Strangechord

Here are a few things I’ve clicked on recently that you should too:

• Sprol: the worst places in the world, using Google’s new satellite maps to hone in on man-made eyesores
  
• Speaking of eyesores, James Howard Kunstler, author of peak oil book The Long Emergency, posts Eyesore of the Month. Be sure to click back through the archives; his commentary is a riot. This is monstrous!
  
• Cleis’ notes on meeting Vandana Shiva: Parts I and II. Shiva speaks truth.
  
• Particularly delightful review of Thomas Friedman’s horrid new book, The World is Flat. Don’t you just love a clever and well-deserved skewering? I ‘ve loathed Friedman for years.

  On an ideological level, Friedman’s new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country.

• Terrific blog heretofore unknown: Left2Right. A recent entry on teaching, grades and overall accountability in higher education is a must-read. From the comments, a remark relevant to my independent study:

  As more and more schools have to “leave no child behind” and start teaching to the state tests and standards, kids get the message that school is about knowing what you need to learn to pass the test and that’s it. It’s not about learning, exploration, and discovery. Combine that with a culture of textbooks that spoonfeed information, and there’s a recipe for disaster when these kids are faced with college-level intellectual and critical thinking expectations. The hardest thing for many of my first-years to do is to read a serious piece of social science or political theory and figure out just what the author is saying. They have never been asked to read in a serious way something where the answers weren’t provided in a pretty colored text box at the end of the chapter.