Education
Whatever Greatness We Like to Imagine
There’s nothing terribly profound about the things I have to say below, nothing too deep or unfamiliar, but I’ve been thinking quite a lot this year about the way we talk of people, of groups, of all the things we…
The Spirit of July 4
When our people agreed to fight for independence, there were colonists who stood with the king and said no. But still, Jefferson wrote. When our people agreed to fight for independence, our barely existing Congress failed to cover the soldiers’…
Daunted by Homelessness
Fifty-three years ago this month, Robert Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles. Over time, the hotel was torn down and replaced by a school and a park to remember Kennedy and his soaring, hopeful rhetoric.…
Obama’s Years in LA
Nestled in the sprawling hills of Los Angeles is a lesser known fact of presidential history, that Mr. Obama once attended Occidental College—Oxy to everyone around here—from 1979 through 1981, before he transferred to Columbia. This is also one of…
Nixon Presidential Library
Visiting the Nixon Library, it’s hard not to wrestle with history, to groan a little bit when the place designed to honor a dishonored man gives him an occasional pass, a slight of word, here and there, to suggest he…
Boarding Air Force One
When you visit the Reagan Presidential Library, the penultimate exhibit, something that dwarfs every other exhibit at every other presidential library I’ve seen thus far, is Air Force One, packed in next to Marine One in the Simi Valley, near…
After 21 Years Apart
When you move around a lot as a kid, you don’t build a lot of lasting relationships. From 1995-1999, when I was living in Oregon, Joel Williams was the closest thing I had to a best friend, someone to hold…
The President’s House
For the record, if you read 1,350 densely-worded pages for hours and hours and hours, marking up every page with lines and notes across two volumes, in less than three weeks, your eyes might actually struggle. It’s like watching television…
A Resource, Reimagined
For the past eight years, I’ve quietly and consistently maintained a low profile as an Adjunct Reference Librarian with UCF, assisting students with research as needed, even during the pandemic. Last month, two of the information titans from our library…
Does It Even Matter?
The following images (plus the one above) reflect 10 presidents, 10 quotes, and the presumption of truth. Each of them are from posters I once made and placed on the wall of my web design classroom, back in 2018. The…
