POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Poetry has been defined as the effort to express the inexpressible. In the context of the flooding caused by Hurricane Harvey, I think that much the same can be said for many disciplines, ranging from statistics to engineering. Consider the following numbers: Estimated volume of rainwater from Harvey that has…
BY JOHN K. WILSON When ESPN decide to shift an announcer named Robert Lee away from a football game at Charlottesville, the far right declared it was a crisis of political correctness. On Fox News, Tucker Carlson announced: Craziest story of the week: #ESPN dropping an announcer named #RobertLee from a game. The president of…
BY HANK REICHMAN My title alludes to an identically titled 1904 pamphlet by Lenin, one of his more tedious, in which the one step forward was the Russian Social Democrats’ Second Congress held the year before and the two steps backward the emergence of the great factional split between Lenin’s Bolsheviks and the opposing Mensheviks. …
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The following are videos of the candlelight vigil at the University of Virginia campus: https://youtu.be/cITuxcGlAr8 https://youtu.be/mm7B4U6745k https://youtu.be/oYjshqCuyTw https://youtu.be/KDuqCpOCqEM https://youtu.be/extOrNa42h4 This next video is from Vice and documents the White Nationalist rally in Charlottesville; It highlights the travesty of Trump’s false equivalency: https://youtu.be/P54sP0Nlngg. This final video is from Disney Studios. Made 1947,…
BY HANK REICHMAN Most members of the AAUP, myself included, identify politically on the left side of the political spectrum, as do a majority of American faculty members, especially in the humanities and social sciences. But the AAUP’s mission is to “advance academic freedom and shared governance” for all faculty members, regardless of their political…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The following are four statements issued by the University of Virginia and President Theresa A. Sullivan over the last 36 hours. They are presented from the most recent to the least recent, and they are followed by news updates. President Sullivan Condemns Demonstration Violence As events have unfolded on…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In this series, I have highlighted headlines that are cleverly expressed, making use of puns, irony, figurative language, or unexpected word choices to grab a reader’s attention. Not surprisingly, the Trump administration has so unabashedly flouted all sorts of political conventions that headline writers have felt freer to write headlines…
BY MARTIN KICH In an interview published in the Wall Street Journal, President Trump seems very clearly to be telling rural voters in the “Rust Belt” that his solution to the economic decline of their communities is to abandon them for the closest metro areas. Based on this quotation from the interview, I am guessing…