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Professor who closed the laptop of a student surfing the web during class acquitted of battery-and fired.
Archive for the ‘Handbasket, world going to hell in’ Category
August 9th, 2011
Now would be a good time to have a charitable thought for pundits, bloggers, opinion columnists - yes, and policy professors - for whom the last month has been incredibly challenging, harder than any time in the last decade. When the world behaves like a parody of grownup affairs, and people with positional authority are [...]
June 12th, 2011
The APA Monitor has an interview with Dr. Sherry Turkle who has documented how iphones, blackberries and other mobile devices have reduced the amount of attention users pay to people who are physically present. I love the technology as much as the next person, but there is something sad in reading that fathers are emailing [...]
May 5th, 2011
Consider four psychiatric patients, all discharged from an inpatient unit on the same day following stabilization of an acute psychotic episode. A week later, the following events takes place: Arnold’s symptoms return and in despair he commits suicide. Barbara’s symptoms return and she goes on a cocaine binge, fueling her aggressive tendencies to the point [...]
April 20th, 2011
Category: Commerce and its discontents, Handbasket, world going to hell in, Popular Culture, Strange world
A Saturday Night Live sketch from the late 1970′s featured a store that only sold Scotch tape. Not tape — only Scotch tape. Then, when the economy went bad, the sketch said that the store did well because everyone needed Scotch tape for their “Going Out Of Business” signs. It was a pretty funny sketch; [...]
April 9th, 2011
Category: Handbasket, world going to hell in
My wife and I greatly admire the parenting of some friends of ours who live in Palo Alto, land of compulsive overachievment. After school, the other parents in their neighborhood chaffeur their kids to Hebrew lessons, dance classes, debate societies, baseball coaching (not Little League mind you, but private instructors in hitting, fielding etc.) and [...]
April 6th, 2011
Category: Handbasket, world going to hell in, Teaching
Student refuses to stop surfing the web during class. Professor shuts her laptop. Result: professor sued, arrested, suspended.
February 27th, 2011
Category: Handbasket, world going to hell in
Last week in London, I ran into an acquaintance who kindly invited me to share a bottle of claret with him and a friend of his. After the bottle was drained and our little group was about to disband, the friend mentioned he was off to the Reform Club and asked if I would like [...]
