The facts of my case are fairly simple. Chad Farnan, a 15-year-old self-described Christian fundamentalist student in my AP History class, sued me for a “pattern” of statements unconstitutionally hostile to religion. His claim was based on hours of illegal and surreptitious recordings. In my attorney’s opinion, the law was on our side, so he advised me to seek a summary judgment. I now believe that was a critical error…
Review: Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis
I recently completed my fifth trip through Joseph Ellis’s indispensable Founding Brothers. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2001, the book provides one of the best all-around glimpses of the […]
Street smarts: the American revolution
Grover helps Thomas Jefferson meet a deadline:
Nightstand: What Scholars & Rogues are reading
Sam Smith: The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. A wonderful analysis on the difficulty of knowing and the impossibility of predicting. Brian Angliss: The End of Faith by Sam Harris I’m […]
A forerunner of credit-card debt helped spawn the Revolutionary War
Washington was caught in the trap that was snaring so many other Virginia planters and that Thomas Jefferson, another victim, described as the chronic condition of indebtedness, which then became “hereditary from […]
WordsDay: the art of the possible
In case you’ve been off-planet, the dumpster fire that is Election Season 2008 is in full swing. While this can be entertaining if you’re cynical enough, it’s a process that can exert […]
WordsDay: Jefferson no Lion in Winter in "Twilight at Monticello"
Alan Pell Crawford’s Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson tries to simultaneously be a Jefferson lovefest and an attempt at balanced history. Jefferson himself was a man of well-documented […]
Lincoln was right – Goebbels was, too, unfortunately…
Pay attention. There will be a quiz later. You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the […]
