A friend of mine forwarded me the following video, which is apparently a part of some series sponsored by the website Rate My Professors in which professors are allowed to comment upon students’ remarks about them. The retorts are called “Professors Strike Back” and this is one from Peter Fettner, Professor of Intellectual Heritage at…
Read MoreAs one of his first acts in Office– a long overdue one– Obama signed an Executive Order to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center within the year. What’s more, Obama’s order also included directives to end torture (such as waterboarding) in U.S. interrogration practices, shutter CIA “black site” prisons abroad, and end the practice of…
Read MoreIt snowed yesterday in Memphis. Not “real” snow, just some flurries in the air, but it added an unreal sparkle to the morning… a morning in which so many other things seemed so unreal. I watched the Inauguration ceremonies in our campus pub, surrounded by rapt colleagues and students. People cheered and clapped and laughed,…
Read MoreAn excerpt from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s “I Have A Dream” address to the people assembled on the Washington Mall, August 28, 1963. …In a sense we have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of…
Read MoreSo, there’s a thing going around on Facebook that asks people to list 25 random things about themselves. I usually delete messages like this immediately, but for whatever reason I actually filled out the list this time. I suppose that the point of this exercise is to show something revelatory about what the author finds…
Read MoreDespite my real and abiding passion for the figure of the antihero (see here and here), I had never seen a single episode of the television program 24 before last week. Everyone– and I mean everyone— told me that I should watch it, that I would love it, and that I was really missing something……
Read MorePresident George W Bush’s Farewell Address (Parts 1&2) You can read the full text of the address here.
Read MoreThis semster I’m teaching a “Philosophy of Race” course that meets on Tuesdays/Thursdays from 12:30-1:45 in the afternoon… which means we will be meeting in the middle of the Obama inauguration next week! I’m debating whether or not to cancel class, or at least to forego my syllabus schedule (would’ve been Bernier and Kant) in…
Read MoreI’ve mentioned my fascination with medical mysteries before on this blog (see: my post on Apotemnophilia). I suppose that part of that fascination is simply grounded in the strangeness of some of the conditions, but I am also particularly interested in the way that medical knowledge is stymied. A couple of years ago, I read…
Read MoreThe painting to the left is Akt Elke 2 (Nude Elke 2) by the German artist Georg Baselitz, who is famous for painting figures upside-down. When Baselitz was asked by a reporter recently whether or not he felt any guilt about the “astronomical prices” his works were fetching at auctions, Baselitz took a long drag…
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