Search Term: st. amant

Thoughts on teaching in prison on World Day of Social Justice

By Samantha Zimbler

On an overcast day in January 2013, with no criminal justice background and no real teaching experience, I entered the stark grounds of New Jersey’s only maximum-security women’s prison to co-teach a course on memoir writing. The youngest in a classroom of thirteen women, many of whom were serving life or double-life sentences, plus my two mentors and co-teachers, Courtney Polidori and Michele Tarter, my mind began spinning with concern and doubt.

Biblical women and Lifetime’s The Red Tent

By Julia M. O’Brien

The Red Tent was perfect for the Lifetime channel. The network’s four-hour miniseries closely followed Anita Diamont’s 1997 novel, which gave voice—and agency—to the biblical character of Dinah.

Defining intransigence and recognizing its merits

By Richard H. Weisberg

On any given day, a Google search finds the word “intransigent” deployed as though it automatically destroyed an opponent’s position. Charles Blow of the New York Times and Jacob Weisberg (no relation to the present writer) of Slate are only two of many, especially on the political left, who label Republicans “intransigent” and thereby assume they have won the argument against them.

Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan from Grove Art Online

In celebration of World Art Day, we invite you to read the biography of Ludovico Sforza, patron of Leonardo Da Vinci among other artists, as it is presented in Grove Art Online.

Leonardo da Vinci from the Benezit Dictionary of Artists

Leonardo da Vinci was the illegitimate son of the Florentine notary Ser Piero da Vinci, who married Albiera di Giovanni Amadori, the daughter of a patrician family, in the year Leonardo was born. Little is known about the artist’s natural mother, Caterina, other than that five years after Leonardo’s birth she married an artisan from Vinci named Chartabriga di Piero del Veccha.

Bad behavior overshadows more subtle systemic exclusions in academia

By Katrina Hutchison and Fiona Jenkins
Much has been made in the media of Professor Colin McGinn’s resignation amid claims that he sexually harassed a female graduate student. The story has headline-grabbing ingredients.

Come together in Adam Smith

By Daniel B. Klein
I support a classical liberal worldview. I call to social democrats and conservatives alike: Be fair. Let us treat one another like fellow Smithians and come together in Adam Smith.

On animals and tools

By Robert St. Amant

Try this experiment: Ask someone to name three tools, without thinking hard about it. This is a parlor game, not a scientific study, so your results may vary, but I’ve done this dozens of times and heard surprisingly consistent answers. The most common is hammer, screwdriver, and saw, in that order.

Who really deciphered the Egyptian Hieroglyphs?

By Andrew Robinson

The polymath Thomas Young (1773-1829) — physicist, physiologist, physician and polyglot, among several other things — became hooked on the scripts and languages of ancient Egypt in 1814, the year he began to decipher the Rosetta Stone. He continued to study the hieroglyphic and demotic scripts with variable intensity for the rest of his life, literally until his dying day.

Commemorating Tippecanoe: The start of an American holy war

By Adam Jortner
The weather in Tippecanoe County, Indiana, played along and delivered a dreary, wet morning—just as it had on November 7, 1811, when a hodgepodge collection of frontier whites exchanged fire with Native American forces. The Americans “won” the Battle of Tippecanoe when the Indian soldiers retreated, but U.S. forces under William Henry Harrison had to evacuate their position the next day.

The Book, the Scroll, and the Web

Dennis Baron looks at how we read.