“How dare you? I’m almost twice your age.” I received this response from a student in my early days of teaching. I often taught at a community college where at least half my students were twice my age. Middle-aged adults don’t always take criticism well from a freshly-minted college graduate.

In this case, the institution gave me the power to critique student work, but we don’t always have this luxury. In the business world, how do you critique a potential client without losing their business? As a writer, how do you interpret various styles of critiques in productive ways? …

To many of us, this question seems preposterous. 2+2 = 4. Right? How can that be racist?

To be honest, I hadn’t thought much about this myself until a family member shared a quote from a Fox News story about a new teacher training initiative in Oregon. Presumably the link was meant to send me into a fit of rage against the liberal education machine. The quote went like this:

The Oregon Department of Education (ODE) recently encouraged teachers to register for training that encourages “ethnomathematics” and argues, among other things, that White supremacy manifests itself in the focus on…

No matter what political party you support, logical fallacies don’t really change. In the past week, I’ve seen several posts attempting to “bookmark” the status of our economy for our future selves. This will show up in four years as a Facebook memory, so we can compare just how worse things became under the new president. This is not new. Obama’s supporters posted the same thing in 2017 (most of which look remarkably similar). These posts go something like this:

Remember this day. No wars in 4 years. Job security. Oil independence. Gas is under $2.20. Stock market is above…

Soon after the events of January 6, 2021, Arnold Schwarzenegger posted a video on Twitter that quickly received over a million likes. What strikes me most about this 7 minute speech is that Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to be offering an alternative masculinity that starkly contrasts with what Donald Trump has weaponized for the past four years.

As James Knight notes in Toxic Masculinity Explains Trump’s Support Among Many Men, Trump’s masculine image has been a key to his success, and he works hard not to betray that image (even to the point of not wearing a mask). …

Though I’m sad to see Conan leaving the late-night arena, I must admit that I haven’t watched much of his TBS show since the pandemic … well, since my partner and I had twins, actually. In high school, I forced myself to stay awake so I could watch Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Later, I would program my VCR and double-check how much tape was left to be sure I could watch Conan’s show any time. (If you checked on me a few hours before my wedding, I was catching up on my Conan tapes before going on our honeymoon.)…

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Print metaphors no longer work in the digital age. Stop thinking in pages! For centuries, we’ve used books as a metaphor to structure our experience … at least in that thing we call “Western Civilization.” Before that, we used speech and other forms of experience to structure our experience.

In the print age, we tend to think about information in terms of sections, pages, and covers. Information technology is seen as containers. In oral cultures, information is organized in sound, through rhyme and stylistic devices. Information technology is linguistic.

Neither of these conceptual metaphors works for much of our digital…

I like this idea of using Yoga poses as a metaphor for the writing process. It makes me think of both activies as techne or a skill that is highly contextual. I would be really interested in hearing more about how writers might apply yoga philosophy to our mindset or approaches. For example, I think there is a principle called "do no harm," which might help us understand the peer review process better. Or maybe maybe Shiva can help us destroy our writing so we can start anew 😉.

By the way, you might try submitting some of these to Age of Awareness (a Medium collection). They would like this kind of thing.

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Acedia is a Greek word for “a state of uncaring apathy due to unrelenting crises.” Though this is a very old idea, used throughout history to describe a state of listlessness, acedia has been given a new meaning during the COVID-19 pandemic … arguably in the 21st century as a whole. We easily grow numb to statistics and images of death associated with the pandemic. Pile on top of this issues of social justice and environmental extremes brought on by climate change, we can easily lose our sense of empathy and action. …