Earlier this morning, I led my high school students through a discussion of Waiting for Godot. The students will be making a film trailer for their version of the play (we won’t actually perform the play; just make a trailer for it), so I showed them a bunch of YouTube clips of  various performances and commercials for [...]

In June of 2006, a few weeks after graduating from college with a bachelor’s degree in Theories of Writing, I decided to apply to an M.F.A. program in Creative Writing. The only school I wanted to attend required a longish writing sample (20 pages) as part of its application. Because most of the stories I’d [...]

During All Things Considered yesterday, Robert Siegel interviewed an Egyptian parliamentarian named Abdul Mawgoud Rageh Dardery. Dardery is a member of Egypt’s Freedom and Justice Party, which is the political arm of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. If you remember, the Muslim Brotherhood is an organization that calls for Sharia law while also remaining dedicated to democratic principles. [...]

As many article junkies are nowadays, I’m a big fan of Instapaper, which is “a simple tool to save web pages for reading later.” I use it to save long-form articles that I come across on the web. After saving and then reading an article in Instapaper, you can “Like” the article or archive/delete it from [...]

In an essay for The New Republic, “The Higher Education Monopoly is Crumbling As We Speak,” Kevin Carey writes that “the single greatest asset held by traditional colleges and universities is their exclusive franchise for the production and sale of higher education credentials.” He continues: “Just as people are ultimately interested in buying holes, not drills, [...]

“It is utterly impossible to get any sort of consensus on what we poor secularists need from religion. The beauty and danger of organized religion has always been its authoritarian aspect: It tells us what is wrong and what is right, what is healthy and what is impure. Apply these edicts to the secular world, [...]

Back in December, I went through a small health issue that, among other things, resulted in my giving up caffeine. Prior to December, and for the previous ten years or so, I’d been a relatively hardcore coffee drinker. For most of that decade, I worked from home, so every morning, I’d brew a full pot [...]