Avital Ronell has just completed a series of eight “séances” or sessions for the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where she engaged such artists and thinkers as Werner Herzog, Frédéric Boyer, […]
Category: author commentary
Health Care, Then and Now by Winton U. Solberg
Good health care is essential, and Americans watch closely as President Obama and Congress struggle to determine how to deliver basic medical service to all Americans. It helps to put the […]
Biggers’s top 10 list for Obama
Jeff Biggers, author of In the Sierra Madre (and The United States of Appalachia), contributes a Top 10 list to the Huffington Post on President Obama and mountaintop coal removal. “Here’s the […]
Stephane never can say goodbye
Stephane Dunn, author of “Baad Bitches” and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films, remembers Michael at NewBlackMan. I moved beyond posters on the walls and accepted that he was a star […]
Monotheism by James F. McGrath
“Monotheism” sounds like such a simple idea. What could possibly be simpler than having only one of something? But if there is anything that is not straightforward in the study […]
Summer is Coming by Joe McFarland
You get about a month. That’s as long as morel mushroom season lasts wherever you live in Illinois, starting from the very first morel somebody shouts they’ve found—the first morel […]
They Meet Again by Gene Rochberg
Composer George Rochberg’s new memoir, Five Lines, Four Spaces published by the University of Illinois Press, comes out at almost the same time as Montclair State University in New Jersey […]
It’s Morel Season by Joe McFarland
It’s finally morel mushroom season in southern Illinois where I live, which means, for these few weeks, I will be everybody’s total best friend. By August, I will be that […]
T. R. M. Howard by David Beito
In the first review of Black Maverick: T.R.M. Howard’s Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power, Damon W. Root writes in Reason magazine: No single individual brought down the South’s […]
The North Korea Satellite and Global Financial Restructuring by James Schwoch
You have to hand it to the North Koreans. In a action-packed news cycle where Obama fired the CEO of General Motors, the G20 London Summit convened, NATO celebrated its […]
Museums Look to the Common Man by Victoria Grieve
As a historian, I’m not supposed to believe that history repeats itself, but sometimes it’s tempting. As anyone who reads the newspaper knows, comparisons of the current “economic crisis” and […]
Satellites, Space Debris, and Shootdowns by James Schwoch
The International Space Station just had a close call with space debris. This is a rare, although foreseeable, event for the ISS, and standard human evacuation preparation procedures were followed—thankfully, no […]