Today I want to ask us to consider how discourse on university campuses—both highly visible statements at the center of social media storms and far more routine communications—reinforces the enduring prejudice in the US that sees China as fundamentally alien and disconnected from “us.” And I want to ask, how would a . . .
Read More
Richard Chu The anti-Asian xenophobia we are experiencing today is not the first instance of anti-Asian discrimination. We have seen in history several cases of such xenophobia: the exclusion of the Chinese in 1882; race riots against Filipino farm workers in the 1920s; the barring of Japanese, Korean, and other Asian immigrants . . .
Read More
Review of Gut Botany by Petra Kupper (Wayne State University Press, 2020) You might remember, when the pandemic began, animals’ intrusion on the suddenly vacant human landscapes. Goats roamed the streets of Llandudno, Wales. Monkeys searched for food in Lopburi, Thailand. A javelina sped through downtown Phoenix. It appeared that the natural world, which we had . . .
Read More
Read Part 8 here “Now we are back to normal” Munich agreed, peace in our time promised, and September done and dusted, MacNeice can settle back to work. The fall term is beginning and MacNeice must “return to work, lecturing, coaching, / As impresario of the Ancient Greeks.” Finally, after sections saturated . . .
Read More
But what is a Chinaman to do with Africa,I hear you ask, on the great green waters that separate the forets of Madagascar from Mozambique Island,where half a million women and men walked down stone ramps into waiting ships?—from “For My Father the West Begins in Africa,” Volume 61, Issue 3 (Fall . . .
Read More
One candle will suffice. The light somewhat subduedwill be better suited, will be more agreeableas Love is drawing closer, as its Shadows arrive. One candle will suffice. The room should not indulgein too much light tonight.—from “For them to arrive” by C.P. Cavafy, Translated by Alex de Voogt Tell us about one . . .
Read More
(Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. NIAID Director. Photo: NIAID) Seeing Albert Camus’s The Plague with 2020 Vision In the summer of 2020, seventeen Drexel University students, many of them international students, Zoomed into my Great Works class to explore Albert Camus’s The Plague. The students found themselves amazed at how eerily this World War Two allegory . . .
Read More
In 1991, during the confirmation hearing of William Barr as George H. W. Bush’s Attorney General, a lawyer named Jimmy Lohman published a piece in an obscure periodical, the Florida Flambeau. Lohman had been a classmate of Barr in high school and again later, at Columbia, and he remembered Barr well: “Billy . . .
Read More
Read Part Seven here (Station platform in London. The Independent: Getty Photo) “Save my skin and damn my conscience.”Remember when the sun shone easy, say eight years ago, about this time of year? Remember when life was comfortable, life was fine? Sure, plenty remained undone, but we’d come out of the worst . . .
Read More
First, we were taught how to spellHis name, then we were told to draw Him.It was an exercise in metaphor.The balls of paper amassed before mewhile my class mates drew stars, maps of the Holy Land.I thought I should color everything I could think of—from “G-d, a Portrait,” Volume 61, Issue 3 . . .
Read More