Journalist – Historian – Speaker
I am still not handling my emotional reaction to the Oregon shooting very well. I’m also troubled by the efforts to focus on everything but the guns. Of course, with every such instance, there’s a rush to stigmatize mental illness and, in this case, developmental disability. It turns out that his mother was – as …
I have a new piece at The Guardian on Carly Fiorina. She has a BA in medieval history and philosophy from Stanford in the 70s and has been claiming that it will help her fight ISIS. I write: Last Sunday, the Republican presidential candidate tried to burnish her national security credentials by claiming that her bachelor’s …
Rick Perstein, a foremost historian on the rise of the American right, has a long piece on Donald Trump and fascism, comparing his emergence to the politics of other demagogues and fascists throughout the 20th century. It’s a thoughtful, detailed, assessment of the risks and the process. When Trump emerged, many folks started to compare …
One of the principles of this site is that language has power. Language and the world exist in close, multi-vectored, relationships, and the words we use to define the world shape some of the ways in which we act. I use the word “cult” in the context of the “cult of compliance.” I chose the …
Image Description: Me on CNN. Michigan Ave/Chicago River behind me. David Perry: Associate Professor, Dominican University Headline: Oregon Massacre, Campus Shooter Kills 9, Wounds 9 I went on CNN on Friday, 10/1, to discuss the terrible shooting on a community college campus in Oregon. CNN hasn’t released a clip so I can’t show it to …
Today at 10:30 ET/9:30 CT AM I an going to be on CNN, talking about the latest campus shooting. I am being paired with John Lott, who argues that more guns cause less crime. His work has been widely and consistently discredited by much better statisticians than me, both his partisan opponents and non-partisan fact …
Say goodbye to the Illinois History Museum. Bruce Rauner has pulled the plug. There’s something populist about museums like this. They tend to be free or cheap, they serve school kids from across the state, and they make our history accessible and interesting. Naturally, Billionaire Bruce isn’t going to permit that sort of thing to …
This was by far the most interesting thing I read yesterday: Menstruation as a Hack by science-writer Suzanne Sadedin. She goes through the whole process by which human fetuses operate as parasites on their mothers (as opposed to in other mammals where the mother’s control the process), thanks to the “ravenous hemochorial placenta.” Therefore, she …
A local story went national yesterday. A mother arrived at school to find her child separated from the other kids and wearing a garbage bag. According to the mother one official defended the practice by saying since there was no rule explicitly against it, it wasn’t actionable. Meanwhile, Chicago Public Schools is cutting vast sums …
I am a cynic about most high-prestige awards, institutions, and other fancy things. Somehow, though, the MacArthur fellowships (aka the “genius” grants) manage to please me every year. Whatever their process, which is mostly opaque, they find both high profile and low profile scholars and creators who just do outstanding work. We’ve had a good …