Grant Addison

people on twitter

His and hers mass-market paperbacks

@Kappa_Kappa I do remember. It was Mads

The Dosunmu takeover is great to watch

Taylen Green was a very fun quarterback to root for even on fairly bad teams. Very glad he got drafted; darn shame about the Browns, tho.

@ShehanJeyarajah This is my point: there are difficult arguments here involving unpleasant tradeoffs that the whole athletics-educational university-state and taxpayer apparatus will have to sort out almost across the board. How, exactly, does that equate to “skill issue”?

@jgrantaddison If we’re ready to establish college athletic departments as primarily revenue and college seeking entities, great — it’s gonna bring up some follow up questions that administrations do not want to answer.

Calling it a “skill issue” to for a public university to eliminate an extremely revenue negative non-academic athletic program is such an unserious consideration of the facts, tradeoffs, and realities at hand here.

As @rpondiscio always points out, E.D. Hirsch was right about cultural literacy

Really hard not to descend into anecdata here but movies and shows used to contain far more references to a more or less shared canon of pop culture, especially vis-a-vis movies referencing other movies’ iconic moments or lines, which reinforced knowledge of and engagement with older works, thus joining that conversation. Whereas now television shows reference memes and streaming company decision-makers proceed from the first assumption their audience knows nothing and isn’t even paying attention. The “limited” cable channel selection (far more than my parents’ generation had, far fewer than unlimited streaming) also meant Turner Classic Movies and TV Land were more prominent viewing options even for kids and teenagers.

Should the men’s college football program and men’s college basketball program be required to subsidize nearly every other athletic program at a public university? Probably not, in my view, but potentially (and they certainly must in regards to some programs such as women’s college basketball). There are more values-based arguments about supporting the broader array of collegiate sporting endeavors that I’m willing to entertain. But financial realities exist, and they are especially salient at a public university, even one with a sizable donor-base for athletics.

Mobility stretches are a fresh level of torture devised in the ninth layer of hell. Why did God design the body this way

@antoniogm @FukuyamaFrancis You don’t even have to read the book! This conclusion is in the considerably shorter National Interest essay, and yet it still goes under-appreciated or strictly ignored

One of the IQ tests in the discourse is whether you think @FukuyamaFrancis is a discredited naïf or a prescient, cynical genius, because you actually read past the title ‘End of History’ through 30 chapters of reinterpreted Hegel and Nietzsche and got to the devastating conclusion.

Also MacFarlane knows about the cat in DCC that he just bought the rights to, yeah? The talking one, doing magic, requiring extensive cg?

Return to Muppet

Probably the worst quote I’ve ever seen from someone allegedly trying to adapt a video game

LeBron James, man

The underlying assumption here that universities deserved whatever level of trust they enjoyed before Chris seemingly single-handedly drove it downward in a mean way is baffling to me. Rising costs were the tip of the spear on higher education’s trust collapse, and was moving that needle far before conservatives such as Chris started hammering specific practices ~2015. Also trust is good but only when the thing in question is worthy of it? Relying on trust exclusively as a measure of value is a Campbell’s law fallacy.

The whole question was whether the institutions were capable of internal regulation and setting themselves on the right course. The answer has been a resounding NO and so we’re on to politics, which any adult understanding of will acknowledge the negative externalities. If you want to do a whole thing describing how Rufo is a Bad Person that’s your prerogative I guess, but it doesn’t matter, no one will care, and people will interpret it as motivated by self interest and as a means of ingratiating yourself with the institutions. The only thing that matters is whether you can deliver any results from your efforts. And if you can’t deliver meaningful change like Rufo and Trump II have you will rightly be judged as a failure no matter how right minded and conciliatory you are.

I want to clearly state where I think @christopherrufo has been harmful for American civic life. He has certainly done some good. My concern is that his tactics are a kind of civic poison. They salt the social earth, making trust hard to rebuild and polarization hard to reduce. I'm part of the Ohio civics project. I left an ordinary academic job to throw myself into the work of academic reform, building institutions that serve as a counterweight to left-wing overreach. The academy is in deep need of reform. I am not a beautiful loser asking conservatives to disarm. But this work requires being charitable to people we disagree with, and Rufo's rhetoric is not uniformly welcome among those of us doing it. Consider his own words: "We will eventually turn [critical race theory] toxic, as we put all of the 'various cultural insanities' under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something 'crazy' in the newspaper and immediately think 'critical race theory.'" This isn't arguing that a view is false. It isn't trying to remove it from a curriculum. It's category construction. It has always read to me as engineered so the public can't distinguish thoughtful people who draw on CRT from crazy ones. That's not necessary to win the argument, and it corrodes the civic ground any future reform has to be built upon. I'm not tone-policing. I'm saying what Rufo gives with one hand, he takes with the other. Many of us are doing the hard daily work of academic reform, and we do not uniformly welcome his efforts, because his tactics are too bare-knuckled and, frankly, unkind. So to be clear: the academy needs reform. I am giving my career to that project. But I will not thank Rufo for anything as long as his rhetoric salts the earth for rebuilding trust with the left.

American Spirit airlines

There is a good deal of this understanding acknowledged in the final page of Deneen’s book about why liberalism failed. It’s just stated as a space provided by liberalism and then not really grappled with

One of the best and worst parts about twitter is being exposed to the opinions of other people who putatively like the same piece of media you do. Constantly in a state of asking “are we even reading the same story?”