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 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,…
by Scared Ignoramus Fellowship Leader Akim Reinhardt You don’t have to fuck me. Or give me any money. You don’t have to shave your head or adopt a peculiar diet or wear an ugly smock or come live in my compound among fellow cult members. You don’t even have to believe in anything. Actually, that…
by Akim Reinhardt Former NFL wide receiver Henry Ruggs III was recently sentenced to 3–10 years for a drunk driving accident that killed 23-year-old Tina Tintor and her dog. Ruggs had a blood alcohol level of 0.18 (>2x legal limit) and was driving his Corvette 156 mph when he struck her vehicle. Tintor’s Toyota caught…
by Akim Reinhardt The Lede: Wombats ate five children at a drive thru restaurant in Omegosh, Texas last week. The Body: A wisdom of wombats, on the run from massive fires in their Australian homelands, surrounded five children at a Checkers drive thru and lectured them on the disproportionate impact of the U.S. carbon footprint,…
by Akim Reinhardt Satire seems all but dead for now. Maybe it’s because the world became increasingly ludicrous, culminating with a real-life president as ridiculous as any satire Jonathan Swift or Dorothy Parker could dream up. Donald Trump’s bizarre presidency may have been the peak of absurdity (fingers crossed), but it had been building for…
by Akim Reinhardt I can’t sing. Or so I always thought. A notorious karaoke warbler, I would sometimes pick a country tune, preferably Hank Williams, so that when my voice cracked, I could pretend I was yodeling. Then one night, I stepped up to the bar’s microphone and sang a Gordon Lightfoot song. I wasn’t…
by Akim Reinhardt I first heard “The Blundering Generation” in the 1990s when I was taking a course on Civil War history. As my professor explained, the early 20th century saw a new cohort of historians who no longer personally remembered the war and debated anew the nature of its origins. They were trying to…
by Akim Reinhardt Last week marked the 20th anniversary to the start of America’s recently concluded second Gulf War. It’s also been nearly 33 years since the much shorter first Gulf War, a.k.a. Desert Storm (1990–91). Unlike the “great” wars, these haven’t merited Roman numerals. My own Roman numerals now begin with an L. I…
by Akim Reinhardt and GPTChatbot A couple months back, I wrote an open letter to fellow professors. Don’t panic, I said. Yes, new crops of student plagiarism bound are sprout in the fertile fields of free, online AI software. But it’ll be alright. Here’s how to adjust. Then it occurred to me: Why should students…
by Akim Reinhardt There is a building on the Towson University campus called Van Bokkelen Hall. In that building, one of the rooms has recently been renamed for Richard E. Vatz. I don’t know who Van Bokkelen was (I should probably look into that), but I can tell you who Vatz is. Professor Richard E.…
by Akim Reinhardt The ChatGPT Bot has changed everything! That’s the basic vibe I’m getting from frantic press reports, early return think pieces, and even public-facing academicians. Specifically, this new, free AI software, only a few weeks old and still improving, is already churning out high school-quality essays on just about any subject a teacher…