Yard Sign Politics
Respect does not mean staying silent about injustice in order to keep a fragile peace. But are yard signs meaningful speech, or just a lazy, self-indulgent shortcut that will only piss people off?
Uncategorized
The Seat of Power
Think of the difference signaled by leather versus cloth, or by a high, winged back versus a task chair. There are department chairs, board chairs, endowed chairs—why did we steal that word for humans in charge? No one takes direction from a department sofa.
Willy Wonka Rides Again
Screenshot of David Klein and his partner in a video titled “Saturday Morning so good to me!” An old friend (his name, coincidentally, Charlie) bought my kids and me a present recently: A chance to find a golden tag and then to win a candy factory.
The Sweet Smell of Success
Image by Evan-Amos, Wikipedia Commons If you have ever been truly poor (or a soldier or mountain man), you understand that having potable water, edible food, immediate physical safety, lifegiving medicine, heat in the winter, and basic hygiene of body/clothes/housing (including an absence of vermin), are what matter. There…
The Poet and the Priest
Is it an American thing that we fawn over glitzy celebrities but pay scholars less overt attention? In France, intellectuals are invited guests on talk shows. In Ireland, literature is sacred.
The Return of the Muumuu
In the painful days, women dressed for men. Then we realized men did not much care, and we began dressing for the people who gave us compliments—other women. Now, at long last, we are doing what every three-year-old demands to do: dressing for ourselves.
What the Boogaloo Bois Are Not
We held our own against the Soviet Union as a Cold War superpower, only to have an impoverished Russia influence our president and our elections. What if we make it through our latest civil rights revolution, only to have some dudes in aloha shirts blow us up?
The Winter of Our Discontent
“If we winter this one out, we can summer anywhere,” the Irish poet Seamus Heaney once wrote. The phrase is now relevant in a way he never anticipated. That is not surprising; poetry pushes past a poet’s limits to trespass on the universal. And thanks to COVID-19, the whole world…
Here Are Some of My Pans
There is something almost magical about a display of humble, well-used tools, as a physical manifestation of a life and calling. It is evidence of the culling of what does not work, and the re-use of and care for what does. It reminds that the tool is not the knowledge, but that which permits knowledge to act; it shows a piety to craft, and a mastery like saintliness of an art.
When Scholarly Articles Are Fraud, Whim, or Total Insanity
“Elsevier says it is investigating how one of its journals managed to publish a paper with patently absurd assertions about the genetic inheritance of personality traits,” I read in the newsletter of Retraction Watch, a brilliant ten-year-old project undertaken by two scientists. Regularly appalled by what passes for research, they…