Best news ever! My conversation with Chauncey DeVega is up at We Are Respectable Negroes. Actually it’s been up since last week, and the conference, post conference, omigod-am-I-leaving-town-again cycle prevented me from posting it here. Apologies to all DeVega fans.
In any case, it was really fun to engage with Chauncey, who did me the favor of making a virtual visit to my blogging class in the fall. We covered, in his words, “police brutality and life in New York in the shadow of the Eric Garner case; the perils, joys, and challenges of public pedagogy and intellectual work; and share[d] some fun stories about the naughty, titillating, and scintillating things that can be found in famous folks’ personal archives and collections.”
And other stuff. We are an awesome pair, and thinking of giving Rachel Maddow a run for her $$. Since the weekend is almost here, enjoy: click here to get there. More great stuff:
- Medieval historian schools sex columnist Dan Savage on misuse of the term “medieval": at The Stranger (April 22, 2015.) H/T Sally Bachner.
- We consider it noteworthy that last week Historiann went tweeto-a-tweeto with a staunch defender of online learning last week because of this post. Cowgirl, throwing Twitter shade is our department! Best tweet from Historiann’s antagonist? The one where @OnlineCrsLady admits she didn’t read the post before pulling out her guns.
- And for a better roundup of this week’s news than you will get here, from, go to Historiann.
- Organizing is well underway to create a dissertation prize at the Organization of American Historians in honor of my OutHistory.org colleague and co-director John D’Emilio. Go here to donate. Every little bit counts, but if you are a full professor, listen to me carefully: be a mensch.
- Did someone say Outhistory.org? Check out a few responses to Larry Kramer’s gargantuan new book, The American People, Volume I, Search for My Heart, A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 7, 2015), a fictional meditation on gay and lesbian history.
- Do you take The New Yorker? Front load Oliver Sacks’ article on Spalding Gray’s suicide. It is also in front of the paywall here. I confess, I never really “got” Spalding Gray, but I realize other people did, and after reading this I may try again. It’s such a good and compassionate article about Gray’s decline into rumination and suicidality that you will forget, for one moment, that the wonderful Oliver Sacks is also dying.
