I recently returned from a Trump fast. It was actually a news fast, but since the news these days is pretty much all Trump all the time, a Trump detox is what it turned out to be. It was in the high desert, in another country, at a place with mercifully lousy cell service, blissfully…
‘You must see the garden,” said the guard, in French, pointing to a door in the Delacroix Museum that my daughter and I hadn’t noticed. It led outside and down two sets of stairs to an exquisite courtyard, a silent oasis below the studio where Eugène Delacroix lived while he struggled to finish his last…
Is Donald J. Trump a liar? Yes, at this point it seems safe to say that he regularly tells intentional untruths. So, is Donald Trump evil? The idea of evil makes me uncomfortable. It makes a tribal, politically-loaded and socially-constructed category into a universal one. It demonizes difference. It treats psychopathology theologically. And, if we…
Michael Pollan had enlightenment envy. Unlike most patients in clinical trials of psilocybin, when Pollan ate a magic mushroom, he wasn’t terrified by a terminal illness, he wasn’t suffering from alcoholism or depression and he hadn’t been diagnosed with a personality disorder. But he “envied the radical new perspectives” of the people in psychedelic therapy…
Oprah gave a pitch-perfect commencement speech at my school’s graduation, a mix of motivation (“Be the truth. Be. The. Truth.”) and motivation shtick (“Invest in a quality mattress. And don’t cheap out on your shoes.”). The exhortation that won the biggest rise from the thousand USC Annenberg students: “Vote. Vote. Vote.” Their cheers almost made…
In this week’s episode, Roseanne hates on the Muslims. Spoiler alert: By the end, Roseanne gets woke. But how many racist jokes can the season’s highest-rated scripted TV series make without itself being racist? I wonder how I’d feel if Roseanne Conner (played by Jewish actress and comedian Roseanne Barr) made the kind of cracks…
I don’t know if Timothy Burke is going to save journalism, let alone democracy, but the spooky video he made for Deadspin at the end of March racked up 30 million views within a week and got the country gasping at Sinclair Broadcast Group’s fake anti-fake-news campaign. Burke, though, will need to pit what he…
You are teaching a class on media literacy. You want your students to think critically about the truth claims of messages. You bring to the classroom Donald Trump and Bette Davis. You display a Trump tweet about our trade deficit with China: “The U.S. is losing $500 Billion a year…. Cannot continue!” You ask your…
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