Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist, died Wednesday of a heart attack at age 87. The Chronicle will have more on Zinn soon. Meanwhile, below are a few videos from bigthink.com that give a sense of how Zinn wished to be remembered. And you might want to revisit Zinn’s reaction in The Chronicle to 9/11 here as well as a 2003 review-essay on Zinn by James Green.

Top 5 Most-Read Brainstorm Posts of 2009

Please welcome Michael Ruse, Brainstorm’s newest blogger. He is an expert at Florida State University in the history and philosophy of science. You can read a little about him here. You can read a lot about him here. And you can read a brilliant essay he wrote for the Review here.

You might see him writing about science and religion (especially creationism and evolution), college football, film, and other similarly uncontroversial matters.

More Waves From Romano’s Heidegger Takedown

Thought the “Heil Heidegger!” storm had subsided? Hardly — it just moved north. Listen to Romano and Damon Linker lock horns on the CBC program Q.

Also, see Morgan Meis “The Heidegger in All of Us” at The Smart Set.

Laurie Fendrich’s Exhibit

We just want to let readers know that Brainstormer Laurie Fendrich’s “Drawings from the South of France” will be on view at GARY SNYDER/Project Space, 250 West 26th Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10001, from November 4 through December 19. Laurie blogged during the summer (for instance, here) about working on these images, and this is your chance to see them up close. The opening will be from 6 to 8 p.m. on Wednesday, November 4. The gallery’s phone number is 212-929-1351, and the Web site is www.garysnyderart.com.

Congratulations, Laurie!

From the Archives: Aloff on Cunningham

The innovative choreographer died Sunday. In 2007, Mindy Aloff explained Cunningham's connections to higher education, and suggested readings for those studying Cunningham's work.

The essay is here, and pasted in below:

November 30, 2007

Illuminating Merce Cunningham's Spirited Choreography

By MINDY ALOFF

The Merce Cunningham Dance Company was founded in 1953 by the choreographer and his partner, the composer John Cage, at Black Mountain College, in North Carolina. Sixteen years later, the director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Harvey Lichtenstein — who had fallen in love with Cunningham's work when he studied with Cunningham at Black Mountain as an undergraduate — was in a position to offer several worthy and financially struggling dance companies a home in New York at BAM, including an annual two-week performance season and offices for the companies' administration….

Gates, in 1995, on How Police Are Perceived

It's a commonplace that white folks trust the police and black folks don't. Whites recognize this in the abstract, but they're continually surprised at the depth of black wariness. They shouldn't be. … As older blacks like to repeat, “When white folks say 'justice,' they mean 'just us.'” Blacks—in particular, black men—swap their experiences of police encounters like war stories, and there are few who don't have more than one story to tell. “These stories have a ring of cliché about them,” Erroll McDonald, Pantheon's executive editor and one of the few prominent blacks in publishing, says, “but, as we all know about clichés, they’re almost always true.” McDonald tells of renting a Jaguar in New Orleans and being stopped by the police—simply “to show cause why I shouldn't be deemed a problematic Negro in a possibly stolen car.” … The crime novelist Walter Mosley recalls, “When I was…