“Max Weber, very much a successful professor, once suggested that all prospective academics should answer the following question: ‘Do you in all conscience believe that you can stand seeing mediocrity, year after year, climb beyond you, without becoming embittered and without coming to grief?’ He added, ‘I have found that only a few men could endure this situation.’” —Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe
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Twitter- mattthomas: Chris Matthews is replaying McCain's debate gaffes and then not so much analyzing them, but laughing at them. Seriously.
- mattthomas: @jayrosen_nyu is on a roll with his observations about tonight's debate
- mattthomas: Lost in all the political talk tonight is the fact that "Barbara Ann," particularly the Beach Boys version, is a really great song.
- mattthomas: @LanceStrate Thanks for the links! Reminds me a little of Negativland's repurposing of Casey Kasem's remarks about U2: http://bit.ly/nlu2.
- mattthomas: @LanceStrate No. Something about bombing them I'm guessing? I don't like the idea of someone with the ability to bomb joking about it.
- mattthomas: I like that McCain makes jokes about bombing other countries to his veteran friends, and only to his veteran friends. That's character.
- mattthomas: @LanceStrate I think it's more about performance than age. McCain doesn't embody any of positive things associated with age, e.g., wisdom.
- mattthomas: Even if you plan to vote for him already, the New Yorker's endorsement of Obama is worth reading: http://bit.ly/nyobama.
- mattthomas: @phdaisy Reggie Bush makes it look easy, doesn't he?
- mattthomas: @EveBottando Around 8:15 PM, a plane crashed into a house, apparently. If you've seen Scorsese's The Aviator, it looks sort of like that.
1 response so far ↓
AMT // March 6, 2008 at 6:55 pm
“For all its intermittent palaver about the individual, the academy is one of the national centers of copycat behavior and groupthink. If a Stanford professor makes a curricular choice, dozens if not hundreds of his would-be peers elsewhere will imitate the choice.” —William A. Henry III, In Defense of Elitism
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