Journalist – Historian – Speaker
New interview at Pacific Standard with Will Butler, one of the stars of Arcade Fire. Highlights: What have you found so far? I’m trying to preach to the choir and radicalize them a little bit, not push them farther left, but make them a little harder. Part of it is a community-building exercise. You came to …
I wrote a long feature for Pacific Standard about disability and disaster response: There are four basic different types of needs related to disability that emerge in the aftermath of disasters: health maintenance (medicine, electricity, medical care), ability to move in and through physical areas, effective communication access, and what the experts call “program access.” …
The GOP tax plan is intended to limit the potential for higher education to enable class movement. The GOP tax plan is calculated not just to shift wealth upward, but also to remove some of the educational tools that make it possible for people to shift their own class status. It’s not just tuition waivers. …
New today at Pacific Standard; We’re just beginning to scratch the surface of the damage that the Trump administration’s particular combination of incompetency and vandalism can do. The Republicans have empowered a class of people who either don’t understand federal policy or actively resist enforcing federal protections for the people and places in need. The …
In Pacific Standard, Noah Berlatsky and Ilana Gershon wrote a great piece about how humanities supports you getting a job! The skills you learn in the humanities are exactly the skills you use in a job search. The humanities teach students to understand the different rules and expectations that govern different genres, to examine social …
I talked to Jacob Remes about Critical Disaster Studies, Hurricane Maria, Imperialism, Trump, and more. New at Pacific Standard: “At the heart [of the field] is a saying that became common in the 1970s: There’s no such thing as a natural disaster. There are hazards, some of which are natural (earthquakes, tornadoes, river floods) and …
I wrote about my son’s bright green hearing protectors for Pacific Standard. I hesitated to get them at first, badly swayed by the idea that they would more firmly mark him as different and cause isolation. They do the opposite. They open up the world. Including Hamilton. Here’s the takeaway: I’m not alone. I know far …
For Pacific Standard, I write about the free speech complexities of the upcoming “free speech week.” First, the organizers didn’t even ask the speakers or book the spaces before they started crying oppression. Second, “security concerns” forced the Anthropology department to cancel a long-planned talk. I write: “Thanks to “safety concerns,” the annual distinguished lecture …
In Florida, parents are forced to call their disabled children “limited” or they risk losing effective healthcare in order to fund GOP donors. It’s a nasty story, but it’s part of a big parent where parents, teachers, and therapists are forced to emphasize deficits in order to preserve access to needed supports. I wrote: I …
Yesterday, Pacific Standard published a piece of mine on medieval brewing and lack of gender diversity at Google. I mostly talked about medieval history and the Bennett-thesis on patriarchal equilibrium. But as I reached the end of the draft, I started doing a little research into contemporary brewing, tipped off by a friend that there had …