Phil Christman teaches first-year writing at the University of Michigan and is the editor of the Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing. His work has appeared in The Christian Century, Paste, Books & Culture, and other publications. His most recent books are How to Be Normal and Midwest Futures.
The cases for travel are often sillier than the cases against, and I think it’s important to question them.
There is a world within the world, and that world is not, as it is for the Marxist, a metaphor. It’s where the lizard people meet.
A small town might well be angry; it is asked to do everything.
Everything that was once considered lowbrow is now triumphant.
We bad-movie watchers have our own anticriteria, the sorts of badness we prefer.
Mary Midgley’s writing was profound but rarely technical; she trained her sights on general problems.
Can neoliberalism’s conceptual structure be traced directly to medieval Western Christianity?
What is this thing we’re trying to be?
Small wonder that Midwestern cities, institutions, and people show up again and again in the twentieth-century effort to determine what, in America, is normal.
Those who write about the rural, white, poor South often alternate between disgust and empathy.