I get that Wicked was an event movie this year, but seeing it win both Production Design and Costume Design over movies like Nosferatu, Dune, and Conclave is baffling.
John Lithgow confirms he will play Dumbledore in the ‘HARRY POTTER’ series.
“It's going to define me for the last chapter of my life... I'll be about 87 years old at the wrap party, but I've said yes”
(Source: https://t.co/xXLExs4niV)
Disaster through and through but including Whiplash in this had me rolling. A STEM guy misunderstood the point of a movie? You don’t sayyyyyyyyy.
Just crying out for humanities education.
The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:
Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.
A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.
A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.
(Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates).
More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”
Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.
Now close your eyes & visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest.
“Normalcy” doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.
This can be our Sputnik moment. We’ve awaken from slumber before & we can do it again. Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.
That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence. I’m confident we can do it. 🇺🇸 🇺🇸
Force a kid onto stimulants, shove him in a desk under fluorescent lightsfor 8 hours with 30 other kids, have a menopausal female pig screech abuse at him whenever he's distracted or socializes. Putting bacon in front of a starved dog and zapping his shock collar for biting it.
Just a reminder that Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealth who was just shot and killed in NY, was a human being with a family. So many of the comments on his murder are despicable.
The only international film to earn Best Picture has a scene in the climax where the rich patriarch covers his nose cause he can’t stand the smell of the lower class man who just killed a lower class woman. Smell is a class/racial signifier in a lot of art.
Think how many times people use the term ‘she smells’ or use smell to put others down, how women are told they stink like rotten fish, or that ‘those people stink’. Smell is constantly used in class discrimination, ‘the awful stench of the working class’
Conservative contempt for academia, beyond being indicative of an inability to read above a 3rd grade level, genuinely stems from the growing sentiment that universities should be replaced by glorified trade schools that pump out business, engineering, and comp sci graduates
Go through this a lot with my students. You are under no obligation to feel guilty for the actions of your ancestors; but if you choose to ignore facts and act like great grandpappy was a morally upstanding hero, don’t be surprised when you get fact checked.