Tag Archives: writing

Re-organization Tempest Brewing

Posted on by under General announcements

Policy of Truth has been around for eleven years now, and on reflection it occurs to me that I’ve frankly done a horrific job of tagging and categorizing my posts here over time. Many of them discuss the same topic, theme, or campaign, but are scattered in ways that make them hard to find.

My migrant justice posts are a perfect example: they stretch back over a decade, but are inconsistently tagged, categorized, and titled. You’d never know that a post written in 2025 bears a connection to one written five or ten years ago, but that’s often the case. It also doesn’t help that I’m so indecisive about titles, e.g., posting one and changing it five minutes (or five days) later. Henceforth, all of that will change. O brave new blog, that has such structure about it!

Continue reading →

No Such Thing as a Free Ride?

Posted on by under Palestine, slices of life

I’ve just worked a fifteen hour day. I want it all to end. I want to end it all.

I take the 8:54 train out of Metropark, hoping to get to Princeton Junction in time to catch the 9:25 bus into town. I’m in luck. We get in at 9:24.

Just as we get there, the son-of-a-bitch bus driver pulls away. In other words, he sees a whole trainload of commuters come in, then leaves a minute early. I curse as I watch him go, sympathizing briefly with every terrorist who’s ever lived. Continue reading →

Stirring the POT (3)

Posted on by under activism, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

Genocide and the Academic Chairs of Virtue

I had meant “Stirring the POT” to be a monthly series, but my last one was back in March and it’s now July, so I guess the “monthly” promise was destined to be broken.

I wrote my last installment just after the talk I gave on institutional neutrality at APPE, and a couple of months before the one I was then scheduled to give at the Heterodox Academy conference in June. The Heterodox Academy talk ended up being significantly different from the APPE version or the version I put on the blog back in March. At any rate, the third version was the charm. The talk was well attended and went very well. There were a few skeptical or critical questions during the Q&A which I expected, but there was also some significant agreement, which came as a surprise. I’ll save all the squabbling for a separate post. Continue reading →

Valley of the Ghosts

Posted on by under Palestine, Ramadan, slices of life

Facebook does this thing where they exhume something you posted on this day, x years ago, just to remind you that you did: “You have memories on this day,” it helpfully intones. Sometimes you want to be reminded, sometimes not, and sometimes you can’t be sure. This one, I guess, falls into the third category. It was the midpoint of a long walk I took on June 10, 2016, which fell during Ramadan, when I was fasting. I was living at the time in Abu Dis in the West Bank, just east of Jerusalem. It was either a day off from teaching, or I was just done teaching, so I started walking, on a whim, from Abu Dis to the neighboring town of Eizariya. Continue reading →

No Questions, No Justice

Posted on by under slices of life

I have no interest in professional sports, much less boxing, much less the life and times of Mike Tyson. So I have nothing of substance to say about his recent bout with Jake Paul or much of anything else about him, but I was stopped short by a sleeper of a Mike Tyson story, his interview with Jazlyn “Jazzy” Guerra, a thirteen-year-old online journalist (scroll all the way down for it). Continue reading →