Later on today, Oprah Winfrey is supposed to announce that she's closing up shop on her wildly influential daily show. The lights go out on that televisual institution in 2011, and that will be the end of a pop-cultural era.

Of course, Oprah didn't invent the genre (and she wasn't the first person to ratchet its stakes up to national prominence), but she has owned that format for much of the last two decades, using it as an amazingly powerful platform, one that has made her the most recognizable first-name celebrity on the planet.

Some credited her "book club" with almost single-handedly keeping America literate (and the publishing industry solvent), a not completely hyperbolic claim.

I probably watched about 10 to 15 episodes of the show a year, but they were some of the most riveting moments of network TV: Tom Cruise prancing around on that couch and...

Former United States Senator Rick Santorum penned an op-ed in this morning's Philadelphia Inquirer that questions the military's commitment to "diversity." Santorum's "The Elephant in the Room: Diversity, but at What Cost?" argues that the Naval Academy's characterization of diversity as "highest personnel priority" is not just silly (as manifested in an attempt to diversify an all white and male color guard before a recent world series game) but also potentially "dangerous," especially if "the military's commitment to 'diversity' as job one prevented military officials and the Department of Defense from 'connecting the dots' when it came to the accused [Fort Hood] shooter."

Of course, academics hear a great deal about diversity,...

Most of the reviews are in, and if it weren't for Wes Anderson's new animated film, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Lee Daniels might have the most critically acclaimed motion picture of the year.

Precious, based on the novel Push, by the poet Sapphire, is finally going into wide national release today, but most critics have been gushing about this gritty little film for weeks. 

Even before it had a distributor, I wrote about Daniels and the Sapphire book right here on Brainstorm, especially after the film won prestigious awards at Sundance and Cannes, something close to the equivalent of Best Picture Prizes at both festivals.

I called my previous post "Sundancing with Controversy," because I thought that Daniels had chosen a very difficult book: the first-person story of a poor, sexually abused (by her father), HIV-positive...

I just want to highlight some of the early comments to my last post. Overnight, several readers offered recommendations and critiques. Let me mention a few of them.

goxewu asks: First question: How does Prof. Jackson cover his undergraduate classes when he's off at a conference? Second question: What does Assoc. Dean Jackson think of the way Prof. Jackson covers his undergraduate classes when he's off at a conference?

I teach on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays this semester, so I haven't had to miss any class sessions for conferences, even during this recent stretch. Your point, however, about how to juggle conferences and teaching is a fair one. And it isn't always easy to pull off. 

rachel321's strategy is to *often* take students with me to conferences as part of their professionalization. sometimes i even take along with me senior...

For the sake of full disclosure, I should probably start off by admitting that I'm in the middle of a particularly heavy conference stretch right now, which clearly informs this mini-tirade.

American Studies, one of my favorite annual meetings, held its conference in D.C. this past weekend, and the event overlapped with the American Academy of Religion's gathering in Montreal. I'm finally just back from both, and the National Communication Association's conference starts tomorrow. In Chicago!

It seems that many of the academic associations (at least the ones putting on conferences that I've planned to attend) have conspired to meet at one and the same time most years. Indeed, some folks might even push for a few extra weeks in the fall semester just to accommodate all of these meetings. 

I have to admit that I really enjoy a great deal about these...

Who posts "comments" to blogs? And why?

It isn't just happenstance that some of the most dismissive and hostile "comments" to blog posts come from anonymous readers. Anonymity gives courage to the cowardly. And that was the case long before the Internet.

Of course, it doesn't even make sense to respond to dismissive comments. Nothing good can come of it.

I'm not sure that both of the comments listed below are dismissive, but I did want to take a second to reframe a couple of responses to my recent "mentoring" post.   

The first, posted by "goxewu," is simple and straightforward:

Wait a minute. There's an "associate dean" for just "undergraduate studies" in just one school (and the middleweight one of "communications," at that) at Penn? Prof. Jackson is hereby enjoined from ever, ever complaining in...

What are "best practices" when it comes to student mentoring? How can we distinguish good models from bad ones?

I've been thinking about this quite a lot lately, and not just because of my post as associate dean of undergraduate studies in the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. Before coming to Penn, I taught at Duke University for four years and spent three of them living in a dormitory with first-year undergraduate students. The students inspired me far more often than their periodic displays of youthful recklessness made me frustrated and disheartened, and most of the Duke students I keep in contact with now were people I first met in Giles Dorm. 

I haven't been teaching nearly long enough to have a Mr. Holland's Opus-type moment yet: the realization that one might impact a student in seemingly small and imperceptible...

Do academics have good reasons to be depressed?

When I was in graduate school, I had two friends (also grad students) who cried (literally broke down in tears) just about every single week of their graduate school careers -- and it might even have been more like every day. They seemed truly miserable much of the time, and it took them both a lot of soul-searching to find a way out of that existential morass.

For me, back then, their plight always seemed like a powerful lesson, a reminder that "the life of the mind" should be challenging without being debilitating. But it isn't necessarily easy to maintain some kind of discrete firewall between those two alternatives. And academics seem to have more and more reason to court such melancholia all the time.

For one thing, the nature of our conversations/debates are sometimes so unnecessarily...

I spent the last four days in sunny Southern California, and most of that time found me losing my mind about the zaniness of America's current racial landscape.

I went out West to take part in a fantastic conference, "Reading Scriptures, Reading America: Interruptions, Orientations, and Mimicry among U.S. Communities of Color," sponsored by Claremont Graduate University's Institute for Signifying Scriptures. I presented research from the book I'm currently writing (an examination of African-American Hebrew Israelites) as part of one of the conference panels organized by Velma Love (Florida A&M University), sharing the stage with Renee K. Harrison (Payne...

When I was an undergraduate, which really wasn't all that long ago, attending classes and completing my coursework constituted the sine qua non of my university existence. And that was probably true for many of my classmates at Howard University. Sure, we had extracurricular activities (some political and some recreational, some artistic and some just plain self-destructive), but that stuff probably didn't take up nearly as many hours per week as the tons of things students are busy with between class sessions these days.

I first noticed the difference (between then and now) when I taught at Duke University and served as faculty-in-residence for a first-year dormitory. I did the latter for three energizing years, and each incoming class seemed more overextended and hyperscheduled than the one before.

They were all serious students. They wouldn't have gotten into...