I’ve thought that unions are overall a good thing since I was able to earn a paycheck. When I first became department chair, I recall going on a retreat with other new chairs from across… Continue reading…
There’s been a series in the New York Times about slavery and its legacy that featured an article about how the plantation grounds the forms of capitalism we find today in the US. Phillip… Continue reading…
When I have taught medieval philosophy in the past, I’ve had to describe the debate between the realists and the nominalists. It’s central to understanding the European Middle Ages. Basically, the dispute is over universals,… Continue reading…
I’ve tried to make this case to various people, usually to no avail (well, not everyone – you know who you are). I said to someone not long ago that I saw Obama… Continue reading…
This is an interesting reflection on a black man being mistaken for another black man, at a conference that was overwhelmingly white. I was at that conference. I met Gabriel Apata (and had a… Continue reading…
I’m still surprisingly affected by the news that Johnny Clegg has passed away. Here’s a really nice piece by Richard Pithouse on Juluka’s first album, that gives some good detail and context to why… Continue reading…
This is a former UCF colleague, someone I knew (although not well), and a supporter of our first and second Flickering Landscapes conferences, in Moab and in Orlando. I’m very sad for the… Continue reading…
This article (behind paywall, sorry) is about the history of politicians and administrators saying that their universities can’t be “all things to all people” (the 5-word phrase in the title). It tells the… Continue reading…
This post responds to the article here.
So, I haven’t seen the movie Yesterday, and not sure if I will. But here’s a post in which philosophers debate the central premise of… Continue reading…
At 11:54 EDT this morning we officially hit the summer solstice (winter solstice in the southern hemisphere). I used to wait for the exact minute and imagined that I could feel the earth start to… Continue reading…
I think Nature needs to work on how it thinks about interdisciplinarity. A recent article (Rafael Núñez , Michael Allen, Richard Gao, Carson Miller Rigoli, Josephine Relaford-Doyle and Arturs Semenuks, “What Happened to Cognitive Science?”,… Continue reading…
From this obituary of Rachel Held Evans: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/04/us/rachel-held-evans.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage
This is going to feel like a Sunday morning homily. Haven’t done one of those for a long time. So be it.
This person, Rachel… Continue reading…
Every time I think about writing about something on Facebook that really matters, I think about how that is even possible to do. Marshall McLuhan was surely at some level correct in saying that the… Continue reading…
Staff are now testifying that the now-former president did indeed know more about the budget scandal than he let on. That the 4 people who were fired a few months ago were possibly fired… Continue reading…
Is Email Making Professors Stupid? is an article in the recent Chronicle of Higher Education. It talks about Donald Knuth, a computer scientist, who doesn’t use email and hasn’t since 1990. Instead, he has… Continue reading…
Test.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_Polytechnique_massacre#/media/File:Mtl_dec6_plaque.jpg 29 years ago today. I remember. 14 women dead, 15 injured, plus suicides reported after the massacre, directly tied to the stress of these events. I was teaching at Trent, in Peterborough, and… Continue reading…
A Chronicle of Higher Education article on English departments, discussing among others Julie Thompson Klein and Jonathan Kramnick (and, btw, I’d love to sit in on a discussion between these two on interdisciplinarity). It… Continue reading…
On next week’s US midterm election: 1. Advance polls are meaningless. Remember two years ago. Everyone has an advanced poll, and will claim accuracy after the fact depending on what happens. Yes, there is… Continue reading…
Everywhere I look in the past week it seems like there’s death and sadness. The big obvious ones – innocent Jews slaughtered in Pittsburgh, a plane crash in Indonesia. Small ones – one of our… Continue reading…
A truism of political morality is that we should take character seriously. This is, perhaps, more of a truism on the right than the left, but it would be rare to find someone who would… Continue reading…
NYT coverage of the primary elections in Florida and Arizona. It’s been noted before, but there’s a subtle (sometimes not so subtle) slant to their political reporting. Exhibit A:
“Mr. Gillum edged out Ms…. Continue reading…
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/25/opinion/sunday/college-professors-experts-advice.html What makes a good teacher, from a student’s point of view? The author here makes some fairly broad generalizations about researchers and teachers. He feels a bit like he cherry-picks examples to prove… Continue reading…
A report in the Atlantic tracks the decline of the humanities since the financial crisis of 2008. The decline is both in the number of students in classes and the number of majors…. Continue reading…
I’m generally not a huge fan of Ross Douthat, but I don’t dismiss him on principle the way I do some other columnists. When he talks about the humanities, though, he makes me want to… Continue reading…
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/upshot/election-2016-voting-precinct-maps.html The NY Times publishes a voting map of the US for the 2016 presidential election, showing how areas voted down to the polling station level. So, if you’re American you can see how… Continue reading…
My university is getting a new president, after 26 years of the previous one being in that position. The new president was our provost (there was a national search, but it’s pretty clear that he… Continue reading…
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/opinion/america-heimat-germany-politics.html
The columnist in this piece thinks that the English speaking world needs a new word from German: Heimat. This is a term which captures more than geographical place, but a state of belonging…. Continue reading…
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-21973-y
So, I’m looking at this paper (above), and what it looks like to me is that it is another way of thinking about the idea of the horizontal in the construction and expression… Continue reading…
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/16/robert-mueller-russians-charged-election This just dropped. So the grand jury found enough evidence to charge these with conspiracy to defraud the United States. That means that there’s enough evidence to go forward with a trial for… Continue reading…