Who Do You Have to Know to Get Some Help Around Here?

Not even as many people as Mr. Six-Degrees-of-Separation, Stanley Milgram, thought. A new study by scientists at Facebook and the University of Milan put the number of degrees of separation at 4.74!?

Two Out of Three R’s

Here’s an article I mentioned in class today on all-too-frequent grammatical and stylistic mistakes in student writing.  As I said before, the most important part of Yagoda’s whole discussion is his claim (which I’m inclined to believe) that reading good prose is the best (perhaps the only?) way to really develop a feel for the complex rules governing English grammar.

Nice Guys & Party Animals

Sociology Newbies:  Americans are practically indoctrinated with the idea that competition is the most basic fact of nature (then there is the common, question-begging assumption that what is natural is therefore to be endorsed).  Law of the Jungle.  Devil take the hindmost.  But as the eminent neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga shows (and as we discussed on Monday), much recent neuroscientific research suggests that cooperation is as much a part of our human hardwiring as competition is.

An even greater panoply of evidence is discussed in Gazzaniga’s most recent book.  But I want to draw your attention to an Op-Ed that came out (serendipitously enough) the day we discussed these topics.  David Brooks covers some even more recent studies of this kind and concludes that ‘Nice Guys Finish First’ (this will be news to the pickup artists depicted by Neil Strauss in an earlier reading, but that’s a topic for another day).  Pace Pinker, human nature may not be as Hobbesian as you might think.

I’m Not the Nicest Re: Electronic Devices

I feel like an ogre vis-á-vis my gadgets policy, so I’ll borrow someone else’s ogre-ish words for a moment.  This is from an Op-Ed that appeared recently in The New York Times featuring ‘advice for freshmen from the people who actually grade their papers and lead their class discussions‘:

Devices have become security blankets. Take the time to wean yourself.

Start by scheduling a few Internet-free hours each day, with your phone turned off. It’s the only way you’ll be able to read anything seriously, whether it’s Plato or Derrida on Plato. (And remember, you’ll get more out of reading Derrida on Plato if you read Plato first.) This will also have the benefit of making you harder to reach, and thus more mysterious and fascinating to new friends and acquaintances.

When you leave your room for class, leave the laptop behind. In a lecture, you’ll only waste your time and your parents’ money, disrespect your professor and annoy whomever is trying to pay attention around you by spending the whole hour on Facebook.

You don’t need a computer to take notes — good note-taking is not transcribing. All that clack, clack, clacking … you’re a student, not a court reporter. And in seminar or discussion sections, get used to being around a table with a dozen other humans, a few books and your ideas. After all, you have the rest of your life to hide behind a screen during meetings.

— CHRISTINE SMALLWOOD, Ph.D. student in English and American literature at Columbia

Below is a photograph taken during budget negotiations in the Connecticut legislature.  I believe you may be inclined to agree with me when I suggest that very few people are capable of resisting computer-based temptation.

Thirty Years Gone

Roger Cohen plumbs the foundations of Iran’s ‘revolutionary establishment’ thirty years after the Revolution, and warns against military confrontation.

Avatards

The use of media devices has been linked with a higher risk of highway fatalities, lost business, dysfunctional government, ruined dates, and even pedestrian mishaps.  Is it any wonder I forbid their use in the classroom?  Defenders of such devices claim that they need them in order to retrieve discussion-relevant data, or to take notes, or to stimulate creativity.  But at the end of the day, it’s best to remember the words of Nancy Flynn, a consultant in Columbus, OH:

“People mistakenly think that tapping is not as distracting as talking,” she said. “In fact, it can be every bit as much if not more distracting. And it’s pretty insulting to the speaker.”

Do you really want to run the risk of insulting a classmate while she’s giving a presentation?  And what about (ahem) the guy who’s responsible for your final grade?

Richard III/3 Richards

Apropos of tomorrow’s agenda in class, here’s a great website wherein Sir Ian McKellen introduces three very different takes on the famous opening speech of Shakespeare’s Richard III.  This past summer, there was a production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music entitled ‘Richard III:  An Arab Tragedy’.

If there’s time, we might also get a chance to listen to a bit of this multimedia interview with the director, Suleyman al-Bassam.  It’s quite a twist to listen to the video:  al-Bassam translated Shakespeare’s text into (high?) Arabic, then flashed surtitles in re-translated English for the benefit of the American audience.

Twenty Years Gone

Apropos of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Timothy Garton Ash has not one, but two articles on 1989 in recent editions of The New York Review of Books.

America/Rules

Preyer 207 is dead.  Long live Preyer 207!

I no longer inhabit that particular office–or the campus on whose perimeter it was situated, for that matter.  But the blog, once on Movable Type, proved movable.  Who’d have thought that a Web log could exist independent of a physical place?…

Anyhoo, welcome, Political Sociologues.  I had an epiphany at 23:59 while rereading Domhoff’s ‘Who Rules America?’ and decided we should watch this documentary:

Someone else has posted a better-quality version, but the first half has been taken down.  We can switch to it at some point.

Here’s an earlier 2003 documentary by the same director (Jamie Johnson, a Johnson & Johnson heir); I believe it was his first.  I’m not sure how the topic and theme of this one differs from The One Percent…

miscellaneous me

Better late than never…

Karl Mannheim.doc

Max Weber PE and SC.doc
second theory pres.ppt

Finally, as promised on the third day of class, here are some of my favorite inauguration pics:

Tha End

Drew