Commonplacing

"Something has gone terribly wrong,” said Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia,..."

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 05:08:45 -0500

“Something has gone terribly wrong,” said Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, “when the biggest threat to our American economy is the American Congress.”

- Jennifer Steinhauer, “A Showdown Long Foreseen,” New York Times, December 31, 2012.
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"It is through spatial structures that mental structures take shape."

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 14:53:14 -0400

“It is through spatial structures that mental structures take shape.”

- Pierre Bourdieu, quoted in Françoise Gaspard, A Small City in France, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 60.

"The point of submitting a piece of writing to the scrutiny of another is that self-editing is so..."

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 08:09:26 -0400

“The point of submitting a piece of writing to the scrutiny of another is that self-editing is so darned hard. Scholars especially need another eye on their work, because they compose at a high level of abstraction and detail. Few brains can simultaneously monitor conceptual progress and mechanical detail without lapses. Academic copy editors can find plenty to improve even in the writing of English Ph.D.’s—just as those scholars are perfectly able to point out errors in writing other than their own.”

- Carol Saller, “Are You a Difficult Writer?”, Lingua Franca, The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 27, 2012.

"The contraction of the public imagination preceded the Tea Party and opened the way for its..."

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 19:21:00 -0400

“The contraction of the public imagination preceded the Tea Party and opened the way for its political effects.”

- Daniel T. Rodgers, “‘Moocher Class’ Warfare: How four decades of radical individualism diminished society and gave rise to the Tea Party,” Democracy: A Journal of Ideas 24 (Spring 2012), p. 3.

"The most faithful followers of obscure leftist thinkers in Paris, New York or Berkeley are the most..."

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 09:19:04 -0400

“The most faithful followers of obscure leftist thinkers in Paris, New York or Berkeley are the most reactionary elements in the American heartland.”

- Ian Buruma, “A New Idea of Truth,” Aljazeera English, March 12, 2012

"It should go without saying that any education worthy of the name teaches children as individuals...."

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:03:00 -0500

“It should go without saying that any education worthy of the name teaches children as individuals. It is equally axiomatic that being an individual does not prevent you from also being part of of one, indeed, many groups. At one and the same time we are always several things and just one, ourselves.”

- Gary Younge, “Replacing History with Fiction in Arizona,” The Nation, February 27, 2012, and at http://www.thenation.com/article/166140/replacing-history-fiction-arizona.

"Every time Congress takes a step to protect consumers, the banks use it as an excuse to raise fees..."

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 09:39:00 -0400

“Every time Congress takes a step to protect consumers, the banks use it as an excuse to raise fees … That doesn’t mean Congress shouldn’t pass consumer protection laws.”

- Mallory Duncan, general counsel for the National Retail Federation, in Ylan Q. Mui, “Bank of America to add $5 monthly debit card fee as era of low-cost banking ebbs,” The Washington Post, Sept. 29, 2011.

Source:...

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 12:09:54 -0400

Source: http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/theres-always-a-class-war-going-on/39464

Source: http://www.buendnis-gegen-rechts.gelsenzentrum.de/

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 18:43:03 -0400

Source: http://www.buendnis-gegen-rechts.gelsenzentrum.de/

"Today’s radical conservatism is an unholy and unstable hodgepodge of ideas that are fundamentally..."

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 13:05:14 -0400

“Today’s radical conservatism is an unholy and unstable hodgepodge of ideas that are fundamentally alien to each other. This marriage is doomed.”

- Susan Brooks Thislethwaite, “The Gospel according to Ayn Rand,” On Faith, The Washington Post, April 18, 2011.

"Collectively, the past month served as a reminder that a piece of hardware should only be replaced..."

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 09:59:10 -0400

“Collectively, the past month served as a reminder that a piece of hardware should only be replaced if it’s about to stop working (whether it’s worn-out or just not up to challenges that didn’t exist when you first bought it) or if the new one can transform the way you work. Otherwise, you’re just being a big, dopey consumer.”

- Andy Ihnatko, “To upgrade, or not?” Macworld.com, April 17, 2011.

Too trivial to commonplace on this tumblelog? I think not. So much of our lives is bound up in such objects that it is important to step back and look at the conversation, or at least snippets from it—like the previous quote on telephoning. Life isn’t always profound.

"Phone calls are rude. Intrusive. Awkward."

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 09:58:32 -0400

“Phone calls are rude. Intrusive. Awkward.”

- Pamela Paul, “Don’t Call Me, I Won’t Call You,” New York Times, 18 March 2011.

"Broadly construed, digital humanities is the use of digital media and technology to advance the full..."

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 12:49:12 -0400

“Broadly construed, digital humanities is the use of digital media and technology to advance the full range of thought and practice in the humanities, from the creation of scholarly resources, to research on those resources, to the communication of results to colleagues and students.”

- Dan Cohen, “Defining Digital Humanities, Briefly,” on his blog, Dan Cohen, 9 March 2011. See also the interesting comment by Alan Shapiro about “reversing the term.”

"If, in the achievement of knowledge and the recognition of that knowledge we’ve actually..."

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 22:51:13 -0500

“If, in the achievement of knowledge and the recognition of that knowledge we’ve actually closed off our openness to new knowledge, we really haven’t learned anything.”

- Nick Lowery, interview with Lisa Furlong, Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, Jan/Feb 2011, p. 96.

"[E]mbracing an interest in the learning of a second language doesn’t weaken a society but rather..."

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 16:12:07 -0500

“[E]mbracing an interest in the learning of a second language doesn’t weaken a society but rather strengthens it. It doesn’t go against national unity and identity as is argued in some ethnocentric political circles by shortsighted cronies.”

- Francisco Marmolejo, “Deficiency in Foreign Language Competency: What Is Wrong with the U.S. Educational System?,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 9, 2010.

"The mind of the demagogue is a foreign country. It has a strange culture, enemies that only the..."

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 14:57:42 -0400

“The mind of the demagogue is a foreign country. It has a strange culture, enemies that only the natives can see, a passion about the ridiculous and a blowtorch kind of sincerity that incinerates logical thinking. On Sunday, the custodian of one such blowtorch was on Fox News. I am speaking, of course, of Sarah Palin.”

- Richard Cohen, “Sarah Palin: Ms. Conspiracy for president?,” The Washington Post, Nov. 2, 2010.

"Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the..."

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 10:11:43 -0400

“Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates.”

- Simone Weil, “The Iliad” or “The Poem of Force” (1940), quoted in Chris Hedges, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (New York: Anchor Books, 2002), 21.

"[M]an … is moulded by society just as effectively as society is moulded by him. You can no..."

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 10:06:52 -0400

“[M]an … is moulded by society just as effectively as society is moulded by him. You can no more have the egg without the hen than you can have the hen without the egg… . It is not that the view of man as an individual is more or less misleading than the view of him as a member of the group; it is the attempt to draw a distinction between the two which is misleading.”

- Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History? (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 39, 57–58.

"Whenever historians and social scientists talk about the military as a profession, they talk about..."

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 19:30:36 -0400

“Whenever historians and social scientists talk about the military as a profession, they talk about Prussia, but this Prussia has the irritating quality of changing every time it is discussed.”

- Michael Geyer, “The Past as Future: The German Ofﬁcer Corps as Profession,” in German Professions, 1800-1950, ed. Geoffrey Cocks and Konrad H. Jarausch (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 183.

"There’s always an ROF (Return on Failure) when you try to simplify—which is to learn from your..."

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 12:14:53 -0400

“There’s always an ROF (Return on Failure) when you try to simplify—which is to learn from your mistakes.”

- John Maeda, Laws of Simplicity, 83.