There [in his autobiography, Jefferson] recalls that on February the seventh, 1779, when he was a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, [he] supported an amendment to a slavery bill that would address, early on, the contradiction at the heart of the new-born republic. He supported an amendment that  …

Matt Sitman:I was thinking, too, Chris, of the great — I forget whether it’s the very final lines or in the last two or three paragraphs — of A River Runs Through It — where the title comes from, right? ‘Eventually all things merge into one, and a river runs  …

I often go to Google News for an idea of what’s current in headlines. I don’t like it, but for this bare, quite specific purpose, it’s the convenient and (so far) all-too-difficult-to-replace tool. Google News disgusts especially for systematically representing news- and newslike-media from every corner as though all were,  …

I’ve had quite a rough year. Not the first rough year in recent years, to be sure. And then, too, at the same time, by no means an all bad year. Far from an all bad year. Something I haven’t been able to do for a lot of the year  …

An organization I’m involved in from several years ago now, never as a central participant but nevertheless in a continually deepening way, the National Writers Union, put out quite a strongly worded statement last week calling for coverage of new open warfare in Israel-Palestine that isn’t tilted in favor of  …

I’ve had a little bit to say about social media, very occasionally, in what I write on this site, and once in a while have the thought that it’s a topic I ought to be discussing only more. It’s certainly a topic that takes up space in my head. It  …

I’m going to try for something relatively short, here, in the way of a follow-on attached to the previous post, mid-June, about democracy talk. Again I take my cue from recent Vlad Vexler video content. He’s making it so damned convenient! The convenience is just in the character of his  …

‘What is democracy.’ Um, democracy can be thought about in two distinct ways. One a banal way — which is really useful. It’s the most basic thought about democracy, and that’s that there are counter-majoritarian institutions, there are checks and balances that work. So a democracy is when you can  …

Here in the academic enclave neighborhood of southern-Chicago shoreland where I’ve been living just a few years — on multiple counts a foreigner-outsider, no doubt permanently — I got myself out to a book talk organized through an arm of the divinity school last week. There are a lot of  …