Cure-alls and Remedies
I am teaching this course again. Every year it changes, and this year I hope it changes a lot. Here’s what I said about this today, our first day of classes: Any story about crime and punishment is bound to start with a few stylized facts. Until this year, I’ve started with the same number:…
The University of Toronto’s Sociology Department posts the reading lists for its PhD comprehensive exams.
What worries me about Silicon Valley’s mindfulness stoicism is the sense that it combines all the worst elements of world mastery and manliness with the stoicism of the weak: acceptance of injustice, the embrace of a hostile natural (and social!) world to which we must conform, and a quietism that locates our agency in that compliance while praising it as mastery.
This past weekend, we inaugurated a new competition soliciting “civic games.” Hopefully it will become an annual contest, but for now the most vexing question coming from game designers is: “What makes a game civic?” Our definition of civics offers little help: we argue that civics is an expansive conception of politics, understood as a…
What should schools do about the fact that politicians are frequently both wrong and immoral in ways that violate educational norms? How can civics education be civil if civic engagement rarely is?