Who Reads?

In some ways, a picture really is worth a thousand words. A picture can often tell a story or communicate feelings that would take a thousand words to tell. If you are old enough to remember the 9/11 attacks, you doubtless remember the video of the buildings on fire and smoking, and people jumping to their deaths to avoid being burned alive. That video has more emotional impact than any of the stories you might have read about it. Reading is more cognitive: we understand more fully. Video is more visceral: we feel more.

When I was an undergraduate . . . → Read More: Who Reads?

What a Week

The impetus for this blog is the recent spate of race-based violence we have experienced following the deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. The history of the US has, of course, a long record of race-based violence. How could it be otherwise when slavery was present from our earliest days. It is easy to forget, for example, that the White House was built by slave labor.

I am old enough to remember early TV news coverage of what were deemed “race riots” in the 1950s and ’60s. The principal minorities in the town where I grew up (Los . . . → Read More: What a Week