Here’s a half-hour interview with me on Radio Felician University, on the pros and cons of online learning during the coronavirus crisis. I’m interviewed by two of my applied ethics students at Felician, Kiera Benson and Nicole Cacciatore (“Nicole Catch”). The interview aired in late April.
I find it ironic that after about a decade of industry-wide hype about the imperative to switch all of our classes to a fully online format, now that we are fully online, people are crying crocodile tears about the pedagogical inadequacies of online learning. In other words, online teaching was a panacea before the pandemic; now that there’s a pandemic raging, the imperative is to return to the physical classroom. Continue reading →
Back in 2016, I mentioned the work of my talented cousin, Sabahat Zakariya, at the time a graduate student in journalism and Near East Studies at NYU. Since then, she’s gotten her degree, and moved–of all places–to New Jersey. In fact, she now lives a mere half hour away from me, which would be rather convenient for both of us if we weren’t currently in the middle of a pandemic.
In any case, I’m happy to mention that Sabahat is now reporting on and from New Jersey for BBC Urdu. Obviously, she reports for them in Urdu–or the mixture of English and Urdu that passes for Urdu nowadays–but you might be able to follow at least some of what she’s saying even if you don’t know the language. Give it a try, anyway.
She’s reporting from Middlesex County, around Edison, New Jersey, a well-known South Asian enclave. Her commentary on life in Jersey is perhaps a little more diplomatic and civilized than my blogging on some of the same subjects--straight factual reporting without editoralization or profanity-laced ranting. But give it time. To quote Prospero in The Tempest, “’tis new to thee.”
I started my COVID-19 Narrative Project in part to capture the first-personal sense of what it was like to live through the COVID-19 crisis, and in part because I simply enjoy reading stories of this sort. Every now and then, I encounter submissions I wish I’d gotten. Here are two. Continue reading →
If you need a break from the Coronavirus Diary for some comic absurdity, then you probably want to hear about this dream I had last night. It featured Irfan Khawaja.
In the dream, Irfan lived in a small but comfortable one bedroom apartment somewhere in urban New Jersey. I happened to be in the neighborhood, so I was headed to his place, but some kids stopped me on the way. They figured I looked like the sort of middle aged guy who wandered through their neighborhood looking to buy drugs, and they told me that this dude Irfan had good drugs to sell. Knowing Irfan, I had two thoughts: first, he is probably not selling drugs out of his apartment (but maybe he’s that desperate?); second, with his history of interaction with the police, the rumor that he’s selling drugs out of his apartment might get him into some serious trouble. So I thanked the boys and proceeded to Irfan’s apartment to ask him about this rumor. I figured that he’d want to know that his neighbor kids were telling random strangers that he sells drugs, whether it was true or not.
When I got there, Irfan wasn’t home. The situation seemed pretty urgent, though, so I thought I had to act fast. I knew that the lock on his door wasn’t particularly strong, and that if I just leaned into it pretty heavily at the right spot, it’d pop open without breaking anything. So I bumped into the door, and sure enough, it opened up. I found some paper and a pencil to write him a note, but I figured I shouldn’t leave any evidence that would incriminate him, whether the charges were true or not. So I wrote the note in Latin. That way only he’d know what I’d written.
Before I left, though, Irfan returned. He was furious to find me in his apartment and proceeded to lecture me on property rights and boundary transgressions. Soon enough, more serious matters arose. I didn’t even have time to tell him about the rumor that he was selling drugs, because he didn’t have time to listen to it. He was, he now revealed to me, leading a team that was fighting Michael Myers — yes, that Michael Myers:
In fact, he was surprised and a bit irritated that I hadn’t already figured out that he was part of the fight against Michael Myers. He had, after all, starred alongside Jamie Lee Curtis in the most recent installment of the Halloween franchise, so it wouldn’t have been hard for me to infer that he was in the process of a career shift. He gathered some weapons from his closet and told me to lock the door behind me and not to break into his place again.
I have vivid and strange dreams pretty regularly. Usually, though, they star people that I’ve interacted with personally in recent days. Maybe because school has moved entirely on-line with the Coronavirus lockdown, er, stay-at-home order, and I’m no longer interacting with the same few dozen teenagers for 40 hours a week, my mind has had to get more creative and work with more distant material. I haven’t even been keeping up with Policy of Truth, I’m sorry to say. So there’s really no apparent explanation for Irfan’s showing up in my dreams.
The rest of the elements in the dream make a great deal of sense to me, but explaining them all might get a bit too personal. I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t a bit sad that Irfan doesn’t actually have a side job hunting supernatural killers, though.
I hope this dream amuses you half as much as it’s amused me.
It’s a federal offense to threaten or incite violence against the President of the United States. I would never do such a thing. Nor am I doing it now.
As it happens, there is a form of prayer in the Qur’an, used in daily (often public) prayer, which might be called the prayer of execration. In prayers of execration, one petitions God to smite or damn one’s own enemies, and/or His (it helps if they coincide). A famous example is Surah Lahab, aimed at one Abu Lahab, an enemy of the Prophet Muhammad. Continue reading →
Michael Young and I are hanging out at an undisclosed location in New Jersey, riding out the coronavirus by trading barbed moral intuitions with (or at?) each other. We need help. I mean, we need your help adjudicating a clash of intuitions about injustice. I doubt that anything of great significance turns on which set of intuitions is right. But I called bullshit on some of the crap Michael was slinging at me, telling him that I would appeal for a verdict to the Final Authority of All Philosophical Authorities, vox populi. Or at least the voice of a handful of self-selected readers of Policy of Truth, the moral and epistemic paragons of the Internet.
I won’t tell you which of us holds which view until I get some responses. This is my idea of an incentive to get you to respond. Like you care. Continue reading →
Policy of Truth 