Sam Haselby

The best description I have read of the relationship between specialization and knowledge, in terms of how the two function in academic or scholarly research, came from a late nineteenth century philosopher of science.

He was explaining a seeming contradiction. How is it possible that a broad field of inquiry, say physics or modern literature, or even more broadly humanity as a whole, knows more and more while at the same time most of the people who have enlarged these bodies of knowledge seem from one perspective to know less and less?

There is no contradiction, he argued, and compared the scholarly or research-based accumulation of knowledge to a spotlight expanding on a w...

There are two kinds of people in the world- those who are foolish enough to believe there are only two kinds of people in the world, and the rest of us.

A friend, a productive scholar and an eager, effective user of digital media in many forms, recently posted a photo on his Facebook page. It was a picture of his seven year old daughter curled up in an armchair at night, under a light, paper book in hands, reading and absorbed entirely. “Maybe the paper book has a future after all,” he commented.

Electronic books have some irreplaceable advantages including but probably not limited to portability, search and share advantages, storage and more. My suspicion that the paper book is not obsolete however has, I think, less to do with sentimental visions of childhood, such as might be suggested by the anecdote described above, and more t...

Where to begin? I’d follow University of Texas law professor Sanford Levine’s plan to scrap the whole thing and have a new constitutional convention, one that draws broadly from the citizenry by lottery. There are some anti-democratic features of the present US Constitution, such as two senators from every state, that are so plainly anti-democratic as to have become sacred. California has nearly 40 million people. Wyoming has under 600,000. They each get two senators. Huh? Then there are the sclerotic internal division of powers and reform requirements Gerstle has focused on that just involve massive wastes of energy and effort, and sometimes a component of absurdity. The example Gerstle ...

There is a lot of discussion today about political Islam. Much of it presumes that the reason for its role as the bearer of a certain kind of radical politics lies in some quality of the religion. In the US at least, that presumption often narrows even further to some quality of the Quran. One thing I like about Raza Rumi’s essay is how it has no time for that approach. His experience as a banker and development advocate, then journalist, in Pakistan, Rumi saw the matter as clearly political. In a casual, off-hand way, his essay identifies two drivers of political Islam in Pakistan. First, the partition from India. With Islam embroidered into its very reason for existence, Pakistan has be...

Joshua Rothman takes note of an important step in the historical understanding of slavery in the US. In the first decades of the 20th century, Americans were taught that slavery was a benevolent, civilizing institution, and not the primary cause of the nation’s Civil War. In 1956, the publication of Kenneth Stamp’s book The Peculiar Institution, brought a big change. WWII’s concentration camps had brought racism into disrepute, and Stamp, for this and other reasons, argued that American slavery was in fact a brutal and oppressive system, that it was the cause of the American Civil War. But Stamp also more or less portrayed American slavery as a peculiarly Southern thing. The Civil Rights ...

This question obviously raises some deeply felt views about how an implicit politics of academics and the media express themselves in society. When posing the question, I didn’t anticipate such fervor. I can’t help but notice that those on both sides find their position so blindingly obvious that the question itself seems to them ideological. As a result, barely anyone has provided any actual examples of how academia and the media might be overwhelmingly liberal or, as a couple writers implied, neoliberal, which is right-wing if not conservative in the proper sense of the word. The answer to the question is to me not at all so simple or self-evident. While most professional academics are ...

Renaming things is a blunt instrument by which to address the legacy and consequences of slavery and apartheid in the US. What effect will changing the name on building in Princeton, NJ have on the impunity with which police visit violence on African-Americans, or on mass incarceration, or on poverty? How is one to explain the discrimination and violence after one has removed references to its causes?

One could argue those 18th and 19th century Brits, with their useless Greek and Latin educations, nonetheless did rather well, if not good, on the world stage.

Allison Pugh’s work on masculinity helps explain some of the deep developments currently roiling US politics, in particular in the Republican presidential primary. As a group, men without advanced degrees basically no longer have a realistic chance of fulfilling the normative expectations of what it means to be a man, of providing stable long term support for their families. The consequences are profound, for their lives, that of their families, and I think increasingly for the country’s politics. Look too at the READ MORE→ See comment