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 Last month I offered about 2,000 words on the meaninglessness of life. “Life is meaningless,” I said. “Nothing matters, nothing at all.” I suggested that “meaning and truth are just illusions that humans chatter about incessantly because they can't stomach the sheer meaninglessness of it all.” Indeed, your birth was an act…
by Akim Reinhardt I was gonna write something about the Clint Eastwood film American Sniper. Seems like a topic of the Now. Something the internetting public can really grab onto and scream about. Clint Eastwood: Sentimental warmonger, or artist of more nuance than leftists and pacifists can discern? U.S. sniper Chris Kyle: Troubled war veteran…
by Akim Reinhardt I think I'm supposed to call it a ship. I get confused about these things. All I know for sure is that we're headed south. I used to be tough when it came to winter. Not like strap-on-some-snow-shoes-and-hunt-a-walrus-with-a-harpoon tough, but tough enough that a five month season in Nebraska or Michigan didn't…
by Akim Reinhardt I still remember the first time I heard it. It was back in the late ‘90s, when I had cable. There was this openly gay guy, bald, a little overweight, a beard I think. He had some design show about sprucing up your house. There weren't a lot of openly gay men…
by Akim Reinhardt I've made some deep runs in my time. I once drove non-stop from central Wyoming to eastern Iowa before passing out at a highway rest stop for a couple of hours, waking up with a scrambled brain, driving the short distance to Illinois, then staring with confusion and regret at the chili…
by Akim Reinhardt Part I of this essay appeared last month. Thus continues my grand voyage, in which a rusty ‘98 Honda Accord shuttles me from one end of North America to the other and back again . . . After stumbling half-way across the continent, I settled into the northern Great Plains for a…
by Akim Reinhardt I'm currently circling the nation in a black and orange ‘98 Honda Accord, my rusted chariot. About 7,500 miles in a little over two months. That's the plan. As far north as North Dakota, as far south as New Mexico, and as far west as California before closing the circuit by returning…
by Akim Reinhardt Thirteen year old Mo'ne Davis recently took America by storm when she pitched her south Philly baseball team deep into the Little League World Series, where clubs from around the world compete every August. A beloved celebrity of the moment, her success brought to mind my own somewhat tortured little league experiences.…
by Akim Reinhardt In February the word came in. My brother in law had a job offer in Orange County. He and my sister would finally be giving up the little apartment in far northern Manhattan and heading for the West coast. “Lemme know if I can help,” I to told my sister. “You wanna…
by Akim Reinhardt It has been exactly 20 years since the United States hosted a World Cup, and just as long since the debut of Major League Soccer (MLS), the nation's homegrown professional soccer league. Two decades later, American interest in the World Cup continues to grow. Beyond that, however, soccer remains a marginal product…
by Akim Reinhardt As far as human experiences go, there's not much that tops doing something you love. But when doing it means you're not only indulging your personal creativity, but also sharing it with hundreds or thousands of other people who are appreciative, and you're contributing to something larger by helping to keep a…
by Akim Reinhardt Let me begin this essay by making one thing clear: I am opposed to capital punishment. I agree with pretty much all of the arguments against it. It's clearly not a deterrent. The possibility, much less the reality, that innocent people are sometimes executed is beyond inexcusable. A variety of factors have…
by Akim Reinhardt Let me begin with some personal disclosure. I am a half-Jewish American who has never been and has no personal connection to Israel. In the early 1960s before I was born, my mother, who has otherwise lived her entire life in The Bronx, spent two years on a northern Israeli kibbutz named…
by Akim Reinhardt In an early episdoe of Mad Men, a character named Ken Cosgrove publishes a short story in the Atlantic Monthly. It'sentitled: “Tapping a Maple on a Cold Vermont Morning.” That's just about pitch perfect for the American literary scene circa 1960. The coating of influential New England literati is so thick on…
by Akim Reinhardt American colleges have undergone substantial changes during the last three decades. Rising tuition costs, which have far outpaced the rate of inflation, are nearly universal. Other changes that have affected most schools include a tremendous growth in non-instructional areas and a serious re-shuffling of labor. Many schools have added layers of administration;…
by Akim Reinhardt It was 1996. I was 28. I had recently moved to Nebraska to attend graduate school. I was at a party. I didn't know a lot of people. Maybe I didn't know anyone. One woman was talking about palm reading. Apparently she read palms. Laughable, of course. But I didn't say anything,…
by Akim Reinhardt Black Pete. Good Lord, what a head shaker that is. Most anyone who's not Dutch looks at Black Pete and thinks to themselves: For real? You've got Sinterklaas, the Dutch version of Santa Claus, working his Christmas season magic accompanied by an army of little Jumpin' Jim Crows? Diminutive, black face helpers…
by Akim Reinhardt In the recent Virginia gubernatorial election, Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis received over 6% the vote. If he had not run, much of his support would likely have gone to Republican Ken Cuccinelli rather than Democrat Terry McAuliffe, who won by a narrow 2.5% margin. Last year's U.S. Senate race in Montana also…
by Akim Reinhardt In part I of this essay, I offered a broad re-definition of the term “Dark Ages,” using it to describe any historical period when dogma becomes ascendant and flattens people's perceptions of humanity's very real complexities. From there, I discussed how the conventional Dark Ages, marked by religious dogma's domination medieval Europe,…
by Akim Reinhardt European Historians have long eschewed the term “Dark Ages.” Few of them still use it, and many of them shiver when they encounter it in popular culture. Scholars rightly point out that the term, popularly understood as connoting a time of death, ignorance, stasis, and low quality of life, is prejudiced and…