Journalist – Historian – Speaker
Today St. Louis police shot a man with a knife. He had been acting erratically, police showed up, he raised the knife and said shoot me now, so they did. Read more about it here. The officers ordered the man to get down, according to Dotson. The man, 23, became more agitated and walked toward …
I am on a deadline but I don’t want to let the morning slip away without these images. During the recent NATO meeting in Chicago, there was plenty of violence. Google NATO POLICE CHICAGO and you will see truncheons, blood, arrests, and angry statements about police states. Here’s a typical picture. There are no semi-automatic …
[Content Note: Ableist Speech including use of the “r-word.” Later, I quote a passage from Huckleberry Finn that contains the n-word, not spelled out.] This post works with a 1996 piece from David Sedaris and This American Life that contains terrible depictions of the intellectually disabled. It was re-broadcast in 2013. I’d like to see content notes …
I published my first piece with Al Jazeera America this Friday on the Cult of Compliance and #Ferguson. I also published a blog post about the phrase, “cult of compliance,” why I use it, what effect I hope it has, and most of all some stories I couldn’t fit into the AJAM piece. I did a …
My first piece for Al Jazeera America is a big one: The Cult of Compliance. As regular readers know, I have been talking this for a long time and thinking about police violence in various ways for even longer. I used the phrase for the first time on this post from August 17, 2013. The …
Alison Piepmeier is a pretty awesome person, by all reports. I don’t know her personally, but someday I hope to change that. Here are some things that I do know. She is the director of the Women’s and Gender Studies at the College of Charleston, the awesome place that had every Freshman read “Fun Home,” …
A few weeks ago, I wrote a well-read blog post about girls and science. Apparently, we’re still debating whether it’s nuture or nature that drives women to choose professions other than science. Two recent pieces in the national media provide more evidence for the ways that women get driven out of the scientific profession, as …
I’ve been thinking a lot about medieval slavery, lately, especially in Venice (the place I study). I’m interested in commodity and the movement of objects, but unfree people are mostly invisible in my texts. I know they are there, because I know something about the medieval Mediterranean economy, but they aren’t appearing in my sources …
For my non-academic readers, over the last week there’s been a big story about academic freedom in the age of Twitter. An arab-American professor lost a job, it seems, because he was rude about Israel on Twitter. There’s lots to say here and I am working on several essays. Here are some resources. First, on …
This week I wrote about Down syndrome in two context: abortion issues and comedy. Many thousands of people read my CNN piece on Down syndrome and comedy. I am deeply impressed by Wyatt Cenac’s willingness to call me and talk at length about the bit and his approach to comedy. To me, it’s what resolution …