1. Higher ed is not K-12. Expect things to be different. 2. Your professors are not here to entertain you. Your professors are not here to motivate you. Sometimes they will be entertaining or motivating, and when they are, consider...
Humor may be even more complicated than evil
Historians love anniversaries. They give them an excuse for writing about what they want to write about anyway. This year is the 40th anniversary of a book that, unless you’re approaching retirement age you have likely never heard of, but...
I think of this as the song of the century thus far (or one of them). It comes from the protests in Iran in 2022 sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini who had been arrested for improperly wearing her...
I had a very challenging student some years ago. Extremely bright, attentive, focused, curious, well-read–all the things you want. But they answered every question immediately upon its asking, never raising a hand (sometimes answering while it was still being asked)....
David French wrote in The New York Times yesterday: Arguments for a ‘Christian nationalism’ are increasingly prominent, with factions ranging from Catholic integralists to reformed Protestants to prophetic Pentecostals all seeking a new American social compact, one that explicitly puts...
Happy July 4th from the Arena!...
On Tuesday of this past week, a Russian missile struck a crowded pizzeria in the city of Kramatorsk, Ukraine. One of those killed was an award-winning writer, Victoria Amelina. Here is an auto-biographical piece she wrote, “Expanding the Boundaries of...
I love Talia Levin’s writing (even when she over-writes it a little). Here’s some graphs from her How to Survive Midsummer in New York originally published in The Village Voice in 2018. I’ve never spent a summer in New York...
Back at the dawn of this century, writer Gary Kamiya penned one of the most arresting meditations on America I know. It was hard to tell just how tongue-in-cheek “All hail Pottersville!” was. The setting of George Bailey’s nightmare vision...
In 1921 the editors of The Farmer’s Wife Magazine meditated on the evolution of Decoration Day from solely focused on remembering the sacrifices of Union soldiers in the Civil War, to encompassing those of the South, and then by the...
“A.I. is 100 times more important” than any other subject we’re talking about today, says David Brooks in last week’s PBS interview. I came in thinking that A.I. was, like, it’s kind of important, and then maybe it’s as big as...
However old they are when they pass, your parents pass too soon. For you, at least. You are, and always have been, their child, and a child is born to and cared for by these folk who are always somewhere in...
“What’s important,” Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev reflected in October 1962, “is not to cry for the dead or to avenge them, but to save those who might die if the conflict continues.” That so many didn’t die, then, was the result of Khrushchev’s,...
Without the surgical incision of sarcasm, we might not have America!
What if religion is not responsible for religious wars?
The very notion of “the common good” may be downright un-American
How useful are historical analogies in our new political era?
Choosing life for the wild creatures we encounter—when possible
A time to listen
