This blog is overrated.

Why doesn’t experimental fiction involve handing out packets of different kinds of fiction to different groups in a double-blind study? You could have a control group that gets some nonfiction too.

Cities usually get a little excited about making it on to the latest best-places ranking, sure, but how often do you see one that’s thrilled to have almost placed on such a list? That would be Baltimore’s reaction to its not-quite-top-10 finish on the new “America’s Best Cities for Design” survey.

Also in best-cities news: why the Texas fixation on so many of these lists? Forbes ranks Houston, Dallas and Austin as the top three cities for recent college grads.

Inside’s Higher Ed’s “Mama PhD” blog, a recent and somewhat dubious addition to the site,
today stirs up vaccination fears and expounds on the dangers of “sodium laurel [sic] sulfate.” The sources: unnamed “news reports” and a friend’s blog, respectively. “I read in another friend’s phenomenal blog (facebook reconnection again) about how she found sodium laurel sulfate in her face scrub and how it is not only a possible carcinogen but lends to the killing of marine life as well.”

Inside Higher Ed, if you’re not familiar with it, is home to many cranky academics who like to bemoan their students’ tendency to cite lazily or not at all.

As an undergrad, I lived on campus all four years, as did just about all of my classmates. So it was a bit of a culture shock to go to grad school at Michigan, where there is an odd social stigma against living in the dorms past freshman year. As a sophomore, you’re supposed to move off-campus as soon as you can, into a most likely dilapidated, slumlord-owned Ann Arbor house with seven of your best friends that you leased 11 months in advance. (Nine months now, since a new law was passed.) And grad dorms? Forget about it, unless you’re a parent or an international student who has to arrange housing in a hurry. I had a number of theories about who might have an interest in perpetuating this attitude. The university, for one; Michigan has just started building their first new dorm since the 70’s. And, of course, the landlords. Even if no one actually moves back to the dorms, just the idea that they’re a viable option could make student tenants better negotiators. When living on campus no longer marks you as a loser, there’s less pressure to sign the first lease that comes along.

So it’s encouraging that students may be starting to realize that living right near their classes in a large community of students with a nonsleazy nonprofit landlord might not be such a bad deal after all.

Technohipster Jakob Lodwick quits the internet over harsh comments from his various detractors. “I may be a millionaire but…this sort of thing still hurts,” he writes. “You may conceptualize the Unites States as a great nation. But it’s also a big tribe, with its own irrational taboos. One of them is: don’t talk proudly about your achievements.”

This may be a good time to mention (proudly!) that, in the latest D&D campaign I’m playing, I’ve named my half-elf warlock “Lodwick.” Okay, there’s no really good time to mention that. But he describes Gawker’s Alex Pareene as an elf, so it’s totally pertinent!

No one refers to individual articles in Harper’s as “magazines”. So why are blog posts increasingly (I have no evidence that it’s increasing, but that makes it a “trend”) considered “blogs”?

Scientists have proved that the hormone oxytocin turns writers into spouters of inane pseudoscience and groundless speculation. Well, not yet, but it’s pretty likely that they will. First it was used to explain the now-debunked “fact” that women talk more than men. Now a science writer at the Times of London is waxing dystopian about a new study showing that the chemical may calm anxiety:

The potential uses of oxytocin could ultimately extend well beyond individual patients and into commercial environments. Restaurants, for instance, could spray a thin mist over customers to put them at ease.

It could be used as a benign form of tear gas, quelling any violent feelings among groups of demonstrators, or even to prevent extramarital affairs.

Lots of “could”s there. The reactions at Metafilter are mostly predictable (OMG SOMA!), whereas you can be fairly sure that if some writer mused that, say, salvia “could” be introduced into the water supply, they’d recognize the suggestion as the media-driven War on Drugs hysteria it is. At least one poster sums it up accurately: “It’s like [journalists] are amateur science-fiction writers.”

Don’t have enough time to fisk an article? Why not tsk it instead? You know, just link to it:

         Michael Pollan’s latest food scolding.

and then underneath write:

         Tsk-tsk.

(Can’t remember whether Wax Banks or I first proposed this.)

“Merit aid still king,” reports Inside Higher Ed. In order to be “king”, you’d think that merit aid would have to make up at least, oh, 51 percent of all grants given, but instead it’s more like 28 percent. Monarchy isn’t what it used to be.

But why shouldn’t it be 0 percent? After all, colleges have these formulas that perfectly account for every possible family financial circumstance, and families are always willing and able to pay exactly the contribution calculated. Unlike merit scholarships, need-based aid “might help needy students enroll in college who might not otherwise, instead of merely changing the enrollment patterns of those who could still otherwise afford a college education.” In other words, if a really excellent student can’t afford, say, Washington University (which, unlike the very highest-ranked colleges, still offers unfashionable merit aid), he can still go to community college. College is college, right?

This is the kind of thinking that makes analysts quote official unemployment statistics as a meaningful indicator. A laid-off engineer who’s now working at Home Depot part-time? Employed. The economy’s doing fine! Of course, at least most people will sympathize with the downsized tech worker. But the brilliant student who’s stuck at community college or a less-selective state school? What’s the problem? Are you implying that some colleges are better than others? You elitist!

As some of you know, I used to blog about density issues in Ann Arbor. After a while, it got a little monotonous because the opposition to any new project was completely predictable. You could play NIMBY Bingo:

• It’s “luxury” housing that will be out of reach for most neighborhood residents.
• It’s going to contribute to the homogenization of America, where every place looks the same.
• Donald Trump. (The anti-density equivalent of Godwin, this is equally effective whether or not Donald Trump is in any way connected with the proposed building.)

And so on.

Christopher Hitchens manages to hit on all these points and more in his Vanity Fair essay Last Call, Bohemia opposing the redevelopment of St. Vincent’s hospital in Greenwich Village:

The inaugural plans featured on one flank a vast new medical building of half a million square feet, standing 329 feet tall and 288 feet wide, and on the other flank a Rudin condo tower of luxury apartments, also consisting of half a million square feet … [They] look like a plan made by Donald Trump’s people on an especially uninspired day.

[O]n the day when everywhere looks like everywhere else we shall all be very much impoverished, and not only that but — more impoverishingly still — we will be unable to express or even understand or depict what we have lost.

The preservation group Hitchens links to uses exactly the same language as its Ann Arbor counterparts. The proposed development is “massive.” It’s “too tall, too dense and completely out of character with the Historic District.” It’s “out of scale with the surrounding area.” At least they didn’t complain that it makes it too hard to see the Michigan “M”.

Sure, labor unions support the new hospital because it will bring in a Level 1 trauma center and lots of jobs. Nearby public housing residents do too; it’s their nearest hospital. But what are the complaints of a few construction workers and low-income project dwellers compared to the outré glamour of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Bob Dylan and the Beats?