Posts from Tenured Radical
In this age of electronic delivery, we at Tenured Radical still receive some of our reading by mail (although not The American Historical Review, which now arrives over the interwebz, deducting $12.00 from our annual dues.) One of these items is Raritan, a physically beautiful humanities journal…
I recently had the good fortune and pleasure of signing, and returning, a new book contract. It is only the third one I have ever been offered, and I am happy to say that over time, these documents seem to be getting shorter, less complicated, and easier to understand. This one is about half the…
Last night I went to see The Hunting Ground, a documentary by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering about rape and anti-rape activism on college campuses that debuted in New York and Los Angeles last Friday. Full disclosure: I was interviewed extensively for this movie, and appear in two clips in the first…
My attention is drawn today to an ongoing story about a right-wing faculty blogger at Marquette University who is facing unemployment for trashing a graduate instructor on his blog. Bloggers everywhere may wish to take note -- and they may also want to make sure their social media style doesn’t…
In case you did not read it (and I obviously didn’t until I was on a delightful long train ride in the Black Forest en route to a conference in Freiburg), check out J. R. McNeill’s hilarious account of his Hollywood moment in Perspectives on History (December 2014.) You may recall that McNeill won…
A dear friend and collaborator has just entered a well-deserved retirement. When I wrote to congratulate her and express my senior envy, she replied: “Do the math, Radical. It’s closer than you think.” I hope so. Of course, she was always better at math than I.
There are plenty of righteous political arguments against LGBT people organizing their lives around marriage and family formation. I say this as someone who was relieved to learn I was a lesbian, even though coming out was tough, because the last thing I wanted was to marry and parent children. I…
Last night I broke my only New Year’s Resolution: don’t argue, or provoke others to argument, on social media. What I am talking about is what I call “the cycle.” This is a mental feedback loop of incessant open-ended arguing, often with insults and others jumping in and repeating arguments already…
During the orientation for a meditation class I signed up to take this winter, the instructor notified us that we would need to make between 40 and 60 minutes a day available for our practice. “You need to figure out where you are going to find that time,” he said, calmly but firmly.