Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Several years ago, Jordan Peterson told me he wanted to buy a church. This was long before he became known as “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world,” as he was described in the pages of the New York Times a few months ago. It was before he was fancied to be a…
HALLOWEEN is supposed to last for one night only. At Yale University (motto: “Light and Truth”) it has dragged on considerably longer. As happens at many American universities, Yale administrators sent an advisory e-mail to students before the big night, requesting them to refrain from wearing costumes that other students might find offensive. Given that…
As the recent uproar over Starbucks’ apparently not-festive-enough holiday cups has demonstrated, a contingent of right-leaning Americans has taken to bemoaning what they perceive as the country’s downward death spiral at the hands of political correctness. Their latest target? Wednesday’s Google Doodle, which celebrates Veterans Day. Visible on the search engine’s homepage, the Doodle depicts a…
Protesters, students, and media fill Traditions Plaza at the University of Missouri. Credit Photograph by Michael Cali / San Diego Union-Tribune / TNS via Landov Barrier Status: ‘none’ Of the many concerns unearthed by the protests at two major universities this week, the velocity at which we now move from racial recrimination to self-righteous backlash…
photo by FreeImages.com/Martina – I know why you’re here. Something has happened that has pushed you over the edge. You know, with regards to “political correctness.” Or “call-out culture,” or the “Internet outrage machine,” or whatever you want to call it. It’s been a lot of little things up until now — you know, comments that you’ve…
Christakis lives at Yale, where he presides over one of its undergraduate colleges. His wife Erika, a lecturer in early childhood education, shares that duty. They reside among students and are responsible for shaping residential life. And before Halloween, some students complained to them that Yale administrators were offering heavy-handed advice on what Halloween costumes…
A recent poll of college students’ attitudes toward free speech (in general and on campus) is a mixed bag. The survey by McLaughlin & Associates for the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale shows that 87% of respondents agreed with this statement: “There is educational value in listening to and understanding views and opinions that…
There are probably more articles on the internet arguing about trigger warnings on college syllabuses than there are actual trigger warnings on college syllabuses. Only one college, Oberlin College, actually recommended that professors warn students about content that might be disturbing or traumatizing — and they eventually withdrew that policy. But however infrequently they’re actually…
So lately I’ve had people passing around this article by Caitlin Flanagan about the p.c. police ruining campus comedy, which appears to be stage one of a one-two punch from the Atlantic about how p.c.-ness is ruining college in general, with the haymaker being Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s magnum opus about how p.c. culture is somehow…
By Jaya Saxena on May 31st, 2015 Cards Against Humanity, before it became go-to entertainment for a generation raised on the Internet and saddled with a backward idea of political correctness, began as a crowdsourced, printable game created by a group of old high school friends. A 2011 Kickstarter campaign produced the actual cards. In…