I’ve been thinking about academic writing and blogging again. I’ve been wondering what we might learn from thinking about the writing that bloggers do.

Academic blogs are not all the same. They can be categorised in various ways. I’ve been thinking about categorising blogs as “action” – focusing on what they seem to want to do with and for their readers. So using “action’ as a lens, I immediately think of academic blogs that aim primarily to:

“When next you meet an existentialist, ask him what kind of existentialist s/he is. There are at least as many varieties of existentialism as there have been high-profile thinkers propounding it. Several major strains ran through postwar France alone, most famously those championed by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus — who explicitly rejected existentialism, in part due to a philosophical split with Sartre, but who nevertheless gets categorized among the existentialists today. We could, perhaps, more accurately describe Camus as an absurdist, a thinker who starts with the inherent meaningless and futility of life and proceeds, not necessarily in an obvious direction, from there. The animated TED-Ed lesson above sheds light on the historical events and personal experiences that brought Camus to this worldview. Beginning in the troubled colonial Algeria of the early 20th-century in which he was born and raised, educator Nina Medvinskaya goes…

Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Saturday and spent an hour on the phone with him, pleading, cajoling, threatening, and demanding that he “find 11,780 votes” to flip the state to Trump’s column. Georgia’s state leaders are Republicans. The November vote in Georgia was counted three times.

In an exclusive report, the Washington Post quoted from a recording of the telephone call:

President Trump urged fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to “find” enough votes to overturn his defeat in an extraordinary one-hour phone call Saturday that election experts said raised legal questions.


The Washington Post obtained a recording of the conversation in which Trump alternately berated Raffensperger, tried to flatter him, begged him to act and threatened him with vague criminal consequences if the Secretary of State refused to pursue his false claims, at one point warning that Raffensperger was taking “a big…

The Daily Beast reports that Trump will not stop fighting even after Congress declares Biden the 47th president on January 6. He will likely keep fighting after the Inauguration.

Trump is promoting demonstrations and protests in D.C. on January 6, hoping for disorders by his gun-toting, maskless cult. He dreams of a putsch.

Eleven Senators, led by Texas’ Ted Cruz, announced that they would not vote to certify the Electoral College vote unless there was an audit of the votes. This, despite the complete absence of any evidence of voter fraud in any state. Georgia counted its vote three times and it came out the same. Other states also recounted their votes. This statement is pure pandering to salve Trump’s fragile ego and to persuade him not to run a Trumpet against them. Senator John Thune of South Dakota has been heroic; Trump tweeted to try to encourage the governor…

Ted Kooser(1939 – ) was born in Ames, Iowa. He was a two-term Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry chosen by the Librarian of Congress. Heused his timeas laureate to further the cause of poetry with American readers. Partnering with the Poetry Foundation, he began the “American Life in Poetry” program, which offers a free weekly poem to newspapers across the United States, aiming to raise the visibility of poetry. He’s won four Pushcart Prizes, the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and a slew of other honors and awards.

To read Ted Kooser’s poem “In January” click:

“As wave is driven by wave
And each, pursued, pursues the wave ahead,
So time flies on and follows, flies, and follows,
Always, forever and new. What was before
Is left behind; what never was is now;
And every passing moment is renewed.”

―Ovid,Metamorphoses

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Elder Olson(1909-1992), American poet, teacher and literary critic. He was born inChicago, Illinois. He became a founder and leading figure of the “Chicago school” of literary criticism.In 1942, he started teaching at the University of Chicago as an assistant professor in the Department of English. In 1955 he was presented with thePoetry Society of AmericaChap-book Award. He gained full professorship in 1955 and was named Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of English in 1973. His poetry collections include Thing of Sorrow, Collected Poems, and Last Poems.

To read Elder Olson’s poem, “Pavan for the New Year” click

“Things Fall Apart is the debut novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, first published in 1958. Its story chronicles pre-colonial life in the southeastern part of Nigeria and the arrival of Europeans during the late 19th century. It is seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English, and one of the first to receive global critical acclaim. It is a staple book in schools throughout Africa and is widely read and studied in English-speaking countries around the world. The novel was first published in the UK in 1962 by William Heinemann Ltd., and became the first work published in Heinemann’s African Writers Series. The novel follows the life of Okonkwo, an Igbo (‘Ibo’ in the novel) man and local wrestling champion in the fictional Nigerian clan of Umuofia. The work is split into three parts, with the first describing his family, personal history, and…

Rick Hess conducts an “exit interview” with Betsy DeVos, which was published at Education Week. Rick is a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, which is funded in part by DeVos.

DeVos came to Washington to destroy public education, and she failed. She bitterly dismisses the “entrenched interests” and bureaucrats who frustrated her ambitions to turn billions of public dollars over to religious and private schools and to extinguish teachers’ unions altogether. During her confirmation, she was unable to answer direct questions about education policy, and she was ultimately confirmed only when Vice-President Pence cast a tie-breaking vote. This had never happened before. In poll after poll, DeVos was characterized as the most unpopular member of Trump’s Cabinet. She did her best to skewer the Department’s Office of Civil Rights, to abandon college students who were defrauded by for-profit colleges, to divert COVID funding to elite private schools. Fortunately…

Richard Hoffman (1949 – ) is the author of the poetry collections Without Paradise: Poems, and Gold Star Road, which won the Sheila Motton Award from the New England Poetry Club. He is also the author of the memoir Half the House, and a collection of short fiction, Interference & Other Stories. A writer-in-residence at Emerson College in Boston, Hoffman also teaches for the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast low-residency MFA program.

To read Richard Hoffman’s poem “December 31st” click