by Michael Bérubé on April 25, 2007
Among the many reasons to love the late Pierre Bourdieu, quite apart from the range and quality of his scholarly work, is the fact that he was willing to appear in the 1977 film <i>Slap Shot</i> as the character of Moe Wanchuk. He wrote about the experience many years later in <a href=”http://www.homme-moderne.org/raisonsdagir-editions/catalog/bourdieu/contref.html”><i>Contre-feux</i></a>, but most English-speaking readers remain completely unaware of Bourdieu’s brief career as a Charlestown Chief. I mean, talk about putting your cultural capital at risk:
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by Henry Farrell on April 25, 2007
Bits and pieces from elsewhere on the WWW in lieu of a proper post.
Via “Tyler”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/04/dani_rodrik_is_.html, I see that Dani Rodrik now has a “blog”:http://rodrik.typepad.com/. And has just won the first “Albert Hirschman prize”:http://www.ssrc.org/press/firstprize/, which sounds to be an excellent institution, honoring “scholars who have made outstanding contributions to international, interdisciplinary social science research, theory, and public communication. Hirschman is notoriously a prophet without honour in his own discipline; he’s far more widely read by sociologists (see Kieran’s “article”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/drafts/moral-order.pdf with Marion Fourcade for further discussion) and political scientists than by economists.
Cory Doctorow is turning out, in the best of all possible ways, to be an “uncomfortable guest”:http://www.boingboing.net/2007/04/25/usc_students_try_to_.html at the University of Southern California. There’s a lot more background in this “interview”:http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i31/31a03001.htm he did with the _Chronicle_ a few weeks back, which I meant to link to at the time, and never quite got around to. More on this later today or tomorrow.
This “bit”:http://www.chrishayes.org/blog/2007/apr/05/library-homeless-shelter/ at Chris Hayes’ blog (which you should all be reading) is thought provoking:
My friend Nick Reville once said something about public libraries that has always stuck with me. “If libraries didn’t already exist, there’d be no way they could ever come into existence now. Can you imagine telling the publishing industry that the government was going to pay to set up buildings where they gave away their product for free?” That’s as good a summary of our current political-economy as any.
by Harry on April 25, 2007
by Kieran Healy on April 25, 2007
Today while walking across campus I had the sobering realization that many people who were not yet born when I started college will themselves be starting college this autumn. In an effort to spread this sinking feeling around amongst readers older than me, I started college in 1990, when I was seventeen. Whenever I teach an undergraduate class, I ask the students what’s the earliest major news event they can remember. When I started teaching at Arizona, most students could remember the Challenger disaster. Then it was the fall of the Berlin Wall. Then the first Gulf War. Then Bill Clinton’s first-term election. At the moment it is the Oklahoma City bombing. Soon it will be the death of Princess Diana.