Michael Bates: March 2023 Archives
Church Celebrities Who are Above Criticism: Bill Gothard
Tim Bayly examines the fall and attempted resurgence of Bill Gothard, founder of the Institute for Basic Youth Conflicts, Institute for Basic Life Principles (IBLP), and the Advanced Training Institute (ATI). He recounts the criticisms his father, Joseph Bayly, leveled at Gothard's teaching nearly 50 years ago.
RELATED:
A survivor of Gothard's abuse describes the grooming process she experienced.
Coverage of the lawsuits filed by survivors against Bill Gothard.
'He was central to music history': the forgotten legacy of Leon Russell | Music | The Guardian
"By 1969, Russell had become a musical octopus with tentacles spreading to his own record company (Shelter Records), a duo he formed called the Asylum Choir, and, most importantly, key contributions to albums by Delaney & Bonnie, the only white act signed to Stax. Their rollicking second album, Accept No Substitute, didn't sell well yet it became, in Janovitz's words, 'a secret handshake. It was the album where all the major musicians said to each other, "You have to hear this."'
"The buzz on Delaney & Bonnie's record was so intense, it inspired Eric Clapton, Dave Mason and George Harrison to join the group - which also included Rita Coolidge - for a UK tour. A then unknown Elton John found himself equally besotted. 'Elton once said to me, "I would not be where I am today without Leon Russell and Delaney & Bonnie, and the music you all made,"' Coolidge said."
BASIC Computer Games - Wikipedia
I have memories of typing computer programs printed in a magazine (Byte, Creative Computing) into our TRS-80 Model I, with the cassette drive for storage. The favorite was the Star Trek text-based game, where you chase Klingons across an 8x8 map of quadrants, and try to destroy them with phasers and photon torpedos, one command at a time. We had it on the Wang 2200 at school as well. Here's the 1978 edition of BASIC Computer Games. Hunt the Wumpus was another favorite; I modified the playing field from a dodecahedron (12 nodes, 3 adjacent to each) to an icosahedron (20 nodes, 5 adjacent ).
MORE: History and source of the 1971 version of Star Trek, with screenshots.
The End of the English Major | The New Yorker
"'Young people are very, very concerned about the ethics of representation, of cultural interaction--all these kinds of things that, actually, we think about a lot!' Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard's dean of undergraduate education and an English professor, told me last fall. She was one of several teachers who described an orientation toward the present, to the extent that many students lost their bearings in the past. 'The last time I taught The Scarlet Letter, I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences--like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb,' she said. 'Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago.'
"Tara K. Menon, a junior professor who joined the English faculty in 2021, linked the shift to students arriving at college with a sense that the unenlightened past had nothing left to teach. At Harvard, as elsewhere, courses that can be seen to approach an idea of canon, such as Humanities 10, an intensive, application-only survey, have been the focus of student concerns about too few Black artists in syllabi, or Eurocentric biases.
"'There's a real misunderstanding that you can come in and say, "I want to read post-colonial texts--that's the thing I want to study--and I have no interest in studying the work of dead white men,"' Menon said. 'My answer, in the big first lecture that I give, is, If you want to understand Arundhati Roy, or Salman Rushdie, or Zadie Smith, you have to read Dickens. Because one of the tragedies of the British Empire'--she smiled--'is that all those writers read all those books.'"
Dishonor Code: What Happens When Cheating Becomes the Norm?
"This past semester, in her Intro to Accounting class, students took the midterm online--but in a proctored classroom using a browser that alerted teaching assistants if anyone navigated out of the exam in search of illicit information. To access the browser, students had to log in with an individual code given to them after they showed up for the exam....
"No one checked IDs to make sure the students enrolled in the class were the same students taking the final. Cheaters in the class paid fellow classmates--the ones who stayed in the proctored exam room--up to $100 to send them the codes so they could log in from outside the room, where they were free to look up information on their phones or brainstorm answers together. In case the Olds got smart and thought to track students' IP addresses--that is, where they actually were--students reserved study rooms in the same building as the exam room, Huntsman Hall, making it appear as though they were physically there. (It's unclear whether any proctors thought to check.)...
"Linda Griffith, an engineering professor at MIT, said bloated college bureaucracies--Harvard has roughly the same number of undergraduate students as administrators, and Stanford meets its 17,680-strong student population with approximately 15,750 administrators--are meant to cater to the every whim and need of an increasingly customer service-oriented student body."
