Yesterday I published a guest post by Nancy McCrea Iannone, an expert on Down syndrome and pregnancy. I would like you, please, to go read it and share it. Independent blogs like mine need your help to spread the word on any given message. The post talked about an assault on the pro-information coalition by anti-abortion…
Nancy McCrea Iannone argues that the new Louisiana law on pre-natal testing inserts abortion politics into what had been a non-partisan movement by forbidding health-care providers to present termination as a neutral or acceptable choice. Comments from David Perry on this post can be found here. Pro-Life, Pro-Choice, Pro-Information: Proceed with Caution by Nancy McCrea Iannone….
In the New York Times, yesterday, Julie Schumacher, a professor of Creative Writing at University of Minnesota, wrote a powerful piece about talking to a student who had been expressing violent fantasies. The undergraduate who had been writing poems about killing people showed up for his appointment in my office carrying a black canvas backpack. He…
First, let me be clear, that I will absolutely sell out to Intelligentsia coffee at any time. The minute they need a higher ed, disability, gender, language, parenting, Red Sox, columnist, I am ready to provide as much paid content as they need. Moreover, I will take my pay in coffee. Or Money. Which I…
Over the last few weeks there’s been a lot of press in the higher education world on a story out of the University of Alberta. Fed up with soaring administration costs, a group of four faculty applied to share the chancellor position (with a salary of $400,000 Canadian, they’re happy to just split it). Then…
Last September, as I wrote about here, a man with mental illness ran into traffic away from police. Police said officers saw a man on foot weaving erratically through traffic and sometimes blocking vehicles. After approaching him, police said, the man reached into his pocket as if grabbing a weapon, and two officers fired a…
It was a very good writing week for me. I pitched four columns, landed three, one of which came out immediately. I also wrote a first-draft treatment of a book (more on this later once it’s ready). Most fun, I did an interview and part of a call-in show with an Australian radio program! You…
On this lucky Friday, the discourse of dads as incompetent in the home looms large (h/t to Soraya Chemaly for the link): There’s a good chance if you receive — or give — a Father’s Day card this weekend, Dad will be portrayed as a farting, beer-obsessed, tool-challenged buffoon who would rather hog the TV…
I actually really like Pink! These are proto-thoughts, very rough. What do you think? When I talk about raising girls and avoiding gender stereotyping, I often get the pushback – what if she really honestly just likes pink (or barbies, bratz, princesses, or whatever)? It’s a fair question. My answer, again still in progress, is…
Lately I’ve been having lots of conversations about norms, code-switching, professionalization, and what our job is as teachers to model and suggest. I’ve written on the blog about code-switching as a skill that my students generally lack and that I think is useful for them. Others have countered, though, saying we should focus on changing…