Sexual harassment uses the erotic to conceal what it really is: bullying. I don’t deny that bullying may be erotic for the bully, and that sex as bullying might be even more exciting. But why should we who are trying to solve the problem concede that sexual harassment is sex? What’s confusing about banning sex in … More Sexual harassment is about power
This post was originally published at Public Seminar on February 7, 2018 When people ask me what I am teaching this semester, I bury the lede. I first describe my exciting, five-section strong introduction to Internet studies. Then there is the big reveal: “I am also teaching a core course in our history graduate program,” … More Why We Return to Certain Books Like Clockwork
This post was originally published by Eurozine on January 26, 2018 as part of an international forum on the #MeToo movement. Back in the 1970s, radical feminists in the United States like Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, women who theorized rape and sexual harassment, had a valuable message: it wasn’t about sex, but about power. … More A lot of things are broken
This post was originally published at Public Seminar on January 24, 2018. Dear Frank Bruni, You and I have a lot in common. We are both gay. We are both white. We are both card-carrying members of the well-educated, Northeastern, liberal elite. We both voted for Hillary Clinton (OK, my politics are to the left … More Is Football a Metaphor for Political Culture?
This post was originally published at Public Seminar on January 17, 2018. In the coming weeks, I want to write more about the meaning of free speech, how we understand free speech differently depending on how and where we are positioned, and whether our difficulty in listening to–and understanding–each other is a crucial context for … More The Campus Speech Wars
This post was originally published at Public Seminar on January 10, 2018. I turned off #GoldenGlobes2018 about 45 minutes into the show. I was impressed by what I was hearing from the awards stand. But I was also offended by Seth Meyers’ repeated jabs at Kevin Spacey, the only gay man other than the elderly … More Oprah for President?
This post was originally published at Public Seminar on January 3, 2018. What do we want from the news? This strikes me as an increasingly important question as the task of actually getting the news requires that we sift gigabytes of knowledge, errata, and trash all mixed up together on the Internet. Do we want … More What Do We Want from the News?
This post was originally published at Public Seminar on December 27, 2017 What happens in the aftermath of a crushing political defeat? In October, almost a year after the election that brought us Donald Trump, I was at the Library of Congress immersed in the archive of a man named Paul Weyrich, and thinking about … More Rebuilding Democracy in 2018
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