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3 weeks ago | 
newpol.org | Scott McLemee
Netflix’ Adolescence is a flawed but powerfully crafted drama. The acting and particularly the dialogue is superb – its poignant, witty in places, and offers up a powerful evocation of working-class family life. The existential flaw in the program, however, lies in the premise. It is endeavoring to grasp the real problem of toxic masculinity/online incel culture purveyed by figures such as Andrew Tate.
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2 months ago | 
insidehighered.com | Scott McLemee
You have /5 articles left. Sign up for a free account or log in. Photo Illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Motizova/iStock/Getty Images The historian and political analyst Garry Wills once described writing for magazines and newspapers as a way to continue his education while getting paid to do it. The thought made a lasting impression on me and has been a driving force since well before I started writing “Intellectual Affairs” in 2005.
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Feb 14, 2025 | 
insidehighered.com | Scott McLemee
You have /5 articles left. Sign up for a free account or log in. A brief announcement: After 20 years of writing “Intellectual Affairs” for Inside Higher Ed, I am retiring at the end of the month—from the gig, that is, not from writing itself. The final column will run in two weeks. Going to a play at the height of COVID-19 was effectively impossible, but I managed to see two productions of Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning in the fall of 2020. The first performance was via Zoom.
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Jan 31, 2025 | 
insidehighered.com | Scott McLemee
You have /5 articles left. Sign up for a free account or log in. RockingStock/iStock/Getty Images Plus Not quite a household word (beyond academia, anyway), “panopticon” nonetheless turns up in news stories with surprising frequency—here and here, for example, and here and here.
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Jan 17, 2025 | 
insidehighered.com | Scott McLemee
You have /5 articles left. Sign up for a free account or log in. The name of an ambition more than it is of a body of knowledge, the term “futurology” is attributed by one source on word origins to Aldous Huxley. The author of Brave New World is a plausible candidate, of course; he is credited with coining it in 1946.
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Dec 10, 2024 | 
insidehighered.com | Scott McLemee
You have /5 articles left. Sign up for a free account or log in. Aaron Hawkins/iStock/Getty Images Plus Scanning the university press books announced as forthcoming in the new year, I noted a few that overlap in topical or thematic ways. A reader interested in one might also be in another. The following seasonal roundup has been culled and arranged with that possibility in mind. Quoted passages are taken from material provided by the publishers.
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Dec 6, 2024 | 
insidehighered.com | Scott McLemee
You have /5 articles left. Sign up for a free account or log in. Aaron Hawkins/iStock/Getty Images Plus Scanning the university press books announced as forthcoming in the new year, I noted a few that overlap in topical or thematic ways. A reader interested in one might also be in another. The following seasonal roundup has been culled and arranged with that possibility in mind. Quoted passages are taken from material provided by the publishers.
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Nov 22, 2024 | 
insidehighered.com | Scott McLemee
You have /5 articles left. Sign up for a free account or log in. Born in South Korea, Byung-Chul Han has taught and written about philosophy at German universities. Over the past decade, his books have been appearing in English translation at an accelerating clip.
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Nov 15, 2024 | 
insidehighered.com | Scott McLemee
You have /5 articles left. Sign up for a free account or log in. The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth—a limited series that just premiered on the National Geographic channel and is streaming on Disney+ and Hulu—represents at least the sixth time the events of 1971 have been portrayed at length onscreen, whether in documentary format or as quasi-fictional drama. How could anyone squeeze almost three hours’ worth of video narrative out of such thoroughly covered events?
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Nov 1, 2024 | 
insidehighered.com | Scott McLemee
You have /5 articles left. Sign up for a free account or log in. Annalee Newitz is a journalist who reports on science, technology and culture. They are also an accomplished science fiction writer—a complimentary set of pursuits, it seems, given that the distance between science fiction and what’s in the news is narrowing ever more all the time. That convergence drives Newitz’s Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind (W.W. Norton).
