Blogs

In a recent interview with Mother Jones, the author Philip Pullman admits: ‘I'm perfectly happy about being superstitious and atheistic.’ Pullman, who has been outspoken about his own lack of faith and has critiqued organised religion in much of his writing, describes a set of rituals he has around his writing

Last Friday I had the chance to drop by the MLA conference for the first time ever. In my faculty days, I used to attend APSA fairly regularly; now I can sometimes be found at the League for Innovation or the AACC. The MLA was a new one. But between an opportunity to participate in a bloggers’ panel in the Exhibit Hall Theater and an unusually accessible location, I couldn’t turn it down.

This Hanukkah/Christmas my wife and I gave each other Fitbit Ones, a wearable digital activity tracker that measures steps, distance, calories burned, stairs climbed and sleep.

Many creative writing courses operate under something called the gag rule. I didn't like it, but didn't know why.

The “end of history illusion” was coined by Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues. Their research, cited in last week’s NPR article You Can’t See it, But You’ll be a Different Person in 10 Years, showed that people tend to underestimate how much they will change in the future.

I usually ease off on reading news stories during the time period between Christmas and New Year’s Day. It isn’t that the news is less important, it is just that I find this an ideal moment to just relax and enjoy quality family time. This year was different. I was focused on the cliff, the ominous fiscal cliff.

In August 2012 the Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, signed a bill making it mandatory for all federal universities in Brazil to reserve 50% of the places in each degree program for students coming from public schools according to their family incomes and their ethnic profile (self-declared descendants of blacks and Brazilian natives), and giving them four years to implement the programs. Not to be undone, in December of 2012 the governor of the State of São Paulo, Geraldo Alkimin, announced his own affirmative action project for the state universities, calling it a program of “social inclusion with merit”.

Our family spent the week between Christmas and New Year's traveling, as we try to do every year. This is partly because, since my mother died, we have no family nearby, and so have no fixed celebration ritual, and partly because it is cheaper to travel when no one else wants to.