Sunday Roundup

It's been a lively week, dashing from topic to topic as usual. I spend a lot (too much) time thinking about blogging and wondering if I'd have more readers if I just posted lots of stories on one topic. Probably. But I'd get bored and it wouldn't reflect my real range of interests.

So this week moved, as usual, through disability to masculinity to politics & history to academia. That seems to be the usual range.

• Last Sunday I wrote about "disability and genius," celebrating the people with disability who triumph and succeed beyond our wildest expectations, but also wondering about the people who don't? How do we celebrate triumphs while valuing everyone?
• On Monday, I wrote about masculinity again, arguing that fathers who feel disrespected by women should focus their ire on patriarchy, not feminism.
• Tuesday turned to academia and the "Northwestern Study" that claimed freshmen learned more from adjuncts than tenure-stream faculty. In the academic world, there's been a lot of hubbub, but I felt too much of it was missing the point. Yes, this tells us something about adjuncts. But I wonder why we should expect R1 tenure stream faculty to care about teaching when every reward pushses them out of the classroom. I also snuck in a post about parental leave and feminism.
• Wednesday, 9/11, focused on my cousin, Ambassador Chris Stephens.
• Thursday features pirates and princesses and gender critique. Seriously, why haven't you read this yet? I also talk about Vikings.
• For Friday, I linked to a great piece from The Atlantic about borders and Syria. There are no natural borders.
• On Saturday, I linked to a syllabus from RISD on assistive technology. With Nico's use of the ipad and a speech app, I'm interested in what the deep thinkers on this are talking about.

Today, it's more on police brutality and disability. I know, I know, I'd get more hits with cute pictures of my son playing with the cat.