Former president Gerald Ford died last night at 93 and, based on the non-stop media coverage, you are led to believe he was the most important president in the history of the United States.
Continue reading → Private Life, Public Death: The Perils of Inappropriate Veneration
There is no greater fun — when it isn’t killing you — than living in cold weather. Cold weather brings snow, the chill of football in the air, and the crisp snap of impending holiday cheer.
We have lost our Melancholia and our Black Bile and we’re the worse for the eradication. We now seek happiness through the pit of a pill and the trough of psychotherapy instead of actively working to remove ourselves from despair and founding ourselves in happiness and contentment even though they can never truly be achieved.
It is that struggle to raise our bodies and our thoughts that makes the life worthy of the living. Melancholia has a rich and deadly history in the mark of humankind and no other state of being has been rendered so beautifully in art than that of the Melancholic mind. It’s fascinating how “head on hand” is the rich semiotic used throughout antiquity to indicate this mournfulness of the memory for the living:
Continue reading → The Necessity of Melancholia and Black Bile
You are the head of Homeland Security.
The following urgent intelligence report has been sent to your desk.
The president has deferred to your judgment:
Your decision will prove the resolution of this threat to national security.
Continue reading → Urban Bioterrorism Attack: A Toxic Agent Airliner
Whether you realize it or not, your schooling brands you — fairly or not — with its historic reputation in the perception of the mainstream, middling, public mind.
Continue reading → School Branding: From Football U. to Ivy League
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