“Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) is one of France’s most important and interesting intellectual figures. She excelled at being a writer, filmmaker and dramatist. After the Second World War she also worked for a number of years as a journalist for France-Observateur. She was often at the forefront of political movements, such as the opposition to the Algerian War, May ’68 and feminism. Surprisingly, Duras supported of the sinking, by the French secret service, of the Greenpeace vessel, The Rainbow Warrior in 1985, her view being at the time that any impediment – which Greenpeace represented – to French nuclear testing in the Pacific only encouraged Soviet expansionism. In her extensive oeuvre, Duras particularly explored the emotional disequilibrium brought by love, desire, suffering and death, especially as these affect women and propel them towards the abyss of madness. In addition, Duras’s writing explores the space between fusion and separation (e.g. in…

A layered research assignment gives students the opportunity to delve deeply into a topic and give students a variety of tasks from which to choose, all designed to guide and build a meaningful learning experience. Also, when using this layered approach, students will move through Bloom’s Taxonomy of knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation.

My Teaching Library offers this easy to use resource that will guide students through (step by step) the three layers of research and can be used with any topic. Since this resource can be used for any topic, it can be used again and again!

The three layers of research:
* The first (bottom) layer will give students 9 tasks of which they will perform all of them. This layer will help students get a good grasp of the topic and begin to gather the materials they will need to create a great project, (knowledge…

At the end of the 19th century, Homer Plessy was arrested for trying to ride in an all-white train car in New Orleans, thus ignoring Louisiana’s segregation law. Plessy was a Black Creole. After a local judge found him guilty, he appealed the conviction all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled against him in the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision, which ratified the “separate but equal” doctrine.

That ruling okayed racial segregation statutes that reduced millions of Black Americans to second-class status, since separate was never equal in a racist society. Separate but equal remained in place until it was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1954, a decision that was boldly resisted by the South for years.

Homer Plessy will be posthumously pardoned as a result of a sustained effort by his descendant Keith Plessy, and the descendant of the judge who found him guilty, John Howard…

Barton Gellman is a staff writer for The Atlantic. He is amazingly prescient. Right before the election of 2020, he wrote an ominous article speculating that Trump, if the election results were close, might refuse to concede. He foresaw the chaos that Trump would indeed unleash, undermining the integrity of the election, which is the central mechanism of democracy.

Now he has written an equally astonishing article in The Atlantic, in which he warns that “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun.” He summarizes Trump’s strategy to overturn the election of 2020 by trying to persuade Republican legislatures to overturn the popular vote (if the Democratic candidate wins it) and submit slates of Trump electors for certification by Congress.

Trump put pressure on Republican state officials in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, and Georgia to override the popular vote, but that didn’t work. Then he tried to stall the certification of the…

“A few days ago, the revised and expanded edition of my book The Jazz Standards was published by Oxford University Press. I’ve never had more fun writing a book than in creating this guide to the jazz repertoire—which covers 267 essential songs. These were songs that I first learned in my earliest days as a jazz musician, and they’ve remained familiar friends over the decades. The first edition of The Jazz Standards, published in 2011, earned praise from Sonny Rollins, Dave Brubeck, Lee Konitz, and other jazz luminaries—a tough audience to please, because they know these songs intimately. I must have done something right to get their approval. But the full range of the response to The Jazz Standards went far beyond my expectations. In fact, more readers contacted me in response to this book than about anything I’ve ever published. These were more than fan letters, but smart…

“One cannot overstate how profoundly our relationship with computers has changed since the mid-twentieth century. Once upon a time, the notion of a mechanical brain was as alien as the notion of, well, an alien. Similar to research of extraterrestrial life, there were then a few elite scientists, sequestered in institutions, who were better informed to predict what an encounter with a mechanical brain might entail than the general population, for whom such a concept was nothing more than fantasy. Stanisław Lem was of that class. Son of a doctor, he studied medicine until his transition to literature. As a newcomer to Lem’s copious body of work, what surprised me most about this collection of previously untranslated stories was how, with very little attention to character development, he manages to render this scientific class with as much fidelity as their fields of inquiry. I expected their curiosity and ambition, even…

A friend in Sweden sent this article via Twitter. It was written by Jenny Maria Nilsson. I went to Google and asked for a translation from Swedish to English. Sweden is even farther down the road to privatization than we are. A conservative government in the early 1990s opened the way to public funding of independent schools, many of which operate for profit.

She writes:

The goal for primary school is not millions of different things but first and foremost education. If that goal is achieved, it certainly also provides other things: life opportunities, education and freedom, social interaction, a place for children to be and so on, but the school’s goal is teaching a basic curriculum.

In the book about the digitalisation of the Swedish school, which I have contributed to, I write: “What is…

Emile Zola, painted by Edouard Manet, in 1868.

The almost-over 2021 is the 150th anniversary of the first of the 20 novels in EmileZola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle. So, I’m writing this appreciation of the French authorjust in time. 🙂

Zola is nowhere near the best-known novelist of the 19th-century, but he’s in the top couple dozen — and I’m a big fan.

While Zola had some writing success before 1871, notably with the 1868 potboiler Therese Raquin, it’s the Rougon-Macquart cycle for which he’s most remembered. Those vivid novels are considered “naturalist” and realistic, with each heavily researched book focusing on a specific theme — art, trains, laborers, retailing, alcoholism, prostitution, etc., in 19th-century France — while also offering gripping plots and compelling three-dimensional characters. The Rougons and Macquarts are two family branches, the first more upper class and the second more working class, whose members share various hereditary tendencies…

“A sharp, comparative analysis of symbolic boundary maintenance across times and cultures, Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger intervened in the anthropology of religion and ritual, as well as in the theoretical development of the field as a whole. It is a key text in symbolic anthropology, an approach that, in viewing symbols as the building blocks of socio-religious worlds, sought to analyze the ways symbolic constructions either generated order or disorder. Innovative for its time, Douglas follows E. E. Evans-Pritchard ethnographic account of The Nuer when she claims that we cannot understand ideas of purity or pollution—that is, hygiene—in isolation. Solid anthropological knowledge comes from an analysis that attends to the ways systems relate to one another and form the structural ‘backbone’ of a society. And so, Purity and Danger embarks on an historical ethnographic analysis of hygienic rituals, locating them as critical parts to classificatory systems that revolve around perceptions…