History in an Age of Fake News
In the Chronicle Review, I tried to work through my frequently conflicted feelings about teaching, politics, history, and ideology, especially in this moment of intense polarization. We work and live in a […]
Category Archives: Essays
A New Hope for Mexico?: A close look at Mexico’s 2018 elections and the candidacy of Andrés Manuel López Obrador
UPDATE 07/06/2018: After the election results, Carlos and I returned to Dissent to analyze the results. My friend Carlos Bravo Regidor and I grew frustrated with the international coverage of […]
The Spy Who Funded Me: Review of Campaigning Culture in the LARB
In the Los Angeles Review of Books, I have a review of Campaigning Culture: The Journals of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, edited by Giles Scott-Smith and Charlotte Lerg. IN […]
Socialism’s Return, in The Nation
In my debut in The Nation‘s Books & the Arts section, I have an essay based on a reading of Bernie Sanders’s two campaign books and two volumes of essays by the left-wing […]
Fidel Castro (1926-2016), Without Illusions
I have a somewhat late-breaking obituary of Fidel Castro, up now at Dissent magazine. Rather than a straight obit, I’ve tried to take stock of the different responses to Fidel on […]
A Defense of Academic Twitter
At Inside Higher Ed, I have a how-to guide to academic Twitter with a prologue on academic precarity and public engagement. “Precarity helped create the new public scholar,” I argue: […]
The Two Lefts of Jorge Castañeda
Update 5/3/2016: this essay has been published in Spanish by Nexos. I’m honored to be making my debut in Dissent, a magazine I greatly admire. To my mind, Irving Howe navigated […]
Arguing against Evil: Liberal hawks and Neocons’ Congress for Cultural Freedom delusion
Up now, at The New Republic: President Barack Obama’s proposed nuclear deal with Iran has prompted concerns from conservatives who say its government can’t be trusted to adhere to the […]
How to Treat Adjuncts with Respect
My latest on issues in higher education is up, on the subject of how to treat contingent faculty with respect. It used to be the case that non-tenure-track faculty were […]
In which I read David Brat’s dissertation so you don’t have to
By a series of improbable near-coincidences, I happened to be looking at the dissertation of David Brat today, on the day after he defeated Eric Cantor in the Republican primary. […]
