A Seminar on the Massive Open Online Course (Link to Lesson One) Lesson Two: To the Letter of the Discourse “This is the single biggest change in education since the printing press.”—Professor Anant Agarwal, President of edX People talk about MOOCs in much the same way Apple talks about a new iPod—with a . . .
Read MoreA Seminar on the Massive Open Online Course Lesson One: Roughly $81 Billion That is the size of the combined endowments of the existing members of edX, one of the leading massive open online course [MOOC] platforms. That amount of money alone is enough to give anyone pause, even if we don’t consider . . .
Read More(Editor’s Note: What follows is a slightly edited version of a talk given at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst on March 28, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of its Master of Fine Arts for Poets and Writers. As Lorberer comments, his overarching aim in this piece was to let loose “an eros-tipped . . .
Read MoreIn his fabulous analysis of the death of Luigi Trastulli, Alessandro Portelli opened up a new task for the study of oral history, one that I would like to replicate in this short entry on the death of Gabriel García Márquez (April 17, 2014). Portelli transformed the study of memory from a . . .
Read MoreSome years back I served with the late Kenneth Libo—who did wonderful work as chief researcher and contributor to Irving Howe’s magisterial and indispensable World of Our Fathers—on an advisory committee for a projected documentary on Abraham Cahan, the fabled editor for fifty years of the Yiddish language Forverts. As part of his research . . .
Read MoreAfter I’d first begun serious work on my dissertation, the head of the English department greeted me at a semester-end shindig and asked what I was working on. “Magazines,” I said. “Little magazines, and the women who published or edited them.” I rattled off a few names—Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap of The . . .
Read MoreMy books mean as much to me for what they are, for their narrative, as those personal scenes and circumstances that they have the power to evoke. Often, the memory of writing the book overshadows the work itself. This is not an aspect of writing that has been explored or analyzed, and . . .
Read MoreLa battaglia d’ Istanbul in difesa di seicento alberi,mille arresti, senza numero i feriti, quattro accecati per sempre,4 morti.La battaglia d’ Istanbulè per gli innamorati a passeggio sui viali,per i pensionati, per i cani,per le radici, la linfa, i nidi sui rami,per l’ ombra d’ estate e le tovaglie stesecoi cestini e . . .
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How did I become a superhero? As a child in Mexico City, I devoured comic strips of all types. At first they were American imports like Batman, Spiderman, and The Avengers. What I most liked about them was the dual identity, say between Clark Kent and his alter ego. Then I found the native counterparts, . . .
Read MoreYou won’t be surprised to hear that I get questioned, from time to time, about what sort of work MR prefers to publish. Generally the query comes from folks who know we’re a literary quarterly and don’t have to be told what one is. Come to think of it, perhaps you yourself have asked . . .
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