I allow students to use their readers/print copies + annotations during exams, which assess use of evidence and argument rather than recall c:

oh great! my kindly on-campus printshop guy was a big help. my biggest worry about the plan was that students wouldn’t pay for the reader—I also make PDFs available—but I explained my thinking + most of them did end up getting it. even those who didn’t still print out the PDFs, because ...

(Among other things, this was a response to a previous course I taught, in which some students were reading Aeschylus on their iPhones, which… was not particularly conducive to their engagement with the text lol)

I’m teaching a lower-level class: in addition to the 2 books we’re reading, I made a physical course reader for articles/excerpts (~$30). all writing assignments are on paper—in-class exams & reflections/discussion questions submitted at the top of every class, mostly handwritten. it’s been good!

it seems a hero has uploaded this high-quality recording of a live performance from the voodoo tour to the internet archive
archive.org/details/dang...

I see your point—that’s a helpful distinction! Still imo necessities like housing & healthcare shouldn’t be bought & sold via markets. (perhaps this is why I’m a a pol. theorist & not an economist 😉). But regulating the private housing market, plus more public housing, would def be an improvement!

I agree with Warren (& Mamdani) that the focus should be on affordability for all. But we should call BS on fake objections: The fact is Mamdani has a plan to raise revenue and is building a political coalition to do that. Naysayers are content to maintain the status quo, as this man explicitly says

This was really excellent! Your conclusion on the material/institutional conditions of study and of decolonial world-building lands perhaps even harder than you might have imagined it would while writing this (I assume pre-2025)...

I love this little passage on memory that Edmund White drops in the middle of his memoirish novel “A Boy’s Own Story”