This has been a tough year for Memphis music. We’ve lost a lot of greats, some better known than others, each an irreplaceable spiritual brick in the impregnable wall of sound that guards and protects and defines this city. The fact that so many have been called home recently serves as a bittersweet reminder that…
Read MoreThe disappearance of citizens displays a perversely cruel and absolute sovereignty. —Ruti Teitel, Transitional Justice (2002) I should begin by noting that I started writing what follows last week, after the publication of the New York Times story on the “1.5 Million Missing Black Men in America” but before the popular uprising in Baltimore that began Monday as…
Read MoreYesterday, a Los Angeles federal jury awarded $7.4 million to the family of late, great R&B singer Marvin Gaye for copyright infringement by contemporary pop-icons Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams. The jurors determined that Thicke’s 2013 chart-topper “Blurred Lines” copied elements of Gaye’s 1977 hit “Got to Give It Up.” Although they were instructed to consider only…
Read MoreOver the last couple of years, the practice of including “trigger warnings” on course syllabi or articulating them aloud in classes that include potentially disturbing, offensive or triggering content has become the institutional norm, if not also a requirement (as it is more or less becoming at many institutions). What detractors remain don’t really question the fundamental advisability…
Read MoreOne of my colleagues, Jeff Gross (Asst Professor of American Literature and Culture), posted a really excellent essay entitled “Rethinking Grades” earlier today, which I want to recommend that everyone (especially educators in Tennessee) read post haste. There, he raises a number of questions about how we think about the phenomenon, widespread in higher education today,…
Read More[Disclaimer: this post is a brief, quickly-composed and so incomplete response to a number of tangentially-related events and essays from the last several days. I have a lot more to say about all of them, including how they are not merely tangentially-related, but not now.] If you haven’t already, you should read yesterday’s Stone article in the…
Read MoreYesterday afternoon, I saw the new film Fifty Shades of Grey, based on the erotic romance novel of the same name by E.L. James. I hadn’t read the books beforehand, which I expect I would have found insufferable if the general consensus about the quality of their prose is even half-true. (Judging from the stilted,…
Read MoreHere’s the thing everyone needs to understand before s/he starts picking a fight: you can only back people into a corner so far before they come out swinging. UChicago law professor Brian Leiter has decided to pick a fight with me in a comment thread on his blog here. There, in a moderated thread allegedly addressing “issues…
Read MoreDespite much well-earned Sturm und Drang in the last few years surrounding the so-called crisis in the humanities, the regrettably pernicious corporatization of higher education, the imminent death of American universities, the (at turns, but more often in conjunction) sexist, racist, homophobic, classist and just garden-variety asshole-ish paucity of civility/collegiality in academia— especially in the discipline of Philosophy— I sometimes fear we…
Read MoreThe printing press, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane: each in their own way radically shrunk the world, diminished the power of mere distance to maintain our strangeness to one another. Yet, arguably, no human innovation has served as a greater tool for transcending Nature’s most seemingly impregnable boundaries, space and time, than the World…
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