In my ninth and tenth grades, I attended boarding school in India. Like many boarding schools of its type, it incorporated the disciplinary mechanism of the prefect: senior schoolboys placed in charge of those junior to them, armed with the rule book, and cricket bats and hockey sticks with which to hand out six ofContinue reading “Of Prefects and Punishment Drills”
Monthly Archives: May 2013
Big Business and its Friends on the US Supreme Court
An academic study conducted by Lee Epstein, William Landes and Richard Posner confirms something many of us have only intuited till now: [T]he business docket reflects something truly distinctive about the court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. While the current court’s decisions, over all, are only slightly more conservative than those from the courtsContinue reading “Big Business and its Friends on the US Supreme Court”
CUNY Administrators: Hanging with the Powerful
Readers of my ‘With Trustees Like These, Who Needs Enemies‘ series of posts will know that I’m not overly fond of CUNY administration. From interfering with faculty governance, to cracking down on academic freedom, to awarding golden parachutes to overpaid, retiring vice-chancellors, they appear to have most bases covered in their drive to subvert theContinue reading “CUNY Administrators: Hanging with the Powerful”
Mukul Kesavan on Making the Familiar Strange
Mukul Kesavan concludes a wonderful essay on Lucknow, the English language, Indian writing in English, the Indian summer, and ice-cream with: [T]the point of writing isn’t to make things familiar; it is to make them strange. Kesavan is right. To read is a form of escapism and what good would it be if we all weContinue reading “Mukul Kesavan on Making the Familiar Strange”
Letters to the Editor, Big Mouths, and Getting Slapped Down
By definition, a blogger is a bigmouth. He or she wants to say things out loud, write them down, and have others read them. As I noted in my ‘Happy Birthday Blog’ post last year, I intended this blog to be a ‘letter-to-the-editor plus notebook and scrapbook space,’ one where I could sound off andContinue reading “Letters to the Editor, Big Mouths, and Getting Slapped Down”
Writing: The Tools Change, the Neurosis Endures
Philip Hensher has written a book–The Missing Ink–on handwriting. In it, according to Jeremy Harding, he: [T]akes the view that we impress our individuality on a page when we make signs with a pen or pencil, that our culture is reaffirmed as we persist in the practice, and that the production of handwritten texts isContinue reading “Writing: The Tools Change, the Neurosis Endures”
Samir Chopra 