Tag Archives: London

Today’s links roundup contains some slightly older things I marked but didn’t post over the last few (several?) weeks:

1. Churnalism: Comparing online text to promotional (press release) text.

2. I’m thinking of the Reinhart-Rogoff “Excel coding error” of a few weeks ago as a case-study of how a particular idea can get very popular without even really being accurate.

3. Andrew Sullivan and Kai Rysdall on Donald Rumsfeld.

4. Student debt:

America is distinctive among advanced industrialized countries in the burden it places on students and their parents for financing higher education. America is also exceptional among comparable countries for the high cost of a college degree, including at public universities. Average tuition, and room and board, at four-year colleges is just short of $22,000 a year, up from under $9,000 (adjusted for inflation) in 1980-81.

Compare this more-than-doubling in tuition with the stagnation in median family income, which is now about $50,000, compared to $46,000 in 1980 (adjusted for inflation).

Also, something I didn’t know until I started trying to pay back college loans:

Consider another dubious distinction: student debt is almost impossible to discharge in bankruptcy proceedings.

5. A cartoon reference: Toonopedia.

6. Leno’s singers: On truth in comedy.

7. Before diaries were private, they weren’t.

8. Pictures of snowflakes as they fall.

9. Color movies of London in the 1920s.

10. History of English language: it’s already bilingual (sorta).