People are often surprised when I tell them that my favorite section of the New York Times, a newspaper that’s still delivered each morning to my front stoop, is business. Their surprise is reasonable enough: I have degrees in the humanities, not economics or finance, and I don’t make a lot of money, have no [...]
In an effort to move the conversation forward: Closed • Borders • Open: The Neutral Zone, Symposium on Sexuality, Class, Race, Gender, and Otherness in Poetry PROPOSAL to fellow poets and writers and CALL for PARTNERS During and following AWP 011, a number of issues regarding race and gender issues particularly in poetry ignited discussion [...]
In between finishing my PhD, planning a wedding, and writing poetry, I’ve been trying my hardest to keep up on the pro-union rallies that have been happening in Madison, Wisconsin. I grew up in Wisconsin, and lived in Madison when I was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, and later for a year after [...]
Go English! More specifically, go language geeks, wherever they may be. In this case, they’re in the Supreme Court, which ruled this week that AT&T may not claim exemption from the Freedom of Information Act on the grounds that it is a corporation, and thus, a “person.” While corporations are technically treated as persons, with [...]
In Swahili, uhai means “life.” In Hebrew, it’s chai. In Arabic, it’s haiya. So there it is, life itself braided into three languages entangled with my own history as an American Jew strangely drawn to life in East Africa. I often explain my ability to speak Swahili as some wacky fallout of a liberal arts [...]
A student at Texa s State University has a bone to pick with higher education: white men, he says, are under-represented on today’s campuses. The Iraq War veteran returned home and enrolled in school only to find that scholarships existed aplenty for minority students, but none for guys like him. So he decided to do [...]
Antinomy is when two or more things held to be true can’t possibly be true if the other “truths” are so. In o ther words, the incongruous, the paradoxical. Kant was big on antinomy, and though I am not a Kant scholar, his thinking about space and time is a good example: he used logic [...]
Andrew Sullivan, one of the more sought-out bloggers in the great big blogosphere, is leaving his prestigious post at the Atlantic online to write for the Daily Beast. Launched by Tina Brown in 2008 as an alternative to the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast has since become not just a juggernaut of the Web, but an [...]
Well, no — it’s not new — but it’ s new to u s. Th is week’s New Yorker features a previously unreleased short story, titled “Backbone,” by David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008. The author of Infinite Jest allegedly struggled for years to surpass that achievement, which made him very, very famous [...]
The irony is no longer lost on me. I am returning from a Comparative Literature conference in New York City on the topic of irony, and I have just realized that I’ve analyzed the city from the outside; I have the mindset of a Southerner-turned-Washingtonian, studying New York City as if I were an anthropologist [...]
In the wake of January’s shooting just outside Tucson, Arizona, lawmakers in that state are trying to push three bills through the legislature that would allow professors and students over 21 to carry guns on the state’ s college campu ses. The rationale, of course, is that people should be prepared to defend themselves the next [...]
Last week when my friend David Alm published his lament of digital publishing in these pages, I happened to be writing an introduction for a visiting writer. I recognized in my draft a soft rebuttal to David’s post, but I decided it had to complete its original mission before I could post it. This introduction [...]
For the past week and a half, protesters in Madison, Wisconsin, have been lined up outside and inside the state capitol building protesting Governor Scott Walker’s proposed budget and its attack on union rights. In addition to asking certain state workers to contribute more to their pensions and health insurance, the bill contains provisions which [...]
Why do we like what we like? Yes, it’s a big question, possibly best addressed in a philosophy seminar. But it has political implications, as Michael Washburn pointed out in his recent post on the VIDA study and why he, as a book critic, has only reviewed a handful of books by women compared to [...]