One of the traditional, fundamental political divides between the left and the right has been the question of rights and ability, the question of positive rights. Conservatives have tended to endorse only negative rights, while liberals have endorsed a more expansive vision of positive rights. Healthcare is a prime example. Conservatives have long reacted to […]
Continue reading →In the 1980s and 1990s, a sex panic of unprecedented scale and destruction swept the United States and several other places. In over a dozen cases, day care workers were accused of ritual sexual abuse of young children. Often, these accusations included references to Satanic worship and other outlandish details that should have raised red […]
Continue reading →Spoilers ahoy. At the end of writer and director George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road¸ a rebooted continuation of his classic post-apocalyptic series, a quote appears: “Where must we go, we who wander this wasteland, in search of our better selves?” The quote is attributed to “The First History Man,” a nod to the time […]
Continue reading →When my father got sick, the insurance company sent him to Los Angeles. He was on the organ donor list and I guess the hospital there was better, or cheaper, even though living in Connecticut, we didn’t suffer for world-class hospitals. Like so much of life as a teenager, that decision seemed bewildering at the […]
Continue reading →I’m friends with a guy from my Chicago days who believes strongly in the need to reform alimony and child custody laws. He married and had a child with a woman who would later suffer a relapse into alcoholism and drug abuse. He went through a ton of difficult times, sticking with her through repeated […]
Continue reading →So it seems to me to be straightforwardly and superficially the case that the Olympics, while a lot of fun, are a corrupt nightmare as an institution. Their apolitical stance, meanwhile, is absurd on its face; everything about their presentation is drenched in competing nationalism, and as usual, the denial that an event or expression […]
Continue reading →It’s not uncommon for politics and policy to be distorted by a romantic vision of human nature, but nowhere is that more true than education. Here at Purdue, we have a strong freshman composition program, Introductory Composition at Purdue (ICAP). One of the reasons for its strength, in my opinion, is our conference system. English […]
Continue reading →Woodrow Wilson’s speech asking Congress to declare war against imperial Germany and bring the United States into World War One is, in many ways, a remarkable document. I’ve taken several classes of freshman composition students through a rhetorical analysis of the speech, and though at times it’s a slog, I find it a very generative […]
Continue reading →In politics, our journalists believe, it is better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It’s better to be savvy than it is to be just, good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere, thoughtful or humane. Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves […]
Continue reading →My piece on corporatism in the American university, and the ways in which it’s eroded intellectual and political freedom, is available today in the print edition of the New York Times Magazine, bundled with the Sunday paper. I have gotten a tremendous amount of feedback, the vast majority of it positive, and I really couldn’t be […]
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