Tag: Akim Reinhardt

Bending the Numbers

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

The Republican Party has forever faced a serious statistical obstacle: There are always more Democrats. Never once since the GOP was founded in 1854 have there been more registered Republicans than Democrats in the United States. Democrats are always more numerous. So how can Republicans win?

You have to shoot every angle. You have to get lucky. And when sharp angles and dumb luck run out, you eventually you have to bend the rules.

The party’s rise, specifically the election of Abraham Lincoln as president with just under 40% of the popular vote in 1860, precipitated cession Democrats’ withdrawal from U.S. government and the start of the Civil War. During the war, the remaining United States was effectively under one-party Republican rule. Despite this, Northern Democrats remained a force in U.S. politics.  When Lincoln ran for re-election in 1864, with only Union states participating, Democrat George McClellan still pulled nearly 45% of the popular vote.

Lincoln had hoped to build Republican support in the South after the war through a coalition of newly freed Blacks and Southern Whites who had opposed cession. However, his assassination placed Southern Democrat Andrew Johnson in the White House, easing former Confederates’ path to regaining U.S. citizenship and voting rights. Former Confederates then waged terroristic campaigns against new Black voters and White sympathizers to regain control of Southern governments. By the time political Reconstruction ended in the 1877, White Democrats in all Southern states, including formerly loyal slave states Maryland and Tennessee, were using the Democratic Party to establish white supremacist apartheid throughout the region.

Republicans were banished to permanent minority party status in the South, and aside from occasional hiccups, the region would remain under one-party Democratic rule for over a century. Read more »

Thursday, May 21, 2026

In Memoriam: Rex Reed

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

The only time I met Rex Reed, I was about seven years old. I went with my dad to Reed’s apartment in The Dakota on Central Park West so he could offer an estimate on painting the place. My father ran a very small general contracting business called Ken’s Home Improvements. Typical jobs involved him and one or two other workers. His theory on acquiring customers was to work for rich people since they had money; economies of scale were anathema to his soul. Reed qualified. A film and cultural critic for the New York Times, GQ, and Vogue, he’d been a judge for both the Berlin and Venice International Film Festivals by the time my little feet traipsed across his hardwood floors in the famous 19th century building with custom apartments and famous residents such as John and Yoko, and Betty Bacall.

The details of how my dad met Reed were vague. By family lore, they were two Southern transplants living in New York City who bonded over a mutual love of Dr. Pepper, which was not yet a national brand; Reed was importing it from Texas by the case. There might’ve also been some theatrical connections as my father, like Reed, was a failed actor. Before siring me, he’d worked off-off Broadway designing and building sets for outfits like the Living Theater. Maybe John Tebelack, the man behind Godspell and another one of my dad’s customers, had recommended him to Reed. Or maybe Reed recommended my dad to Tebelack. Regardless, there we were, Rex offering me a soda while I stared at what I saw lying on the living room floor: a baby zebra rug. I was transfixed. Was that a real zebra? Yes it was. But what truly held my eyes was the void of the zebra’s own: two big, oval holes where its eyes would have been were it still alive. It was one of the eeriest things I’d ever seen.

Though I never saw Reed in person again, he remained a tangential figure in our lives. He was famous enough to pop up on TV from time to time. I remember seeing him as one of the judges on The Gong Show, praising and canning various acts of marginal talent on the campy talent program. He had a cameo in Superman (1978) and occasional guest spots on fare such as The Love Boat and Fantasy Island.

Then one December, when my younger sister and I were about 4 and 10 years old, Reed mailed us a Christmas gift: a five gallon bucket of popcorn.

It was a kid’s dream. Three flavors of popcorn: salted, caramel, and chocolate. And more of it than the two of us could go through in a holiday season, even accounting for our father occasionally walking by and pulling a man-sized scoop.

No one had ever given us anything so cool. Read more »

Wednesday, April 22, 2026

And So it Begins

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

Black Rain (1989) - IMDb
Black Rain (1989, dr. Ridley Scott)

I remember a strain of paranoia that ran through American popular culture during the 1980s: The Japanese are going to overtake us. Many feared that the same nation that we’d bombed into oblivion during World War II, and then helped to rebuild, was about to steam right by us.

First came their better, cheaper cars. Initially dismissed as “rice rockets,” their superiority to American-made cars eventually could not be denied; they were cheaper, more durable, and got better mileage. That proved a real blow to an American psyche that had been trained to see Detroit’s Big Three automakers as the bedrock of U.S. industrial might, and the cars they produced as the sexy, muscular symbols of Americans’ independence and dreams of the open road.

Then came all the cool, futuristic Japanese gadgets that everyone wanted: the walkman, compact discs, the VHS, home video game consoles, and even the first laptop computer. Americans began to worry that the Japanese were more disciplined and dedicated to world economic and technological domination, and that Americans themselves had become layabout fat cats who could no longer compete with zaibatsu corporate ninjas. American cultural expressions of these fears were plentiful. One of the most forthright was the 1989 Michael Douglas film Black Rain.

It’s all rather laughable now. Most older Americans have to jog their memories to recall this panic about Japanese dominance. Most of the under-40 crowd don’t even know it was a thing. The year after Black Rain played in American theaters, the Japanese economy began deflating and still hasn’t rebounded. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. economy was remade by its own tech revolution, increased energy production, and various free trade agreements.

Now they say China is going to overtake the United States. Only this time they might be right. Read more »

Friday, March 27, 2026

The Uncommon Enemy

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

I was 12 years old when I walked down a street in my Bronx neighborhood and saw the poster in the window of Cappie’s. Cappie’s was a certain kind of corner store common in 20th century New York. It sold newspapers and magazines, candy and soda, lotto tickets, cigarettes, and various tchotchkes aimed at kids and teens. Cheap toys, baseball cards, posters, etc. Most of their posters were pinups of the era’s sex pots such as this or that Charlie’s Angels in various states of near nudity. But this poster featured a cartoon mouse, a clear copyright infringement on Walt Disney’s famed vermin. The caption read: Hey, Iran!  The mouse held an American flag in one hand.  The other flipped the bird.

This was the year 1980, and the Iran hostage crisis was chugging along. Soon, America’s most watched and trusted newsman, Walter Cronkite of CBS, was signing off his nightly broadcast with an addition.  Instead of just “And that’s the way it was,” followed by the day’s date, he was now adding: “And that’s the way it was [that day’s date], the [X] day of captivity for American hostages in Iran.” The last time he signed off this way, on January 20, 1981. It was the 444th day.

That running tally, the images of blindfolded hostages, and other near-constant media discussions were a relentless source of U.S. shame and impotence. The saga dragged on and on. The American citizenry, much more homogeneous then than it is now (ca. 80% white, 12% black, and >90% native-born), was united in its outrage and frustration. Nearly everyone in the United States hated Iran, or at least specifically, the Iranian revolutionaries holding American hostages. And that mass hatred was made easy by mass ignorance.

We all heard, over and over, that the fundamentalist Muslim revolutionaries who’d captured the U.S. embassy and kidnapped some of its staff had overthrown the Shah of Iran. Politicians and the media kept telling us that the Shah had been a friend of the United States. But what hardly any Americans knew was that the Shah had been in power only because back in 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had directed the CIA and its British counterpart, MI6, to foment a coup against Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh. Read more »

Thursday, February 26, 2026

Bad Stupid

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

A thought has been nagging at me lately. Are most shitty people not very bright?

Some shitty people are very smart, of course, and those are the ones you really have to worry about: the pied pipers enchanting others to dance to their shitty tunes. But is it possible that most shitty people are not Darth Vader types, brilliant but troubled and drawn to the Dark Side’s Machiavellian potential? Could it be that most of them instead discover their shittiness through ignorance and low emotional intelligence, and are not seduced into it despite their brilliance?

There’s a lot to untangle. First and foremost, I am not contending that most not very bright people are shitty. Far from it.

Beyond that, however, we must ask ourselves both: What makes a person shitty, and, What makes a person smart?

Shittiness is the easier category to tackle, but by no means simple. Indeed, everyone is a shitty person sometimes. Everybody starts out as a baby, a toddler, a little kid, and every single one of them is a shitty little brat from time to time. Me! Me! Me!  No one else matters! That selfishness is at the core of both, general human shittiness, and much of childhood up to a certain point. But in most cases, families, teachers, and many others train children to leave a lot of that shittiness behind most of the time, and to become a functional member of various social groups: families, schools, houses of worship, friend groups, workplaces, and so forth.

How much of that Me! Me! Me! are people trained to leave behind? Aside from personal proclivities and experiences, it varies significantly across human cultures. For example, in many Indigenous American cultures, or in Japanese culture, historically there has been a strong emphasis on sublimating individual selfishness in favor of group function and cohesion. In U.S. culture? Yeah, not so much. But does that mean American society has a higher rate of shitty people than other countries? Who’s to say?

Well, this Brit for starters. But what even is shittiness?
Read more »

Thursday, January 29, 2026

The Big Door Prize

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

The Marx Bros. and Margaret Dumont.

I’ve always found the notion of a handful of Swedes deciding the world’s best anything to be ludicrous, even laughable. Well, not always. When I was a kid, a teenager, I thought the Nobel Prizes must be important and mean something. But by my twenties, they had started to seem like a joke.

Nothing against Sweden or its fine denizens, of course. A lot of us would probably very much enjoy living there. But that’s precisely because it’s hard to think of a country less representative of the global human experience. Almost any other country you could name is a truer sampling of the global human experience than this one, with its roughly 0.1% of humanity perched near the top of the world.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s different in the sciences. Maybe in that realm a Nobel Prize signifies something other than an ego trip and a fat check. I’m no scientist. I don’t even really understand how gravity works; if you told me it’s because there’s some big ‘ole magnet at the center of the Earth holding us down, I’d probably muse: “Huh, should probably get a little more iron in my diet.”

How ‘bout that. Turns out there is a big ‘ole magnet at the center of the Earth. Pass the brocolli.

Maybe Nobel laureate Richard Feynman was just kidding when in his memoir he named a chapter about the Nobel Prize in Physics: “Alfred Nobel’s Other Mistake” (his invention of dynamite being the other). Perhaps in the sciences the Nobel is a meaningful brand of lifetime achievement award for worthy scientists who have made important contributions to our understanding and applications of physics, chemistry and biology/medicine. But not geology, oceanography, mathematics, or a bunch of other sciences. Cause fuck those branches of science?

I don’t know. At least they’re not handing out Nobels to the social sciences. How ridiculous would that be?

Oh wait. They are. But not. Kinda. It’s confusing. Read more »

Joy to the World, I Insist

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0f/Miracle_on_34th_Street_%281947_film_poster%29.jpg/960px-Miracle_on_34th_Street_%281947_film_poster%29.jpg
Released: 1947

I have never been Christian. Christianity then is at once very familiar and rather foreign to me, rather distant yet omnipresent. Although I’m now atheistic, I was raised Jewish and have a reasonable understanding of Christianity ‘s founding document: the Hebrew Bible. As a Historian who has periodically had to grapple with the role of religion, especially Christianity, in the European, colonial, U.S., and Indigenous pasts, I have a sense of how the religion has changed and been used over time. But mostly, as someone who has lived his whole life in a large nation thoroughly dominated by Christians, who has some Christian family, and who has been in relationships with women who were raised Christian even if they no longer practiced it, I am very used to the annual rhythms and rituals of Christianity, as well as the public stances and goals of various Christians.

This time of year tends to bring out the best, and occasionally the worst, in American Christians. While the materialistic orgy is a bit dismaying, it does not generally concern me. However, the emphasis on good will and generosity can genuinely warm American society. Indeed, even a lot of the ass holes start behaving a little better. Yet at the same time, there is always a small quotient of people, for whom genuine happiness seems to be forever elusive, and they will invariably begin whining about a supposed War on Christmas. Even during this festive season, in this very Christian country, that old Christian persecution complex never really goes away.

They’re not entirely wrong, you know. But boy are they not right. Christ has, to a large degree, been taken out of Christmas in the United States. But what some are apt to see as a sinister Liberal plot to de-Christianize Christmas is actually the largely passive secularization of Christmas that has been ongoing for at least a century in the U.S. The whole Santa Claus schtick and even Christmas sales at stores, date all the way back to the mid-19th century. The New York City department stores Macy’s and Gimbel’s came up with the odious Black Friday in the 1920s. It’s not a sinister conspiracy, and certainly not the doing of non-Christians. It’s just millions of people, most of them Christian, actually, embracing aspects of the Christmas holiday they enjoy (getting and giving gifts, putting up and decorating a tree, eating big family meals, watching football, not going to work, etc.) and forsaking overtly religious aspects of the holiday by not going to church and generally not giving too much thought to the birth of Jesus.

Yes, Christmas has secularized to an amazing degree, first here in the United States, and increasingly, because of America’s vast pop culture influence, around the world. Simlar to how the American-style wedding has also become a prominent part of many cultures around the globe. When you’re the wealthiest empire in the history of the world, and invent blue jeans, Hollywood movies, and modern pop music, you end up with a lot of copycats. Read more »

Wednesday, December 3, 2025

Danger

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

Hold Your Fire, Coz the Author is Already Dead – Studying Religion in CultureArt is dangerous. It’s time people remembered that and recognized the fullness of it. For if art is to remain important or even relevant in the current moment, then it’s long past time artists stopped flashing dull claws and pretending they had what it takes to slice through ignorance. We need them swallow their feel-good clichés and to begin sharpening their blades. We need dangerous art, and we cannot afford much more art that its creators believe is dangerous when it is not.

When people say Art is dangerous, they’re often bragging. Talking it up like a super hero. Evil had better beware: Art is here to save the day!

Oh my, she gasped, clutching her pearls. Why, how could art possibly do that?

Because it’s dangerous! It reveals the evil that masked villains seek to hide!

Such sentiments are naive. They are wishful thinking. And those sentiments are actually far more dangerous than the art typically produced by those who espouse such sentimets. Supposedly dangerous art often does little more than preach to the choir or wrap important points up in obfuscations that most audiences lack the inclination or even the background to unravel. Instead of puncturing sacred cows or shining a bright light on dark evils, much “dangerous” art merely creates illusions of damage amid billows of self-congratulation and self-satisfaction. When the smoke clears, all the same problems remain, and no one, save for perhaps professionals and other insiders of various art worlds, are any more enlightened, while the problems that had been targeted with “dangerous” art quietly and stubbornly linger. Read more »

Monday, February 24, 2025

Ken Burns, Donald Trump, and the Lies that Bring Us Together

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

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 graduates, and plenty of pablum on how to live a good life. But Burns also delivered his address as the nation was staring down the barrel of the 2024 election, and so in addition to vague life advice, he offered up ruminations on the near future.

Burns’ films strive to unite modern Americans through a shared understanding of the past. Personal displays of political partisanship would make that difficult, so beyond stumping for PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Burns’ has always remained publicly neutral on the day’s political events and issues. Yet during his speech at Brandeis, Burns broke with this tradition, and voiced dire political concerns. Without naming Donald Trump directly, he warned of the potential calamity a second Trump presidency would bring.

Trump’s hyper divisiveness is in direct contrast to Burns’ plaintive, gather-round-the-maypole interpretation of America. And even nearly a year ago, Burns already grasped the threat that Trumpism poses to U.S. constitutionalism and democratic institutions. In many ways, Burns and Trump couldn’t be less alike, and Burns spoke with gravitas, as if he felt duty-bound to move beyond his comfort zone and warn the nation, even if he was preaching to the choir at Brandeis.

Yet the distance between Donald Trump and Ken Burns is neither so simple nor so vast as it seems. It may sound counterintuitive, but Ken Burns’ version of U.S. history actually has quite a bit in common with Trump’s version. I say this as a professor of history, and I think that if we’re willing to look past all their obvious differences, and identify their subtle intellectual overlap, we can perhaps learn more about what it means to be American today than we ever could from Burns’ saccharine films or Trump’s racist rants alone. Read more »

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Einstein’s Cults

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

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 than anyone else, which is to say, not at all. I’m not out to get one over on anybody. And I may or may not be wise, which is probably savvy-adjacent, but also definitely different. So when I say I think I’m savvy, mostly I mean that I’m not a chump. I rarely get taken anymore, and on the odd occasions when I do, I usually know it’s happening, but just sigh and go along with it, passively if not actively.

I’m also savvy enough to know that I might actually be quite the chump without realizing it. After all, big chumps don’t know they’re chumps. And even if I’m not much of a chump now, I can look back and see that I was much chumpier when I was younger, embarrassingly so in some cases. I can also look forward and know that as people enter their senior years, their critical faculties decline, at least to some degree, exposing them to all kinds of nonsense. There’s a reason scammers target the elderly, and I’m not that far off from being in their sites.

But for now, I think I mostly have my shit together. You wanna fuck with me? Fuck you.

Here’s an example in the form of a recently posed question: “Ever go to Trader Joe’s on a Saturday morning?”

No. Absolutely not. Never. I generally avoid Trader Joe’s and haven’t been inside one in about a decade. They’re invariably located out in the ‘burbs and their parking lots are notoriously under capacity. I’m a city boy; I just walk to my neighborhood markets. Plus, here in my corner of Maryland, supermarkets are not allowed to sell alcohol. Remove cheap wine from the TJ equation, and the place is about as special as a white t-shirt. Drive out to a faceless suburb on a weekend morning so I can fight for parking and stand-in-line with a basket of mediocre groceries sporting supposedly clever titles? You’ve gotta be kidding.

And just like that, I felt like my answer to the question, which opens Mara Einstein’s new book, marked me as savvy.

But as I made my way through Hoodwinked: How Marketers Use the Same Tactics as Cults, my unease began to deepen.

It’s not that I slowly realized, despite my cynicism, I actually am like one of the black, silhouetted sheep on the book’s front cover. I’m really not. My misanthropy, stubbornness, and asceticism pretty much inoculate me from such bovid behavior. FFS, I still have a flip phone.

No, it was something else. Read more »

Thursday, January 2, 2025

New Year’s Resolution: Admit You Don’t Have Your Shit Together

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

Belgian Chocolate Soft Serve Gelato | Wholesale Liquid MixSome 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. Rather, so far as I can tell, many of them use it to avoid getting their lives together.

That’s not to pick on the religious. Most people don’t have their shit together (I’m not sure I do). And most of them don’t try, or genuinely try to get it together. Either they do not even know they don’t have their shit together, or they do know but their efforts to get it together are illusive or half-assed in some way.

When people don’t try to get their shit together, or they make a show of trying without really trying, they often offer up lies and excuses that justify not having their shit together. They cling to false narratives about how they really do have their shit together when they actually don’t.

Oh yeah, I have my shit together, just look at this . . .
or, Yeah, I’ve struggled, but I’m well on my way now, see? . . .

Sometimes, if they’re financially successful, they’ll hide behind their money. If they’re married and raising kids, they might trot out their family. And some will confidently point to their religious faith and affiliation.

I’m not rich, I don’t have any kids, and I have absolute faith in nothing but my own mortality. Maybe that allows me to better recognize that I don’t have my shit together, and realize that I probably never will. And perhaps it allows me to better see other people’s shit even when they try to paper it over with money, family, or God. Or maybe I’m just a cynical bastard. Either way, I have some capacity to see through you and me. And I’ve lost my patience for moral posturing. Read more »

Tuesday, November 5, 2024

1800, 1828, 1860, 1876, 1896, 1928, 1932, 1948, 1980, 2000, and Today

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

Voting Clip Art - Voting ImagesHistorians 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 to be tremendously influential far beyond the four years they were intended to frame.

2016 and 2020 were almost certainly among those elections, though academic historians have not yet written much about them (or even Obama’s 2008 election) because we typically wait a couple of decades before sensing that an event has passed from current or recent events into our distant domain. And anyway, it’s quite possible, even likely, that many future historians end up examining the three Trump elections of 2016, 2020, and 2024 as a bundled set.

But that still leaves about 55 elections historians have focused on and learned lessons from. So here on Election Day 2024, I offer brief summaries of select, momentous presidential elections and explain how they connect to this current Trumpist era and today’s electoral contest. Read more »

Thursday, July 18, 2024

Giving a Shit and Seeing Through It

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

The Best White Paint Colors, According to DesignersThere 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 just ahead of Vermont and New Hampshire (both 92%). But not all of Wyoming’s counties are so very white because within its state boundaries are relatively populous Indian Reservations. None of the other four have reservations, except for Maine, but those have relatively small Native populations.

There are some other similarities among these four states. Three of them are in New England, and all four can be considered part of the broader Northeast, defined as north of the South and not west of the Appalachians. All four are also all substantially mountainous. And none of them have a major city.

However, there are also notable political and economic differences among these four states. West Virginia is one of the nation’s poorest states, and now one of the reddest. Vermont and New Hampshire have very strong state economies. But while Vermont is one of the nation’s most liberal states, to the point of sending Bernie Sanders to Congress for thirty-four years and counting, New Hampshire is a purple state with a strong libertarian, anti-tax tradition. Meanwhile, Maine is also purple and its economic standing varies from rather wealthy to quite poor

Comparing and contrasting these four states can remind us of the limits that both race and wealth offer in predicting U.S. political preferences. There are certainly patterns and trends to be found, some stronger than others, such as the strong propensity of African Americans, particularly women, to vote Democratic. But ultimately, the U.S. political equation is complex with many factors in play. Read more »

Monday, June 17, 2024

Rethinking Atheism

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

undefinedThe 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 called, to be a mixed bag. It was long overdue, and many good (if obvious) points were made.  However, there was also a fair bit of navel-gazing and even stupidity. And among some of the celebrity leaders, I believe, there was also a profound misunderstanding of religion, how it functions, and even its basic purposes.

Below I identify what I see as two basic recurring problems in modern atheism. I then offer two approaches that I believe atheists should consider for understanding and relating to the religious.

Problem 1: Arrogance. Don’t be so sure of yourself. Even if you’re not laboring under a “God delusion,” you should still have the humility to recognize that you know next to nothing, and what few answers you might proffer aren’t anything anyone wants to hear. If humanism is to offer any benefits, it must begin with an acknowledgment of humanity’s vast ignorance and inability to learn much.

This sentiment will likely send some admirers of science into paroxysms. Surely, they protest, we’ve learned so much over the last century or two. Read more »

Monday, May 20, 2024

The Reinhardt Style Guide, or All the Stuff You’re Wrong About

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim “Scare Quotes Can Indicate Facetiousness” Reinhardt

Forrest Gump - How their lives have changed - Where are they now? | Gallery | Wonderwall.comTwo 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 lot.  Let them breathe.  Show them some affection.  Teach them to shit outside.

Never wear sneakers with a suit.  Whenever I see this combo on a man, I silently ask myself, “What exactly is the point of your existence?”  Not ours or mine, but yours, personally.  Why do you exist and what are you trying to accomplish other than signaling to the world that you’re the snazzy version of a dumb jock on a halftime highlight show?  You look like Forrest Gump.

Amid and among instead of amidst and amongst.  Amidst and amongst don’t make you sound smart or sophisticated; they make you sound like a boring side character in an unfunny Shakespearean comedy.  You’re a modern English speaker, stop trying to sound like you have an Elizabethan speech impediment: Amidst the thorny thistle there, and amongst stones stealthily stored.  There’s no shame in talking plainly whilst thou speaketh thy truth.

While sneakers are out, you may wear brown dress shoes with a gray suit.  Once upon a time, my dear friend Prachi excoriated me for that combination, insisting a gray suit calls for black shoes.  A couple of years later, I noticed her wearing brown dress shoes with a business suit, and eagerly called her on it.  She, perhaps not incorrectly, insisted that she looked good in the combo and I don’t.  Very well.  I will suffer so that the rest of you can be free. Read more »

Monday, April 22, 2024

The Barbarians Won

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

File:SLNSW 37140 Three men in suits with waistcoats.jpg - Wikimedia CommonsThe 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 mountains have been driven mute.

The barbarians and their lust for shiny trinkets have won, their new world a wasteland of flashy baubles. The stars are washed out above us.

The barbarians and their genocidal urges have won, their swords encrusted with dry blood. Nations uncounted decimated to tenths, or even zero.

The barbarians and their bar-bar talk have won, countless languages stricken from the mouths and ears. We can only think this way.

The barbarians and their bloody vengeance have won, howling in the name of justice. Transgressors thrown into iron cages, we are forever paying fines.

The barbarians and their greed have won, their eyes glow green. A cast of paupers define their wretched wealth.

The barbarians and their selfishness have won, their rights dictating how we must exist. Societies fragmented and families, like split atoms, reduced to sub-nuclear components. Read more »

Monday, March 25, 2024

Teaching with Artificial Intelligence

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

Calculator, Vectors | GraphicRiverA 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 heard of AI. By the very next semester, a shocking number of them were tempted to have it research and write for them.

Many of my earlier observations about how to avoid AI plagiarism still hold: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure; good policies and clear communication from the jump are vital; assignments such as in-class writing and oral exams are foolproof inoculators.

However, other, more abstract questions with profound pedagogical implications are emerging. These can be put under the larger canopy of: What am I teaching them and why?

Us Historians specifically, and Liberal Artists more generally, help students develop certain skill sets. We train them in the Humanities and Social Sciences, teaching them to find or develop data and use it effectively through critical and creative thinking. Obviously a political scientist and a continental philosopher go about this differently. However, the venn diagram of their techniques and goals probably overlaps a fair bit more than a lay person might realize. For starters, we all have the same broad subject matter. Everyone in the Liberal Arts, from art historians and literature profs to psychologists and economists, studies some aspect of the human condition. And while we each have our own angles of observation and methodologies, there are also substantial similarities among them. We all find or generate data (even if forms of data are different), analyze them, draw conclusions, and present our findings. And those presentations of findings, even when centered around quantitative data, include a narrative.

In other words, words. Read more »

Monday, February 26, 2024

Why Donald Trump Might be a Vampire

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

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 into ignoring all their horrible vampiric misdeeds

At first glance then, it seems as if Donald Trump might actually be a vampire. But of course the thought is ridiculous. Just the hysterical ramblings of an unmoored Ukraine-supporter. The above is nothing more than a list of random, vague coincidences. Or so I thought. And then I found the following excerpt from Bram Stoker Steve Bannon’s journal.

3 May. Palm Beach.–Left NYC Trump Tower at 8:35 P.M., on 1st May, arriving at Washington, D.C. early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late because Amtrak is full of losers. DC seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets. I feared to go very far from the station, as we had arrived late and there were Democrats everywhere.

The impression I had was that we were leaving the North and entering the South; the most splendid of Confederate monuments over at the Capitol, which are here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Jim Crow rule.

We left in pretty good time, and came after nightfall to Atlanta. Here I stopped for the night at the Waffle House. I had for dinner, or rather supper, a steak done up some way with blood red sauce, which was very good but thirsty. (Mem. get recipe for Melania.) I asked the waiter, and he said it was called “steak well done with ketchup,” and that, as it was Trump’s favorite dish, I should be able to get it anywhere. Read more »

Monday, January 1, 2024

Once More Around the Sun, then Home

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

Peter Paul Rubens, "Saturn Devouring His Son" (1636)
Peter Paul Rubens, “Saturn Devouring His Son” (1636)

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 the course of the year. At that speed, a full revolution is 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds in the making. At least for now.

Each year, Earth’s voyage around the Sun takes just a little bit longer, to the tune of roughly 3 nanometers per second. It’s minuscule, but adds up over time. Since the solar system’s inception 4.571 billion years ago, Earth is moving 22 mph slower.

The main reason is that Earth is drifting ever so slightly away from the Sun, stretching out the orbital path, and lengthening the duration of a revolution.

We’re not fleeing the Sun so much as it’s pushing us away. As the Sun’s hydrogen core transmogrifies into helium through the process of nuclear fusion, the Sun loses somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 million tons of mass every second. Since that process began billions of years ago, the Sun has lost mass equivalent to 1 Saturn, or approximately 95 Earths if you prefer to think about it in homier terms. The Sun also suffers particle loss through Solar Wind, and that has resulted in its shrinking by another 30 Earths or so. Solar flares and coronal mass ejections also steal away mass. In all, the Sun is ~1027 kg lighter than it was at the birth of our Solar System. Here’s what 1027 looks like written out in digits:

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Since a ton equals two-thousand, feel free to add another three zeroes and flip that one to a two. Then again, a gram ain’t much, so maybe just leave it as is, stare at it a bit, and try to feel the full weight of it. Read more »

Monday, December 4, 2023

Thank You for Not Caring

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

Amazon.com: Hallmark Signature Sympathy Card (Many Thoughts and Prayers) : Everything ElseI 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 for each one, so I suppose the administration tries to keep it “relevant,” for lack of a better word. These heartfelt missives arrive in my Inbox once or twice a year, typically after some lunatic shoots up a college campus. So far as I can tell, they go to everyone. To every faculty member, staff member, and student on campus. To 25,000 people or more.

These emails were introduced by our previous university president, who wore her concern like a badge. She departed last spring for a seven-figure salary at another school. When an email arrived following the Hamas attack on Israel last month, we were still between presidents. That letter included a group sign-off from the interim president, the interim provost, the vice president of student affairs, and the vice president for institutional inclusion and equity.

Then came an email from the dean of my college, followed by yet another email from the interim president, this one signed only by her. In all, I received three letters in less than a week.

So much caring. So much concern.

To say that emails of this nature infuriate me would be an overstatement. They don’t actually make me angry, which I’m sure my therapist will be happy to hear. However, I do find them to be mildly exhausting and rather annoying. They instill a sense of umbrage.

Figuring out how to talk to family and friends about this stuff takes enough energy. Now my bosses have to insert themselves into the conversation too?

Perhaps the phrase that best sums up my reaction to receiving such emails over the last several years is: How dare you. Read more »