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 →Back in the 90s, there was a kind of clumsy course correction by the entertainment industry when it came to the portrayal of black men. In its typical ham-fisted way, Hollywood attempted to assert its benign, market-driven progressivism by filling its middle brow shlock with impossibly noble black characters. Every other movie seemed to feature […]
Continue reading →Check out this piece from xkcd, the beloved and influential web comic. I think it’s a good example of how important how you position your argument is relative to the arguments you’re fighting against, how desperately people want to be the underdog. (I share this comic via a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License. The creator […]
Continue reading →There’s an old joke where three statisticians go hunting deer. The first one shoots at a buck and misses five feet to the left. The second one shoots at a buck and misses five feet to the right. The third one shouts, “we got ’em!” To me, that’s what politics is, more or less. Think […]
Continue reading →So I thought this was funny. Now, I don’t know how an august thinkfluencer and popular internet celebrity like Barro happened upon this little academic blog, but that’s not important. What is important is that this Tweet is flagrantly, straightforwardly, unambiguously dishonest. You can read the piece here. I said that, to me, Barro becomes […]
Continue reading →[View the story “The Tao of Neoliberal DudeBros” on Storify] Part of the nice thing about the rise of new left media like Jacobin is that there are spaces for left-wing economics, rather than just the cultural and political analysis that lefties have always had forums for. The problem, though, is that a forum is only […]
Continue reading →I’m writing this from the Ninth Biennial Feminisms and Rhetorics conference, at Stanford University, where I’ll be presenting a paper on archival research. I had a situation this morning where I was genuinely unsure of the best way to be better a feminist (or feminist ally). I attended a panel in the first session on […]
Continue reading →I’m going to tell you a story, or really, a paraphrase of someone else’s story. Richard Fulkerson, a compositionist and Professor Emeritus in the Texas A&M system, wrote a series of controversial articles (over a span of decades) that traced a history of formal composition study and the dominant theories within. The beginning of that […]
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 […]
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