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	<title>Critical Mass</title>
	<link>http://erinoconnor.org</link>
	<description>Just another WordPress weblog</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Wed, 15 Feb 2012 16:53:49 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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	<item>
		<title>Quote for the day</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
For me, at least, writing consists very largely of exploring intuition. A character is really the sense of a character, embodied, attired, and given voice as he or she seems to require. Where does this creature come from? From watching, I suppose. From reading emotional significance in gestures and inflections, as we all do all [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://erinoconnor.org/2012/02/quote-for-the-day-18/</link>
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		<title>The dustbin of history</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Historian KC Johnson has for years now been tracking how the politicization of his discipline has transformed it in ways that thoroughly compromise and threaten not just the study of history, but our capacity to be a functional democracy.
Here&#8217;s an excerpt from his latest:

In a ruling likely to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://erinoconnor.org/2012/01/the-dustbin-of-history/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>A day in the life</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I am a sucker for biography. Right now, sitting on the bedside table, I&#8217;ve got David McCullough&#8217;s John Adams and Frances Wilson&#8217;s Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, waiting patiently to be taken up. I&#8217;ve got to finish Jane Smiley&#8217;s Private Life, Peter Ackroyd&#8217;s Thames: The Biography, my third trip through Melville&#8217;s Moby Dick (it&#8217;s been twenty [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://erinoconnor.org/2012/01/a-day-in-the-life/</link>
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		<title>Welcome to the desert of the real</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Quote for the day: &#8220;I feel like there’s a red pill and a blue pill. And you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I’ve taken the red pill, and I’ve seen Wonderland.&#8221;
That&#8217;s soon-to-be ex-Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun, whose recent online course on artificial intelligence [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://erinoconnor.org/2012/01/welcome-to-the-desert-of-the-real-2/</link>
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		<title>Don&#8217;t cheat!</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Happy Friday, everyone. If you are like me, you are looking forward to a weekend with lots and lots of reading in it. I&#8217;ll be finishing Ransom Riggs&#8217; strange and wonderful first novel, Miss Peregrine&#8217;s Home for Peculiar Children, which is inspired by and woven around Riggs&#8217; amazing collection of creepy vintage photographs of children. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://erinoconnor.org/2012/01/dont-cheat-2/</link>
			</item>
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		<title>In the mail</title>
		<description><![CDATA[&#8230; A review copy of Frank Delaney&#8217;s The Last Storyteller. I&#8217;m in the mood for some Irish historical fiction, so this is perfect.
]]></description>
		<link>http://erinoconnor.org/2012/01/in-the-mail-4/</link>
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	<item>
		<title>My year in books</title>
		<description><![CDATA[First, a confession: I don&#8217;t entirely know what books I&#8217;ve read this year. Until about April, I wasn&#8217;t writing them down and never had. But I didn&#8217;t like the way that sent reading experiences down the memory hole (I never used to forget anything, but I am fast becoming my father&#8217;s daughter &#8212; if it&#8217;s [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://erinoconnor.org/2011/12/my-year-in-books/</link>
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		<title>Best books about higher ed: 2011</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Minding the Campus asked ten people to vote on that (I happened to be one). I picked Academically Adrift, and so did most of the others. I also gave props to Professor X&#8217;s In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic, which I thought was a particularly good evocation of what [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://erinoconnor.org/2011/12/best-books-about-higher-ed-2011/</link>
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		<title>Humanities and the black hole</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Emory English professor has long argued that the academic humanities needs rethinking&#8211;and has specifically pointed out that the research imperative that for so long existed to dignify and professionalize the humanities disciplines has outlasted its usefulness. Now, most of the scholarship coming out of humanities departments isn&#8217;t, sadly, worth the paper (or the bandwidth) it&#8217;s [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://erinoconnor.org/2011/12/humanities-and-the-black-hole/</link>
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		<title>Self-serving</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Riding the wave of the Penn State scandal, the AAUP has released a statement about the dangers of unchecked college athletics. As summarized at Inside Higher Ed:

Leaders of the American Association of University Professors on Tuesday released a statement warning of the &#8220;dangers of a sports empire&#8221; in higher education, citing recent sex-abuse scandals as [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://erinoconnor.org/2011/11/self-serving/</link>
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