| The Mysteries of the Masons |
[15 May 2015|07:33am] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/05/masons_and_american_history_the_1826_kidnapping_allegedly_by_freemasons.html To this day, nobody knows the true fate of Capt. William Morgan. A failed businessman and citizen of generally low repute, Morgan was abducted from his home, in the town of Batavia, New York, in the early morning of Sept. 11, 1826. He soon found himself in a Canandaigua jail cell, about 50 miles away, imprisoned for a debt of $2.65. The whole ordeal was doubtless confusing to Morgan, a man best known for his drinking. It likely became even more confusing when a stranger paid his bail. But that man had no intention of setting him free. Morgan emerged from the jail only to be forced into a carriage, reportedly screaming out “murder” while he was being dragged away.
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| Pitch Perfect 2 |
[15 May 2015|05:05pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2015/05/pitch_perfect_2_reviewed.html Two weeks ago, for about a day, I allowed myself to get excited about the upcoming premiere of Pitch Perfect 2, the follow-up to 2012’s improbable hit comedy about the competitive collegiate a cappella circuit—or, as one of the characters put it, “organized nerd-singing.” Then I came back to my senses and to that familiar contemporary condition for which there ought to be a word, probably a German one: the dread of a superfluous sequel to a small, beloved original. (Überschussangst?)
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| Inside Pedro’s Brain |
[15 May 2015|06:14pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2015/05/pedro_book_review_pedro_martinez_s_memoir_offers_insight_into_the_boston.html Michael Silverman is uniquely qualified among Boston sportswriters to assess Pedro Martinez’s fascinating life and career. Just two years into covering the Red Sox for the Boston Herald, Silverman contacted Martinez after he had been traded from the Expos in November 1997. Silverman, without the permission of his editors, wanted to visit that year’s Cy Young winner at his home in the Dominican Republic before the 1998 season. To Silverman’s surprise, the request was granted and the 26-year-old pitcher brought Silverman into his modest Santo Domingo apartment and opened up about his short but already impressive résumé. Thus began a nearly two-decade long reporter-subject relationship that resulted in the book Pedro, a rare example of a highly anticipated sports memoir that manages to deliver new insights into its subject, who in this case happens to be one of the most quotable and unlikely sports superstars of the last few decades.
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| Does Don Draper Believe in Love? |
[15 May 2015|08:26pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/2015/05/don_draper_s_relationship_to_love_what_will_the_mad_men_finale_tell_us_about.html Rachel Menken sits down with Don Draper in a dark Manhattan bar one evening in March of 1960. As with many of Don’s most pivotal interactions, the flirtatious exchange that ensues—ostensibly a business meeting between a department store heiress and the advertising executive intent on landing her as a client—becomes personal when Don is disarmed by attraction. Rachel is a tough woman, perhaps the toughest that Don has ever met, but she doesn’t share his cynicism. “For a lot of people,” she tells him, “love isn’t just a slogan.”
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| Is Don Draper Worth It? |
[15 May 2015|09:35pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/2015/05/don_draper_as_hbs_case_study_a_harvard_professor_tries_to_decide_whether.html As both a professor at Harvard Business School and a Mad Men obsessive, I’ve been considering the final episodes of the series from what is surely an unusual perspective. Specifically, as Don flamed out at McCann, I couldn’t help but think that the company faces a classic managerial dilemma. Here was an employee whose brilliance was matched only by the problems he creates. It’s a common issue in the corporate world: How should a business executive deal with a subordinate whose talents and challenges seem equally vast?
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| Why Not Get Rid of Student Evaluations? |
[15 May 2015|09:45pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2015/05/a_defense_of_student_evaluations_they_re_biased_misleading_and_extremely.html Everybody has reasons to hate student evaluations. If they represented the judgments of one individual, rather than being a big heterogeneous data set, we would call that individual sexist. Women face double standards and, often, tougher expectations. Students in some experiments give higher scores to teachers who they think are men. Evaluations may also favor the white and the young, or punish the homely (when we find someone attractive, we tend to rate their other qualities more highly, in what psychologists call the halo effect). And better scores don’t mean that students learned more—not if you go by subsequent performance in sequenced classes (e.g., Spanish 1 and Spanish 2) in which you can measure such things.
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| B.B. King’s Greatest Performance |
[15 May 2015|09:53pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/05/bb_king_dead_at_89_remembering_live_at_the_regal_s_three_song_medley_the.html B.B. King, a titan of American music who died Thursday at 89 years old, lived for so long, did so much, and was so deeply woven into our cultural fabric that it was easy to take him for granted. “The King of the Blues,” he was called, although too often in the offhanded and unthinking tone in which people call Budweiser the King of Beers. King was a singer and guitar player of unfathomable depth and dimension, and his music was a watershed: In the middle part of the 20th century, no performer so effortlessly melded country blues to the more urban, “modern” sounds of post–World War II rhythm and blues than King: not Muddy Waters, not Howlin’ Wolf, not the still-missed Bobby “Blue” Bland. Already on his first major hit, 1951’s “3 O’Clock Blues,” King exemplified this fusion in spades: the urbane and jazz-inflected guitar playing, the lush and billowing horns, the vocal performance that seems to channel Lonnie Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson out of one lung, Jimmy Rushing and Frank Sinatra out of the other.
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