This piece makes a common argument that religious belief has played and continues to play an important part in the struggle to overcome White supremacy in America.  The author points to Rev. Al Sharpton and Rev. William J. Barber II as contemporary...

It's late in the day and I've said nothing on here.  We're self-quarantining, which is nice--we stay in our house--but begins to feel like we're in a bubble out of time in general.  Actually, that's nice too.

Is it the higher ed apocalypse? Maybe not. Gonna be thinking about...

Here is a really nice piece on what anthropology is doing: offering a critique of the "here and now" by looking at the "there and then".  Boas and his generation were engaged in a critique of the metaphysics of race, and white supremacy, which explicitly governed US policy, law, and cultural self-understanding, at least until World War II.  He also plays up the way this generation of anthropological theorists, many of them women, critically assessed the...

I agree with this piece on the importance of making distinctions.  The practice of making distinctions and weighing proportional significances can sound too much like casuistry, and casuistry can easily sound deeply, irredeemably corrupt.  (That seems to have been Pascal's view, for starters.)  But, as people who study ethics know, while casuistry can become corrupt, it...

The import of community colleges as drivers of immediate and medium-term economic development cannot be gainsaid.  This report shows how valuable and significant those institutions are in the United States, even from a narrow economic perspective. 

They can sharpen their focus on serving economic development, it is true; and the report makes a good case for that.  But as an educator, I want them also...

One of my favorite lines in literature is from Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises:

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

So much of human life happens this way.  So much of social change is like this, too.

Two 

The Walkman is 41 years old.  I must have gotten my first Walkman by about 1982 or 83, I think.  It’s an amazing artifact, and as this piece makes clear, came on the scene just at a moment when people turned inward, toward more social isolation especially in large urban settings—and perhaps in part caused that inward turn.  Really worth reading.

We live in a merciless age.  And maybe many of us need to suffer mercilessness for a while.  There’s very little space given on social media for people to overlook things done by other people near or to them.  We like to track people going bad, losing their shit, flailing in public.  We’ve all done it, of course—both the tracking people going bad, and the going bad itself—but not all of us (yet) have been caught out doing it in public.  Social media, and to a lesser degree phone cameras, take the blessed oblivion of chance away.  Everything we...

Just because I have a ton of them.

Brookings on Europe’s large-scale shift, over the past few years, on China—from fundamentally engaging to more complicatedly confronting.  But it being Europe, it’s never whole-hearted.

Apologies for being slow to post these. 

A good review of Eduardo Porter’s new book AMERICAN POISON.  

“There is something essential about the suffering of black people that can’t be reconciled with the suffering of other people.”...