From Musings

America’s sordid love affair with reality TV and Alaska…fetish much?

Let’s face it, America has a reality fetish when it comes to Alaska. While its been brewing for awhile, in the last few years the Alaska reality genre has exploded. Perhaps it was Sarah Palin that opened the Alaska reality floodgates, but whatever the impetus is, we love romanticizing the rugged, frontier, Alaskan way of life. Take any mundane job in the lower 48, stick it in Alaska and you’ll likely have a film crew tagging along. Get arrested in Alaska, chances are good are it’ll be captured on film.

I tweeted this a few months back:

And I’d now like to build upon this by providing an ever growing list of Alaska reality shows currently or recently on air (let me know if I’ve missed any):

Believe it or not, it doesn’t stop here. There are more shows currently in production. We’ll soon have the pleasure of watching:

Not to mention, one-off specials and episodes of other shows including:

In sum,The Anchorage Daily News puts it in perspective:

On a Friday night… a new Unalakleet-based show about Alaska Bush pilots became Discovery Channel’s biggest new series premiere ever with 2.6 million viewers.

With a state population of 710,000, the Flying Wild Alaska premiere was watched by more than 3.5x people than Alaska has residents. Fetish much?

Teach.com has launched

Today I’m thrilled to announce the launch of Teach.com. Teach.com is a comprehensive educational resource dedicated to discovering, discussing and encouraging great teaching around the world.

We’ve been working on the site for nearly a year. Many thanks goes out to everyone who worked on the project, I’m ever thankful for my wonderful team of designers, developers, project managers, and content producers! A big thanks also goes out to our friends at USC Rossier and the MAT@USC who helped make this site a reality.

Check out: