It’s weird to call him a prophet, what with all the F-Bombs and other NSFW obscenities he drops, but consider that this dead jester said the below in 2005. Prophetic indeed. . (h/t to Hullabaloo)

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 [...]

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 things  in wisdom traditions both Eastern and Western. A few snapshots will serve: Jesus’ Needle: [...]

Hear, hear: University students worried about getting a job see the study of the humanities as a waste of precious time. . . . Times are hard for humanists. But when economic growth becomes the focus of education, both democracy and human decency are in jeopardy. In her new book, Not For Profit: Why Democracy [...]

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 [...]

So I’m somewhere in Thailand called Pattaya that I wouldn’t choose to come to except that John, my best friend from my “professional college student/Bohemian vagabond years” from age 20 to 34, is here — I wrote about him and those years of our knuckleheaded intellectual awakening in the In the Crumbling Temple of the [...]

This “Critical Thinking” video is worth a watch. Now: What follow-up questions for discussion or writing will get the most bang for the buck if used in the classroom? (h/t One Good Move)

wrote Mark Twain, “have been greatly exaggerated.” True here as well, but only slightly. Autopsy The lines from Nick Cave’s song, “Hallelujah,” sum it up: My typewriter had turned mute as a tomb And my piano crouched in the corner of my room With all its teeth bared Change “piano” to “Gilgamesh” and there’s not [...]

“Piper, sit thee down and write In a book that all may read!” So he vanished from my sight, And I plucked a hollow reed, And I made a rural pen, And I stained the water clear, And I wrote my happy song, Every child may joy to hear. –William Blake, Songs of Innocence “And [...]

Did you ever notice that we have no holidays in which we revere history’s true – in the sense of “backed up with evidence” – miracle-workers, those hard-working saviors we call “scientists”? Think about it: scientists, through the “miracle” of human reason, have eradicated diseases for literally billions of people through medicine, created light and [...]