A vampire film comes out tomorrow, Let the Right One In, and everybody seems to be talking about it. The award-winning feature is a Swedish offering about a 12-year-old boy, Oskar, the sympathetic victim of some merciless bullying by mean-spirited classmates, who meets and befriends the new girl in town, a goth-looking pre-teen named Eli. And from the trailer, it would appear that Eli is a waif-like, pre-pubescent vampira on the prowl — both in the playground and beyond its chain-linked fence.

I’ve always had a fascination with vampires, but I seem to be particularly intrigued with them lately, which (if I wanted to push real hard) might still be chalked up to the election-season zeitgeist. Why wouldn’t I have a renewed preoccupation with could-be bloodsuckers who sometimes pretend to be something they’re not, potential threats that we have to invite into our homes (with our votes...

While I was working on a postdoctoral fellowship some nine years ago, a senior faculty member at the host institution gave me some advice that I didn’t fully understand.

We were meeting over lunch, and I was explaining to him that I had been making real headway in my attempt to transform a dissertation into a publishable book manuscript. As I relayed my informal progress report, the scholar listened and nodded approvingly. Then he leaned over and told me — in no uncertain terms — that I had better not let anyone tenure me “with just one book.”

There was a third person at the table, and that individual’s subsequent comment quickly swung the conversation to a different theme entirely. But I never forgot the stern recommendation, even if I didn’t completely know quite how to make sense of it.

Many anthropology professors that I knew had received tenure with one book and...

Is McCain too angry? I don’t think so. If anything, the issue is more about what makes him angry and the degree to which he is able to channel that emotion into productive, thoughtful, and level-headed action. Anger can be a righteous ally, but it gets destructive whenever it’s allowed to make sound, reasoned judgment bow to its volatile mandates.

To his detractors, Obama isn’t angry enough. But that doesn’t seem right, either. He is just a lot better at demonstrating/performing self-control — with the smile that is supposed to show just how much he won’t let anything get under his skin.

Whatever the candidates themselves represent on this score, their most adamant supporters are definitely angry. No doubt about it. But where is that anger focused?

One of the problems is that we usually tend to translate our anger — come election time — into unfair demonizations of the...

I found this response to my post from last week, “Fear of a Black President.” It almost speaks for itself.

The blogger is an anti-affirmative-action advocate, and he seems to believe that anyone who disagrees with him is stupid, not just me. That’s some small consolation, even if being characterized as potentially “nuts” is still unpleasant.

It is fine (probably unavoidable at some level) to be ideologically driven, but it is disingenuous to pretend that you have reason exclusively on your side and that everyone else is simply crazy, unprofessional, and undeserving of any public platform whatsoever.

The author particularly enjoys framing his dismissive responses to my posts in disciplinary terms. The problem seems to be as much about the inanity of anthropology as it is about my own individual inadequacies as a logical thinker. This two-pronged attack emerges in several of his ...

Every single day brings another hyped-up controversy on the campaign trail —invocations of George Wallace, the booing of Sarah Palin, Christian ministers asking God to show his power through the defeat of an other-Godly Obama, and on and on and on. So, I am trying to lay off the 24-hour news recyling of stories as long as I can — until I can’t hold out any more.

I’ll watch the debate on Wednesday, but I don’t expect any major plot reversals. I already have a pretty robust sense (after all these many months) of where these candidates stand on issues — and of how their spin doctors approach every new political brush fire.

So, I am going to watch this last debate for much the same reason I have DVR’d AMC’s Mad Men this week: to make sure that I can talk specifics at the proverbial watercooler the next morning. That’s it.

But what am I going to do with all of my newly found...

When I first agreed to start blogging for Brainstorm, I assumed that I’d be able to use this venue as a perch from which to talk about everything from contemporary network telaevision shows to my idiosyncratic pet peeves about the daily grind of academic life.

Of course, I underestimated how compelling and overdetermined this presidential race would become. Can I really justify talking about my weird obsession with HBO’s newest vampire romp or the latest Spike Lee epic when the political stakes seem so high (and demand such diligent attention) this election season?

Just this week, even as I’ve been trying my best to keep up with the newest season of my favorite televisual offerings, I have been glued to the pundits’ continued dissections of the two campaigns’ respectice electoral moves. And I can’t help but feel frustrated by how dirty the bathwater has become that we’ve been using...

With America’s economy on the brink of collapse and mounting fears about global terrorism, many African Americans are becoming increasingly convinced that Barack Obama will actually win this election. But that just makes some of them more — not less — cynical about how race operates in contemporary America.

As an anthropologist who spends a lot of time listening to people talk about their hopes and dreams, their complicated pasts, and uncharted futures, I have noticed an interesting and growing pattern lately: Some black folks are describing the potential inauguration of this country’s first black president (no offense, Bill) as the epitome of America’s traditional version of racial prejudice and scapegoating, not its ultimate repudiation. In other words, they see it as another reason to be skeptical of America’s newfound capacity to elect a person of color to the highest office ...

The editors at LIFE Magazine have just published a beautiful new book of intimate photographs depicting Barack Obama’s life story, LIFE: The American Journey of Barack Obama (Little, Brown). The book, officially released today, includes a foreword by Senator Edward Kennedy and original essays penned by Melissa Fay Greene, Gay Talese, Charles Johnson, and Brainstorm blogger Regina Barreca, among others.

I also have a piece in the volume, an essay that examines what I call Barack Obama’s “racial optimism,” and I just want to take a second to provide an alternative ending for it.

The LIFE editors did a great job with my piece (authors can be so sensitive about how they get edited, and that definitely includes me), but they reworked the ending in a way that recasts my final point in a way that changes its political valence a bit. To read the entire essay (and the others), you ...

Since I spend so much time talking about subtle forms of racism, I sometimes underplay the fact that more hatefully pitched versions of racial ideology still have a powerful second-life — especially on the Internet.

A colleague of mine is conducting research that examines contemporary white supremacy’s presence on the World Wide Web, and he forwarded me a post from a site that critiques one of my previous Brainstorm posts. The site includes my “Culture Wars, Anthropology, and The Palin Effect” post from a couple of weeks ago, a small copy of my headshot, and a much larger, doctored photo of an Islamicized Obama that tries to threateningly redefine the kind of “change” his presidency would actually signify.

The posting highlights the end of my previous piece….

“Is it a notion of ‘family’ that would imagine the ‘real’ America as a monoracial unit that beats back the threats of an...

What’s the latest on the entire “paper trail” issue vis-a-vis our electronic voting booths?

I remember that Diebold (one of the few companies responsible for designing some of those electronic voting machines) got really upset when HBO broadcast Hacking Democracy two years ago, a documenary that tried to emphasize the degree to which these machines/computers are susceptible to purposeful manipulation.

Princeton University’s Edward Felten, a computer scientist who does work on information-security issues, made the rounds in 2006 trying to demonstrate just how prone these machines are to virus-induced tampering and fraud. He did segments for CNN, FOX, and other major media outlets showing broadcast journalists that no matter how many times they might vote (in a mock election) for George Washington over Benedict Arnold, a pre-loaded hacking program could make Arnold the winner...