We like to imagine decisive electoral victories and the end of political struggle, but every generation must protect and rebuild the society’s institutions. Somebody’s always aiming to capture the institutions, hollow them out, and undermine their stated goals. And they get pretty good at it, too. A "how a law gets made" civics curriculum that…

There are so many ways for an English teacher to ruin literature for students. With an older writer like Shakespeare, it's so easy to do. Here, students, work hard and read this great comedy. The students come back on Monday and say, it wasn't funny. The teacher insists it was very funny and says they're…

Hisham Matar has written about how, in “countless ways,” the corrupt and corrupting spirit of “the Libyan dictatorship, like a crazed jealous lover, infiltrated every aspect of public and private life.” We face that same problem here, and we do not have sturdy customs and institutions in place for talking about it, much less addressing…

An old classmate posted a poem about teachers as an often-lamentable type of person, a person easy to parody. This memory came to mind: After the funeral of an elder member of the English Department, her son said to me, “She liked her colleagues. Her one regret was that they were not braver.”

“The task is not to claim that every ruling is fascist, but to recognize what these decisions illuminate when viewed together: the emergence of a political order in which democratic institutions are increasingly reorganized to serve authoritarian ends. Fascism becomes visible not simply in a single spectacular act, but in the accumulation of institutional changes…

On the phone with a friend (paraphrased): P says, roughly, “For this important thing I have undertaken there is no script.” Me realizing from his comment, roughly, that “For all the important things, there is no script.”

Beneath the stadium, people in ones and twos strolled through the air-conditioned food court. One table away from me, university students were talking about a book, Heart of Darkness, just the sort of experience recruiters promise applicants will have in the affluent enclave of a large beautiful campus. Thoughtful, healthy young people, protected from other…

We are all "Good Germans" now, writes Dave Winer. People who look the other way, who comply, who don't seem to know what's going on, who don't manage to resist, just as many Germans did in the 1930s and 1940s. Many Americans occupy a peculiar space of privilege, where something that looks from arm's length like…

If you say so-and-so was a slave, that means one thing. Saying that this person was enslaved means another. I was writing a paragraph about right-wing moves to mask parts of American history. In the first version of one sentence I took the already packaged meaning of a familiar word which I found immediately at…

When a journalist refers to Public Law 119-21 as the One, Big, Beautiful Bill, that's repeating a political slogan uncritically, needlessly, and doing political advertising for free. Public Law 119-21 began life as H. R. 1 during the 119th Congress, and it was signed into law by the President on July 4, 2025, so no hint of…