Author Archives: Dan

Damage Control

Posted on by under guides and nudges, The Moronic Inferno

Over at Deadspin they’re running a piece proclaiming 1978’s Superman vs. Muhammad Ali “the greatest” (get the joke, eh? Eh?) comic book ever. This woke up the little nerd who lives inside my gut, because it’s clear these people have never heard of Damage Control, a cluster of comics spread across two decades about a team of engineers using “engineering techniques that are much more advanced than the competition which enables them to perform their job in remarkably short periods of time.” That quote is from Marvel’s Wiki. I apologize for the ghastly phrasing. In any case, the Damage Controllers’ job is cleaning up the mess after superbeings destroy buildings and such. I was lucky (unlucky?) enough to own a copy of Damage Control Vol. 1, #1 when I was a kid (I think I traded a Frank Viola baseball card for it), and I remember feeling confused when I read it. It was basically about working in an office, something both my parents did. I imagine some guild of civil engineers put Marvel up to publishing it. Otherwise, I have no idea why this comic was made, let alone why there have been four limited series. I invite some poor grad student in need of a publication or conference appearance to dive into the wreck (er, stacks) and make a case for why Damage Control is some sort of protest against neoliberal values. Me, I’ll just bask in its bureaucratic glory and think of Frank Viola.

We Should be Concerned

Posted on by under education, in the news, The Moronic Inferno, the polis

Peyton Manning’s 7 TD, 450-yard passing performance the other night leads me to believe that this NFL season will be one of the best yet, as the league’s talent level among both players and coaches has never been higher. That’s a statement that could get me hissed at by some old people who think the game peaked with Johnny Unitas or Dan Marino, but I stand by it. But the recent massive settlement the NFL reached with former players about the still-not-totally understood ramifications of football-related concussions reveals that all’s not well in the NFL, and watching the first game the other night was enough to make me queasy: heads snapping back and forth after guys took massive hits; knees bending the wrong way as three-hundred-pound men undercut other three-hundred-pound men; and subtler blows on every play that could be stripping these men of the ability to function later in life. Football is a nasty, awful sport that no kid of mine will play. And, of course, I’ll watch every game I can this year. Call me a hypocrite. It fits.

I have no time for people who hate on sports or act like they aren’t a significant part of what constitutes a culture. You’re allowed to be uninterested, but not dismissive. In general, Americans love sports, and in this way we’re not unlike people in other countries. However, our relationship with sports is uniquely screwed up. In a short and smart “Daily Comment” over at The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert thinks about the ramifications of the fact that sports play such a central role at many American high schools. She writes:

…I was watching my fourteen-year-old twins play soccer. It was the day before school began, but they had already been going to J.V. soccer practice two hours a day for nearly two weeks. I wondered what would have happened if their math teacher had tried to call them in two weeks before school started to hold two-hour drill sessions. My sons would have been livid, as would every other kid in their class. Perhaps even more significant, I suspect that parents would have complained. What was the math teacher doing, trying to ruin the kids’ summer? And why should they have to make a special trip to the high school so their kids could study trig identities?

As she makes clear, we miss the point when we worry about or praise the effect of playing sports on a kid’s academic performance. What we should be concerned about is the messages we send when we make sports seem like a stitch that holds the fabric of education together. It isn’t true. In other countries, people who are excellent at sports are paid from young ages to train and entertain. And other kids either throw pickup games together. In the U.S., kids are taught to do it for their schools. For free. Who cares if the schools they’re doing it for aren’t giving them rigorous educations? FOOTBALL!

Obviously, this problem continues on past high school into higher education, where it gets even smarmier. Major college football and basketball programs serve as de facto minor leagues for the NFL and NBA, and small college programs exist to entice alums to donate money. There’s nothing essential to the educational mission of a university about a football program sending hundreds of people on chartered flights to go give concussions to kids at another school. And yet today I’m sure I will find myself watching several college football games . Again, hypocrite. Meanwhile:

Poland is a surprising educational success story: in the course of less than a decade, the country raised students’ test scores from significantly below average for the developed world to significantly above it; Polish kids now outscore American kids in math and science, even though Poland spends, on average, less than half as much per student as the United States does. One of the most striking differences between the high school Tom attended in Gettysburg and the one he ends up at in Wroclaw is that the latter has no football team, or, for that matter, teams of any kind.

Nothing to see here, folks. Enjoy the games.

 

 

Weekend Beats: Hot in Herre

Posted on by under Weekend Beats

It’s disgusting in LA right now. We’re just a sweaty mess. Temps in the 90s, regionally inappropriate humidity, and not a breath of wind. At least the Santa Anas move the detritus of the city around. This past week has just cooked it deeper into the pavement. So here you go, folks. Hot music for hot weather. Eddie Murphy, Glenn Frey, Glenn Frey’s stubble, a vaguely androgynous lady playing a saxophone. As a kid I had this song on a Pocket Rocker cassette. I’d blast it (as loud as one could blast a Pocket Rocker) while eating Doritos and reading the World Book Encyclopedia. Thus academia. Stay cool, kids.

Et tu, Obama?

Posted on by under education, in the news, Life of the Mind, The Moronic Inferno

As is usually the case in these matters, I agree with everything Ryan wrote the other day about President Obama’s farcical plan to “win the future” by devising a federal rating system for colleges and universities. No doubt the President and his mandarins will be able to create a totally ungameable system that will not encourage waste, fraud, and abuse, the holy trinity of government cliches. University administrators will definitely see it as an opportunity to invest in high quality undergraduate education, right? What could possibly go wrong?

Obama’s doubling down on the kind of systematic education policies of the Bush administration is right up there on his list of follies with his failure to close Guantanamo and his fulsome embrace of the surveillance state. And, like Ryan, I say this as someone who voted for the guy twice, and who thinks he’s done some helpful things in the face of unprecedented opposition. But good grief, whenever he opens his mouth and talks about higher education, I cringe. Like Jonathan Chait, Obama appears to think universities should be like factories where “skills” are fastened onto students like lasers onto toy robots. I doubt his own college career at Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard bore much resemblance to the melange of MOOCs, huge classes taught by adjuncts, and standardized tests his new gold-plated system will inspire. We’re well on our way there already.

I know we’ve said it a thousand times, you guys, but if the politicians and pundits who profess to care about college and college students so much actually did, they would sit back and think about what made their own college experiences so helpful: difficult, small courses taught by secure faculty members; a focus on cultivating critical thinking skills by making students read and write about hard texts, some even written a long time ago; universities that actually thought of themselves as universities, not mini-hedge funds; and an administrative class that didn’t wag the dog, or at least that was staffed by people who cared about undergraduates.

The President should work on fixing our broken economy so that people who don’t actually have any interest in going to college don’t feel like they have to take out huge loans to enroll in online classes that are basically just cut and pasted from Wikipedia and a few out of date textbooks. If our choices in life are college or McDonald’s, we’re no superpower. Or he could start pressuring states to fix our criminally mismanaged K-12 systems. Or (here comes the pipe dream), he could start talking about the virtues of higher education being difficult and not for everyone. He could use the bully pulpit to make Plato, trigonometry, James Baldwin, coding, and Spanish, seem like things worth working hard to understand because they will help you lead a more interesting life and figure out a way to make decent money because you’re a well-rounded, savvy, likable person. He could talk about these things. But he won’t.

Weekend Beats: Tournament Style

Posted on by under mainly rap music, Other Critics, Weekend Beats

It’s way too hot here in Los Angeles this weekend. We live on the second floor, so our apartment is just gross today. Still, we have a marginally functional air conditioner, which makes staying in better than going out, giving me a lot of time to pore over Grantland‘s “Battle for the Best Song of the Millennium” feature. It’s an utterly pointless exercise, but they admit as much. Songs are given seeds and pitted against one another in an NCAA-style bracket, and readers vote to determine the “winner.” Some of the results have been disheartening. That “Stay Fly” by Three 6 Mafia was given a 15 seed, and that people with ears think “Drop It Like It’s Hot” is a better song by almost a 3 to 1 margin really shake my faith in humanity. But M83 and Phoenix upsetting Taylor Swift and Katy Perry, respectively, are reasons for hope. In any event, you should follow the action.

In a follow-up feature discussing the bubble songs that just missed the cut, the NIT songs, if you will, the always insightful Steven Hyden diagnoses what is wrong with the bracket’s composition: very few mid-major songs made the field. He writes:

Let’s acknowledge a few of the biases inherent in the creation of this bracket. There is no metal. There is only a smattering of country. Rock music is consistently relegated to the lowest seeds. Pretty much anything played on an acoustic stringed instrument is apparently verboten. Bands you might like — Spoon, the National, the Hold Steady, Queens of the Stone Age, the Flaming Lips, Modest Mouse, Drive-By Truckers, Bon Iver, Mastodon, Fucked Up, TV on the Radio, Muse — are nowhere to be found. This is a list where “great song” is synonymous with “rap and pop bangers that were popular on the radio once.” That doesn’t mean the bracket is terrible, necessarily — just that if you happen to be among the troglodytes for whom “rap and pop bangers that were popular on the radio once” does not constitute quality listening, sorry, you are left out.

He says this before recommending the Shins’ “New Slang,” a song that most of the folks who read this blog probably listened to on repeat in their college bedrooms while pining away after people who weren’t in fact as cool, smart, or attractive as they seemed. It’s the perfect song for that sort of thing, and as such deserved to be included in the field over something like Britney Spears’ “Toxic,” which is just another serviceable, and frankly boring, pop song. It’s like when a 19-12 Illinois team with a .500 record in Big Ten play gets invited to the tournament over a 26-6 Long Beach State squad from the Big West. Both teams are likely to lose in the first round, but I’d rather see how the team from the small conference and that runs an unorthodox system fares against a tough opponent. We’ve all watched enough middling Big Ten basketball and heard enough middling pop music.

So here’s a mid-major gem some of you might know, and some of you might not. It’s from 2011 and merits a Parental Advisory sticker for its adult content: lyrics acknowledging that there are some things in life you can’t come back from. Not kids’s stuff. Then again, Gillian Welch was no Mouseketeer.

 

Topical Verse: The Dog Days

Posted on by under sports, Topical Verse

Ryan and I have long argued that Opening Day of the Major League Baseball season should be a federal holiday. But baseball’s popularity isn’t what it was even thirty years ago. There are many reasons for this: the steroid scandal, the strike of 1994, new technologies that have made watching other sports on television a lot more exciting, as well a general ratcheting up of our need to be “entertained” every second of every day. Baseball isn’t “entertaining” like basketball or football, though I’d argue both of those sports are less wildly exciting than people claim. How many two-yard runs up the middle can one watch? And how many Milwaukee Bucks games get the adrenaline raging?

Baseball is now seen by many as something past its prime, especially as football games are the most-viewed programs of any kind each week. But this way of valuing a sport misses the point. Football’s season is only 16 games, whereas the baseball season stretches out for 180, if you include the playoffs. Its rhythms are more like our own lives: we must get up, go to work, go home, and find joy where we can. Maybe people look to sports for something other than dailiness, but I have always loved the slow pacing of baseball. It fits into my life perfectly. I can duck in and duck out, have it on in the background while I do other things, give it my full attention as the bases load and anticipation builds. I don’t want to sound like a D-list academic in a Ken Burns documentary, waxing poetic about a game in 1912 I never saw, but the folks who talk almost gleefully about baseball’s “demise” are missing out on something important, and something uniquely American.

In honor of August baseball, here’s the A.E. Housman poem “To An Athlete Dying Young.” Maybe baseball needed to die in the 1960s for people to really appreciate its virtues. I’m glad it’s still going out there every day though.

To An Athlete Dying Young

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.

 

Make That Paper… Or Two

Posted on by under education, Life of the Mind, Other Critics

I recommend you read this little post by Adam Kotsko, an assistant professor at Shimer College (which sounds like an awesome place, by the way). The following paragraph sums up Kotsko’s point, and it’s something Ryan and I have been saying to each other for years: most grad students have some skills that could be useful in the private sector, but few actually figure out a way to make use of them there. Kotsko writes:

In terms of making this work, you first need to think about the skills you have as a grad student. You have research skills. You have writing skills. You are basically an information processing machine. You hopefully have some language skills. Depending on your discipline, you might also have some advanced math or stats skills — in any case, you probably know how to use standard office software better than the average office worker does. You’re almost certainly anal-retentive when it comes to grammar and usage. These are things that don’t take any pre-existing special skills, and there are plenty of companies that need help with all of that. (And if you do have pre-existing special skills like programming or web design, then that’s just another advantage.)

Kotsko goes on to suggest that grad students make two resumes, one of their private sector work, and one of their academic work, as both spheres are irrationally hostile to what they think happens in the other, thus somehow tainting the mind of the person who has strayed beyond the borders of either. A lot of grad students I knew did something like this, but most still touted their academic credentials and work on their non-academic CV. They shouldn’t have, at least not in the language of academia.

One of the changes that needs to occur in humanities and social science graduate programs (the sciences are better at this for pretty obvious reasons) is advisors coming to grips with the fact that most of their students won’t become tenure-track professors. This has always been the case, but people still act like all of their young (and old) charges are going to work as “academics.” This fantasy leads advisors to almost never mention that grad students pursue work other than adjunct teaching, save maybe for volunteering at politically correct non-profits. Folks who work in the digital humanities are better about this, but even they don’t often tell their students how important it is to cultivate non-academic professional relationships, build marketable skills, and MAKE MONEY. This has to change soon, or else many grad programs and the people they churn out will insulate themselves out of existence.