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…
Read MoreToday 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…
Read MoreI 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…
Read MoreRemember 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….
Read MoreFor 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…
Read MoreFirst, 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…
Read MoreWe 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…
Read MoreMany 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….
Read MoreSeveral 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…
Read MoreAnyone who’s ever read Jacques Derrida’s The Gift of Death, one of the greatest books ever on secrecy, has certainly had to grapple with the aporia of the secret. Of course, the “secret” of that text (such that there is one) is that there is no Secret. This is partly true because, structurally speaking, someone…
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