Recently I decided to check in with Glenn Beck. (I do this semi-regularly with all the various cable news talk shows out of a sense of responsibility, though I never last more than about 10 minutes at a stretch.) I was not optimistic. Based on the clips I'd been exposed to by people who don't like Glenn Beck, I expected a mix between a revival meeting, a Klan rally, and the McCarthy hearings. Instead, I got Glenn in front of a blackboard, lecturing about…Calvin Coolidge.

I found this hilarious. In terms of presidents, it's like giving a lecture about James Bond focused entirely on George Lazenby. Coolidge lucked [...]

Michael Sayeau, now at University College London, returned from last week's conference entitled "On the Idea of Communism" in somewhat low spirits regarding the state of academic conferencing. Our papers, we tell ourselves, are incisive critiques of the status quo. But how intimidated is the status quo by a rigorous Marxist analysis of Philip Larkin's "Whitsun Weddings" anyway? It doesn't help that Power, despite our repeated invitations, rarely shows up at events like "Rethinking Modernities" to suffer our blistering remarks.