Monthly Archives: September 2010

Why the Owl of Minerva Doesn’t Get Party Invitations After Dusk

I don’t do this very often, but I’m going to get a bit aggressive about disciplinary expertise for a second. William Easterly has an interesting post about the “mystery of the benevolent autocrat”, observing that while the highest growth rates … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Africa, Production of History | 5 Comments

Crime and Punishment

What should happen to the Rutgers students who livestreamed a roommate having sex, spurring him to suicide? This isn’t the first time the question of criminal consequences for an action like this one has come up, and doubtless it won’t … Continue reading

Posted in Politics | 9 Comments

Who’s Martin Luther?

Let’s say there’s this person. He or she and family regularly go to church on Sunday, and their church is Lutheran. For them, church is a supportive community first, a theological and philosophical experience second (or third or fourth). He … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Production of History | 5 Comments

Viruses? Assassination? Arming Insurgents? How Could That Go Wrong?

You don’t have to be paranoid or a conspiracy freak to think that re-engineering the technology at the heart of digital communications so that it can be legally wiretapped is a bad idea. Drearily, this is another example of how … Continue reading

Posted in Information Technology and Information Literacy, Politics | 2 Comments

State of the Union

One of the commitments I carried into blogging from the outset was to try and build bridges to conservatives. First, because they were a significant presence in the early blogosphere and the wider public sphere. Online, I’ve always sought inputs … Continue reading

Posted in Politics | 11 Comments

Learning the Rules

I got into a conversation earlier this week about the cultural capital of graduating students at elite universities. What students learn in their coursework and from being in a college community builds some of the cultural capital that they will … Continue reading

Posted in Academia | 8 Comments

A Lord Byron in Every Cyberpot

I’m interested in seeing the film Catfish after reading A.O. Scott’s review. Still, Scott’s references to familiar examples of online deception coupled with his welcome awareness that literary and cultural fraud is an old and established part of American life … Continue reading

Posted in Digital Humanities, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Popular Culture | 2 Comments

Island at the Top of King Solomon’s Mines

Re-reading King Solomon’s Mines for today’s class, I was suddenly struck powerfully by a sort of deja vu. Not about the novel itself, since I’ve read it quite a few times, both for courses and otherwise. Nor even about the … Continue reading

Posted in Information Technology and Information Literacy, Popular Culture | Comments Off on Island at the Top of King Solomon’s Mines

How to Succeed as a Court Jester

If you want to be the kind of professorial public intellectual who gets quoted a lot or profiled in mainstream media, some advice (keeping in mind that I’ve done a few laps around that racecourse) about what to write and … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Politics | 2 Comments

Toilers in the Trope Workshop

One of my hopes for cultural history & media studies courses that I teach is that students will learn not just how to read, analyze and critique expressive culture but also get some sense of how to produce it, use … Continue reading

Posted in Africa, Digital Humanities, Popular Culture, Production of History | 1 Comment