Yesterday I began following the story of Eden Foods (this is a good place to start), an organic food company whose products are beloved by many friends, especially my vegetarian and vegan friends (they make beans and soy milk, among other products). In 2013, the company and their chairman and sole shareholder, Michael Potter, sued…
There are now hundreds of articles and blogs on the Facebook emotions experiment. Yesterday’s non-apology apology from COO Sandberg only intensifies the discussion. She said that she’s sorry we got upset about it. I suspect that she’s sorry we found out about it. She hasn’t said that she’s sorry they did the experiment. As for…
Last week I wrote about and hosted an essay on the Pro-Information coalition in the world of Down Syndrome Prenatal Testing policy. This week, I want to share our diagnosis story as part of Never Alone, a pro-information campaign from Lettercase to make sure that people who are receiving diagnoses not only have the best information…
What would it look like if every decision at the university were made, explicitly, around the following question – How does this make the institution a better place for students to learn and develop? Implicitly, maybe that’s already built in to many discussions, but I think that the explicit language we use to define what we…
At the end of May, a black female professor named Ersula Ore at Arizona State University was walking across the street when she was arrested for jaywalking. By report, people cross at that site regularly to avoid construction and it is reasonably suspicious that a black woman was the person singled out by police. She…
We interrupt this blog to bring you a special announcement. I am recording a live album with my band, The Tooles, this September. It will be all original music and we’re really excited about it. It is, however, expensive, and so we have a kickstarter. If you like music, please check it out and consider…
I had three pieces this week that I thought were especially important. First, I hosted a guest post by Nancy McCrea Iannone on the troubles of the Pro-Information law in Louisiana, where anti-abortion activists have hijacked what was an unusual, important, coalition. I wrote about my own thoughts here in Pro-choice, Pro-Information, Anti-Eugenics. Mark Leach…
I’ve been working on work-life issues lately, focusing on fathers and discourse around working dads. This has led me back to an important piece by Amanda Hess from last year, important not only because of its argument but because of the rabbit hole of links and studies to which it leads. Hess responds to the…
So Verizon and Makers teamed up to make a great new video about the insidious ways that we push girls away from science. I am always suspicious of corporations getting involved in social causes, as they tend to be followers rather than leaders. Still, Makers is pretty great and I think the video highlights some typical…
Here are a few more points related to my article on public engagement – how it might work and what I mean by “there is no ivory tower.” 1. How might it work? No one is seriously advocating that an op-ed is equal to a piece of peer-reviewed scholarship. At least no one I know of….