While talking with my friend Ron as he drove through Nebraska, I quoted him a James McMurtry song: “Out here in the middle where the...

Last summer, on a road trip from Minneapolis to Kansas City, I passed through a town in Iowa where I lived from age two to five.  Here is...

My aunt Carolyn retired from a college teaching career and moved into our family’s historic farmhouse in northern Wisconsin. When the St....

I know I’m not supposed to play the proud parent too much, especially when my daughter (Lucia Hulsether) moves in some of the same...

There isn’t much point in sending readers of this little blog to Reading Religion, the American Academy of Religion’s review portal—I...

In few days I head to my summer writing place, a log cabin in the Wisconsin north woods where my mom grew up. It's about halfway between...

I've imagined this as a place to gather and repost—when timely and useful—earlier pieces that are “blog-friendly” but scattered to the...

This is day 40 or more (depending on how one counts) of a major strike in British universities, which has been nearly ignored by the...

This essay is lightly revised from a talk I gave in 2009 on the occasion of my teacher, David Noble, retiring from the University of...

I hope I was clear in my last post, and in any case it bears repeating, that the logic of “assessment” is not tied narrowly to “student...

Yesterday I read this piece in the New York Times by Molly Worthen. Then I made the mistake of reading the comments thread, which...