Andrew Piper

79 Theses on Technology: Piper to Jacobs—No Comment

What if we taught commentary instead of expression, not just for beginning writers, but right on through university and the PhD?

Cultural Critics vs. Social Scientists—They Both Stink

We need to think more about the process of cultural modeling. How do we model a cultural subset through a data set (a generation, contemporary television), and how do we model a cultural practice or concept through a particular measurement? These aren’t easy questions, but they are the prerequisite for correcting against the journalistic just-so stories of cultural criticism.

You must change your graduate program!

We can either change in substantive ways or pretend to do something else while actually continuing to do the same things we’ve always done. The MLA report looks a lot like the latter and no doubt so will most of the responses to it.

Semi-Pro—On the New Work-Study Conundrum

Rather than banish the idea of work like some unclean vermin out of a Kafka story, we should be taking the opportunity to look it more squarely in the face, and not just in the world of college sports. Work is everywhere on campus today. It's time we accepted this fact and start rethinking higher education accordingly -- starting with that most hallowed distinction between working and studying that informs almost everything else we do.

The Unpredictability of Academic Writing

So rather than rehash tired clichés about the jargony nature of academic writing – itself a form of redundancy! – we might also want to consider one of academic writing’s functions: it is there to innovate, not comfort.

The New Anti-Intellectualism

Never before has it been so fashionable to be against numerical thinking.

The internet killed books again

The real problem, as everybody knows, is not that the internet is ruining writing. It’s writing. There’s just too much of it.

The Thrall of Evidence