They Say / I Blog

A Big Promise: Alana Semuels on Tennessee’s ambitious tuition program

Free tuition inTennessee, that’s genuinely wonderful. And we don’t mean to be ungrateful or greedy, but is it enough? How do the bills get paid in the meantime? And what about academic preparation? Alana Semuels, staff writer for the Atlantic, explores these questions in her October 2015 report on the Tennessee Promise.

Read it here: Semuels, “Free tuition is not enough”

 

“Artificial stupidity”: Geoffrey Pullum on user-interface software

If you were to write “you have one messages” in an essay, you would probably lose points for your error. But the machines we deal with every day use such phrases, and we pay no attention. Not all of us, however, let these statements go unnoticed. Linguist Geoffrey Pullum criticizes what he calls “artificial stupidity” in this October 2015 post on the Lingua Franca blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Read it here: Pullum, “Everyday artificial stupidity”