Rep. Tricia Cotham ran for office as a Democrat and was elected as a Democrat. She had previously been Teacher-of-the-Year and claimed to be a strong advocate for the state’s beleaguered public schools. She switched her party and joined the Republicans, giving them the one vote they needed to have a supermajority in both houses. Republicans can now override Democratic Governor Roy Cooper’s vetos.

The NC General Assembly has been consistently hostile to public schools and to teachers. They have authorized charter schools, including for-profit schools, and vouchers. Many financial scandals have marked the charter sector.

Yet Rep. Cotham just voted to give the Republican-dominated General Assembly contro of charters. No critics or skeptics allowed!

Former Democratic lawmaker Tricia Cotham sealed her move to the Republican Party this week by co-sponsoring a bill that would remove the State Board of Education from the charter school approval process.

Under House Bill…

It Happened in 1966: Andy Warhol’s Plastic Exploding Inevitable: “During 1965, Andy Warhol accelerated and amplified his scope to match the culture’s momentum. In October, he announced that he was leaving art and staged a happening: a 40-foot long silver balloon was launched into space from the Factory roof. Filled with helium, it was a forerunner of the Silver Clouds that remain a staple of every Warhol retrospective today. Four days after the helium happening, Warhol travelled to Philadelphia for a major retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art. This was planned as something different: Columbia Records executive Norman Dolph was hired as a DJ, while curator Sam Green removed the art from the walls to ensure its safety. The blank space was more like a discotheque than an art gallery. To the sounds of It’s All Over Now, Barefootin’ and Ian Whitcomb’s campy You Turn Me On, the crowd of…

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is going after Disney again, trying to prove he’s a tough guy. He is angry at Disney because the corporation—Florida’s largest employer—issued a statement opposing the Governor’s “Don’t Say Gay” law.

First, DeSantis retaliated by dissolving the Reedy Creek District, a special self-governing district controlled by Disney, which supplies all services to Disney’s theme park. DeSantis created a new board called the Central Florida Oversight District Board of Supervisors to oversee the district, packed with his cronies.

But before the legislation passed, Disney quietly held public meetings and granted its district decades of future control.

Outraged, DeSantis threatened to increase hotel taxes and put tolls on the roads to Disney. He also told the State Attorney General to investigate Disney. Not a nice way to treat the state’s biggest employer.

Now he is wreaking vengeance again:

The Disney versus DeSantis fight headed into round three on…

Explain why your research is worth doing … it might be obvious to you but it’s not necessarily clear to others. But it’s not just you who has to explain. All scholars have to justify why their research topic is important.

You have to create the warrant for your research when you write the proposal for entry to the PhD, when you apply for funding and when you write the thesis. You also have to explain the warrant for a book, a paper and a book chapter.

Now, your justification for doing a particular kind of research is often found in the wider social political cultural context. Or maybe in professional practice. There’s a problem that needs attending to urgently. And you’re just the person to do it.

However, all scholars also have to find where their research fits in, and fits with, existing scholarship. That means getting into the…

Sal Castro addresses students during the East L.A. Blowouts in 1968.

“The East Los Angeles Walkouts or Chicano Blowouts were a series of 1968 protests by Chicano students against unequal conditions in Los Angeles Unified School Districthigh schools. The first walkout occurred on March 5, 1968. The students who organized and carried out the protests were primarily concerned with the quality of their education. This movement, which involved thousands of students in the Los Angeles area, was identified as ‘the first major mass protest against racism undertaken by Mexican-Americans in the history of the United States.’ … Since the school walkouts, Los Angeles schools have since increased in Mexican American school teachers and administrators, they’ve also seen higher graduation and college attendant rates as well as incorporating both Latino and Bilingual studies and programs. … In a radio interview, Moctesuma Esparza, one of the original walkout organizers…

Jane Jacobs, third from right, with architect Philip Johnson, protests against the demolition of Penn Station in New York, 1963.

“The need for Jane Jacobs and her clear-eyed human-scale urbanism is as strong as ever. Her masterpiece The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) described in brilliant detail the intricate ecology of how a city works (New York) or does not work (Detroit). Though Jacobs never wrote fiction, the book was more like a novelistic rendering of lived street life than a scholarly text. She was, as she once described herself, a ‘student of cities’, more interested in the effects of buildings than their design. Vital Little Plans collects for the first time Jacobs’s interviews, speeches, talks and short pieces of journalism – and there is much in this lucid and persuasive anthology that resonates today. In her essay ‘Downtown Is for People’, from 1958, she criticises…

The blog called “Misinformation Kills” usually focuses on COVID Lies and misinformation and their perpetrators. In this post, however, Dr. Alison Neitzel takes a different perspective on the money men who are undermining our democracy by capturing the courts.

She shows the outlines of a “vast rightwing conspiracy,” as described years ago by Hillary Clinton in 1998. At the time, people thought she was exaggerating. Now we know it exists.

It involves not only Harlan Crowe, the very generous benefactor of Justice Clarence Thomas, but Charles Koch and the mysterious Council on National Policy, where rightwing zealots meet and greet and plan their strategy.

Leonard Leo, the Catholic and deeply conservative leader of the Federalist society, planned the successful conquest of the U.S. Supreme Court. Donald Trump was his useful idiot.

Koch is all in for deregulation. But not when women’s reproductive rights are at issue.

Will Justice Thomas be…

“Who was Stanislaw Lem? The Polish science fiction writer, novelist, essayist, and polymath may best be known for his 1961 novel Solaris (adapted for the screen by Andrei Tarkosvky in 1972 and again by Steven Soderbergh in 2014). Lem’s science fiction appealed broadly outside of SF fandom, attracting the likes of John Updike, who called his stories ‘marvelous’ and Lem a poet of ‘scientific terminology’ for readers ‘whose hearts beat faster when the Scientific American arrives each month.’ Updike’s characterization is but one version of Lem. There are several more, writes Jonathan Lethem in an essay for the London Review of Books, penned for Lem’s 100th anniversary – at least five different Lems with five different literary personalities. Only the first is a ‘hard science fiction writer,’ the genre originating not with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but ‘in H.G. Wells’ technological prognostications.’ Represented best in the pages…