Tumblr Has Banned Adult Content, RIP the Tumblr That Was (The Mary Sue) For a couple of years after my family moved back into our house post-reconstruction (following the fire we had back in 2001), we didn’t have cable television. My father claimed that he did this to encourage us to talk more with each other, but as with so many of his similar plans, he just wanted more excuses to spew out his inane prattle on any and all topics under the sun. Right after he…
First past the post vs. proportional representation: B.C.’s referendum explained (CBC) Jared Golden declared winner of first ranked-choice congressional election, but challenge looms (Portland Press Herald) Brian Kemp’s Win In Georgia Is Tainted by Voter Suppression (Mother Jones) The combination of my growing interest in politics of all stripes in the early 1990’s, and me living close enough to the Canadian border that I was regularly watching CBC to satiate my hockey fix, meant that I quickly got hooked on CBC’s Friday night political comedy…
Don’t Look Now, but the 2020 Senate Map Is Brutal for Democrats (vice.com) Attempting to define the word “democracy” beyond its most abstract sense often proves incredibly difficult. The mechanisms we humans have devised to try to enact democracy, like all our other creations, are subject to imperfections and errors, some more glaring than others. When this country realized that its initial governing document, the Articles of Confederation, were working so poorly that civil war seemed imminent, our founders reunited to write the Constitution in…
Roughly 80 Percent Of Americans Scared Political Incivility Will Lead To More Violence (wesa.fm) As the 2016 election taught us all, probability is not certainty. Maybe those of us who love crunching numbers (I know, I’m an English teacher, but I was drawn more to math when I was younger because the assholes who were “teaching” me back then couldn’t mess with my grades when they had to be calculated objectively), and follow along with the websites and television talking heads that do the most…
We have 12 years to save the world. What do we do now? (The Weather Network via msn.com) In one of my classes earlier this semester, my students and I spent a long time brainstorming the advantages and disadvantages of taking classes online. Although I’ve taught online before, and would welcome the chance to do so again, my teaching style is better suited to in-person classroom environments, and the discussion I had with my students that morning was a prime example of how some teaching…