Episodes

We’ll be taking a brief hiatus until December. Enjoy the holiday. [Read More]

The world of higher education is sometimes scandalous, sometimes shocking, and sometimes depressing. But the news this this week seemed to have most people darkly amused more than anything else. Because the thing that everybody was talking about was at once terrible, but also seemed to a lot of people maybe kind of a joke. I’m talking of course, about the University of Austin. [Read More]

I want to start this week by talking about a man named Eugene Debs. You may remember Debs from your history classes. He occasionally got a brief mention in there. But you may not. But to many of my more regular listeners he’s kind of iconic.

You see, Debs was an American socialist, union activist, one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and five times candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States. Through his presidential candidacies as well as his work with labor movements, Debs eventually became one of the best-known socialists living in the United States. [Read More]

I’m in my office while writing this. I can’t get any music to play, which is a bit of an annoyance, but I’ve got the room cooled to a tolerable temperature, which in this hotbox of a building is no small feat. I just put on some water to make myself some tea. Usually when I start to work on the podcast, I am kind of curled up on the couch at home with a cup of coffee within reach and my laptop balanced precariously on my knees. [Read More]

I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of genius, recently. This isn’t because of some conceptual height I’m reaching but because of what I’ve been teaching. In rhetorical theory, which is as much a rhetorical history class as much as anything else, we’ve been discussing the pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment thinkers. And they had a lot to say on the topic of genius. [Read More]