According to public intellectual Arthur Brooks, the internet has created “an explosion of nonsense.” He’s right. Let’s take my discipline of American history for example. If you read this blog, you know that there is a lot of bad history...
expertise
The Author’s Corner with Tamson Pietsch
Tamson Pietsch is Associate Professor in Social and Political Sciences and Director of the Australian Centre for Public History at the University of Technology Sydney. This interview is based on her new book, The Floating University: Experience, Empire, and the...
What COVID-19 exposed about the United States
All of these points come from Ed Yong’s recent piece at The Atlantic: “How the Pandemic Defeated America.” We under-fund public health. Our health-care system is weak. Too much of what we do spend on healthcare is wasted. We have not...
How Many Have Died Because of These Voices?
This reminds me of Kara Swisher’s recent piece. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh4uS4f78o&w=560&h=315] And it doesn’t stop. Here is Laura Ingraham, TODAY: The “experts” are routinely wrong on issues big and small—on wearing masks, on reusable grocery bags…virus modeling and treatments. For years...
Anxious Benchers Weigh-In on the Kidd-Merritt Dust-Up
Here is a taste of historian John Turner‘s post at The Anxious Bench: To what extent should non-academics defer to academic historians on matters of history? John Fea faulted Merritt for being snarky and dismissive (“maybe you should think some...
What Happens When an Evangelical Pundit, Armed Only with 58K Twitter Followers and a Reference to the Bebbington Quadrilateral, Takes on a Historian
On Thursday night a very interesting, revealing, and somewhat disturbing Twitter exchange took place between religion writer Jonathan Merritt and historian Thomas Kidd. Here is what happened: It began when someone retweeted Kidd’s Gospel Coalition post on eighteenth-century African-American poet...