Of all the joys of grading, this is by far the sweetest .  (Explained.)...

A friend sent me the text of a recent WSJ editorial entitled “Will This Crisis Produce a ‘Gatsby’?� I’ll link to it later—for now I want to recreate my bad-faith reading experience in all its glory.  My first reaction was to the title, even though I know authors never write their own ti...

I’m holding off on that other Watchmen post because I think I might, um, be wrong about something fairly central to my argument. In the meantime, I have a declaration to make: I love Debbie Schlussel. Her review of Watchmen is simply to die for. To wit: If you take your kids to see “The Watchmen...

It is guided-tour-of-campus season at UCI.  Bubbly undergraduates escort groups of thirty or so prospective students and their parents around Ring Road.  After conferencing with students for a few hours, SEK runs to the Zot-n-Go for coffee.  He wears his typical day-of-office-hours attire: an exp...

(Before I begin: Lane casually spoils the film, so do not click on that link if you want a virginal viewing experience.) Anthony Lane would forestall serious criticism of his Watchmen review by characterizing defenders of the genre as "masonically loyal, prickling with a defensiveness and an ardor t...

Over at Edge of the American West, I contextualize this: It is next to impossible to teach many of the colored people of the South that it is as wrong to steal a watermelon as a calf.  The colored man will admit that the calf larceny deserves the severest penalty of the law, and if he were on a jur...

(Because the number of people who will understand the references to modernism and baseball number in the high single digits.) The prototypical leadoff hitter should radiate self-importance.  He has one job and one job only: to get on base.  He has one style and one style only: ostentatious scrappi...

As a child I lulled myself to sleep by imagining myself into the fiction worlds I inhabited by day.  I was Ishmael and Frodo and I was Luke Skywalker and the Great American Hero.  I visualized myself to sleep through my teens.  Every night I strengthened my muscle's memory by ceaselessly starting...

1972: "Hey, Polanski!  Bet you can't shoot a noir film entirely during the day somewhere it never rains!" "Bet you I can!" 1974: "Damn it!  Who knew there were so many Chinese in Chinatown?  You win this time!" *And am I the only person who didn't know that the planned third sequel to Chinatownâ€...

The comments on Farley’s post about grade inflation and student effort had convinced me not to read the article that inspired them.  Then Shahar excerpted a different part of the article and I changed my mind: A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a thi...