Nerd Notes: An Interview With the Cartoonist of PhD Comics

Poking fun at grad school is a fantastic defense mechanism.

Awesome: The Commencement Speech From Space

Take a look at what happened yesterday: "NASA Astronaut and UConn alum Rick Mastracchio '82 (ENG) delivers the 2014 UConn School of Engineering Commencement address from the International Space Station."

Nerd Notes: A Princeton Freshman Checks His Privilege

It's not what you think.  This little op-ed has blown up the Nerdverse, and plenty of people are unloading on the guy, but you should first read what he has to say.

Nerd Notes: How to Teach Good Writing

Good ideas, including (a) tossing out ponderous standard textbooks, and (b) focusing on clarity, clarity, clarity.

Professor Donald Kagan on A Liberal Education

Yale's great historian gives his farewell lecture.  Do listen.

Nerdiest, Most Obscure Supreme Court Protest Ever?

By Georgetown University Law Center students.  Quelle surprise.

Quote of the Day: Politicizing History

NERD FIGHT! It's journalism professor versus historian as David Greenberg excoriates Howard Zinn.  Here's a piece of it (my emphasis in bold):

... historians are obliged to explore the viewpoints of elite actors, however unattractive, not to parcel out sympathy in proper proportions, but to show, in a faithful account of the past, the interconnectedness of the rulers and ruled, and of all strata of society, and how one group’s experiences influence another’s.  But Zinn reduced historical analysis to political opinion.  He assessed a work of history by its author’s partisan loyalties, not its arguments about causation, influence, motivation, significance, experience, or other problems he deemed “technical” in nature. 

... the fatal flaw of Zinn’s historical work is the shallowness, indeed the fallaciousness, of his critique of scholarly detachment.  Zinn rests satisfied with what strikes him as the scandalous revelation that claims of objectivity often mask ideological predilections.  Imagine!  And on the basis of this sophomoric insight, he renounces the ideals of objectivity and empirical responsibility, and makes the dubious leap to the notion that a historian need only lay his ideological cards on the table and tell whatever history he chooses.

I don't need to tell you how dangerously enstupidizing this is.  The "nerds behaving badly" tag belongs to Zinn, of course, whose book has warped countless impressionable readers and still makes life harder for honest, responsible teachers of history.

Nerd Notes: Naughty and Nice in Academia

My advice: Don't be a jerk, even if other people are.

20 Classrooms From Around the World

As school is about to start all over the country, do take a look at these classrooms from 20 different nations.

Nerd Notes: 10 Lost Works of Literature

Just thinking about this makes my nerdy heart hurt a little -- or would, if I had a heart, which of course I don't.  Imagine too if we had more plays from ancient Greece and Rome ...  Of course, sometimes we do get lucky.

Swan Upping on the River Thames

How did I miss this annual avian census, complete with royal livery?  It dates from the 1100s!  By the way, check out the chaps who make it happen, the Queen's Swan Marker and the Swan Uppers of the Vintners' and Dyers' Livery Companies.  Call me crazy, but that sounds like the name of a band.  An Elizabethan punk rock band that plays at Renaissance festivals.

UPDATE: Oh!  Here's a tidbit especially for my friend Lady Bird, herself an ornithologist. The Swan Upping crew even has a resident nerd -- Professor Christopher Perrins of the University of Oxford, an ornithologist who specializes in swans (natch). His role is helping to check Her Majesty's swans and cygnets for disease.  He gets the very cool title of "the Queen's Swan Warden."  Just imagine how that looks on a CV!

Nerd Notes: Warrior Scholars of World War II

Meet Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) and some of his remarkable peers in this captivating obituary. I am utterly charmed.  Leigh Fermor, by the way, managed to kidnap a Nazi general on Crete and quote the Roman poet Horace in almost the same breath.  Hail and farewell, sir!  Ave atque vale!

Punctuation Panic: The Oxford Comma

Keep it!  I think it's beautiful, useful, and necessary.

Nerd Notes: A Wellesley Conservative

A personal story from a famous college campus.

Nerd Notes: A History Prof Ponders Ken Burns and the Civil War

Read the entire thing.

Nerd Notes: Researching Gendercide

Thoughts on the unnatural gender imbalance in Asia -- what some people call "gendercide," the selective abortion of girls.

Nerd Notes: At Commencement, Are You an Athenian or a Visigoth?

Here's fascinating, though undelivered, commencement address.  Link via Stones Cry Out.

Nerd Notes: Time to Get Rid of Affirmative Action?

Hmmmm. Well, yeah.  One of my recent campus memories is a white male telling me, with perfect seriousness and sincerity, that in the minorities/diversity game, "Asians don't count."

Ancient Site, Modern Perils: Excavating Jerusalem's Temple Mount

Here is a lengthy writeup in Smithsonian magazine.

A Nerd Rant: The Politicized Campus

Hmmmm.  Well, OK, but as usual this sort of generalized conversation bothers me because it focuses almost exclusively on "wow, there are so many leftists in academia" and has no mention or thought AT ALL of the conservatives, libertarians, centrists, and independents who ARE ALREADY THERE.  Gee, thanks a lot.  What are we, chopped liver?  So on one hand we have liberals basically crowing that they have a chokehold on campus culture and on the other we have folks complaining about it.  What about my tiny group of compatriots and me who are doing our best out there as teachers and students?  We want a vibrant place for debate of all ideas and political outlooks.  I for one am not advocating that we exchange one kind of campus mental hegemony for another.  Anyway, what we need is a good shot of intellectual honesty -- read this -- though I'm pretty sure we're not going to get it from anywhere.  The politicized campus is so riven with ideological faultlines that it's almost too unstable for rational discourse.  Rant follows after the jump: