Midway through the book that bears his name, Jack Boughton confesses his sins to a Black preacher, saying, “I’m a bad but confirmed drunk. I have no talent for friendship. What talents I do have I make no use of. I am aware instantly and almost obsessively of anything fragile...
Margaret Hagerman spent years in the wilds of privileged white America, talking with kids, going to their soccer games, etc. in order to produce White Kids: Growing Up With Privilege in a Racially Divided America. Working in the Midwestern burg of “Peterfield” (one suspects Minneapolis or Milwaukee), she focuses on...
In September 2019, I took a group of students to the annual Prairie Festival at The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, as part of my effort to introduce them to some genuinely radical thinking regarding environmental sustainability, local food systems, and the cultural shifts necessary to make them happen. Afterward...
Margaret Hagerman spent years in the wilds of privileged white America, talking with kids, going to their soccer games, etc. in order to produce White Kids: Growing Up With Privilege in a Racially Divided America. Working in the Midwestern burg of “Peterfield” (one suspects Minneapolis or Milwaukee), she focuses on...
Dr. Eve Tracy Coker is the first person I befriended on the Internet — about a quarter of a century ago. It’s my pleasure to read and comment upon her first book, A Worker’s Worth. In it, she reviews findings from her research into meaning in work for Millennials and encourages...
I read this book due to two of my less popular interests: Puritanism and the American Studies/Consensus School scholars. In many respects, my picture of the former is a product of the latter, and they had some important structural elements in common. Both were institution-builders; both have had oversized impacts...
Clandestine was the beginning of James Ellroy’s dip into his mythic realm, the noir Los Angeles of the 1950s – the world about which he spent his wayward youth wandering around the city fantasizing. Eventually, Ellroy’s dream-nightmare-LA would be the scene for the epic L.A. Confidential quartet; extrapolated to embrace the...
Having put aside my recent readings inquiring into the goals of white supremacists, the connections between free-market right-wingers and Bitcoin enthusiasts and the morality of markets to reread and comment upon Alex Z. Salinas’ debut book of poetry, WARBLES, I’m struck by the way his work communicates the struggles of...
We all frame the question of “What is love?” by our own most pressing concerns. For some of us, this question is a matter of whether or not love is “real.” For others, whether or not they’ll find it, or whether or not there’s only “the one.” My own biggest...
