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The Silence Camus Refused to Domesticate: Hazel Barnes, The Myth of Sisyphus, and the Cost of a Sympathetic Misreading

Hazel Barnes was one of the most careful American readers of French existentialism in the twentieth century. She translated Sartre’s Being and Nothingness in 1956, a labor that shaped how generations of American students encountered Continental thought. When she turns to Camus, though, something interesting happens on the page. Her summary of The Myth of Sisyphus is partly accurate and partly an act of quiet translation in the other direction, pulling Camus toward a Sartrean humanism that Camus himself spent the last decade of his life resisting.

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The Canon for Sale: How Congress Handed Literature to a Homeschool Company

On March 17, 2026, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce passed H.R. 7661, a bill that would strip federal education funding from any public school whose libraries contain “sexually oriented material.” The bill’s formal title is the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act,” and it was introduced by Representative Mary Miller of Illinois on February 24, 2026, days after the State of the Union address. Eighteen Republican cosponsors signed on. No Democratic members supported the bill. The legislation now awaits a vote on the full House floor.

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The Quiet Throat-Cutting of the American University

Syracuse University announced the other day that it will phase out 93 of its approximately 460 academic programs. The administration framed the decision as strategic alignment, calling it a portfolio review driven by student demand and institutional focus. Provost Lois Agnew insisted the move was “not a cost-cutting exercise.” Taken at face value, some of these cuts are routine catalog maintenance. Fifty-five of the ninety-three programs had zero students enrolled. Twenty-eight were advanced certificate supplements to graduate degrees. The provost herself noted that Syracuse offered more than double the roughly 200 programs typical of peer institutions, and a university trimming a bloated catalog to concentrate faculty resources is doing ordinary academic management. Reasonable people can call that housekeeping.

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Learning Italian Lifetime Immersion Style

For the past 60 days, I have been intensively studying the Italian language. I want to learn Italian in order to better serve our ASL Opera project since 50% of the most popular operas were written in Italian (25% were written in German, and 15% were written in French). I understand modern Italian isn’t the same as “original opera Italian” — but learning something new only helps deepen the appreciation of the comprehension of the context of the original aesthetic. In this article, I will share with you some of the treasures, and techniques, I have been using to apply a greater understanding to my Italian learning.

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Non-Fungible Tokens are the NFTs of Education

In my last article, I wrote admiringly about John Fetterman, and later that day he had a stroke; so I’m a little wary of writing about cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens again, lest they, too, continue their precipitous clambering downward trends. However, I am excited to write about the future importance of a decentralized information network, and to discuss how the blockchain will enhance freedom, and independence, and I want to firmly, and vehemently, set the expectation that NFTs will become the new publication pathway for distributing information — as well as becoming the de facto standard for education.

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Return to Chess After 44 Years

I retired from chess in 1977 at the age of 12. I wasn’t a pro player. I wasn’t in any tournaments. I was just a kid in Lincoln, Nebraska looking for a good game. I was studying the game eight hours a day every day of the week. I was the 7th Grade self-crowned King of Chess at Robin Mickle Jr. High School until, that is, I cleared a chessboard of its plastic pieces while I thought I was playing a friend in Chess — until others in the class started to line up next to him, giving turns advice, and warning him against my traps — and I ended up playing the entire class Over the Board (OTB), even though we had a strict “no kibitzing” rule that, I guess, applied only to me. If I had been clearer minded, and perhaps a bit more mature, I would have taken it as a compliment that it took 28 other kids to give me a good game; but, back then, winning was everything, and resigning with a dramatic sweep of the arm across a chessboard was just too tempting to ignore. 1972 was a great year for Chess when the world turned, and it was still spinning in 1977. Bobby Fischer beat Boris Spassky for the World Championship in 1972, and the Cold War was Hot again! Now, after my retirement in 1977, 44 years later today, I’m back in the Chess game by demand of dying age, and wondering spectacle, and next I’ll tell you more about the why of it; and I’ll also explain the story behind the curious board setup you see below. Chess, the ancient game, changed a lot over a half century!

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2020: The Year of Disremembering and Disassembly

2020 has been a year of contemporaneous contemplation hanged by the bridle of dismay. We have been forced to leap from the cliff, together, Zombie-like, from crisis to crises. We drowned in foolish Tweet after Tweet and now, as a new horizon presents itself to us for celebration, and referral in 2021, we cannot stop but to hope against the losses we served, and the punishments we received, over the last four years.

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The University Does Not Belong to the Student

We all want to belong to something. We want to feel we are not alone. We want to believe we are part of a greater whole. However, there are some who believe the world, and its hallowed institutions, owe them more than due respect, and contrived honor — they believe they are entitled to not just set an agenda, but to rewrite the future plans of us all for their benefit alone.

Students protesting university policy is ordinary, expected, and commonplace. Students want to test boundaries, and to stretch their intellectual capacity, and to learn where the levers of power belong in an arc of a history that existed before them, and that will, and shall, extend to outlive them.

All of that is fine unless, and until, the student tries to takeover those levers of power to do specific damage to another student, faculty member, or the institution itself.

The university does not belong to the student. The university belongs to itself.

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Calcification of Sorrow

Life is about letting go, starting over, and grief on the way to the grave. In between those monumental stations of human being, we endeavor to find contentment, discover joy, and save friendships from perishing. Here is how Vincent van Gogh drew to know sorrow in 1882.

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