elitism
tsmith | May 31, 2014Perhaps because it's college graduation and reunion time, L.V. Anderson at Slate has written a column entitled "People Still Say They 'Went to College in Boston,' Meaning Harvard? Please Stop Doing This." She claims that by giving such an evasive answer, one "buy[s] into the overblown mythos of Harvard and the presumption of Ivy League superiority." Or worse, it "functions as an elitist dog whistle," and that those who may "react inelegantly" upon hearing one went to Harvard/Yale/Princeton and others are "insecure people who perhaps have not yet learned that Ivy League schools confer degrees…
sastyk | November 10, 2010Local food is elitist! This trumpets from one paper or another, revealing that despite the growing preoccupation with good food, ultimately, it is just another white soccer Mom phenomenon. Working class people (who strangely, the paper and the author rarely seem to care about otherwise) can't afford an organic chicken or a gallon of organic milk! Ordinary people don't have time to make soup. Regular folk don't care about that stuff - that's for brie-sniffing folks, just the next rich people's food fad.
I can think of a few hundred refutations of this claim, of course. There are all of my…
sastyk | April 5, 2010During the period of my life when I was a professional smart-ass (ie, my adolescence), I used to complain to my mother that even the day after she went grocery shopping, there was never any food in the house, only the component ingredients of food. As I teenager I wanted to eat like my peers who seemed to have an endless supply of chips and soda around. To have to come home from school and actually scramble eggs or make a sandwich seemed horribly unfair. My mother and step-mother expressed little sympathy.
It was only later that I realized how central this "buying the ingredients of food…
bioephemera | May 11, 2009This week, Nieman Journalism Lab is running a fascinating series of video interviews with the New York Times' R&D group on the possible future face of news media. I know - you're wondering why the supposedly financially moribund NYT is wasting money on nerds who play with Kindles. Who do they think they are, Google? But it might be a good strategy after all.
As Fortune and the Columbia Journalism Review recently pointed out, with outlets all around them slashing premium content (like science), the NYT's best strategy may be to instead become increasingly "elite:"
Meanwhile, the company is…
grrlscientist | February 12, 2008tags: James Watson, racism, sexism, genetic engineering, seed media group, scienceblogs, Adam Bly
James Watson, 1962 Nobel Prize winner
for co-discovering the structure of DNA along with
Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins.
Yesterday, Adam Bly, founder, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Seed Media Group, was interviewed by Carol Goar for an editorial about the Canadian government's dismissal of its national science adviser, Arthur Carty.
"Science is driving our global culture unlike ever before," Bly is cited as saying. "Now is not the time to send a signal -- domestically and internationally --…