Cure-alls and Remedies
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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’ deadly contempt for life as it is, or for his social surroundings. His opening words are, “It’s a…
Antoinette and I have decided to pursue a self-uniting marriage license. Basically, it allows a couple to get married without an officiant. I guess instead of ‘getting married’ it allows the couple to ‘marry themselves.’ It’s only available in Pennsylvania and Colorado, and at least in Pennsylvania it often goes by the title ‘Quaker marriage,’…
My friend Dr. J recently wrote about the various transitions in the faculty, and noted in passing that we should be careful not to push the 60’s era faculty out before we’ve had a chance to pick their brains on instructing war veterans. I had a passel of veterans at MTSU (10-12?) and it was…
Wendell Berry’s article in the May Harper’s is out from behind the paywall. It’s a really interesting attempt to take moderns to task for their conflation of freedom with limitlessness and infinite progress. (My Metafilter post on Wendell Berry is the most popular thing I’ve ever done there, so go check it out if you…