Well, it’s been quite a week. On Thursday, CNN published a piece critical of Sarah Palin. I’ve criticized public figures before, but I usually have done so in “see both sides” kinds of writing (intended to have the reader end up seeing the world my way, but careful and measured). This was not measured in…
David Brooks published a column this week that has circulated widely, including among my circle of liberal intellectuals and artists, and to much praise. It’s really quite lovely. It celebrates the love of art – writing, music, images and more. It mourns for a lost world. And it completely misses the point of how we…
I don’t mind if my critics call me a lazy tenured socialist academic. But criticizing my earring is GOING TOO FAR! — David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) May 1, 2014 Today is my last day of grading for the year, so here’s a very quick post on reactions to my Sarah Palin essay. I’m continuously fascinated…
I have a new essay up on CNN today reacting to Sarah Palin’s “forced baptism” remarks. In it, I link her most recent comment and her use of “blood libel” back in 2011 (after the Giffords shooting) to the history such words invoke (or evoke, depending on intention). One thing that startles me is that…
There is power in a factory, power in the land Power in the hands of a worker But it all amounts to nothing if together we don’t stand There is power in a Union. Just in the last few weeks, the rhetoric of the adjunct crisis in American Higher Education has shifted, intensifying around the…
In the New Republic, historian Sonya Michel has written a scathing indictment (with a response and followup) of the “National Women’s History Museum,” a group dedicated to making a real museum on the Mall in D.C. According to the piece (and many other historians, including – full disclosure here – my mother), the NWHM has gone out of…
Apparently it’s a write-about-writing week so far on the blog. I really like Rebecca Schuman. This week, she has a call out for why academic rejection hurts more than other kinds of rejection. If it does for you, you should go give her your story, as she curates data well and writes beautiful polemics on…
A little over a year ago, I wrote a piece for CNN on my daughter. It was the first piece I had written that hit a truly mass audience – well over two hundred thousand clicks, 32K facebook shares, incalculable tweets (because CNN does things with their URLs that makes it hard to count them)….
I had two published essays this week: One for Chronicle Vitae on The Language of Labor and Adjuncts with a blog comment. One for CNN on the Canonizations of the Popes John 23 and John Paul 2 with a blog comment. I’ve been writing a lot about Higher Ed of late, in part thanks to new column opportunities at…
This is my first attempt to generalize some guidelines for talking about people with less power than yourself, especially when trying to highlight an injustice that you, to some extent, are responsible for perpetuating. Almost a year ago, I wrote a piece on how to talk about feminism if you’re a guy (especially a straight…