Education

Practicing

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:00:00 -0400

Taking piano lessons, learning to speak Russian, seeking enlightenment

Lesson Plan

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:00:45 -0400

The Right and I agree on the potential of universities as a space in which students develop ideas that can transform the world. The difference is, they want to stamp it out, and I want to encourage it.

Practice Losing Everything

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0400

I challenged my students to interrogate their own religious inheritance, and I spoke frequently of the “ethics of faith.” I asked whether they’d arrived at faith through honest inquiry or by suppressing their doubts.

The Fourth Estate

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:00:45 -0500

I don’t believe we’re confined to the media business models that we know. As the information landscape evolves, there will still be journalism about what is happening now, and that will help people in the future who are trying to make sense of it. This work has value.

Nicknames

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

Get to know Boxcar Betty, Stick Dick, Lali, and the Cajun Asian

Sunbeams

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

The press must be free. It has always been so, and much evil has been corrected by it. If government finds itself annoyed by it, let it examine its own conduct, and it will find the cause.

Thomas Erskine

Graffiti

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 12:00:00 -0400

A tag on a dumpster, poetry in an outhouse, Viking runes in an underground tomb

Getting Dressed

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Sleeping in uniform, layering against the cold, wearing your spouse’s jeans

Under Construction

mcdermon@gmail.com — Fri, 30 May 2025 12:00:14 -0400

McDermon: In my day-to-day life I’ve definitely seen gender stereotyping that has excluded girls from certain realms, but I don’t feel like I’ve seen similar evidence of men and boys being excluded or oppressed. What is it I’m missing?

Reeves: I completely agree that the problems facing men are not largely about exclusion or oppression. That’s why I find the term “men’s rights” so unhelpful. It’s basically an oxymoron. The reason fewer men are attending college today is not the same reason why women were attending college in lower numbers at the beginning of the seventies. Women were not encouraged to go to college. In fact, women were intentionally discouraged, and in many cases legally excluded, from certain spaces. That’s by and large just not true for boys and men. We have two similar-looking gender gaps with very different causes.

Where I think the debate goes wrong sometimes is when people look at these disadvantages for men and boys and try to find a villain or an oppressor. They’ll claim the “feminist woke takeover of institutions” is causing men’s problems. That’s just horseshit, and it distracts us from structural issues.

After All This

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

When twenty first graders were slaughtered and the country responded without a national gun-buyback program, national red-flag laws, universal background checks, a national wait period, a gun registry, an assault-weapons ban, disarming all domestic abusers, ending legal immunity for gun manufacturers, instituting mandatory yearly classes for gun ownership (list all your ideas that could help here), we became complicit.

Crossroads

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 12:00:14 -0500

The South is made to carry the nation’s slop jar. That’s deliberate, because then the United States doesn’t have to actually contend with all of its violence. We just put the blame on that region where bad stuff happens and where those backward people are. I don’t think it’s incidental, either, that it is the Blackest region culturally (and demographically) speaking. So it is at once seen as the most racist and the Blackest.

Enemies of Freedom

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0400

Like the breeze that blew through the campus that day, whipping up the leaves and our hair, the student strike had stirred me, as if from sleep. Certainly, in deciding to march despite my fears, I woke up a little: I saw more clearly than I had before that my teachers weren’t my parents and my parents weren’t God and that I could risk a little disapproval without my world falling apart.

A Thousand Words

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 04:00:00 -0400

A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.

Please Be Patient, Student Driver

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 04:00:00 -0400

My classmates were all getting their driver’s licenses. Like any of us had anywhere important to go. They drove cars their parents had gifted them, either a hand-me-down or a brand-new lease. I was the last without a provisional license and the only one without a car parked outside Shane Yamamoto’s house.

The Normal Force

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 04:00:00 -0400

The waiting room was mostly full of pregnant women that day, and then there were the rest of us. It made me feel sorry for the ultrasound techs, who must spend their days bouncing back and forth between rooms with babies and rooms with not babies.

Shock Value

Wed, 31 May 2023 04:00:00 -0400

In general my job was predicated on my ability to suppress rage. I was an itinerant instructor, an adjunct whose career depended on good reviews from my co-instructor.

Dating Profile

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 04:00:00 -0400

What’s on my mind lately: How to survive the winter alone with a roaming catamount who needs a snack. I asked advice from the guy who plows our driveway. “What should I do if I see it?” He stuck his head out of the truck window: “Don’t act like food.”

Ohashi Bridge In The Rain

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 04:00:00 -0400

When we met for lunch, she wore a dark silk dress and red lipstick. At the school where we both taught, she always dressed practically: plastic boots, a raincoat over a faded blue sweatshirt, a white sailor’s cap.

Learning The Hard Way

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 04:00:00 -0400

Hitching a ride, trusting a partner, marrying the same person three times

The Bus

Wed, 31 Aug 2022 04:00:00 -0400

A fifth-grade bully, a blossoming romance, a late-night crash

White Lines

Sun, 31 Jul 2022 04:00:00 -0400

We divided ourselves up until the teams were formed correctly, evenly. In other words, until the white kids were satisfied. No one had declared them the leaders, but, like most enduring traditions, the rule had become quietly understood, rooted in our fledgling muscles and minds.

Sticks And Stones

Sun, 31 Jul 2022 04:00:00 -0400

In 1986 I was the Horse Girl of St. Margaret’s, the tallest girl in sixth grade, with dark-brown hair I tossed like a mane.

Dudley Ball

Sun, 31 Jul 2022 04:00:00 -0400

The red hair and freckles, puffy cheeks / and constant perspiration amplified / his otherness. No one spoke to him. / But why do I see his face so clearly now, / the fear and loneliness in his eyes? / The faces of all the others I’ve forgotten.

Of History And Hope

Sun, 31 Jul 2022 04:00:00 -0400

We have memorized America, / how it was born and who we have been and where. / In ceremonies and silence we say the words, / telling the stories, singing the old songs. / We like the places they take us. Mostly we do.

Emotional Morons

Thu, 30 Jun 2022 04:00:00 -0400

Kayla and I were not friends, so when she called me out of the blue, on a blistering July morning, to ask if I wanted to join her and her dad on the lake for the day, it was like NASA calling to invite me to the moon.

Falling Behind

Tue, 31 May 2022 04:00:00 -0400

In terms of security and a sense that you can count on a certain career path in life if you do your part — that’s over for most people. You’re on your own.

More Of This, Please

Thu, 31 Mar 2022 04:05:00 -0400

In grad school I had a writing teacher who’d completely cream my essays. / Cross-outs and tracked changes. He took me at my word / when I said I wanted to get better.

I Pledge Allegiance To The Republic

Thu, 31 Mar 2022 04:00:00 -0400

Every morning the public school chooses a student to lead us in patriotic worship over the intercom. I stand before my classroom flag and count my heartbeats. At recess I draw stars and stars.

Before

Thu, 24 Jun 2021 04:10:00 -0400

It’s not as though I was going on dates, gorging / on the daily bread of sex, before the governor told us all / to stay home.

The Quiet Room

Thu, 29 Apr 2021 04:10:00 -0400

She read a brief passage in a small, clear voice that will live on in my memory. Fluent in sounding out words she didn’t know, she gleaned tones from everyday verbs that I’d never dreamed they possessed, and conferred a strange new life on faded old nouns, as one might draw a hidden thread of some brilliant color from an old rug.