“We have been at war for your entire life,” I told my classes of mostly 16-year old students a couple of years ago in a unit focused on American involvement in the Middle East. Most of them weren’t that surprised. The truth, at least according to Andrew Bacevich in America’s War for the Greater Middle…
Category: Books
Dogs in American Culture
I’ve been thinking about animal consciousness and suffering even more than usual lately in light of the fact that my wife and I adopted a shelter dog last Friday that we’ve named Bwana. I’ve long expressed my ambivalance about dog ownership, even though I love dogs. They demand a lot of care and attention, their…
Adolescent Development and Technology
Back when I was doing my Masters in Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I took a couple of classes in adolescent psychology. At the time, I didn’t find them all that useful, as many of the interesting and useful insights were duplicated in a wonderful class in the learning sciences which was…
Light, Darkness, and Slavery
A couple of years ago, I read Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and was struck by its use of magical realism to portray the darkness of slavery and, as Whitehead articulated, “the truth of things, not the facts.” To be honest, I do think there’s some danger in fictional interpretation being understood as fact. At…
Animal Consciousness & Suffering
How often do you really make an effort to put ourselves in someone’s shoes, and try to see things as they see them? And how often do you do that for animals? I suspect the answer to the first question for most people is sometimes, and that that is rarely for the latter. I’ve long…