I'm back in DC.  Lugged my overweight (by two pounds! but that made it 52 pounds) suitcase through the metro system, including a mistaken early exit at the Archives station - always forget there's a station between L'Enfant Plaza and Gallery Place.  This is how my roommates greeted me:

• Jordan: hug.
• Aaron: hiding in my room and jumping out when I ( Read more... )

My experiment with Mad Men is now over - it just got too depressing for me.  I have started devoting my couple hours of free time between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. (seriously) to Nip/Tuck, which so far I'm enjoying a lot more.  It's interesting, because they're ostensibly very similar shows - main characters are male professionals, there's a lot of ( Read more... )

I have been in DC for two weeks now.  So far I have:

- Started classes.  Have to drop one out of four.  Must get BACK IN THE ZONE of studying and discussing things, mainly by focusing and working out a caffeine injection schedule.  This is actually the part of my life I'm most worried about right now.  Weird, right?  I think maybe I over-worried ( Read more... )

1.  My mother and I are going through the basement.  She finds a manila envelope stuffed with old pictures from the 1940s-1960s of her nuclear family growing up.  The ones from the 1950s really do make them look like a "perfect American family" - tight-lipped but proud father, demure homemaker mother, and the older brother (my uncle) looks like he ( Read more... )

Jon Krakauer has produced an investigative expose of Greg Mortenson and his memoirs about building schools in Afghanistan, Three Cups of Tea and Stones Into Schools (available for free at byliner until April 20th).  Krakauer seems mostly pissed off because the dramatic story was used to solicit donations for the Central Asia Institute - Krakauer ( Read more... )

It's budget cutting time at the university, and while majors, faculty positions, staff positions, departments, and structures are being eliminated, the coach of the men's basketball team - which hovers somewhere between "appalling" and "merely embarrassing" in league play - has received a $100,000 raise to a salary of $900,000 each year.  Nebraska ( Read more... )

Leaving at 5 a.m. tomorrow to visit two grad schools in D.C.  Feel ridiculously nervous about it even though I've already been admitted, so I'm the one doing the deciding, not the schools.  More nervous about how I will like them than anything else, hoping that I don't find out anything horrible and don't have any more reason to second-guess my not ( Read more... )

Daniel Hemmens of FerretBrain on teaching history in British schools:Simon Schama observed recently that British school students were missing out on “vast tracts” of our nation's past. Now this is the kind of thing that the mail loves. Nothing suits a British tabloid better than a WE ARE FAILING OUR CHILDREN story, particularly if it can be ( Read more... )

I was watching the Law & Order series finale.  It was a pretty intense episode, about a blog that posts threats of shooting up a school.  I thought the twist was pretty neat-o for Law & Order, and I was certainly tense at the end.  The NYTimes has a good write-up of it, and I agree that the Department of Ed. and teachers' unions probably won't be ( Read more... )

How cool is my alma mater high school, yo?
Several Lincoln East High School students were suspended Wednesday for making or distributing fake "green cards" thrown onto the field after the championship soccer game against Omaha South.

Sixty percent of Omaha South's students are Latino -- and the green cards were an apparent reference to immigration ( Read more... )