Expanding on the I-Word

By JEFFREY N. WASSERSTROM

In the late 1990s, a colleague's reference to my having given a "postmodern" talk triggered a brief obsession with figuring out what that word (and postmodernism) had come to mean. I concluded that they were being used so promiscuously and showing up in so many contexts (I even found a recipe for neo-postmodern pupu platters) that they had lost their...