BY AARON BARLOW Most everything I’ve read about NYU’s Avital Ronell misses what should be the most significant point of the messy affair. Yes, Ronell should not be defended in knee-jerk fashion nor piled on by acrimonious former colleagues. Nor is it enough to bemoan the impact of the case on the classroom. What we really…
Over this past year, there has been some major turnover among television talk show hosts. Some of them are moving on to “other projects,” “other Interests,” or “new challenges” (most notably Jon Stewart and Craig Ferguson) and some are simply switching venues (most notably Stephen Colbert, who is presumably also switching personas). But David Letterman’s…
The topic that I am about to treat in this post might be a provocative starting point for a discussion in a wide range of courses: a course on rhetoric or argument, a course on mass media or news reporting, or a course on recent American political history, the nature of celebrity, or the increasing…