We’re nearly a week into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and I’ve thought a lot about whether and how to address it in my composition classes. My starting place is this: valuing democracy, and seeing the invasion as part of a global attack on democratic values and institutions. And of course I need to tie that in with what we do in writing classes.

This blog post from Stanford economist John Cochrane is a critique of diversity & inclusion statements, which many academics must write when applying for jobs at universities, and it rehashes some of the (I think tired) arguments against them.

Take Control is the third album from Year of the Dragon, an L.A.-based metal/funk/rap outfit with an arsenal of heavy riffs, deep grooves, and songs that move easily between chilled-out neighborhood strolls and politically conscious tirades. It’s a skillful album with a big heart, and while a few too-easy rhymes and vocal melodies come off as less than fresh, in total it’s a powerful batch of songs and a seriously fun listen. 

Last semester, I succeeded far more than I ever had before in combating first-year composition students’ reliance on “bias” as a framework for judging sources, and in the process we had richer conversations about media and sources of information than I’d experienced in any FYC class.

All of this has changed my idea of grief as a private thing. It’s private in the sense that it’s internal, but it’s not at all private – it’s public, in fact – in the sense that what I’m feeling has everything to do with my connections to others.

They taught me that having something to say and having your shit together are deeply intertwined. That if you want to be listened to you’d better give people a reason to listen, and that you can - should - expect that from other people.

This is Bill Moyers interviewing one of the authors of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Professionals Assess a President, which will be published in October. An unprecedented event like this shows what a mess we’re in. The basic thesis is that Trump’s mental instabilities and disconnection from reality make him so dangerous that we must remove him from office immediately. But reading this interview I can’t help thinking that DT succeeds because of the traits these experts write about.

Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital looks for the roots of global warming in 18th and 19th century UK cotton mills, where coal power first took hold on a mass scale, and the book asks if our fossil-fuel driven quagmire was inevitable or avoidable. He argues that it was avoidable. 

One of our many challenges in the coming years is to not be exhausted by this exhausting prismatic reality. We have to learn to ridicule alternative facts while taking them seriously.

I'm teaching two classes this semester, Environmental Literature and Rhetoric, and Writing Social Justice, a required course at Roosevelt U. In WSJ students had read two chapters from Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice about "democracy as public reason." Here are our discussion questions, which took us most of the way through our 75 minute class meeting...

Since election day a question has been nagging at me: "What do we owe Trump supporters?" It's an especially pointed one for me because I can count so much of my family among this group. So this post is part of my process of figuring out how to approach his supporters, how to think about what we owe them and what it's okay to feel towards them. Deciding these things simply based on their vote is, for me, too simple. Getting answers to the below questions seems like a better way. 

After the shooting in Orlando this week, I pulled Mark Doty’s memoir, Firebird, off the shelf to re-read a few passages. Doty is a wonderful writer, a poet with a gift for storytelling, and I thought this book – which tells the story of his childhood, his coming out, and his troubled relationship with his alcoholic mother – might provide some wisdom and perspective. It did.

I’ve been playing drums for more than twenty years but I only just started taking lessons. At my first lesson, my teacher, Sol, a broad-shouldered Frenchman in his late forties, asked me what I wanted to learn. Among a few other things, I said “rudiments.” Rudiments are short sticking phrases first practiced on a pad or single drum then moved in various ways around the drum set. They’re what scales are to the pianist: a simple foundation of mental and physical knowledge with endless applications on the instrument. One of the most basic and useful rudiments is the paradiddle, an eight-note phrase most commonly played like this: RLRR LRLL. I thought I “knew” the paradidle because I knew the strokes and could play it at a decent speed. But Sol has taught me that I don’t know the paradiddle, or a dozen other things that most drummers know. I mention all this because it seems to me like a failure followed by a success, and I’ve been incorporating stories about failure – mostly mine – into my teaching.

Whatever else might be said about Purity, this novel completely absorbed me. I put off work and sleep, lost track of which train stop was coming up and whose bag or elbow was pressed into my hip because of the gravitational pull of Franzen’s prose, plot, and characters.

I’ve been thinking about how conservatives’ hatred of “political correctness” got used in the recent Republican debates, which led me back to David Foster Wallace’s essay, "Host," on conservative radio host John Zeigler, published in Consider the Lobster in 2006 and re-published this year, with cool new formatting, in the Atlantic.

Reading Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, about his work with the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal non-profit representing death row inmates based in Montgomery, Alabama, one is struck by the notion that no one is easier to forget than a prisoner. If we think about the incarcerated at all, it is disturbingly easy to assume that they deserve to be where they are. But this assumption is based on a tacit faith that the US criminal justice system is in fact just, or mostly so, and Stevenson is here to show us, in dramatic detail, some of the many ways in which it is not simply unjust, but evil.

I talk a good game to my students about the importance of reflecting on your work. When you take some time, I tell them, to look back on a single assignment or a whole semester and write about what you did and what you learned, it helps those lessons stick. And when they stick, you’re more likely to transfer them to other classes and other parts of your life, making the time you’ve spent in class more effective and efficient. I’m less good than I’d like to be, however, at following my own advice. At the end of every semester I mean to do some reflective writing . . .

Nature’s Metropolis has been on my to-read list for years, and since I’ll be moving to Chicago in a few months now seemed like a good time to dig into it. William Cronon’s animating idea is to tell the history of Chicago’s rise as the gateway city to the American West not through individuals or even groups of people, but through flows of natural resources and the wealth they generated – that is, through nature turned into capital – and the way these flows inextricably connect city and country. It’s an incredibly ambitious historiography that has much to say about how American cities grew in the 19th century.

I lived nearly all of the first 30 years of my life within thirty miles of Baltimore City, including four in it. Since leaving I’ve gotten interested in environmental history and environmental justice, but I’d never looked into the history of these issues back home. So as the week of demonstrations and violence has unfolded I’ve been wondering: what role have environmental factors – like pollution and the distribution of park space – played in the anger and disenfranchisement so many people feel in Baltimore? If “environmental justice” sounds squishy to you, you might not be buying the relationship between green space, or even pollution, and looted Baltimore liquor stores being shown on the news. But I would argue, and I think Boone et. al. would too, that this week’s “theater of outrage” is the result of urban black people facing higher levels of risk of all kinds for decades, whether it’s the risk of lead-poisoning or death by cop. I also think that the vast majority of Baltimore protesters have a sense of the history of the distribution of risks and resources in their city and in this country, and that environmental factors are an important piece of that puzzle.