Graham Hillard

1 week ago | washingtonexaminer.com | Graham Hillard

Making the rounds in April was a higher-ed post for our time: “The honest B or C student, submitting essays filled with awkward constructions, malapropisms, [and] earnest, if failed or surface-y arguments, [is] a surprise hero of the present age.” So wrote professor Matt Dinan of Canada’s St. Thomas University, a liberal arts institution in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

3 weeks ago | washingtonexaminer.com | Graham Hillard

Between 2009 and the beginning of last week, dramatist and author David Mamet released 16 new plays and books, some of them exceptional. During the same span, filmmaker David Mamet directed either one or zero feature-length pictures, depending on whether one counts the 2013 made-for-TV movie Phil Spector. To say merely that this imbalance saddened fans of the unofficial laureate of American hustlers is very nearly to engage in Mametian deception, so drastically does it undersell the point.

3 weeks ago | mindingthecampus.org | Graham Hillard

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from an article originally published by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on May 12, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. Let us take for granted that the NCAA in its prime was greedy, hypocritical, reactionary, schoolmarmish, tone-deaf, and more than a little absurd. That case is not difficult to make, and I have made it before, fairly drowning in examples.

3 weeks ago | jamesgmartin.center | Graham Hillard

Let us take for granted that the NCAA in its prime was greedy, hypocritical, reactionary, schoolmarmish, tone-deaf, and more than a little absurd. That case is not difficult to make, and I have made it before, fairly drowning in examples. Nevertheless, having come out the other side of NCAA v.

1 month ago | washingtonexaminer.com | Graham Hillard

Like most Marvel offerings, Thunderbolts* requires so much background knowledge that fine print seems appropriate, which may explain the asterisk at the end of the official name of the film. That typographical addendum, much discussed by Marvel fanboys during the promotional lead-up, turns out not to mean anything at all, unless one counts an in-joke “reveal” during the closing credits. To the critic, however, it is irresistible.