Black Friday in Colorado Springs: A Brief Response

Given the increasing frequency with which these mass shootings have been occurring, it is all too easy to become insensitive to the life-altering impact of such events on those most directly involved—the victims and survivors and their families, friends, and co-workers. But until someone discovers a way to transform these cumulative shocks to the national…

Black Friday in Colorado Springs

All week, we have been watching media reports on the ramped-up security at airports, train stations, shopping malls, and public events—all intended to discourage ISIS-led or ISIS-inspired attacks and to reassure the public that there will be a rapid and decisive response if any such attacks should be attempted. Very thankfully, no such attacks have…

The Ten Things for Which Robert Reich Is Most and Least Thankful

I am re-posting Robert Reich’s Thanksgiving message because I largely agree with it. In a period in which partisanship requires almost absolute conformity to the “party line,” even when there is actually still no consensus on where or what that line should be, the adverb “largely” seems to have become a largely abandoned modifier. Yet,…

Happy Thanksgiving from the Far Right

This is the cartoon of the day from the Far-Right website RedStates: Although it is far from the worst caricaturing of President Obama that I have seen, it is reflective of the relentless attacks on anything and everything that he has done while in office. It may be worth remembering the next time that there…

Addendum to the Call for Papers for the AAUP’s 2016 Annual Meeting

The Collective Bargaining Congress has created a Subcommittee on Racial Justice, which has recommended the following list of suggested topics for presentations at the AAUP’s annual meeting in June. The list is consistent with the broader Call for Proposals but offers more specific suggestions. All proposals need to be submitted by December 7 and should…

Looking Back to 1915

I was doing some online research and happened to follow a link to the Wikipedia entry for the major events of 1915. What follows is a selectively edited version of that list of events. In some ways, the mix of events seems strangely familiar. In many other ways, however, it is very clear that the…

But Will My Robot Students Have Names? And How Will I Remember Those Names unless They Have Faces to Go with Those Names?

Here is a succinct summary from University World News of an article by Cara McGoogan that has been published by Wired: “Researchers in Japan are one step closer to their goal of getting an artificial intelligence accepted by Tokyo University. The artificial intelligence, called Todai Robot Project, has passed the standardised Japanese universities entrance exam…