Journalist – Historian – Speaker
At the end of May, a black female professor named Ersula Ore at Arizona State University was walking across the street when she was arrested for jaywalking. By report, people cross at that site regularly to avoid construction and it is reasonably suspicious that a black woman was the person singled out by police. She …
We interrupt this blog to bring you a special announcement. I am recording a live album with my band, The Tooles, this September. It will be all original music and we’re really excited about it. It is, however, expensive, and so we have a kickstarter. If you like music, please check it out and consider …
I had three pieces this week that I thought were especially important. First, I hosted a guest post by Nancy McCrea Iannone on the troubles of the Pro-Information law in Louisiana, where anti-abortion activists have hijacked what was an unusual, important, coalition. I wrote about my own thoughts here in Pro-choice, Pro-Information, Anti-Eugenics. Mark Leach …
I’ve been working on work-life issues lately, focusing on fathers and discourse around working dads. This has led me back to an important piece by Amanda Hess from last year, important not only because of its argument but because of the rabbit hole of links and studies to which it leads. Hess responds to the …
So Verizon and Makers teamed up to make a great new video about the insidious ways that we push girls away from science. I am always suspicious of corporations getting involved in social causes, as they tend to be followers rather than leaders. Still, Makers is pretty great and I think the video highlights some typical …
Here are a few more points related to my article on public engagement – how it might work and what I mean by “there is no ivory tower.” 1. How might it work? No one is seriously advocating that an op-ed is equal to a piece of peer-reviewed scholarship. At least no one I know of. …
I have a new piece up at the Chronicle on public engagement in higher education. I’ve written about public engagement both here and on various sites before, but now I am starting a series of columns for the advice/careers section of the Chronicle. I will be writing about how both individuals and institutions could be engaging …
Yesterday I published a guest post by Nancy McCrea Iannone, an expert on Down syndrome and pregnancy. I would like you, please, to go read it and share it. Independent blogs like mine need your help to spread the word on any given message. The post talked about an assault on the pro-information coalition by anti-abortion …
Nancy McCrea Iannone argues that the new Louisiana law on pre-natal testing inserts abortion politics into what had been a non-partisan movement by forbidding health-care providers to present termination as a neutral or acceptable choice. Comments from David Perry on this post can be found here. Pro-Life, Pro-Choice, Pro-Information: Proceed with Caution by Nancy McCrea Iannone. …
In the New York Times, yesterday, Julie Schumacher, a professor of Creative Writing at University of Minnesota, wrote a powerful piece about talking to a student who had been expressing violent fantasies. The undergraduate who had been writing poems about killing people showed up for his appointment in my office carrying a black canvas backpack. He …