Leigh M. Johnson

“Fishing” and The Art of Misdirection

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Teaching 2 Comments

My oh my! I am seriously impressed with the flurry of activity on my friends’ blogs in the week that I’ve been away from this one. (Especially nice posts by Ideas Man on what’s really wrong with Mormonism, and by chet on the death of the author/artist.) As chet rightly pointed out to me, I…

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I couldn’t make this up…

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Politics 3 Comments

Last night, just before going to bed, I logged in to my computer to check my email. Imagine my surprise when one of the headlines on the msn.com homepage read: “Liberia’s Gen Butt Naked admits killing thousands” First, this is not a practical joke. The news sites did not get hacked. There really is a…

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Just Ask, Part 2: The “Steakburger”

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Just Ask, Pop Culture/Film, Pop Culture/Film/Literature 8 Comments

Today is a two-fer in the Just Ask Challenge! In response to my ealier post about Burger Friday, I received another Just Ask query from Ideas Man (who also wrote an entire post about this on his blog). Leave it to Ideas Man to skip the whole romantic story there and instead ask: How does…

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The Most Photographed Barn in America

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film, Pop Culture/Film/Literature 6 Comments

I read Don DeLillo’s 1985 masterpiece White Noise as an undergraduate in an American Lit course at the University of Memphis about ten years ago now. I was still developing my postmodern muscles at the time, and I loved DeLillo’s novel, despite its overly stylized and sometimes too-precious prose. In particular, I loved the very…

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Why Do We Love the Anti-Hero?

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film, Pop Culture/Film/Literature 13 Comments

Remember Han Solo? That smarmy, proud, devil-may-care mercenary from the “Stars Wars” movies? As best I can remember, I think he’s the first “anti-hero” I loved. After Han, I think the next one for me was the narrator of Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground. Since then, I’ve been collecting them like some sort of neurotic hobbyist….

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Shameless Self-Promotion

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Memphis, Music 6 Comments

For those of you who don’t know, I host a radio show on Sunday nights from 7-8 pm (Central time) on Rhodes Radio. My show is called “Americana the Beautiful” and is ostensibly devoted to American “roots” music (country, blues, jazz, rock n’ roll), but I often just play whatever I like. Anyway, we’ve now…

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The Trouble With Fossils

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics Comments Off on The Trouble With Fossils

First, a caveat: The following post is NOT intended, primarily, to advocate or oppose any particular Presidential candidate. A couple of days ago, NPR correspondent Robert Seigel interviewed Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. (You can read the transcript of the interview here.) Initially, it seemed like the main focus of Seigel’s questions was Romney’s health care…

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Aristotle for Inspiration

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Teaching, The Search for Values 3 Comments

We concluded the semester in my “Search for Values” class with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Specifically, we ended with the end of the Nic Ethics, Book X, in which Aristotle defends the life of contemplation as both the highest achievement for human beings and the “truly” happy and virtuous life. I always find that Book X…

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Oh, What A Tangled Web…

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics, Teaching 11 Comments

Many of you have probably read the now-famous text by historian James Loewen Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. I find that many of my students, especially those who come from liberal or progressive backgrounds, read it in high school or in some other context before they reached college….

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War is War

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics, Teaching, The Search for Values Comments Off on War is War

Several weeks ago, when my class was still reading Homer’s Iliad, I tried to goad my students into making comparisons between the Trojan War and our current war in Iraq. That didn’t go over so well, and at the time I wasn’t sure why. I suspected that it was still early in the semester and…

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