Journalist – Historian – Speaker
Ron DeSantis banned AP African-American Studies. The President’s of Florida’s 28 state colleges announced they would not support “any institutional practice, policy or academic requirement that compels belief in critical race theory or related concepts such as intersectionality.” [Note: Taking a class on a topic does not compel belief. That’s not how education works. It …
On the morning of February 12 2013, I woke to the news that Pope Benedict XVI had retired. There hadn’t been a papal retirement in a few centuries, so reporters were rushing to wikipedia and the like and drawing analogies to Pope Gregory XII, the last to retire. But medievalists in my social media networks, especially the …
The pitch from the publicist came by surprise, alerting me to a new book about pacifists and their struggles during WW2 and how resisting the “good war” shaped later efforts during the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam movement. “That’s my grandad,” I said, and quickly sent off a pitch to an editor at the …
Once upon a time the Chronicle of Higher Education created a webby bloggy site called Chronicle Vitae. The idea is that it would be Linkedin but for higher ed (I think. They never told freelancers like me!) with jobs, profiles, connections, messaging, and blog posts and I wrote a bunch of pieces for them. But it’s all offline …
In August 2021, the journalist Anne Applebaum, wrote an essay called “The New Puritans” about online speech. There are many things about the essay that are true! Online speech is complicated and many people behave really badly. And yet, I keep coming back to this thesis. After talking about repression in Turkey, Applebaum writes: In …
I’ve spent some of today trying to figure out whether, in fact, a Pennsylvania school district has banned the series Girls Who Code as was being widely reported. It seems that the book was banned in 2020-2021, the ban was reversed thanks to awesome local activism, but a new PEN AMERICA report on book banning …
I’ve been experiencing active symptoms of depression since 4th grade. I started getting them treated when I was 45. It’s been a terrible year, with the triggers directly linked to the beginning of the Fall 2021 semester (as I recovered from Covid, with some symptoms that lasted for months and had to go back to …
Yesterday I took an electric leaf blower and blew out a layer of dead leaves, broken sticks, moldy mulch, and all the detritus of a too long winter out into the yards, then carted it away to the top of a hill and into the woods. It made way for us to plant flowers and …
“As writers and historians – one Jewish, one Catholic – we both find ourselves able to remember the crackle of burning pages and wonder at the beauty in the chapel. It’s in this duality – the messiness of real people who lived in the past – that we found the bright ages, illuminating our own …
Thanksgiving is coming and our traditions have changed. My brother’s kids are grown and they have their own things to do. My father is unlikely to leave the house. My mother is now three years’ gone, as of yesterday. My sister and I agree that intensive all-day cooking is really not what we’re going to …