Leigh M. Johnson

The Quotable South, Part 9: What You Can Kiss

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Memphis, The Quotable South 3 Comments

Last year, I had a running series on this blog that I called The Quotable South. It was about one-part PSA (below-the-Mason/Dixon information campaign) and two-parts personal therapy (as I had just returned down South after 6 years in the Northeast). Anyway, a good friend of mine and semi-regular contributor to this blog, Dr. Trott…

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Oy vey!

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Politics Comments Off on Oy vey!

In one of the more shameless displays of media exploitation I’ve seen in a while, Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv last Friday published the prayer note that Barack Obama left at the Western Wall (also known as the Kotel or the Wailing Wall) on his recent trip to Jerusalem. Reportedly, the prayer note was stolen by a…

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What if you were Gerald McGrew?

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics, Teaching 16 Comments

So, I saw this on anotherpanacea first, and therefore can’t take credit for what a great idea it is… You may remember the story by Dr. Seuss (né, Theodore Seuss Geisel) from 1950 entitled If I Ran the Zoo, in which the pint-sized protagonist, Gerald McGrew, speculates upon the amazing creation he could bring about…

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In Memoriam: Michel Foucault

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics 3 Comments

Twenty-four years ago today, on June 25, 1984, Michel Foucault died in Paris, France. In an interview with Lé Magazine Littéraire, barely a month before his passing, Foucault remarked: “The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field,…

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A Genuinely Original Thought About Race

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, Teaching 2 Comments

Pace the author of Ecclesiastes, every once in a while we find that there is, in fact, something new under the sun. As evindence, I refer you to the political philosophy blog Public Reason, where Simon Keller (Philosophy, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand) recently offered what I find to be a remarkably original “Thought…

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How We Got Here

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Politics Comments Off on How We Got Here

In other election-related news, check out the dubious decision on the part of supposedly left-leaning German magazine Die Tageszeitung editors to run a picture of the White House with the headline “Onkel Baracks Hütte” (“Uncle Barack’s Cabin”). Wessen dumme Entscheidung war das?

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Mama, trains, trucks, prison, gettin’ drunk… and Obama

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Memphis, Music, Philosophy, Politics 8 Comments

There’s a very famous country song, made popular by David Allan Coe, called “You Never Even Called Me By My Name.” (NOTE: That link is to a YouTube rendering of the song, which might be one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen.) As Coe explains in the song, it was actually written by Steve…

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Ranking the “Stars”

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy 3 Comments

Rankophiles (n. pl., people who are in love with “rankings”) might be interested to learn that Brian Leiter has identified the top three “Rising Stars” among newly hired junior faculty in philosophy. The stars (Agnes Callard, Matthew Kotzen and Japa Pallikkathayil) earned their rank, according to Leiter, by exhibiting a level of “talent and promise”…

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International human rights v. Multinational corporate money

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Human Rights, Politics 2 Comments

About a month ago, the U.S. Supreme Court almost heard a case from the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in which the plaintiffs, South African citizens, sought damages from several American and multi-national corporations for their role in (and profiting from) the perpetuation of apartheid in violation of international law. The Circuit Court had…

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There Will Be Blood is a bad Taxi Driver

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Film, Film Reviews, Pop Culture/Film, Pop Culture/Film/Literature 9 Comments

I just watched There Will Be Blood (2007), the Paul Thomas Anderson film adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! about a small Texas village that becomes a boomtown in the crude oil rush of the early twentieth century. Daniel Day-Lewis won an Academy Award for his performance as Daniel Plainview, the story’s tortured protagonist, and…

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