In a Web post labeled "Reality Check," the White house recently blasted Fox News for trying to "smear the Administration's effort to win the Olympics for the United States."

The White House has been attempting to stay somewhat above the fray with respect to partisan media debates about the coverage of Obama's administration, but its official website offered a blog entry this Wednesday that castigated the "fair and balanced" network for supposedly being anything but. The post specifically highlights Glenn Beck's criticisms as indicative of the network's overall "disregard for the facts" in its coverage of Obama's White House.

The White House pushes back against several things:

a) Glenn Beck's claim that Vancouver lost a billion dollars when it hosted the Olympics is dismissed as a function of the fact that Vancouver will, in fact, host its Olympics in 2010.

b) A Beck guest arguing...

The beginning of the academic year is full of excitement and activity. Especially activity. There's all that frantic prep to get courses ready for students (completing syllabi, posting readings, organizing lectures). Then your fall meeting schedule starts to kick-in, and you end up spending late nights doing all the reading and writing that's no longer possible during daylight hours. I get it. I've been there. Truth be told, I'm marooned there right now.

If you have any "televisual interests" (i.e., if you are even the mildest of TV-Junkies), the new fall season has started, and the shows you forgot about are clamoring for your distracted attention.

Many academics want to have their cake and eat it, too. We spend our summers hunkered down trying to make major headway on our research projects (which, for me, meant editing the first rough cut of an ethnographic film on violence in...

When I arrived at Duke University, the location of my first tenure-track job, the incoming junior faculty had a meeting with the provost (fairly standard, I'm sure, at most universities) about the school's policies and expectations, especially expectations around tenure. After that meeting, I remember a few of the new faculty members joking about how they couldn't wait for tenure, at which point they'd kick off their heels, metaphorically speaking, and just coast. They claimed that they'd be able to shut down their engines post-tenure and smell the flowers from their office windows. But I wasn't buying it. 

In many ways, tenure is about faculty demonstrating that their research "off" switch is sufficiently broken, the aforementioned intellectual engine rebuilt such that it is self-propelled and no longer in need of extrinsic compulsion.

For me, getting tenure was something to be...

I just got off the phone with a friend/colleague at a university on the West Coast. (I'll try to stay purposefully vague about things, which will include avoiding gendered pronouns.)

The person, a rigorous scholar in the social sciences, is frantically trying to get a dossier completed for a pending promotion review, which explains why I would get a buzz at 8:45 in the morning, Philadelphia time. Said friend/colleague was pulling an all-nighter.

This colleague was freaking out about the tenure process, and our conversation went something like this:

ME: Hey, it has been a long time. How are things?

THEM: I'm going crazy over here.

ME: Why? What's up?

THEM: This tenure thing. They are trying to make me go insane.

ME: All the material you have to assemble?

THEM: No. Well, yeah. But not just that. There is all this voting about the process. Everyone is constantly voting on whether...

On the train ride back from Washington to Philadelphia this morning, after catching the U.S. premiere of filmmaker Haile Gerima's new feature film, Teza, I read the David Brooks NYTs op-ed, "No, It's Not About Race." Brooks does a compelling job historically contextualizing the "populist backlash" against Obama's policies. The partisan media, on the Left and Right, is making racism the story, Brooks says, but the real causal truth lies elsewhere.

"[Obama] has fused federal power with Wall Street, the auto industry, the health-care industries, and the energy sector," Brooks writes, and there is a long history of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian resistance to "the fat cats and the educated class; for the small towns and against the financial centers."  All this, coupled with the fact that the tea-party demonstrators mingled peacefully on September 12th with thousands of African Americans out...

Although it initially looked like the House Democrats were going to turn the other cheek on the incident, they ended up voting to "admonish" South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson yesterday for his outburst during President Obama's healthcare speech last week. According to some experts and insiders, their change of heart pivoted on Wilson's unwillingness to formally apologize to his colleagues on the House floor -- and in response to the ironic fact that he's been able to financially capitalize from that little breach of decorum, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for his campaign coffers (as has his Dem opponent).

According to most news reports, the Congressional Black Caucus has been particularly committed to the idea of sanctioning Wilson, and many critics chalk that fact up to the racial imagery of the entire thing: a lone White representative from the South heckling America's...

I know that there are so many more important things to blog about these days, from the mounting stress over the spread of H1N1 to the health-care impasse that seems to be making so many people sick, at least metaphorically. Then there were the recent 9/11 memorials and the 9/12 protests, the latter replete with threats of secession from the union! Maybe all of that is exactly why I desperately need the distractions of HBO these days, now more than ever. But I have to say, I am starting to feel a little nonplussed about my little cable TV vice.

When did HBO start skimping on the minutes? I have been a rabid fan of HBO's Original Programming since the surreal days of Oz, a prison show that should have ended all prison shows. And I'm still hooked to the channel's offerings, almost across the board. I've watched all the hit show, The Sopranos, Sex and the City, The Wire. Usually, I had to...

I missed most of President Obama's speech last night, but I've been getting tons of messages about South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson heckling him during the address, screaming "You lie!" from a seat in the audience. Even though it does seem a little weird and disrespectful that a Congressman would decide to voice his objections in such a backalley way (and he's since, of course, apologized), was this vulgar display all that qualitatively different from, say, Wilson going on FOX News later on that very evening and calling Obama a liar after the fact?

I actually don't want to talk about the kind of bubbling-over rage that prompted Wilson to publicly yell at the standing President of the United States, but it reminded me of one of academe's double standards around public displays of hostility, a double standard that I've always found peculiar. It has to do with how students are...

In symbolic preparation for the start of another academic year, I ritualistically cleaned out one of the many file cabinets today, one of the several that I haven't opened in what seems like millennia. There are usually at least two or three pleasant surprises to be uncovered during such a process, and this time around I came across my old stash of Lingua Franca magazines. And I immediately had a dilemma. Do I throw them away or not?

The purported rationale for this annual late-summer exercise is just such purging. I'm a packrat, a trait I probably got from my mom, who tosses just about everything that comes across her kitchen table into a cardboard box (to be filed away and subsequently forgotten). Plus, I'm an ethnographer who considers just every bit of material culture ever manufactured potential "data" that might be deployable in some future attempt at cultural analysis, which means ...

So, the semester has finally started. It really has. And I've got a stack of half-written student recommendations (and more than one unfinished syllabus) to prove it. Classes don't begin at Penn until next week, and I have been trying to take a little break before the delicious storm that is the start of every new academic year pours down on my head.

I've also re-read many of the scathing comments to my last few Chronicle posts, trying to honestly consider their criticisms, including the idea that my Chronicle posts exemplify the kind of left-wing brainwashing that needs to be purged from the academy.

I don't see it, but I would also readily concede that that doesn't necessarily mean the criticisms are unfounded. Culture is powered by self-deluding blinders. It is a kind of second nature that usually only gets harder to recognize the more you try to spot it. Culture wouldn't be culture...