Category Archives: Policy & Politics

Pandemic: The Return

We are coming up on one year of near complete isolation. While “conservative” has never been an adjective I would use for our family, in this instance we have been. We saw little reason to risk our health unnecessarily, and knew that removing ourselves as a node from the network also increased the survivability—in some […]
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The Gated Academy

I was walking past the gates on my campus this morning and noticed them in a way I hadn’t before. Like at many universities, they are symbolic, and intended to represent the opening up of knowledge and–particularly for our campus, which serves a large number of first-generation university students–of opportunity. But today, I wondered about […]
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Garage Universities

I am wary of playing too much into the Silicon Valley myth, and nothing can be more central to that myth than the garage start-up. Nonetheless, the idea of a “university start-up” seems almost unfathomable, outside the less-than-interesting world of for-profit universities. I may want to buy a Tesla (automobile start-ups probably pre-date the Silicon […]
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Reheeling

There lived on Actinuria a young inventor by the name of Pyron, who learned to pull wires out of platinum so thin, you could make nets with them for catching clouds. Pyron invented the wire telegraph, and then he pulled the wire out so fine, it wasn’t there, and in this fashion he obtained the […]
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