Although I love to travel, I’ve never liked crossing borders. It makes me nervous, perhaps because, on one side of my family, I am the child of immigrants who were always fussing about their paperwork. Border guards, I learned at an early age, are anonymous functionaries who have outsized power to wreck your plans, or … More The U.S. Border Crisis is Not the Holocaust
I used to love Bill Clinton (known in our household for years as The Big Dog) and now I just want someone to get him off the stage. Two days ago, in an interview with The Today Show‘s Craig Melvin about a new thriller co-written with James Patterson, former president William Jefferson Clinton seemed to be completely, and … More Bill Clinton’s Symphony of Hypocrisy and Rage
Yesterday I checked my Twitter feed and learned that Roseanne Barr had finally blown herself up. Up all night tweeting about Soros and Clinton conspiracy theories (including a bizarre exchange with the cool-headed Chelsea Clinton about whether her husband is a member of the Soros family), Barr capped off her literary output with a tweet … More Roseanne Bombs
At Public Seminar we are feminists, so we don’t raise our daughters to be princesses. We are open-minded leftists, so we don’t fawn over the ruling classes, but we don’t long to guillotine them either. And we are anti-racists, so we haven’t declared an end to racism worldwide just because a multi-racial American TV star has married … More Royal Wedding Roundup
The mass hiring of women into higher education, beginning in the 1970s, is one of the great affirmative-action success stories. Although universities have simultaneously done a remarkably poor job of cultivating, hiring, and promoting scholars of color, and although the natural sciences, economics, and philosophy remain defiantly male, the status of women in higher education … More What Affirmative Action Didn’t Change
7:41 AM: Remember I said never to miss morning prayers at CPAC? People I missed yesterday by being late and leaving early: Wayne LaPierre, Mike Pence and Eric Trump. As I publish today, if you are a general ticket holder, it’s already standing room only, an hour before the pledge to God and country. If you followed my live blog or my … More LIVE from #CPAC2018, Day 2
At the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, I was lucky enough to moderate a conversation between Earl Lewis, the outgoing President of the Mellon Foundation, and William D. “Bro” Adams, the former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The conversation had actually begun a few weeks earlier, at Mellon, an … More Are the Humanities Really in Crisis?
Last week I was surprised and pleased to learn that an article I wrote years ago, “Queer Hoover: Sex, Lies and Political History” (2006) had been featured in an essay by Mathew Wills at the JSTOR Daily. You can read it, with a link to the original article, here. I am really very flattered by this, … More Queer Hoover: The Long Life of an Article
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