Amidst all the excitement about yesterday’s California ruling legalizing gay marriage, it’s worth remembering that reactionary heteronormativity, while on the decline, isn’t going away. The interim principal of an all-girls Catholic high school in Staten Island, New York has declared that junior girls may not attend their prom next week unless they are accompanied by a male escort. Watch a local TV news report here. I know. It’s almost too 1950s to be believed. Parents are pissed, while students have been barred by the school from speaking to the media. Principal Florence Bricker, what are you thinking? Don’t you want your students to grow up into assertive, independent young women capable of having a great, safe night without relying on men? Or don’t you? - from Dana Goldstein in the American Prospect blog
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shield your eyes
In the Basement of the Ivory Tower | by "Professor X" in The Atlantic
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Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it—try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish. But one piece of the puzzle hasn’t been figured into the equation, to use the sort of phrase I encounter in the papers submitted by my English 101 students. The zeitgeist of academic possibility is a great inverted pyramid, and its rather sharp point is poking, uncomfortably, a spot just about midway between my shoulder blades.
For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.
Beer Pong as art at Alex Da Corte and Jack Sloss’s Love Explosion at the Fleisher-Ollman Gallery.
Breathe Easy: Clinton's Win Doesn't Mean Anything
The Observer’s Steve Kornacki explains. “[I]t’s true that no Democrat since Woodrow Wilson has won the presidency without West Virginia. But the exact same is true about Minnesota – a state where Obama crushed Clinton back on February 5. And Minnesota is every bit the swing state that West Virginia is. (Actually, it’s more of one: In 2004, George W. Bush won West Virginia by 13 points, while John Kerry won Minnesota by three. Plus, Minnesota is worth twice as many electoral votes – 10 – as West Virginia and its five.)”
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I wrote about dressing rooms this week. Brace yourself for my mind-blowing reportage! Kim’s quote kills me: “Kim Taylor, 23, fell through a dressing-room curtain in just a bra and panties while struggling to put on a pair of corduroys. ‘It was one of those ‘I was so mortified’ moments they print in magazines,’ she said. ‘I was wearing neon orange underwear, too.’”
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Personal Reminder: Built to Spill will perform their album Perfect From Now On at Terminal 5 in NYC on Sept. 25 and 26. Tickets go on sale Friday @ noon (via BrooklynVegan).
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