This piece has me thinking.  Why is the US's political situation so sclerotic?  Why are we so polarized, and why is the polarization not changing?

I think one reason for this is relatively simple. We...

Happy 4th of July!  No, seriously.

It's amazing how my own understanding of the 4th has changed over the past quarter century.  25 years ago, July 4, 1996, I was in Chicago; I was a grad student, and...

It's June 22nd.  Eighty years ago today, Nazi Germany and its allies invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, inaugurating what would be--if it were considered its own conflict--among the...

My dad died twenty-five years ago next month, and so I have been without someone to wish a "happy Father's Day" to in person almost as long as I had someone to wish that to, which is a very strange...

I had breakfast at a diner this morning. Yes, that's right, you heard me: an actual diner.  Indoors.  Unmasked.  I mean, I wore a mask when I came in, but for the meal I took it off.  Everyone...

Oh this is sort of fun—a close reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.”  But it is a tepid analysis of a great poem, missing some obvious things.

First of all, let’s allow that it’s not a great...

I'm reading a piece on Robert Merton, the great sociologist of science (and so much more--his On the Shoulders of Giants is a tremendous book that anyone should read).  The piece is about his writing...

32 years ago today, an iconic image of our era was committed to posterity: 

I wonder if we have fully recognized how iconic, how representative, it would be.  Resistance--yes.  But futile...

This spring I read Joel Isaac's Working Knowledge: Making the human sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Harvard 2012), and I have to say I found myself enjoying it quite a bit.  Not so much for the forest...

Just some Memorial Day Weekend links for you.  

Come to think of it, when was the last time I had an actual honest-to-goodness Memorial Day Weekend?  I hope this one is that.  May it be so for you...