On the Come Up

posted in: Good Reads: Fiction, Race | 0

Of all the great opening lines of literature–“Call me Ismael,” “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”–Angie Thomas’s in On the Come Up may well be the greatest: “I might have to kill somebody tonight.” … Continued

Year of the Three B’s

posted in: Personal | 0

Buckeyes. Bearcats. Bengals. It was a great year to be a football fan in southwest Ohio. The combined record of what I came to call the Three B’s was 37 wins to 11 losses, or a .771 winning percentage. All … Continued

The Fruits of Collaboration

The Dawn of Everything “began as a diversion from [the authors’] more ‘serious’ academic duties: an experiment, a game almost, in which an anthropologist and archaeologist tried to reconstruct the sort of grand dialogue  about human history that was once … Continued

Safe Spaces

posted in: Personal | 0

“Do they exist or are they spooks?” Classics professor Coleman Silk’s question is playful, casual. Its ramifications are serious, dire. He is accused of using a racial epithet about two repeat absentees he does not know are African American. Is … Continued

Force or Choice?

posted in: Good Reads: Nonfiction | 0

In These Truths, Jill Lepore asks her reader to consider a central question as she makes her way through her 800-page survey of American history. It is a question first posed by Alexander Hamilton in 1787 in what became known … Continued