The Grammy-winning singer-songwriter John Legend spoke at the University of Pennsylvania yesterday, delivering this year’s graduation speech for the College of Arts and Sciences, a school he graduated from in 1999. (You don’t see me, but I’m seated two rows behind him on the stage. I was one of the faculty members responsible for shaking the hands of graduates as their names were announced.)

Legend crafted a thoughtful and heart-felt speech that was clearly both personal and political. He talked about his first trip on an airplane, a trip his 16-year-old self took to Philadelphia to start his stint at the University of Pennsylvania.

He argued for the academic conceptions of “truth” that he learned as an undergraduate, conceptions he considers a lot more rigorous and weighty than what gets passed off as truth in the contemporary public/political sphere.

Legend invoked...

I used to watch a lot of movies when I taught down at Duke University. That was before newborns and post-tenure administrative responsibilities conspired to pummel my spare-time into bloody submission. Not that I’m complaining about my two kids or that promotion, especially since it is probably a little amazing that I can even boast of such changes at all given how many film screenings used to get squeezed into one of my average weeks back then. Of course, as a filmmaker and media ethnographer, it was all part of my job. That’s at least how I rationalized a schedule that was so arguably decadent.

One of the annual high points of my life in Durham, N.C., besides the Tobacco Road basketball showdowns and the pulled-pork delicacies, was the Full Frame Film Festival every April. Full Frame is a documentary film festival, all nonfiction films, and its advertising slogan prodded would-be a...

The Cannes Film Festival, probably the most prestigious annual film festival in the world, opened this week at the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès in the south of France.

When I was completing my undergraduate degree in Film/Communications at Howard University, I made a silly pact with some of my fellow Comm majors (way, way back then) that I would never attend Cannes or Sundance (the important Salt Lake City festival started in the late 1970s) unless I had my own film in competition, which means that I’ve never been to either festival. Not once. And given the kinds of demands that my writerly/scholarly interests have been placing on my filmmaking productivity, I’m certainly in danger of having that silly little promise torment me for the rest of my life. Maybe I’m being too stubborn. (Surely, some of those former student-filmmakers have broken our hubristic pact.) But alas,...

A twenty-something college student in Dublin, Shane Fitzgerald, decided to conduct his own little cyber-experiment.

Only hours after learning of French composer Maurice Jarre’s death on March 28th of this year, Fitzgerald made up a memorable yet bogus quote, attributed it to the just-deceased Jarre, and then posted it on the composer’s Wikipedia entry.

Here is Fitzgerald’s fake quote: “One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear.”

By the end of April, the made-up quotation was being referenced and invoked all over the Web (and the world), quoted in blogs and electronic versions of newspaper Web sites in several countries.

(According to imdb.com, Jarre is one of the...

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, FIRE, is celebrating its 10th Anniversary this year. I actually got a chance to get licked by a few of its flames last month, and I promised to respond to the critiques of my representation of the organization. From SFO International Airport, here’s a quick crack at just that.

Here’s how FIRE describes its mission: The mission of FIRE is to defend and sustain individual rights at America’s colleges and universities. These rights include freedom of speech, legal equality, due process, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience—the essential qualities of individual liberty and dignity. FIRE’s core mission is to protect the unprotected and to educate the public and communities of concerned Americans about the threats to these rights on our campuses and about the means to preserve them.

In my first post about FIRE, I called them...

Since I'm in San Francisco this week, theroot.com's "Why Are Black Folks Leaving San Francisco?" jumped out at me.

The city is trying to offset a steady stream of race-specific outmigration. According to the article, two major factors are causing this black exodus. One issue is, predictably, gentrification. Many poorer blacks (and others) are simply being priced out of the city's housing market. The house bubble was popped, but that doesn't mean anything for the poorest city residents. If anything, it just makes a bad situation worse.

The article's author, Michael E. Ross, argues that blacks are feeling increasingly marginalized, culturally and socially, which Ross admits is "at odds with the city's reputation for tolerance and diversity."

"The decline in the population of black San Francisco has been the result of a perfect storm of social ills and social transitions," Ross writes. ...

I’m stuck at Tweed Airport in New Haven, so I just thought that I’d take advantage of the free Wi-Fi to use one new genre/platform (the blog) to comment on another (Twitter). This Brainstorm blogger doesn’t get the entire Twitter craze. Can somebody please explain it to me?

I actually had a lively conversation about this with a roomful of ethnographic researchers just over an hour ago (at a Yale University conference honoring the 35th Anniversary of Carol Stack’s canonical response to the demonization of poor black families, All Our Kin). The discussion was during a lunch-time workshop on “Media and Ethnography,” a workshop I rushed out of after it was over (so that I could catch a flight that I didn’t know was already canceled). Ugh!

But I was telling them that even as someone interested in studying (and using) new media technology, I didn’t understand why Twittering was a thing th...

I just want to give everyone some details about a live webinar I’m taking part in this Thursday (4/30/08) from 1pm to 2:30pm. If people are interested, they can watch the event on their computers.

Obviously, this is the week of “Obama’s First 100 Days,” and the panel discussion I am moderating, sponsored by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, brings together several scholars from different disciplinary traditions to dissect Obama’s few months in office.

The panelists include Diana Mutz, professor of communication and political science and director of the National Annenberg Election Survey; David Eisenhower, director of the Institute for Public Service at Annenberg; David Grande, an assistant professor of Medicine in the University of Pennsylvania Health System; Brooks Jackson, director of FactCheck.org; and Al Felzenberg, Principal Spokesman ...

As a potential faculty hire, what should one expect to find in an academic institution’s offer letter?

I only ask because a few junior colleagues have recently asked me to give them my two cents on the matter.

Most specifically, each of these scholars has been negotiating with schools that have decided to send them offer letters without any specific details about “the package” except for the starting salary.

They’ve had conversations (via phone and email) about other items that they’ll be provided (office computer, research and/or travel budgets, moving allowances, etc.), but none of those specifics are in the actual official letter. How common is such a practice? I told them that I thought it was fairly atypical, but there might be folks out there who have a better sense of this practice’s prevalence.

In the instances referenced above, the faculty members have had productive...

Former Teachers College Professor Madonna Constantine became (in)famous last year. More than once.

The first time was because of the hubbub that ensued after she found a noose attached to her office door. The finding turned into a national news story about hate speech and resurgent public displays of racism. Then people began to speculate that she had actually hung the noose herself as a way to deflect from an ongoing investigation into allegations of plagiarism made against her. The noose was found in October of 2007. The investigation was announce in February 2008. And Teachers College fired Constantine three months later.

Just this week, the plot has thickened (as some might have imagined it would). Constantine has filed a lawsuit against her former employer for ruining her reputation. Constantine’s attorney claims that they have proof of her innocence, even speculating that the...