When I decided to teach Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness at Berkeley High School, it had been out of favor as an appropriate text because it was considered too controversial. I wanted to do a whole unit on Africa and the Congo, including African authors, journalism, and history, and I...

I teach a course on adolescence at a nearby university, exploring the various challenges and rewards that new teachers will encounter in the middle and high school classrooms. In addition to the university's computerized evaluations, I always hand out my own feedback and evaluation form near the end of the...

There really is an existential threat to Israel -- a threat to its very existence. The finger, however, needs to point in the right direction, at the policies of the Israeli government itself.

If we're getting down to fundamentals, let's look at the reason for the founding of the...

One of the most obscene aspects of the current debate about torture is this discussion about whether it "worked." If it "worked," then perhaps it should be utilized. I can imagine a parallel discussion we might have: is rape effective as an instrument of war? If it is effective, let's...

As I write this, the city of Oakland, my city, is observing a day of mourning - a huge funeral for the four police officers killed last Saturday in a confrontation with a young man, Lovelle Mixon. It is a tragedy for all the families as well as for our...

Laurent Cantet's The Class (translated from the French "Entre les Murs) is finally a school movie that gets it right. I get so tired of the standard pattern of American school dramas. Generally the hero-teacher is a self-sacrificing Christ figure, willing the culturally deprived (read: poor) students to come out...

It is curious that the blame gets passed around to plenty of people for the economic crash we are experiencing -- money managers, bankers, politicians, even home-buyers and workers. But somehow the academics, the MBA factories, have managed to duck any criticism. These are the guys (yes, mostly guys) who...

One of the casualties of a bruising political campaign is language and no word has been more invoked and less defined than terrorism. We have suffered this condition for some time. Since the end of the Cold War, terrorism has taken the place of communism as the bogeyman in US...

When my friends and I met Studs Terkel, in 1963, we were a bunch of high school suburban rebels, living twenty miles west of Chicago. We sought freedom by turning our dial to the black music stations, WVON and WYNR -- discovering the beat of Bo Diddley and the heart...

I confess I never really did much. I fretted. I sent emails around to people I knew. I was outraged by the spurious attacks by the idiot-right (the Hannity-O'Reilly-Limbaugh types). But I never got out and did the work for Obama.

In other words, I missed the boat. As...

The American literary establishment is crying foul. The comments of Swedish Academy permanent secretary Horace Engdahl suggesting that an American is unlikely to win the Nobel Prize in Literature this week have provoked great patriotic upswellings. Engdahl suggested that the U.S. literary establishment is "too isolated, too insular. They don't...

Ah, there are so many imponderables in this week's economic crash. The question that keeps coming back to me is: why are no capitalist big-shots jumping out of windows? That was one of the iconic images of the Great Depression -- even satirized with funny Monopoly game capitalists with top...

The New York Times today scratched the surface of the phenomenon that is crying out to be exposed. In their article "4,000 U.S. Deaths, and Just a Handful of Public Images", Michael Kamber and Tim Arango unpacked the whole, sordid story of Pentagon news control and spin which...

Somehow we are all operating in a fog, a fuzzy Lethe of assumptions we are supposed to have agreed upon -- but we didn't. Our public discourse has edged so far to the right that we cannot even name what is in front of us.

Having endured the longest...

Parvez Sharma's new documentary, A Jihad for Love, is a remarkable exploration, six years in the making, of the lives and struggles of gays and lesbians in the Islamic world today. From a pair of Sufi lesbians in Turkey to a religious instructor in South Africa to young men in...

If you want to see a fantastic overview of the struggle of Asian-Americans in film in the US, a struggle to be included, a struggle for a voice, a struggle for some truth, be sure to check out Hollywood Chinese, a recently released documentary directed by Arthur Dong. Coming out...

Read more reactions from Huffington Post bloggers to ABC's Pennsylvania Democratic debate

Until tonight's debate, I didn't really think Hillary Clinton would go so far as to attempt to sink the whole Democratic Party campaign in her struggle for power. But now it is clear that she...

Ah, the Huffington Post is abuzz with political blogs, Democratic primary blogs, national politics blogs. I tend to be more local - education, culture. But I'm getting into the spirit of this thing so here goes:

I confess. I'm a boomer. I'm an old radical. What they call old...

Martin Luther King's birthday. Have things changed? Even a little? Not in the important, fundamental ways. And in schools, where African American young people are sorted and classified and shunted aside, we white teachers have to look at our own blind spots.

We white teachers. .. .. aahhh,...

OK, I'm tired of writing negative blogs. Is everything bad? Southern California is burning (check out Mike Davis' "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn" in The Ecology of Fear for an understanding of the political social basis of these disasters). The war slogs on. But I need a happy blog....