I’ve really resisted starting a blog. There are so many out there already. Who has time to read them all? I’m not an avid blog reader myself. We all spend so much time at the computer already, and I find myself eager to get done with my screen business so I can get back to reading my book. Truth to tell, I read only one blog regularly. Every morning when I fire up my computer, there is Diane...
I was at work on a personal piece for next week’s posting when I was derailed in a most fortunate way. Here’s what happened. We had invited some of our favorite people to dinner – Adrienne Lieberman and her husband Andy Thomas, along with Mark and Mary Larson. We had managed to go deep into the evening without venturing onto the Trump/Musk ice floe before plunging into those frigid waters. It’s...
In the university world and particularly at the University of Chicago, the name Kalven is often reverentially invoked. Harry Kalven was a professor of Constitutional Law at the UofC. In 1967 he headed a commission that issued a report that called for the University’s neutrality on public issues. Kalven’s primary interest was freedom of speech, and the major argument of the Kalven Report was that...
Around the time of Donald Trump’s first election victory, Timothy Snyder published a book that was small enough to fit in my back pocket, but which packed a War and Peace-sized wallop. I’m sure most of you are already familiar with both the author and the book but for those who aren’t, Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University, and On Tyranny is a distillation of the lessons he’s...
Let me start with two off-topic comments. First, lots of bloggers and columnists are filling their spaces this week with advice about how to survive the next four years. I will abstain from doing that because I don’t think any of us can really envision how it’s all going to unfold. I am a bit distressed, though, by how many people are choosing to tune out, take a vacation from the news. I think...
We signed on to 23andme early in its 18-year history, inspired by the breakthrough series on PBS hosted by Henry Louis Gates. At the start, Finding Your Roots focused on celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Chris Rock and Gates himself. Through a combination of DNA sampling and deep dives into archival research, the show often revealed to its subjects aspects of their family history that were...