A Letter To My Daughter
by Eric J. Weiner Dear Chloe: You were born an old soul and I was sure you had been here before.[i] You arrived sporting a black, faux-hawk and I immediately imagined you as a punk rock girl banging heads and breaking hearts wherever you went.[ii] From the moment you were placed on your mother’s breast,…
In The Name Of My Father
The Mis-Education Of White Folks
Reimagining Public Education
by Eric J. Weiner In the wake of the pandemic, many people sense an opportunity to reimagine and rewrite public education so that it aligns with their particular political agendas. Progressives sense an opportunity to reassert the critical capacities of a democratic education. From the religious right, there is an attempt to blur the lines…
Minima Pedagogica: Teachable Moments from the Damaged Life
by Eric J. Weiner Dedication As an “intellectual in emigration,” Theodor Adorno wrote Mimima Moralia, his book of philosophical, sociological, cultural, and psychological reflections “from the standpoint of subjective experience, [which] means that the pieces do not entirely measure up to the philosophy, of which they are nevertheless a part.” I have always been fascinated by this book. As…
Sole Craft as Soulcraft
by Eric J. Weiner Shoes could save your life. —Edith Grossman, survivor of the Auschwitz death camp These boots are made for walking/And that’s just what they’ll do/One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you —Nancy Sinatra As I had never seen my shoes before, I set myself to study their…
Schooling and the Emergence of Free-Market Authoritarianism: The Struggle for Democratic Life
by Eric J. Weiner What is commonsense to most people who received a K-12 public education in the United States is that every formal system of state schooling throughout the modern world is designed to educate its students to develop, what Charles Lemert calls “sociologically competencies” within whatever ideological system is dominating at the time…
Slave Play: Theater of Pain and Pleasure
by Eric J. Weiner Slave Play is a comedy of sorts. It should be played as such. —Jeremy Harris Jeremy Harris is a dark and stormy cocktail of Dave Chappelle, Augusto Boal, Boots Riley, and James Baldwin. The dark comedic energy that drives Slave Play, Harris’s provocative Broadway show about racism, sex, kinky fetishism, white…
Writing To Learn, Learning to Live: Against Instrumentality
by Eric J. Weiner The allure of fresh and true ideas, of free speculation, of artistic vigor, of cultural styles, of intelligence suffused by feeling, and feeling given fiber and outline by intelligence, has not come, and can hardly come, we see now, while our reigning philosophy is an instrumental one. —Randolph Bourne Schoolteachers across…
The Responsibility Of Intellectuals Who Teach
by Eric J. Weiner There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. ― Soren Kierkegaard A lot has changed since 1967, the year Noam Chomsky published “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.” His essay threw damning shade at the intelligentsia—particularly those in…
The Things We Schlep: A Short Cultural Study Of Type 1 Diabetes
by Eric J. Weiner The word “schlep” comes from the Yiddish “schlepn,” which means to drag or haul. You don’t have to be Jewish to be a schlepper, although it couldn’t hurt. Amidst the deepening economic and political inequities informing everyday life, schlepping is one of the great social equalizers. To see a person in…
Thinking Dangerously: Henry Giroux’s The Terror Of The Unforeseen
Sequestered Spaces, Public Places: Identity Politics, the Neoliberal University, and the Crisis of Imagination
by Eric J. Weiner An intransigent form of identity politics in combination with neoliberal ideology has left the modern university, if not in ruins, then lacking imagination and cultural capital. It has become a place of sequestered spaces—symbolic and real—where too many students and faculty fear discussing issues deemed to be controversial, inappropriate, or “political.”…
A Praxis of Pleasure
by Eric J. Weiner Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare. —Audre Lorde As I write this introduction, I struggle against becoming overwhelmed by too many things: The mass shootings that occur on a regular basis; the daily gun-related murder and maiming that occur throughout…
Learning to Laze
by Eric J. Weiner From Saint Pélagie Prison in 1883, Paul Lafargue wrote The Right to Be Lazy, an anti-capitalist polemic that challenged the hegemony of the “right to work” discourse. The focus of his outrage was the liberal elite as well as the proletarians. His central argument is summed up in this quote: Capitalist…