On Dylan Anxiety
Bob Dylan is the 2016 Nobel Laureate in Literature. Some people love it, some people hate it. That’s to be expected. But why do the people who hate it, hate it so much?
There are all sorts of possible explanations, and certainly more than one of them has purchase. We can ...
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Hillary Rodham Clinton May Be The First Feminist President
Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuit
It has taken me a few days to figure out why Hillary Rodham Clinton makes me a little giddy. I have always enjoyed watching her run for office. She is the smart girl who does her homework. She aims to get the job by earning it. She is tireless and ...
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Category Anxiety: Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize
It’s been a weird year (the weirdest I can remember at least), and Thursday morning’s announcement that Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature made it weirder still. But, overall, it is weird in a welcome way.
Pre-announcement speculation centered on the possibility that the prize might be awarded to an ...
Bob Dylan: Nobel Laureate?
I can’t say that I am a huge Bob Dylan fan. I may have been born just a little too late to have been caught up in the folk craze, though I do remember singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” along with “This Land is Your Land” and “Where Have All ...
Transparent, Wells Fargo, and Cable News
Past Present Episode 54
In this week's episode, Neil, Niki, and Natalia debate the place of Transparent in the history of LGBTQ representation on television, fraud at Wells Fargo, and the 20th anniversary of Fox News.
Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show:
The third season of the hit show Transparent recently ...
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On the Chelsea Bombing
Trying to Think about Terrorism and Everyday Life
Saturday night, September 17, 2016, a bomb exploded on Twenty-Third Street in Manhattan injuring twenty-nine people. Soon after, unexploded devices were found on Twenty-Seventh Street. Over in New Jersey, one of three pipe bombs exploded just before a running event in Seaside earlier on Saturday, and then on Sunday, in ...
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The Smartest Places on Earth
Why Rustbelts Are the Emerging Hotspots of Global Innovation
For nearly four decades, the manufacturing centers of the industrialized world have been in decline, their once mighty engines of mass productivity decommissioned and rendered into silent, rusting hulks. Waves of capital and (mostly white) people have streamed out of the central cities, leaving ruined landscapes in their wake. Recently ...
How to Effectively Ban Abortion
On the Polish Black Monday Strike and its Consequences
This week saw a massive mobilization of women in Poland (and elsewhere) against a proposed total abortion ban in the country. On Monday, women refused en masse to go to work or school, striking both economically and socially, in order to stop the proposal, which would have refused abortion to ...
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Does this Meme Prove Donald Trump is a White Supremacist?
In a development that is no doubt utterly inexplicable to many, Donald Trump has gotten himself in trouble for associating with an amphibian: an internet meme known as Pepe the Frog. Pepe isn’t the only frog to “blow up” on the internet in 2016. But he’s undoubtedly the most ...
The Woman Who Might Have Been President
As former Goldwater Girl Hillary Rodham Clinton is poised to become the first woman president of the United States, it is worth asking: what prevented Elizabeth Dole -- Clinton's former Senate colleague -- from breaking that historic barrier?
Sexism, not just within the Republican Party but also in a larger political ...
Call For A Yell-Ceasefire Around The Polish Pogroms
A few weeks ago at 7/9 Planty Street in Kielce, Poland, we of the Jan Karski Society launched a permanent exhibition devoted to the Kielce pogrom, a tragedy suffered by a local community of Holocaust survivors for whom that city became a place, not of peace and security, but of ...
