In all of the hoopla about a fake meritocracy, illegal shenanigans for college admissions, legacy and other legal but questionable methods of getting in, and all the other things swirling around the internet… Continue reading →

Once I knew a woman named Laura. Her light brown hair and hazel eyes were unremarkable in white American society. She told me a story–this was in 1975–about something that had happened to… Continue reading →

It shouldn’t work. After all, jukebox musicals are an abuse to the songs, most presented as a verse and a chorus or two, the idea of the music enough, so move along. With… Continue reading →

There’s an article in The Washington Post from earlier this week that all of us within academia today might want to pay attention to. By Andrew Marzoni, an English PhD, it is called “The Cult… Continue reading →

The following is excerpted and adapted from Chapter Five: How the Other Half Lives of my book The Cult of Individualism: A History of an Enduring American Myth (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Publishers, 2013). It… Continue reading →

“This will be an election of… common sense,” said Donald Trump recently. Common sense? The greatest American writer of common sense (though Ben Franklin might believe he should take that crown) was Thomas… Continue reading →

When my book The Cult of Individualism: A History of an Enduring American Myth appeared in 2013, I thought it’s Afterword (included below) both naive and overly hopeful–even though I had written it. Over the… Continue reading →

Yesterday, in class, I showed my students an old clip of Jon Stewart with Tucker Carlson on Crossfire. It’s from 2004, but it has relevancy now. That CNN show, as Stewart points out, was… Continue reading →

Yesterday, I posted an expanded version of “Stop Disparaging Professors. They Work for a Better America” on medium.com. I added, in particular, mentions of a number of professors in the public sphere, including… Continue reading →