December 2009
71 posts
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Interdisciplinary Research
I’ve been thinking quite a lot about interdisciplinary research lately, in large part because of my work with the University of Nebraska’s Human Rights and Human Diversity Initiative. A small but active group has been attempting — for about a year now — to think of creative, collaborative projects that we might take up, not simply for the sake of doing something together...
November 2009
31 posts
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CNN Heroes -- The Ten Finalists →
I just read Matt Langdon’s post at the Hero Construction Company blog about the CNN Heroes award ceremony and decided to reblog it in its entirety, since he pretty well sets out what I would have said in a more eloquent manner than I likely would have if I’d watched the show and written about it myself. With all the Thanksgiving excitement yesterday, I missed the broadcast...
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“I was driving down to TX, listening to top 40 radio b/c it was the only option,...”
– One of my students, on Twitter. Now I feel like I’m really getting through to them!
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Climategate?!
I’m way from my computer for the holiday weekend, but I had to post something about the so-called “Climategate” scandal that has had all the global warming skeptics up in arms for about five days now. I’m not going to write a whole lot right now — after all, it’s Thanksgiving Eve and I have to put the presents around the tree — but I am really curious...
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“The Lou Dobbs-for-Senate rumor had barely crested when the Lou...”
– Lou Dobbs Weighing a U.S. Senate Run Against Menendez
So, apparently this is happening. And, frankly, it’s about time. The guy hasn’t been doing anything since November 11. Those immigrants aren’t going to bad-mouth themselves, people.
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Political Theory and the Cult of Personality
It doesn’t matter how matter-of-factly I say it, or how much of a good liberal democrat I clearly am, I think there always must be something jarring about referring to what I do as establishing a cult of personality. After all, such an assertion seems to fly in the face of all the things I hold dear: equality, human rights, the Socratic life of self-examination.
But, really, I wonder...
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Forum Shopping and Justice
There has already been a fair amount of discussion surrounding Eric Holder’s announcement that one group of “War on Terror” detainees will be tried in federal court in New York. Former attorney general Michael Mukasey claims that this “decision represented a turn from the Bush administration’s war footing to a ‘Sept. 10, 2001’ mentality.” If...
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Budget Crisis!
Unsurprisingly, Nebraska finds itself in the midst of a more challenging budgetary situation than originally anticipated. Or, in the parlance of our times, we’re broke. So Governor Dave Heineman called a special session of the legislature in order to revisit the overly-optimistic two year budget passed last Spring. After a couple of weeks, the Unicam has proposed spending cuts of about $334M...
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Eternal Life Can't Last Forever
I’ve been meaning to write something about vampires for some time now, even since I watched the first season of HBO’s appallingly bad series True Blood on Blu-Ray a couple of months ago. We all know that violence and nudity are absolutely essential in a vampire movie — and there’s plenty of that here — but I wasn’t sure that terrible acting was also a necessity....
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To The Victors
Dear University of Michigan Athletic Department,
I read this afternoon that you don’t have any record of how much practicing your new coach has required of the football team since he took charge of the program in 2008. That seems like bad news, since you’ve had current and former players alleging that the number of hours dramatically oversteps the number allowed by NCAA rules....
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Sentencing Our Kids
As an article in the New York Times noted yesterday, the Supreme Court is in the process of attempting to sort out just when kids should be treated as kids and when they should be treated as adults. The difficulty, as I understand it, is that sometimes kids do terrible things and sometimes our society thinks the appropriate response is to pretend that they’re not kids. As a result,...
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A Rogue By Any Other Name Would Smell As Sweet
You will no doubt be shocked to learn that the New York Times hasn’t published the most flattering review of Sarah Palin’s book, Going Rogue.
You will no doubt also be shocked to learn that the book — which will be released next week — has the Amazon sales rank of #1 right now.
With that in mind, I have several questions:
Why do so many people want to read this book? ...
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Politics=Scary
I was just saying the other day that the one thing missing from the health care debate is burning legislators in effigy. Because, really, nothing says “I’m thinking critically about my position” like burning someone in effigy. And, like a bolt of lightning from above, comes this story from Virginia, where — you guessed it — organizers plan to set fire to effigies of...
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Americans and Restorative Justice
About a week ago, I wrote a little bit about South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and I noted that a great many people — especially Western observers — felt disappointed insofar as justice seems to have been traded for truth in the belief that reconciliation would be the result. Since reconciliation hasn’t yet been achieved, justice was traded away for...
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Charitable Tweeting
Earlier this year, Ashton Kutcher announced a competition with CNN’s Breaking News account to be the first Twitter account with one million followers. Kutcher won, and both he and CNN donated 10,000 mosquito nets to families in sub-Saharan Africa. Most interesting to me, though, was that Ted Turner then challenged Kutcher’s followers to join the UN Foundation’s Nothing But Nets...
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Making Lists, Cheating Death
The great Italian novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco has a terrific interview in Der Spiegel about the important role that lists play in our artwork, our language, and our lives. I endure a fair amount of teasing — much of it pretty funny — about my own list-making, so I’m thrilled that Eco justifies my behavior in such an eloquent and philosophical way. Here’s the crux...
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Not Doing Evil Isn't Enough
My friend Michael Tofias reblogged a couple of my recent posts this week, with interesting critical commentary; this one — about not doing evil — convinced me to do some reblogging myself in order to clarify what I meant (when I posted pictures of the Google website in Germany and in the U.S. on November 9th) and also to write a little bit about the important issue he raises:
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WatchSteve Yzerman entered the Hockey Hall of Fame over the weekend and I’m posting the full eleven-minute video of his induction speech. Watching the speech likely won’t impact most people in the way that impacts me, though I presume that most Detroiters will feel like I do: Stevie Y is my captain, regardless of the number of people who will wear the C for Detroit after him. I’m sure...
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Reason, Passion, Capital Punishment
In his most recent Huffington Post piece, my friend Lou Klarevas makes an argument for changing the standard by which juries in America will decide whether defendants in capital cases should be sentenced to death. His argument is that, in order to avoid sentencing so many innocent people to death, the new standard should be “beyond a lingering doubt” rather than the old “beyond a...
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Der Mauerfall
There has been -– and there will be yet -– a great deal written about the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Though everyone likely feels they have something special to say about this iconic moment, especially if they lived through it, I’m hoping that, having spent a considerable amount of time in Berlin in the past four years, I’ll be able to hold readers’ attention for a...
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Truth *and* Reconciliation?
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a little bit about spending a few days with Albie Sachs at a conference in Berlin. This was a big deal for me not only because I’m writing a book about why some people act in ways that I call morally heroic, but also because I’ve been working on a series of articles that have transitional justice as their focus.
I’ve been teaching and writing about...
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I'm Pretty Sure I Owe Someone Money
I walk a lot, usually about four miles a day. And when I walk, by and large, I listen to podcasts, which I download onto my computer via iTunes and then play on my iPod. I’ve paid for iTunes and I’ve paid for the iPod. The podcasts, though, are free. In fact, iTunes actually tells me that they’re free when I subscribe to them. And some of the podcasts begin by telling me that...
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I Couldn't Care Less
A few weeks ago, I wrote that “the list of things I don’t care about is pretty long.” On that list, of course, were the people who’d won the Nobel Peace Prize, which just so happened to be the topic of my blog post that day.
Then, earlier today, I actually tried to come up with a few more items to put on that list and I realized that it’s not nearly as long as I...
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We Don't Believe In Anything
Increasingly, my students seem to believe that anything is as good as anything else. I say they seem to believe this because I’m not really sure that, if push were to come to shove, they’d really stick by their relativism. But, in the classroom, cultural relativism is both an easy position to take and one that feels politically correct.
Of course, I lampoon this position in just about...