In a recent article for the Mail and Guardian, Brendan O’Neill suggests that adoptions of African children by the likes of Madonna and Brangelina may show us that “having a black baby is the new black.” O’Neill calls this phenomenon the “White Madonna’s Burden” (in not-so-thinly-veiled reference to the famous poem by Rudyard Kipling, “The…
Read MoreBecause I was having some technical blogging difficulties last week, I just posted briefly on the Bloggers Unite for Human Rights Day. In that post, I urged readers to visit the Tear It Down project website, which is the home of an initiative to tear down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay and to call…
Read MoreNow that the semester is over, I had the rare opportunity to actually see a movie in a movie theater last night. For the last year, I’ve been almost entirely reliant on Netflix, and I had forgotten the magic of the big-screen experience. My friend and I went to see The Visitor, a film about…
Read More[Argh! I was having blog problems on the UNITE day, so this post is late (and severely truncated). I think I have things figured out now, though, so more on human rights later…] Bloggers Unite for Human Rights day is a joint venture of Amnesty International and BlogCatalog.com intended “to help elevate human rights by…
Read MoreSome of you may have seen Mary Kolesnikova’s recent Los Angeles Times article entitled “Language that makes you say OMG.” There, Kolesnikova tells of a Pew Research Center study that polled 12- to 17-year-olds and found that almost 40% admitted to letting “chat-speak” slip into their essays and homework. And a full 25% of them…
Read MoreIf you keep a blog, I urge you to check out the upcoming event Bloggers Unite for Human Rights, which will occur on May 15th (in just a couple of days). This blog will be participating!
Read MoreI’m giving the discussions of Hillary Clinton and strategic misreading a rest for a bit to make room for another, more immediately pressing, question of mine. What counts as the central “canonical” text of Platonism? Let me set the stage for this question: At my academic home, we have a great-books-ish series of courses that…
Read MoreConsider this a friendly (though not completely unrelated) break from the Clinton/feminism discussion of late on this blog.
Read MoreI used to say that one of the things I both loved and hated about philosopher Richard Rorty’s work was that he was a master of what I call “strategic misreading.” If you’ve ever read Rorty’s famous foray into the “Continental” (European) philosophical tradition, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, you may have some sense of what I…
Read MoreI suppose it was inevitable that, when the results came back from North Carolina and Indiana, people would begin calling for Clinton to drop out of the race. I don’t think she should. I’m not going to appeal to the most obvious reason, which is that many of the superdelegates still remain uncommitted. (In the…
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