This is the time of year when it’s not clear whether I’m completely overwhelmed with tasks or I’m suffering from writer’s block.

I sat down to write a piece about the importance of voting and why we ought to be trying to find ways for as many citizens to vote as possible, but then my daughter and I went to see Benson Boone in c...

Brief Reflections on Getting Back to Campus

As regular readers likely know, my latest book—Fascist Legacies: Far-Right Ideology Then and Now—has just been published by the University of Nebraska Press.

It’s been a great few months for people like me who love movies and who also happen to teach and write about heroic behavior.

After successfully navigating the Scylla of sending off a paper to a journal and the Charybdis of preparing next semester’s syllabus, I managed to find three hours to see Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey.

What You Need To Know About Odysseus

Last week’s post about Substack’s rollout of an AI checker netted the exact same numbers as every post I write—you readers are remarkably consistent, as are you non-readers—but a whole lot of discussi...

I doubt I’m the only one who’s thrilled that Substack unveiled a new feature this week that enables readers to check posts to see how much of it was likely written by AI, with help from AI, or entirel...

Because I’m a political science professor, people often ask me if I agree that everything is much, much worse now than it’s been at any point in my (or their) lifetime.

"We’re going to win so much, you’re going to be so sick and tired of winning."

If things have seemed a little quieter around here this past week, it’s because I’ve been on a family vacation to visit relatives in Virginia.

There’s an unusual phenomenon that’s taken hold of us as a species over the past two decades, namely spending an inordinate amount of time trying, across time and space, to convince total strangers th...

The world of 24 hours news channels and social media is chock full of invitations to look everywhere except directly in front of us.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and writing about empathy because it’s a building block of heroic behavior and it’s a cornerstone of political liberalism. I’ve tried to find ways to bring empathy tr...

If you spend any time at all on social media, you’ll very quickly run into the claims that both sides are terrible and all politicians are the same.

It’s been an exciting and challenging primary season here in Nebraska and now the successful candidates are putting their efforts into a long summer and fall of campaigning ahead of November’s importa...

It would be incredibly easy to expand what I’m doing here, to cultivate more regular readers, to increase traffic, to get more comments and restacks on posts.