[This space hasĀ been quiet because I've been fact-checking and otherwise researching my Unsucky Gilgamesh chaptersso far (which I hope to publish as a book when finished) and, since school started two weeks ago, writing for my students. The below is one such piece for my History of China students. There's no reason other students [...]
Archives for the ‘history’ Category
Of Confucius, Holy Clowns, and Holy Murderers: Some Advantages of China’s Religious Atheism
Thursday, 2 September 2010
Hand-Held Libraries for God-Like Searches (a Geek Challenge)
Saturday, 17 July 2010
Remember, this is a man with that old-fashioned European humanist faith in the library as a model of good society and spiritual regeneration – a man who once went so far as to declare that “libraries can take the place of God.” –Lee Marshall, “The World According to Eco,” Wired.com I have a hallway for [...]
Mark Twain’s Posthumous Bombshells
Sunday, 11 July 2010
Why is Mark Twain’s autobiography only coming out now, 100 years after his death? Because he stipulated so before dying. What he expresses in these screenshots from a PBS Newshour clip of the manuscript suggests why he might have wanted these thoughts to stay silent for a century. And they’re strangely resonant in our own [...]
“The New York Times is Always Right”: A Media Literacy Lesson
Thursday, 1 July 2010
Readers of George Orwell’s Animal Farm should remember Squealer, the pig whose “journalism” manipulated the entire animal society into unquestioningly supporting the dictatorial pig Napoleon. If they studied Animal Farm in the classroom, the depressing odds are they learned it as a good, all-American attack on socialism. The most simple-minded of our teachers make a [...]
Advice for Teachers Scorned
Tuesday, 29 June 2010
A teacher recently dismissed, I gather, for encouraging critical thinking in her class in (where else?) my native United States writes: I am stunned by the number of “conservatives” who truly appear to loathe teachers. What is up with that? Why the distrust of educators? And all I can say is, “Come teach in Asia. [...]
Riveting Video: 2000 Global Nuclear Tests
Tuesday, 22 June 2010
MAD=Mutually Assured Destruction. A serious Cold War joke. Don’t have students read about this in textbooks. Show them the below instead. Amazing. From Zero Hedge: Who needs a wartime nuclear exchange when you have peaceful countries nuking the gamma rays out of their own sovereign territories – now that the environmental theme is rather popular, [...]
Fugue: Jesus, Plato, Confucius, Goldman Sachs
Wednesday, 16 June 2010
Democracy – the rule of the people at the heart of the American political ideal — and plutocracy, the rule of the wealthy and the tumor at the heart of America’s political reality: both are looked on as very problematic thingsĀ in wisdom traditions both Eastern and Western. A few snapshots will serve: Jesus’ Needle: [...]
Voltaire: On Fanaticism and Holy Murder
Sunday, 13 June 2010
A Real-World Mini-Lesson in Critical Reading and Writing
Saturday, 12 June 2010
I’m always looking for models of real readings to share with students. The Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein gives us a good one with his reading of a recent opinion piece by conservative NYTimes columnist David Brooks. At issue is Brooks’ argument that deficit spending during periods of debt crisis makes consumers insecure, and thus deficit [...]
Voltaire on Superstition, Suicide, and Murder
Saturday, 12 June 2010
The superstitious man is his own executioner; and he is the executioner of all who do not agree with him. Voltaire – ON SUPERSTITION – Toleration and Other Essays What I love about this line is its first clause. In what way does superstition make us our own executioners? The second clause is easy enough [...]






