* When to leave grad school off your resume. In my limited experience reading resumes, having a PhD is a minus; an M.A. is useless, and being in grad school makes me think less of its value, not more.
* “The Forgotten Student: Has Higher Education Stiffed Its Most Important Client?: How the prestige game costs students more money for a lower-quality education.” To me, this is utterly obvious.
* The novel Hemlock Grove sounds like fun: “‘Its howls all the while more plaintive and lupine as a snout emerged through its lips and worked open and shut, its old face bunched around it in an obsolete mask. It rolled onto all fours and rose shaking violently, spraying blood in a mist and divesting himself of the remnants of man coat in a hot mess.’ It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to write like this, to use an almost Faulknerian descriptive palette in service of a monster story.”
* Is the Future of English Bad Science?
* “Hunter Moore Makes a Living Screwing You;” I had never heard of isanyoneup.com before and won’t link directly, but as I read the story I kept thinking, “This is why it’s hard to write relevant contemporary fiction. . .” This, and Reddit’s user-submitted adult site, which you can find easily enough if you want to.
* A short, accurate description of the long-term problems in Europe. This is also, on some level, about how people form groups and act in those groups. (“Americans in Massachusetts and Americans in Mississippi do feel themselves part of the same country, sharing language and culture. Germans and Spaniards do not feel the same.”) See further Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind.
* Why poetry should be more playful, which seems completely obvious to me; Billy Collins is one of my favorite poets precisely because he’s so playful, so much the opposite of the poetry read in school. From the post itself: “The growing distance between serious verse and children’s verse has certainly been connected—as cause, effect, or more likely both—to the increasing irrelevance of serious poetry.”
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