Hello! Today, we talk about the protests in LA, give a short timeline of what’s been happening and talk about all the silly discourse about how “the protesters” should “do x” as if every person at a protest is receiving a newsletter about message control or whatever.
Re: the very ending of the episode -- I'd be interested to hear you guys discuss the bad blood between journalists and academics some time. I teach in the English Department at a large public university in Texas. Most of the journalists I follow have college humanities degrees, and I tend to think of them as doing parallel work to my own. We all try to engage the public with knowledge of history, culture, politics, and so on. Yet I'm constantly confronted by the fact that these folks I imagine as my allies actually hate my profession and are pleased with the idea that it's nearing extinction. Yes, there is a lot about the institution of academia that is contemptible, but it seems be more than this. It's as if the very proximity of our two enterprises produces a special kind of contempt, like the one between weathermen and meteorologists. Anyway, I wish this was something we could work through so that we could be better allies against the forces of illiteracy.
Re: the very ending of the episode -- I'd be interested to hear you guys discuss the bad blood between journalists and academics some time. I teach in the English Department at a large public university in Texas. Most of the journalists I follow have college humanities degrees, and I tend to think of them as doing parallel work to my own. We all try to engage the public with knowledge of history, culture, politics, and so on. Yet I'm constantly confronted by the fact that these folks I imagine as my allies actually hate my profession and are pleased with the idea that it's nearing extinction. Yes, there is a lot about the institution of academia that is contemptible, but it seems be more than this. It's as if the very proximity of our two enterprises produces a special kind of contempt, like the one between weathermen and meteorologists. Anyway, I wish this was something we could work through so that we could be better allies against the forces of illiteracy.