Jonathan Dettman

There are plenty of blogs and news sites online, so why build your own newspaper? Most of us probably don’t need to, but some bloggers or educators might find it useful to have a centralized, up-to-the-minute repository of news or discussion on a narrower topic than most websites or blogs offer. Teachers could incorporate such [...]

Hoy es Cinco de Mayo, pero dudo que los mexicanos en el estado de Arizona tengan ganas de festejar, ya que la gobernadora del estado acaba de firmar una ley que institucionaliza el racismo. No hay duda que la ley es fundamentalmente racista, ya que depende de criterios raciales para identificar y reprimir una clase [...]

A tumultuous Fall term at California’s universities promises to give way to a new year of struggle in which tensions and divisions will only increase. There are as many ways to describe this conflict as there are students, but its basic contours are shaped by an economic system that demands a continuous and ever-increasing input [...]

Towards the end of summer I stumbled upon a gem of a book. Kepa Artaraz’ Cuba and Western Intellectuals since 1959 documents the reciprocal—often symbiotic—relationship between the Cuban Revolution and the loosely-knit New Left formations that arose in Britain, France and the United States during the late 50s and early 60s. Artaraz outlines a broad, [...]

In a now-familiar series of events, the collapse of the housing finance bubble in 2008 led to what is generally considered the worst economic recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

In California, the recession has meant drastic losses in both state revenue (based primarily on personal income and sales taxes) and local revenue (based [...]

The Ph.D. qualifying exam generates a different kind of anxiety than a typical test. Other exams can be stressful and, depending on the subject matter, very difficult, but there is an element of the unknown that makes the qualifying exam unlike any other test I’ve taken in my long career as a student. Other exams [...]

Well, I’m getting closer to having this site up and running, so I thought I’d better start posting. I write on a couple of other blogs (one political and the other a private blog for family members) but I wanted to create one for academic purposes. So, I hereby join the hordes of grad students [...]