"The Art of the Slur," Revisited
BY AARON BARLOW
History, Human Rights, and Basketball
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Bronson Koenig is a guard on the University of Wisconsin basketball team. He is also a Native American. This fall he visited Standing Rock not just to participate in the protests against the Dakota pipeline but also to conduct basketball clinics. In “What I Found at Standing Rock,” a piece for…
On Race and Racism Data Matter
BY HANK REICHMAN In the aftermath of the election there has been plenty of discussion, both among academics and in the media, of the role played by “identity” and especially race in the outcome. Mark Lilla’s much and deservedly criticized New York Times op-ed, “The End of Identity Politics,” got things going. Among the more…
In Memoriam: Gordon Aubrecht
BY MARTIN KICH Gordon Aubrecht passed away at age 73 on Monday, November 21. Gordon was the long-time President of the advocacy chapter at Ohio State University. For almost a decade, I had had contact with him through the Ohio Conference of AAUP. But our acquaintance went much farther back than that. Gordon and I…
Columbia Provost Coatsworth Escalates Assault on Grad Student Union Rights
BY HANK REICHMAN Back in August, the National Labor Relations Board ruled in the Columbia University case that student employees at private universities have the right to organize unions to bargain collectively over the terms of their employment. Within a week Columbia’s provost, historian John Coatsworth, responded with a letter to the campus community, which…
American Ideals and the Sometimes Very Disappointing Realities
BY MARTIN KICH Although we often look nostalgically at our national past and find the present wanting in comparison, looking backwards can also remind us of the very considerable progress that we have made toward realizing the ideals that the nation was ostensibly founded to pursue. It reminds us also that the fault is almost…
Quotation of the Day
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH I have been collecting pieces of the way that the arts can help us to fashion a response to disturbing political circumstances. What follows is a brief excerpt from “In the Dark Times,” a poem by Bertolt Brecht that was written in response to times much darker than our own: “In…
Statistics of the Day
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Yesterday, I posted a breakdown of the percentages of metro areas of various sizes that Clinton and Trump won. The following chart complements that chart because it breaks down the vote by number of counties carried by each candidate and the relative GDP of those counties, with a comparison between the…
Trump University Valedictorian Speech, Class of 2009
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This satiric piece has been written by Seth Fried for the New Yorker. What follows is the second paragraph of the speech: “It will be sad to leave a place where we learned so much about ourselves, like when we all discovered, with some guidance, that the thirty-five-thousand-dollar Trump Élite Gold…
Science Is a Kind of Poetry
BY MARTIN KICH If poetry is at its core the effort to give expression to the inexpressible aspects of our experience, then science is often a kind of poetry, or at least provides a complement to the poetic impulse. For science provides both a fundamental challenge to all simplistic notions about our existence and a…