Akim Reinhardt is a professor of History at Towson University in Baltimore. Born and raised in the Bronx, he has also lived in Michigan, Nebraska, and Arizona. He is the author of several books with more in the hopper. Email: yankeeslim [at] gmail.com
Website: https://ThePublicProfessor.com
by Akim Reinhardt On a hot summer evening in Baltimore last year, the daylight still washing over the city, I sat on my front porch, drinking a beer with a friend. Not many people passed by. Most who did were either walking a dog or making their way to the corner tavern. And then an…
by Akim Reinhardt Medieval historians hate it, don’tcha know, when people talk about the Dark Ages. Scholars haven’t used the term in decades, eschewing it as an unfair and inaccurate description of 500–1000 years of European history, give or take. The Middle Ages weren’t just filth, poverty, violence, and ignorance, historians protest. They were actually…
by Akim Reinhardt Last spring, American documentary film maker Ken Burns gave a commencement address at Brandeis University in Boston. Burns is a talented speaker, adept at spinning uplifting yarns, and his speech soon made the rounds on the internet. As is the way with commencement addresses, there were signposts pointing towards what awaited the…
by Akim Reinhardt Are you savvy? I like to think I’m savvy. I’m 57, I’ve seen a lot. Not, I joined the Foreign Legion and traveled the world, seen a lot. More like, I’ve lived a while, and have tried to keep my eyes open along the way. I can’t predict the future any better…
by Akim Reinhardt Some people use religion to get their life together. Good for them. I’m all for it. Although I myself am an atheist, I don’t think it much matters how someone gets their life together so long as they do. Then again, many religious people don’t use religion to get their lives together.…
by Akim Reinhardt There’s a lot going on right now. Lowlights include racism, misogyny, and transphobia; xenophobia amid undulating waves of global migrations; democratic state capture by right wing authoritarians; and secular state capture by fundamentalist Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu nationalists. Among the many factors causing and influencing these complex phenomena are: the rebound…
by Akim Reinhardt Historians have spilled much ink analyzing and interpreting all of the U.S. presidential elections, dating back to George Washington’s first go in 1788. But a handful of contests get more attention than others. Some elections, besides being important for all the usual reasons, also provide insights into their eras’ zeitgeist, and proved…
by Akim Reinhardt Death has stalked me of late, claiming those whom I was once close to, or who remained closest to those who are closest to me. A friend from graduate school. My father’s cousin. The brother of an old and dear friend. A long time neighbor around the corner. Four men who hailed…
by Akim Reinhardt Here’s what a bubble looks like. I walk into the local convenience store, and next to the two ATMs is a third machine selling Bitcoin. You can slide a bank card into the ATMs and get cash. You can slide your credit or debit card into the third machine and buy a…
by Akim Reinhardt There are only four U.S. states where white people are at least 80% of the population in every county: West Virginia, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. These four are also among the five whitest states as a percentage of total state population, with Wyoming coming in second, behind West Virginia (97%) and…
by Akim Reinhardt The turn of the 21st century saw a burst of atheistic declarations and critiques in the United States and Great Britain, led by a small group of celebrity atheists including Philosopher Daniel Dennett, Biologist Richard Dawkins, and journalist Christopher Hitchens. I have always found this New Atheism, as the movement is often…
by Akim “Scare Quotes Can Indicate Facetiousness” Reinhardt Two spaces after a period, not one. If a topic sentence leading to a paragraph can get a whole new line and an indentation, then other new sentences can get an extra space. Don’t smush sentences together like puppies in a cardboard box at a WalMart parking…
by Akim Reinhardt The barbarians have won. The barbarians and their arrogance have won, their shouted assertions offered up as commandments. No one can be right who disagrees with them. The barbarians and their death cult have won, their zombie god lording over us. The spirits of trees and animals and waters and sky and…
by Akim Reinhardt A little over a year ago I published an essay here at 3QD that implored my fellow educators not to panic amid the dawning of Artificial Intelligence. Since then I’ve had two and a half semesters to consider what it all means. That first semester, many of my students had not even…
by Akim Reinhardt What do we know about vampires? They are selfish to a degree that is sociopathic They are consumed by vanity They roar against anyone who contradicts them Their skin is oddly discolored They demand sycophantic followers All they care about is fucking, feeding, and being complimented They are capable of hypnotizing people…
by Akim Reinahrdt Time slips past us, fast flow, like a river rushing over gray stones Time drips slower than slow like thick sap hanging from pine cones I’m not sure time is real. I mean, things happen. Entropy and whatnot. But I don’t know if I accept that measuring the pace of happenings is…
by Akim Reinhardt We’re circling the Sun at a rate of between 18.20–18.83 miles per second. It is not a fixed speed because Earth travels on an ellipsis, and moves a hair faster when it’s closer to the Sun than it does when further away. It averages out to about 67,000 miles per hour over…
by Akim Reinhardt I teach at a large, public university in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. For about a decade now, the upper administration has had a habit of sending “comforting” emails whenever there’s a major school shooting. Of course there are far too many school shootings in America to send a note…
by Akim Reinhardt No longer eating meat was similar to no longer believing in God. I can’t pinpoint a moment when it ended, for abstinence did not come upon me suddenly. Rather, what had once been a bedrock of my existence slipped away after years of contemplation. Some time in 1995, I realized it was…
by Akim Reinhardt and A Nother I am sitting on the couch of our discontent. The Robot Overlords™ are circling. Shall we fight them, as would a sassy little girl and her aging, unshaven action star caretaker in the Hollywood rendition of our feel good dystopian future? Shall we clamp our hands over our ears,…