This post is a commentary on Colin Woodard's book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. Woodard argues that the United States is not a single national culture but a collection of national cultures, each with its own geographic base. The core insight for this analytical approach comes from … Continue reading Colin Woodard: Maps that Show the Historical Roots of Current US Political Faultlines
Month: April 2020
Patricia Limerick: Dancing with Professors
In this post, I feature a lovely piece by historian Patricia Limerick called "Dancing with Professors: The Trouble with Academic Prose," which was published in the Observer in 2015. Everyone disparages academic writing, and for good reason. No one reads journal articles for fun. Limerick, whose work shows she knows something about good writing, finds … Continue reading Patricia Limerick: Dancing with Professors
Wit (and the Art of Writing)
They laughed when I told them I wanted to be a comedian. Well they’re not laughing now. Bob Monkhouse Wit is notoriously difficult to analyze, and any effort to do so is likely to turn out dry and witless. But two recent authors have done a remarkably effective job of trying to make sense … Continue reading Wit (and the Art of Writing)
The Triumph of Efficiency over Effectiveness: A Brief for Resilience through Redundancy
{This piece was originally published in the San Jose Mercury News in July, 2020. Here's a link to the original.] The current covid-19 pandemic has shown a lot of things that are wrong in American society, including terrible leadership, a frail social safety net, and a lack of investment in public goods. But one that … Continue reading The Triumph of Efficiency over Effectiveness: A Brief for Resilience through Redundancy
The Exceptionalism of American Higher Education
This post is an op-ed I published on my birthday (May 17) in 2018 on the online international opinion site, Project Syndicate. The original is hidden behind a paywall; here are PDFs in English, Spanish, and Arabic. It's a brief essay about what is distinctive about the American system of higher education, drawn from my … Continue reading The Exceptionalism of American Higher Education
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 