The semester has begun; I had my first course yesterday. And I am happy to say that I’ve started to reconnect with colleagues this week, including a few that I haven’t seen all summer.

We mostly had the usual conversations about respective summers (and about this unprecedented election season), but I also got into a longer (and more substantive) discussion with a faculty member (in a different field, an important variable) about the relative value of postdoctoral fellowships and tenure-track jobs for new Ph D ‘s.

He advises his students to focus on jobs, not postdocs. He’s skeptical of the entire postdoc thing for several reasons: the way it can be deployed by universities as an exploitative cost-cutting measure and at the expense of more secure tenure-track offerings (my fellow Brainstorm blogger, Marc Bousquet, could say more about that), and because it runs the risk of trapping...

I’m tired of seeing pundits support their particular political party the way rabid fans root for sports franchises — or even worse, the way players themselves sometimes engage in such sporting events, with a kind of ruthless amorality. Truth and falsehood don’t matter. Only the bottom line. The win.

This is a mentality that seems to plague many of our athletes, even if the stakes are much lower. Think of those scrappy basketball players who inadvertently knock loose balls out of bounds and instinctively — misleadingly — blame nearby opponents for the infraction. Anything to get the ball back. Anything for the victory.

The Democratic and Republican talking points exemplify this same sensibility: victory at all costs, even if the price is the truth, or when it comes at the expense of an even-handed reading of contemporary political debates.

These folks must think we’re stupid. ...

I am spending the week in Michigan, which means that I’m just about completely caught up on the scandal surrounding Detroit’s Kwame Kilpatrick, the so-called “hip-hop mayor,” who faces the prospect of being ousted as early as next week during a “removal hearing” ordered by Michigan’s governor, Jennifer Granholm.

Of course, Michigan was one of the two states trapped in the middle of the Clinton-Obama vote tabulation dispute this primary season, so it is also interesting to see local coverage of the Democratic Convention. The message doesn’t seem too differently pitched than the one offered up by national media outlets (although every other TV commercial seems to be that McCain ad linking Ayers to Obama).

But where do we all stand now? Well, we have already heard the Clintons offer their two-pronged support of the ticket, and Joe Biden unveiled his critique of John McCain’s judgement...

Tonight our former president will formally address his political party’s convention — and only one day after he ostensibly took yet another Hail Mary-sized swing at Obama by invoking some hypothetical “Candidate X” who says all the right things during the campaign but wouldn’t be able to get the job done in office.

Still, everyone anticipates that Bill Clinton will do his partisan part tonight and express his full support for the Obama-Biden ticket. I know political moves can be complicated, but this is getting ridiculous.

When asked about Bill Clinton’s seemingly tepid or conflicted support of Obama, people either invoke the incentive of a potential second run for Hillary in 2012 (if McCain’s the one in office) or Bill’s own wound-licking and hypersensitivity about being characterized as a racist during the primaries. He was, after all, the first black president.

But do we real...

All eyes are on the Dems this week as they try to make their first grand and unified case for the party’s nominee.

I’ve been watching FOX News coverage of the convention so far, and they have done an amazingly powerful job raining on the Dems’ parade: profiling that infamously You Tubed Clinton-supporter, Harriet Christian, who is at the Denver convention this week solely to insist on the fact that she will definitely go for McCain (no matter what Hillary says) as a vote against sexism; interviewing Don Imus to find out why the shock-jock will vote for McCain even though Imus likes Joe Biden — it’s because Imus believes (ironically?) that Obama is a big “phony”; highlighting all the many reasons why the convention seems to be doing little in terms of creating an anticipated “bounce” for the Dem ticket; exposing the hidden infighting between Clinton and Obama; emphasizing that the...

An assistant professor at a research university in the Midwest was fuming after she received an e-mail from a third-year undergraduate student there. The email was a seemingly impatient request for a meeting that same day to discuss the student’s final grade in a course. The student wanted a B instead of a C+.

Many faculty members have dealt with similar requests, some more reasonable than others. But this professor was most frustrated by the fact that said student also took it upon himself to use the professor’s first name in the e-mail.

Of course, some professors purposefully cultivate a kind of informality, but she was not one of them. She found it disrespectful, and her sneaking suspicion was that this student had taken such a liberty specifically because she was young and female and black.

“He would never have imagined addressing one of the senior men in the department...

I should probably start off with a mild disclaimer by admitting that I am an anthropologist who has been interested in studying urban legends and conspiracies for the several years. My new book on racial paranoia spends a lot of time unpacking conspiracy theories, past and present, especially the kinds linked to race and racism. But a person doesn’t have to go out of his or her way looking for conspiratorial thinking these days. It is all over the place, particularly in connection to this electoral season’s heated presidential campaigns.

With that in mind, I decided to take a second to see if I could list at least 10 election-related conspiracy theories that I’ve heard since the beginning of 2008. Again, this isn’t me going out of my way and hunting down obscure claims from some dark and dysfunctional corner of the Internet. I just wanted to stick to conjecture that I’ve overheard in...

I pried myself away from NBC’s (controversial) tape-delayed broadcast of the 100m dash to watch most of Reverend Rick Warren’s back-to-back dialogue with John McCain and Barack Obama on CNN. Of course, the fact that Warren was able to pull this event off at all is another example of the significance of religion in American politics—and of Warren’s power as a contemporary leader and authority in both domains (politics and religion).

Warren asked the two men similar questions, and McCain (who went second) was allegedly kept in some kind of soundproof booth as he awaited his turn on stage.

There were many intriguing exchanges. Warren asked both candidates about their greatest moral failures, about their stances on abortion, about their definitions of marriage, and about whether or not “evil” really exists in the world. And the candidates both did a pretty good job, I thought,...

I was going to write an entry today on John Corsi. If you remember, he was the author of a controversial book in 2004 that challenged John Kerry’s readiness for the presidency (as a function of an unflattering reading of Kerry’s military service). Corsi has published a new book on Obama that supposedly accuses the presumptive Democratic nominee of more substantive ties to Islam than the Illinois senator has thus far admitted. I am trying to finish a short essay on the top 10 rumors/conspiracies circling the election campaign these days, and Obama’s alleged Islamicism is one of the most popular ones. That’s what got me interested in the Corsi book, and that’s why I would have written about the new book.

But I am trying to revise my approach to blogging a bit this week.

That’s because the genre is far trickier than I realized. For one thing, many readers still want to imagine it as ...

I am a huge fan of Ben Stiller and of urban black radio, but the two don’t always go well together.

Listening to several black radio station DJs this weekend, I caught more than a few heated discussions about Robert Downey Jr.‘s role in Stiller’s new film, Tropic Thunder (out later this week), calling it an updated form of blackface minstrelsy.

The minstrel tradition demanded that 19th- and early 20th-century actors darken their faces while parodying blacks on stage and screen. The actors, black and white, would use burnt cork or greasepaint to cover their skin. They contrasted that with exaggerated red or white lips, and then topped the entire image off with a wig that satirized the kinkiness of blacks’ hair.

Al Jolson’s 1927 film The Jazz Singer, one of the first feature-length “talkies” to come out of Hollywood, enshrined the theatrical practice of minstrelsy in its...