Weblogs in Higher Education

Silencing

In Anne Applebaum's NYROB essay on the ways Communists locked down civil society in Poland shortly after World War II, the general mechanism is described and illustrated by example. First, the general mechanism: ...the elimination of all remaining independent social or civic institutions, along with the exclusion from public life of anyone who might still sympathize with them. (39) How far does this process extend? Applebaum describes one official being horrified at...

Our very own UFO

[This week's radio essay--audio here.] We were fairly good kids, I suppose, more or less, but the country had gone UFO crazy and that brought out the crazy in us too. In government labs out west, there either were or were not alien bodies floating in formaldehyde. Silvery saucers darted across American skies and bony, big-eyed faces in the windows scanned our puny human...

Beyond dictatorship

A little Storify essay, four tweets and three comments long, about language, imagination, and revolution, starring the writing of Libyan novelist and political observer Hisham Matar.

The silence of the citizen

Perhaps this is true: Silence is the basic mode of the citizen, largely unallied with others, in possession of no regular civic audience, skilled in no genre of public address, in possession of no reliable stream of information or of one so contested and poisoned and vexed as to be more problem than aid, susceptible to cynicism or despair or indifference every moment that is not spent in laboring or consuming entertainment or tending the beautiful or bare walled garden of the...

Radio radio

A fine example of a small story told well, from This American Life--a four-year-old grows very interested in Jesus and what he taught, and then she sees a connection to a new person she learns about, Martin Luther King. Go to Kid Logic (Episode 188) and skip ahead to 13:10 in the audio. What takes this from a story to a good story?...