherine MacKinnon and Stanley Fish… are explicit in their disdain for the First Amendment’s absolutist and noncontextual approach. In her influential book Only Words, MacKinnon, a feminist legal scholar at the University of Michigan, introduced her chapter “Equality and Speech” with the blunt statement that “the law of equality and the law of freedom [...]
Book Notes – Deschooling Society (2)
Image via Wikipedia
Following on…
For most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school. ((From the introduction.)
the existence of the university is necessary to guarantee continued social criticism (p. 37)
The man addicted to being taught seeks his security in compulsive teaching. (p. 39)
once the self-taught man or woman has been discredited, [...]
Book notes – The Shadow University
Cover via Amazon
I heard about this book and was inspired to read it by a speech given by Ralph Raico on the occasion of his being awarded the Gary G. Schlarbaum Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Cause of Liberty. (Read the speech on the Mises Institute website.) Here’s the relevant section from the [...]
The sexiest woman on TV
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Christina Hendricks in Mad Men.
Season 1 is out in Tsutaya video rental stores in Japan. The series has some memorable characters; Don Draper is merely conventionally mysterious (tho his suggestion for advertising Kodak’s slide-projector wheel is unforgettable), but son-of-the-founder Roger Sterling is witty and charming, throwing zinging one-liners like they are going out [...]
The Teens’ speech – UK teens get uplugged, raw and real
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Zemanta is a blog plugin that supplies a list of online articles related to the content of one’s blog entry. About one minute after starting to write this blog entry, Zemanta should have enough input to work on and start making suggestions (it also suggests photos).
One of Zemanta’s suggested articles was Global Youth: [...]
“What we have here is a failure to communicate”
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In a recent issue of Journalism Communication Monographs was an article about Japan, or rather about how Japan is viewed by American magazines. It was entitled “Seeing themselves through the lens of the other: an analysis of the cross-cultural production and negotiation of National Geographic’s “The Samurai Way” story”.
Thinking that I might perhaps [...]
Other people’s lives, or Carlin and Nock
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Do you read autobiographies? I read a lot of books, but autobiographies is not a genre that has attracted me much for most of my life. At a certain stage of his life, my dad read and recommended autobiographies to me . I remember one. It was the autobiography of actor Dirk Bogarde [...]
The truth about (American) colleges
Gary North writes regularly for the libertarian, free-market economics website LewRockwell.com. I’ve been impressed by his no-nonsense, fact-filled, humour-laced style (a combination of honest businessman and high-powered professor).
Links in these articles led me to Dr North’s own website. Here, there’s free stuff and a subscribers-only area. The free stuff includes sections on college finances and [...]
Bad dependence
James Atherton is a retired teacher and teacher-trainer. He has an extensive website which I’ve referred to before on this blog. I came across this article of his on dependence while looking for something else. It strikes a chord with me because I teach in Japan, where people generally strongly believe that “the dependent leader [...]
