What Does a Virtual Conference Look Like?

Scholars have been grousing about the expense of annual meetings for years. The pandemic is our opportunity to imagine change

----------- Why do we conference? Scholarship, dialogue, and community are all good answers to that question. But as the Covid-19 pandemic remapped our lives and shuttered American institutions last spring, the Society of United States Intellectual History (S-USIH) took stock of our annual meeting plans. Suddenly, answering that question became urgent. We had set ...
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What Does a Virtual Conference Look Like?

Enjoy Your Pandemic Waterpark

A corporation deigns to let taxpayers into a previously private park they paid for

Back in 2017, Nashville, Tennessee, provided real estate investment trust Ryman Hospitality with about $13.8 million in tax breaks to build a waterpark at its Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center. However, taxpayers weren’t able to access the park unless they stayed overnight at the four-star facility. The hotel limited waterpark access ...
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Enjoy Your Pandemic Waterpark

What America Got Wrong About COVID-19–and What We Can Learn from France and Italy

Institutional fragmentation and a lack of national solidarity have derailed the pandemic response

On Tuesday, August 11, just as Florida was setting a new daily record for deaths from Covid-19, Billy Woods, sheriff of Marion County in north central Florida, banned all of his employees, with a few exceptions, from wearing masks.  “This is no longer a debate,” he told his staff, explaining how ...
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What America Got Wrong About COVID-19–and What We Can Learn from France and Italy

How to Reopen the American Economy Now

We don’t have to choose between a depression and tens of thousands of avoidable deaths

And, of course, economists are on the case. In my favorite economic paper on the COVID-19 economy, Harvard University economist James Stock describes a new family of epidemiological-economic models that provide guidance about how best to reopen the economy. Here are his smart reopening requirements: promote collective behaviors to stop the spread of the ...
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How to Reopen the American Economy Now

The Pandemic Has Revealed the Driving Values of American Higher Education

Universities like UNC are going online for the public good, while other universities persist in reopening for perceived prestige and elite branding

Yet despite the rapidly escalating numbers of COVID-19 cases on campus, this elite private Catholic research university has kept its undergraduates in the dormitories at full capacity, and expressed its intention to reopen its campus again by Labor Day weekend for in-person classes, work, and other activities including Division I ...
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The Pandemic Has Revealed the Driving Values of American Higher Education

When Filming “On-Location” Is Filming “At-Home”

The pandemic has interrupted business as usual — but that might be good for your creativity

But the pandemic changed that. Making a short film without being able to be on location, without a crew, and being physically distanced from subjects is exactly what many film students experienced this past spring semester when their classes were moved online because of COVID-19. Films that had been carefully ...
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When Filming “On-Location” Is Filming “At-Home”

Don’t Let Campuses Become Plague Dystopias

College and university presidents should have the courage to halt their reopening

In late May, the President of Notre Dame and Thomist philosopher Fr. John I. Jenkins defended his decision to reopen its campus in terms of the university’s religious and moral values, including the virtue of having soldierly “courage” in the face of death. This, he insisted, was a virtuous Aristotelian “mean” between ...
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Don’t Let Campuses Become Plague Dystopias

Fifteen Years

You haven’t tried.To know me.Only try to control me.You think it’s my job to cater to you? I was seven,Or around that age,When you two finally separated.I was relieved. You never deserved her.And she may not be thereAs much as I need her,But even then you haven’t earned her love.So why would ...
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The Hidden Structural Racism in the American Response to Public Health Emergencies

Facing a disproportionate death rate among Black people from COVID-19, President Trump shrugs: “What, me, worry?”

When faced with emerging epidemics related to HIV/AIDS in the 1970s, to crack cocaine in the 1980s, to Ebola in 2014 and 2018, the U.S. government was slow to intervene on behalf of homosexual populations, or urban poor populations, or African populations, who respectively were most-affected by those public health ...
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The Hidden Structural Racism in the American Response to Public Health Emergencies