Richard Jeffrey Newman

I haven’t been post­ing as much I would like – some­thing that is, I hope, start­ing to change – but I have been read­ing, and so I thought I’d put up a list of the pieces that have inter­ested me for one rea­son or another:

• It Is What It Is, by my friend Cas­san­dra, about her “round, high, and in your face [butt] — a brazen and rebel­lious per­son­al­ity that dares any­one, includ­ing me, to attempt to silence her. She invites stares, wel­comes gropes and rev­els in praise — she is not one to keep quiet.” Cassandra’s new to blog­ging, so if you have a chance, go over to Lady­Caz and let her know what you think.
• That Dreaded Skirt, also by Cassandra.
• The Best Birth Con­trol in the World is for Men: “The pro­ce­dure called RISUG in India (reversible inhi­bi­tion of sperm under guid­ance) takes about 15 min­utes with a doc­tor, is effec­tive after about three days, and lasts for 10 or more years.” But don’t look for it any time soon in the US, since it’s not a big money-maker for the drug companies.
• Could This Male Con­tra­cep­tive Pill Make A Vas Def­er­ens In The Fight Against HIV?: “To cut right to the chase, it’s affec­tion­ately dubbed the “clean sheets” pill due to the fact that it inhibits release of any semen whatsoever…while still per­mit­ting the cir­cu­lar mus­cles to contract.…”
• Eval­u­at­ing the Adjunct Impact: “Using large sam­ples of com­mu­nity col­leges, stud­ies find that as col­leges use more part timers, their stu­dents are less likely to grad­u­ate or trans­fer to four-year insti­tu­tions. And another study finds that as part-time use goes up, insti­tu­tional aver­ages in class par­tic­i­pa­tion (for all fac­ulty mem­bers) go down.”
• What Adjunct Impact?: Cites stud­ies that con­tra­dict the stud­ies cited in the pre­vi­ous article.
• Com­ple­tion at What Price?: “[T]he debut report…takes on the “com­ple­tion agenda” and its heavy empha­sis on work­force devel­op­ment [at com­mu­nity col­leges], a fix­a­tion that the report said threat­ens aca­d­e­mic qual­ity and stu­dent access, as well as social mobility.
• The Dis­pos­able Pro­fes­sor Cri­sis: “[A]s grow­ing num­bers of insti­tu­tions turn to con­tin­gent (or adjunct) fac­ulty to cut costs, while keep­ing pay as low as pos­si­ble for the sup­port staff who keep cam­puses run­ning[,] stu­dents suf­fer… [T]he num­ber of avail­able ser­vices are reduced, class sizes increase, and edu­ca­tors are less able to pro­vide direct assis­tance and men­tor­ing to the stu­dents they are there to teach.”
• ‘Danc­ing Boys’: A Tale of Sex­ual Exploita­tion: “The prac­tice of wealthy or promi­nent Afghans exploit­ing under­age boys as sex­ual part­ners who are often dressed up as women to dance at gath­er­ings is on the rise in post-Taliban Afghanistan, accord­ing to Afghan human-rights researchers, West­ern offi­cials and men who par­tic­i­pate in the abuse.”
• Poetry, Medium and Mes­sage: “Here is a ques­tion that has been con­found­ing or even infu­ri­at­ing poets for eons. So what is your poem about?”
• Cur­ried Lamb and Bar­ley Grain: A recipe I made recently that I really, really liked.
• Cin­der­fel­las: The Long Lost Fairy Tales: In these tales, “Cin­derella is a woodcutter’s daugh­ter who uses golden slip­pers to recover her beloved from beyond the moon and the sun.”
• Adri­enne Rich’s News in Verse: Katha Pol­lit on Adri­enne Rich’s death.
• Sex­ting Ice Break­ers for Eng­lish Grad Stu­dents: “Maybe we should con­sider using a rhetor­i­cal device; though, to be clear, I am not sug­gest­ing that we rely on that rhetor­i­cal device every time we cowrite a paper.”
• Ten Rea­sons Not To Sleep with a Poet: “8. Like other kinds of men, he will never under­stand the anguish of car­ry­ing a phone that does not ring. Unlike other kinds of men, he will seem to fall off the planet for weeks at a time, lost in a place — that god­damned place you know to be a space in his head and not an actual location.”
• Cunt: The His­tory of the C Word: “In fact, the ori­gins of ‘cunt’ can be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European ‘cu’, one of the old­est word-sounds in recorded lan­guage. ‘Cu’ is an expres­sion quin­tes­sen­tially asso­ci­ated with fem­i­nin­ity, and forms the basis of ‘cow’, ‘queen’, and ‘cunt’. The c-word’s sec­ond most sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence is the Latin term ‘cuneus’, mean­ing ‘wedge’. The Old Dutch ‘kunte’ pro­vides the plo­sive final consonant.”
• Women Pub­lish­ers in Iran: Fark­hon­deh Hajizadeh: “The process of grow­ing cen­sor­ship has reached a point that even the con­cept of cen­sor does not apply to it. In a time when we all seem to be liv­ing in glass houses and have noth­ing left to hide, such approaches to book pub­lish­ing is syn­ony­mous to a return to the Mid­dle Ages.”
• Repeat After Me: A review of Lan­guage: The Cul­tural Tool by Daniel Everett, in which Everett claims to have found evi­dence to dis­prove the Chom­skian the­ory of lan­guage universals.
• Do Col­lege Pro­fes­sors Work Hard Enough?: A professor-bashing op-ed from the Wash­ing­ton Post that is nonethe­less worth read­ing so that the rebut­tals (here, here (the most bal­anced of them), here, here, here) will all make sense.
• What Do Pro­fes­sors Do All Week?: Intro­duc­tory post to a series in which one pro­fes­sor logged the time he spent on work-related activ­i­ties dur­ing one seven-day week. It’s worth read­ing the entire series; the links are at the bot­tom of the post I am link­ing to here.
• Why Are You Here?: Chi­ma­manda Ngozi Adichie on brand­ing, char­ity, and class in Nigeria’s schools.
• Nathalie Han­dal — Haiti: Poet Nathalie Han­dal on edu­ca­tion in Haiti one year after the earthquake.

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