Last night, I posted the transcript and some video clips of Obama’s 2009 State of the Union Address. Here are my thoughts on the speech: The Tone:Perfect. We all expected that President Hope would sound strong and inspiring last night, that he would steer clear of fear and pessimism, that he would rally the troops……
Read MoreAbout a month ago, I started watching the television show “24” from its beginning. I was immediately hooked, as I wrote in my initial post on the subject (“24” Is Like Television Crack), and this week I just began Season 5. My general impression is that the quality of the show declined after the first…
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 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 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 MoreIt’s funny how a simple and arbitrary change in the calander date can give us all the impression that something has really started over, that we have begun a new project that is in some way really distinct from the one we were in only a couple of days ago, that the weight of 2008’s…
Read MoreJames Baldwin, a 20th C. African-American novelist and parrhesiastes, wrote a letter to his nephew in 1963– on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation— that was later published under the title My Dungeon Shook. In that letter, Baldwin tried to persuade his young nephew not to fall prey to the more insidious temptations of assimilation,…
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…
Read MoreWith only 8 more days to go before the Inauguration, Slate magazine (in collaboration with MixedInk) has invited us, the people, to help write Obama’s inaugural address. The way it works is as follows: when you click on this link, you will be taken to a site where you can begin writing your own speech….
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