Corey Robin's Blog, page 5

The Anxiety of Self-Promotion

My last post, on cringey academic posting, generated a lot of debate on Facebook. In the course of that conversation, we got into a discussion about self-promotion of our work on social media, and why people are so anxious/apologetic about doing it. As I said on Facebook, I don’t really understand the anxiety about self-promotion. And that’s not because I have no anxieties about drawing attention to myself in real life. I do. Big time. I come from a big family. It’s always been hard to get a word in edgewise, when we’re all together, which as a kid, growing up, was every day. My tendency ever since has been to withdraw and watch. But writing is very different for […]

Please, no more of your light in dark times

Why do academics and journalists and writers need to announce their professional good news or that of a friend or colleague or department with these cringey “amid the dark times, a bit of light” introductions? If you think these are dark times, the fact that a journal just accepted your article—or a publisher signed a contract for your co-edited anthology or your friend is now the dean or a favorite writer just got hired by a magazine—well, you can’t really believe any of this illuminates the darkness. Can’t you simply tell us your good news and trust that we’ll be happy for you without our having to run it through the cash register of the universe to see whether and […]

Richard Garwin, 1928-2025

According to the New York Times, the scientist Richard Garwin has died. Garwin, as his biographer wrote, was “the most influential scientist you’ve never heard of.” At the age 0f 23, he built the H-bomb. He advised every president from Eisenhower to, who knows, probably Biden, on everything from nuclear deterrence to the MX Missile to arms control and more. Enrico Fermi said that he was “the only true genius I have ever met.” As it happens, I met him, too. It was the summer of 1985. I had just graduated high school and gotten a scholarship for college from IBM, where my dad worked. As part of my scholarship, I had the option of taking summer jobs with the […]

Pomp and Circumstance

I know this headline and the story it tells are terrible, a sign of how bad things are and how much worse is to come, but, still… But, still, you have to laugh. Here we are, people of conscience everywhere, rallying on behalf of beleaguered universities everywhere, who are fending off this extraordinarily tetchy administration, so quick to take offense at the slightest untoward remark, and what do the leaders of NYU do? Freak out about this student, their commencement speaker, who had the audacity to refer to “the atrocities currently happening in Palestine,” and, so, naturally, is having his diploma revoked. Just in case that wasn’t clear enough, NYU issued a statement. Of course. NYU strongly denounces the choice […]

We really are the oldest democracy in the world

A new book about Biden’s decline and the 2024 campaign has tons of damning quotes from Democratic Party insiders. Apparently, Biden’s inner circle did a lot of covering just how far gone he was during the campaign. One insider tells the authors of the book, “It was an abomination. He stole an election from the Democratic Party; he stole it from the American people.” You’ve got to admire the moxie. Everyone’s always stealing an election from the Democrats. In 2016, it was the Russians. In 2024, it was the candidate they were supporting. This whole discourse is the ne plus ultra of a party that loses and loses yet always finds someone else to blame. Even if that someone else […]

Habeas corpus

Apparently, Stephen Miller thinks that Donald Trump can suspend the writ of habeas corpus. There’s just one problem with that idea, as a little known law professor wrote in the Cornell Law Review in 2014: “Congress alone can suspend the writ.” The name of that professor was Amy Coney Barrett.

You belong to me, er, us

In Capital and Black Reconstruction in America, respectively, Marx and Du Bois devote several passages to the fraught conceptions of ownership over labor in post-emancipation societies, whether the laborer is the Black freedman in the American South or the wage laborer in Western Europe. Though many people know that after emancipation, Black people in the South endured another hundred years of slavery by another name, that whites perceived Blacks as still belonging to some entity, we’re less familiar with a version of that story in Western Europe. Pairing these two passages raises delicate issues of comparison, but there’s no doubt that a similar dynamic is at play in both societies. In both societies, the employers of labor wrestle with the […]

Who’s scared and unwelcome at Harvard?

Harvard today released two reports about the state of life on campus. One is on Islamophobia and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias at Harvard. The other is about what has come to be called antisemitism, but which often includes or is nothing more than pro-Palestine or anti-Zionist sentiment and action. Before I say anything else, and because I might lose you as I get into this more, I want to highlight two critical paragraphs from the New York Times article on the two reports. The paragraphs get buried almost two-thirds of the way into the piece: The two task forces worked together to create a campuswide survey that received nearly 2,300 responses from faculty, staff and students. It found that 6 […]

Drop Dead City

My wife and I saw “Drop Dead City” tonight at the IFC in Manhattan. It’s a riveting documentary about the New York City Fiscal Crisis of 1975. I know that statement sounds like a parody of a lecture in a poli sci class, but it happens to be true. The documentary is also riveting just as a cinematic experience. If you love the scene and soundscape of New York City film from the 1970s—from The Taking of Pelham One Two Three to Dog Day Afternoon—you’ll love this documentary. The archival footage alone will bring you back to the feel and time of another place. For me, the film was not just political (more on that below) but also personal. Figures […]

Off to Wisconsin

If you’re in Madison, Wisconsin tomorrow (April 24), I’ll be delivering the Phi Beta Kappa Lecture at the University of Wisconsin, at 5 pm, on “Clarence Thomas’s Radical Race Politics and the Future of the Supreme Court.” It will be at the Elvehjem Building, Room L 150, 800 University Avenue. If you make it, make sure to say hi!