Antoinette and I were married this past Saturday at the Hershey Hotel in Hershey, Pennsylvania. You can find some pictures at our Picasa Web Album, which we will continue to update, and the text of the ceremony (excepting the vows) at our blogspot devoted to the wedding. Since linking to this information is pretty much [...]
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Politics and Celebrity
Monday, August 11, 2008
Peter Levine offers an imaginary speech by Barack Obama, responding to the charge of celebrity:
“Modern celebrity culture is a terrible thing. I can hardly believe that my daughters, growing up two generations after the height of the women’s movement, should be exposed to relentless news about someone who happens to be thin, blond, rich, deliberately [...]
Updates…
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Preparations are now almost complete for the wedding next Saturday. Antoinette’s amazing powers of organization have really made the process manageable and calm, although now we’re starting to see people worrying that they ought to be doing something: anxiety at the lack of anxiety, I guess. In just under a week, we’ll be married!
Some things [...]
Interpretation
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
The task of interpretation is a thankless one, as Mikhail Emelianov points out in his recent post about Derrida. (He ought to have mentioned that we generally study the dead and they are rarely very boisterous in their gratitude.) Dr. J, a Derridean, but no mere derridalogist, responds positively. The story goes something like this: [...]
Celebrating Dr. Lucinda Peach
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
I never met Lucinda Peach, but because I’ll be covering one of her courses at American, I’ve been doing a little research into her life and work. Dr. Peach died July 24th from complications following treatment for recurrence of breast cancer. She was 52 years old. Her best known work, the book Legislating Morality, (review) [...]
Post-Communist Russia: “a Walpurgis Night in which all cats are gray”
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
I don’t know nearly as much about the years following the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union as I would like to. I know the basics: that Yeltsin won against Gorbachev and instituted free market reforms, and I know that most state industries came under the control of former Communist Party members, and it’s [...]
What’s Right with Kansas: Kathleen Sebelius
Monday, July 28, 2008
Back in June, the Washington Post did a two-part series on Kathleen Sebelius as potential VP: The Case For and The Case Against. The case for Sebelius is pretty strong: she comes from the famous state that demographically “ought” to vote differently than it does, she’s managed to appeal to Republicans and independent voters during [...]
Sheldon Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated
Saturday, July 26, 2008
In the small corner of political philosophy I inhabit, Sheldon S. Wolin is a big name. His mammoth Politics and Vision is a breathtakingly systematic genealogy of political life, a Rosetta stone of political theory. His perpetual commitment to thinkers like Tocqueville and Montesquieu has kept interest in those figures alive during a period when [...]
Pre-9/11 FISA Violations and Retroactive Telecom Immunity
Sunday, July 20, 2008
I’ve not seen much mention of one of the most important complaints about the FISA reauthorization: the claim made by Joseph P. Nacchio and Qwest Communication International that the Bush administration sought the power to engage in warrantless wiretapping in February of 2001, seven months before the events of Semptember 11th and the Authorization for [...]
If I ran the zoo…
Friday, July 11, 2008
The National Association of Scholars is running a series on visions of the academy, amusingly based on the Dr. Seuss story about re-inventing a zoo.
Dr. Seuss’s protagonist, young Gerald McGrew, suffers none of his sophisticated contemporaries’s deadly contempt for life as it is, or for his social surroundings. His opening words are, “It’s a pretty [...]