“Terror made me cruel; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bed-clothes; still it wailed ‘Let me in!’”

Thus speaks Mr. Lockwood, a clueless townie and milksop, narrator of Emily Bronte’s 1848 novel Wuthering Heights, about to appear – again! –  on screen in a Valentine’s Day release.

This production generates a new burst of interest in a novel that’s never lost its coolness-cachet. Romance – doomed, of course  – and the lure of Gothic darkness are bestsellers, particularly with a young audience.

Unsuspecting Lockwood, forced by bad weather to stay at remote and rural Wuthering Heights, the house now under the seriously unpleasant domination of brutal Byronic anti-hero Heathcliff, dreams that a child scratches at the window, begging to get in: “I’m come home! I’d lost my way on the moor!” she moans.  Overcome with inexplicable cruelty, the otherwise normal Lockwood drags ghostly Catherine’s wrist across the jagged window glass.

Catherine, Heathcliff’s long-dead childhood and eternal love, is back.

Emily Brontë’s novel also is a bit of a cine-revenant: a silent film version in 1920 was followed by five English-language screen adaptations, including 1939’s version starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon. Foreign directors are not immune, with Indian, Spanish and Filipino films attesting to the pull of Brontë’s fiction.

It certainly channels the Gothic horror we all seem to crave. What fictional mode was ever more resilient than the Gothic? Born in eighteenth-century England with Horace Walpole’s “The Castle of Otranto” (1764), the Gothic mode powered on, past Mary Shelley’s 1820 classic “Frankenstein,” through Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca,” up to the very recent “Mexican Gothic” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

The Gothic closet is stuffed with ghosts, dead bodies, graves, vampires, the living dead, corrupt sexuality, damsels in distress, powerful and dangerous attractive men,  gargoyled architecture and locked doors. The list is long.

But Gothic is a fragile literary mode, lurching sometimes into farce: Brontë piles it on, ad absurdum: a kitchen with a row of hanged puppies, dead rabbits mistaken for kittens, a knife thrust casually into a servant’s teeth, and Heathcliff’s late penchant for grave-digging.

Catherine’s and Heathcliff’s declarations of eternal love indeed caught the irreverent eye of satirists in “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” a seventies UK television series: “Semaphor Wuthering Heights” depicts the supposedly desperate lovers complacently signaling in neat flag formation across the desolate moorland.

But let’s get serious again. The novel is genuinely disturbing in its depiction of childhood love turned into adult obsession: “I am Heathcliff!” declares Catherine. “He’s always, always in my mind not as a pleasure . . . but, as my own being.”  And we believe her.  Their individual identities are merged forever, even after death, when Heathcliff begs dead Catherine to haunt him: “Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! . . . I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”

Heathcliff – brought as a nameless street urchin into the Wuthering Heights household, mistreated in childhood, and bereft of Catherine – takes revenge on everyone implicated in his misery. Vampire-like, he sucks the free will, money and property from his victims, turning the landowning gentry system on its head.

The young novelist herself spent most of her life in her clergyman father’s northern England vicarage and was an unlikely author of such a startling fiction.

“Wuthering Heights,” originally published under the man-sounding pseudonym Ellis Bell, was slammed by reviewers, who denounced it as coarse, brutal, and irreligious. After her death at 30, Emily was “defended” by her older sister Charlotte, who resorted to claiming that her sister was just a child of nature, living secluded in rural Yorkshire. She really “didn’t get” polite society.

But Emily has had historical payback after those disapproving reviews. “Wuthering Heights” stays reliably in print, thanks to people like me, who teach it, and thanks to the film makers, who periodically boost it lucratively into the headlines.

The new film beckons. But I hope that moviegoers will turn again to the book: a real Gothic shocker, which entertains while inviting us to ponder the dangerous and wonderful strength of human feeling, to consider the possibility that individual human identity is permeable, and that we may really be able to live in each other’s hearts and minds – perhaps forever.

I teach college freshmen in an interdisciplinary seminar titled “The Global Experience.” I chose to focus on politics because these days it is impossible to understand global experiences without thinking about politics, especially the rise of Donald Trump in the United States. I wanted my students to understand both the attraction and the repulsion of President Trump.

In contrast, decision makers in Washington, D.C. seem more interested in blaming and shaming the other political party. Instead of engaging in dialogue, they circle the wagons, perform for their own party, and pretend that someday the other half of the country will magically fade away.

I believed my students could do better. I had this crazy idea that meaningful conversation about political disagreements is still possible. It certainly beats participating in political echo chambers or contemplating violence.

We began our politics unit with a coin toss. Heads – Republican Week, followed by tails – Democrat Week.

We celebrated Republican Week by reading everything we could find about the motivations and values of that party. Using a Republican lens, we explored foreign policy topics like immigration, border security, alliances, and tariffs. During Democrat Week, we repeated this exercise using a liberal lens.

Each week culminated in a debate between a team of student champions, nominated by their classmates, and a political opponent. I played the role of the opponent, but my arguments changed each week based on whether I wore a blue or a red T-shirt.

The third week, we explored the strengths and weaknesses of each party on major political topics. Then we voted anonymously on who had the stronger position.

Students favored Democrats for some issues, such as climate change and preserving traditional alliances. They favored Republicans for other issues, such as how to secure our southern border and how to achieve peace in Gaza. No clear party preference emerged for some issues, such as tariffs and the treatment of illegal immigrants. Some students favored neither party.

In written assignments on chosen foreign policy topics, students advocated for a variety of perspectives and solutions. Even as Congress failed to perform its basic functions, my freshmen managed to present viable solutions to thorny and pressing issues. None of them presented raw partisan dogma from just one side. Most sought out middle ground by blending ideas and policies from both parties. For example, some advocated for preserving foreign aid, but with greater oversight to ensure tangible benefits for Americans. Others advocated for deportation procedures that incorporated greater compassion.

I learned college freshmen can understand and respect multiple political viewpoints. In doing so, students did not have to sacrifice or water down their own political beliefs. Anonymous polls of my students showed equal levels of support and opposition for President Trump both before and after our politics unit. But encouragingly, my students also reported greater familiarity and less animosity towards the opposite party.

In an age when three in 10 Republicans and three in 10 Democrats agree that Americans may have to resort to violence to get the country back on track, it was encouraging to see students challenge this misguided belief. A negotiated middle ground rarely satisfies anyone, but it sure beats the ‘good guys, bad guys’ mentality that too often dominates our political discourse.

It’s challenging these days for elected officials to serve both sides of the country. Politicians who don’t fit the mold of a ‘pure’ Democrat or a ‘pure’ Republican get vilified by both sides, often leading to dysfunctional government. But my students have shown me that the gap separating Republican and Democratic positions is not as wide as we might believe.

—

Views expressed in this column are the author’s own and not necessarily those of ������Ƶ.

When the Nobel Committee announced that László Krasznahorkai had won this year’s prize for literature, I pulled one of his novels off the shelf in Belk Library. I wasn’t familiar with his work, but when he was described as a “difficult and demanding” dystopian writer, I was intrigued.

I’ve always been drawn to long, complex books such as War and Peace,��Roots, and Cryptonomicon. They are the kinds of works that stretch across generations. But this time, with Krasznahorkai, I couldn’t make it past three pages. My attention slipped, and my focus felt fractured. Somewhere along the way, I had lost the endurance that deep reading requires.

It’s easy to blame phones, social media, and the endless stream of short-form content. Screens compete for our attention every waking minute, training our minds to crave instant gratification rather than depth. But screens are only part of a larger pattern: a growing discomfort with stillness, boredom, patience, and the slow work of concentration that deep thinking requires. Our time isn’t the only thing being fractured; our capacity for sustained attention is too. Distraction has become the cultural default.

As a librarian, I’ve come to see that reading isn’t just an academic skill or a pleasurable pastime. It’s how we build complexity within ourselves in a time that increasingly rewards simplicity and quick conclusions. Deep reading means lingering with a text, following its ideas, and allowing it to challenge us. It slows us down long enough to notice nuance, to sit with ambiguity, to develop compassion and foresight, and to see how seemingly unrelated ideas might connect. It strengthens the mental muscles we need to navigate an ever more complicated world.

������, neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf explains that the human brain wasn’t born to read: we taught it to do so. Each time we engage deeply with text, we strengthen the neural pathways that make abstract thought, imagination and empathy possible. Reading doesn’t simply transmit information; it builds the architecture of critical thought itself.

The Liberation of Reading
For most of human history, reading was a privilege of the few: priests, scholars, rulers and the wealthy. Literacy opened doors to knowledge, power and capital. As it spread, it reshaped the world. Ordinary people could interpret sacred texts for themselves, study new ideas, and imagine different futures. The printing press accelerated that freedom. Books moved from monasteries into homes and coffeehouses. Literacy crossed social lines, and ideas multiplied. Reading democratized thought itself. That same power to think for ourselves is what’s at stake again today.

That ability now feels more fragile. show that reading for pleasure in the United States has dropped sharply in the past two decades. reports that many students and adults struggle to finish full-length books. We skim, scroll, and summarize. Increasingly, we think in shorter bursts, leaning on AI to condense what once demanded our full attention. While AI offers an expanded toolkit for inquiry, helping us analyze and synthesize at larger scales, it works best as a partner to human reflection, not a replacement for it. The challenge is finding balance by using technology to extend our reach without letting it erode our capacity for depth. It helps us move quickly through more information, but the trade-off is depth, the kind of understanding that only comes from staying with something long enough to feel its weight.

What if, despite all our technology, we are returning to an earlier kind of culture, one built more on regurgitation than reflection? Are we sliding back toward older ways of organizing not just communication but culture itself, where ideas are consumed rather than examined and made our own? It’s a fascinating paradox. Our digital world is full of narration: posts, clips, comments, emojis, and reactions, yet so little of it invites us to pause and think. We swipe, we move on, and the cycle repeats. As James Marriott argues in , we may be living through a “counter-revolution” against reading itself, an era where the screen favors immediacy, emotion, and performance over reasoning and depth. We seem to know more than ever before, yet think less deeply about what any of it means.

Deep reading is a counterbalance. It restores the diversity of thought that our fast media diet erodes. Sustained engagement strengthens the neural networks we rely on for creativity, problem-solving and design. It helps us hold competing ideas, trace relationships, and find meaning in complexity. It’s the mental equivalent of cross-training, developing the stamina and flexibility our thinking needs to meet a complicated world.

Reading as Rebellion
If the problem is cultural, the response can be personal. To read a book today is, in its own quiet way, an act of rebellion. It resists speed. It refuses to be optimized. It asks for our full attention in a world that profits from distraction and constant stimulation. When I pick up Krasznahorkai at lunch, it feels like a small protest. His long, winding sentences offer no shortcuts. Reading him reminds me that some forms of thinking cannot be rushed and that not every kind of meaning can be summarized.

Reading is also a form of self-governance. It is how we choose what enters our mind and how ideas connect in ways no algorithm can predict. The physicist who reads poetry, the engineer who studies philosophy, the novelist fascinated by biology are all exercising the same muscle of synthesis. Every voice and story expands our map of understanding, and reading across difference stretches that map even further. It builds empathy and a sense of care, and it fuels the kind of innovation and creativity that come from seeing the world through many perspectives.

The Library as a Practice of Attention
Visiting a library, too, is an act of resistance in our attention economy. It offers space to think, create, and focus within a world that rarely pauses and continually pulls at our attention. If the mind is a muscle, the library is its gym: a space to stretch, strengthen and build endurance for complex thought. The more we exercise it, the more capable we become of holding tension, nuance, and imagination together.

Within its walls, ideas coexist across time and discipline. On the shelves, books gather like conversations, from Yuval Noah Harari and Octavia Butler to Paulo Freire, Mary Oliver, and Liu Cixin. Each offers a different way of seeing, but together they remind us that intellectual strength comes from diversity, from reading across difference and letting unexpected connections form. The library holds these voices in dialogue and invites us to join the conversation.

In an age of AI and an abundance of information, libraries teach something rarer than access: discernment. They help us slow down, weigh evidence, and find patterns amid noise. They remind us that knowledge is not a commodity to consume but a relationship to cultivate. They are one of the few places left where thinking still feels unhurried, where curiosity is allowed to take its time.

I’m sticking it out with Krasznahorkai, reading a few pages each day. My goal isn’t to do a deep analysis but to rebuild my focus and rediscover the kind of concentration that feels expansive, when the mind is free to wander and wonder. It’s about putting in the reps, retraining the muscles of attention one page at a time.

In a way, I’m rebuilding my own capacity for deep attention after years of digital overconsumption. I’ve started leaving my phone in another room, keeping a book on the table instead of an iPad, and carving out quiet time each evening. These small choices remind me that reading is both self-care and social care. It strengthens our inner lives so we can more fully engage the outer world. Every time I see someone browsing the shelves or paging through a book, I feel encouraged. I recognize in them the quiet act of stepping into the life of the mind. So maybe that’s the invitation: set the phone aside once in a while and pick up a book that challenges or surprises you. Give your attention something demanding to work on. And if you need a place to start, stop by Belk Library. We can always recommend a few books that will help you think.

Views expressed in this column are the author’s own and not necessarily those of ������Ƶ.

This is not an article to rehash pointless and stale political debates about COVID-19. Been there, done that.

I won’t comment on whether funding for vaccine research should come from the private versus public sector. I also won’t comment on whether anyone should mandate vaccines for their citizens or employees. There is room for legitimate disagreement on these important social topics.

My article will focus instead on the science of vaccines. And in matters of science, the data should take center stage. Legal and political opinions are secondary.

One well-supported conclusion about vaccines is that even though side effects vary, some vaccines have provided fantastic benefits to public health. Smallpox was eradicated globally by 1980. This could never have happened without vaccines.

Vaccines also allowed us to eliminate measles from the United States by 2000. A few years later the virus sneaked its way back into our country, largely because some folks concluded they and their children would be better off unvaccinated. The ongoing measles outbreak of 2025 unfortunately affects primarily these unvaccinated individuals. The data on the benefits of measles vaccination are so clear now that even Kennedy said he would “probably” vaccinate his own children against measles.

mRNA vaccines represent the latest in a long line of vaccination innovations. If you want proof, search the internet for a readable peer-reviewed article titled “safety and effectiveness of mRNA vaccines” in the open-access medical journal “Cureus.” More research is still needed on how to store mRNA vaccines at room temperature and on how to reduce negative side effects, but there is no question about their overall potential.

Traditional vaccines still work, but mRNA vaccines are categorically better. It’s like comparing flip phones to smartphones. Flip phones were amazing for their time, but no serious investor would place their money on flip phone technology today. Similarly, Kennedy is misguided to think that research money would be better spent on traditional vaccines.

Take speed and scale. Traditional vaccines take months and even years to develop. In contrast, mRNA vaccines can be produced an order of magnitude faster. The first step, sequencing the pathogen’s genome, takes just a few hours.
Scientists then synthesize a sequence of genetic material called mRNA that codes for the protein antigens found in the pathogen. After the mRNA is delivered to your body through a vaccine, your cells can then synthesize these antigens, which trains your immune system to target and destroy the pathogen. You can see this process summarized as an infographic by searching the internet for “mRNA vaccine production” at “genome.gov.”

Because sequencing and synthesizing genetic material is easy and cheap, mRNA vaccines are much more adaptable than traditional vaccines. They provide flexible manufacturing options for business. Next time we find ourselves in another rapidly evolving pandemic, mRNA vaccines will help us to remain a step ahead of new pathogen variants.

Just as smart phones facilitated new apps that would never work on flip phones, mRNA vaccines are bringing new applications that move way beyond the COVID-19 virus. For example, scientists are now testing new types of mRNA vaccines that show promise against various cancers, chronic infections like HIV and autoimmune diseases like MS.

As a proud American, I don’t want my country to fall behind the rest of the world when it comes to vaccine technology. And make no mistake, the rest of the world will move forward with or without us in the development of mRNA vaccines.

Let’s not squander the future by losing our faith in mRNA vaccine technology.

Views expressed in this column are the author’s own and not necessarily those of ������Ƶ.

Immigrants are the willing guests of the “host” country, unlike the unwilling guests of Hamas, their threatening hosts. But all are connected to the rich and complicated notion of hospitality, something I’m concentrating on right now as I prepare to teach (in translation!) Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey to my undergraduate students this fall. 

The hospitality theme recurs in the Odyssey, where Greek hero Odysseus, returning to Ithaca after the Trojan war, becomes the guest of many island hosts on his journey: some more kind and honorable than others. 

Circe’s seductive charms pall, along with her party trick of turning Odysseus’s crew into pigs, as do beautiful but clinging Calypso’s. Odysseus the guest becomes a pampered prisoner who must escape. Cyclops chief Polyphemus punishes Odysseus’s bad-guest qualities by eating several of his crew; the fleeing survivors blind the giant’s single eye. Top of the nice-host charts is King Alcinous, who wines, dines and welcomes Odysseus to his court without even asking his name.

But even Alcinous has an ulterior motive: might Odysseus be a good catch for a marriageable daughter? Pure, disinterested, unconditional hospitality is a rare thing. Hosts usually want something from their guests.

It’s in the last book of the Iliad where hospitality is really tested. The stakes are high for both guest and host. Aged and frail Priam, King of Troy, visits famously angry and volatile Greek chieftain Achilles during the Troy v. Greece war. Priam seeks the return of his son Hector’s body, slain in battle by Achilles. Crossing the Greek’s threshold, Priam occupies the role of reluctant guest, and supplicant. 

Scary host Achilles gives him a tasty dinner (from a “gleaming sheep”) and agrees to return Hector’s body for funeral rituals, along with a 12-day truce to accommodate them.

Priam has skillfully encouraged Achilles to identify with an aged father’s grief for his son by reminding him of his own old father, alone and unprotected, back in Greece. But Achilles, deeply moved by sympathetic (and guilty) sorrow, warns Priam: I might not stay calm. Don’t push your luck. 

Hermes, Priam’s divine guide, agrees, waking Priam from his guest-room bed and hastening his departure back to the Trojan camp, with the returned hostage, the dead Prince Hector.

In this episode, we see the host and guest as “near enemies,” with the guest as both threat to the host’s emotional stability and a near-victim of his violent nature. This ambiguity is, as French critic and philosopher Jacques Derrida argued, the paradoxical heart of hospitality: calling it “hostipitality,” Derrida argues that hosts need guests to dispense hospitality and to be benefactors.

The guests thus look more like givers, not takers. They give the host the capacity to be generous, turning the tables of the hospitable encounter. Priam enables Achilles to be magnanimous.

What kinds of hosts are we, in the United States? Our national hospitality is conditional: we are not open-handed King Alcinous, and we definitely want to know the immigrant’s identity, to say nothing of every detail about his background.

And once the migrant is here, many conditions apply, as recent ICE arrests demonstrate. Migrants must be “good guests,” which apparently now means, like Priam, knowing when to leave. 

Perhaps as Americans, we could be better hosts, realizing that our relationships with migrants are reciprocal: giving and receiving, benefactor and beneficiary, are reversible processes and roles. Guest-migrants give us the opportunity to be our best selves, generous and forgiving.

Right now, the Achilles-Priam episode is almost too meaningful, with its added poignancy about the return of the body of the dead enemy. In Gaza, Hamas fighters cling to their unwilling guests, dead and perhaps alive. In the earlier days of the war, a truce allowed the return and release of some. Now, Achilles’s gift of a twelve-day truce looks pretty generous.

Which Priam-like negotiator might be able to get a similar deal from the Palestinian fighters?  Would they sit down to dinner? Would Hermes the messenger god be available as a guide and protector in enemy territory?

Immigrants and hostages: they play their parts in the drama of hospitality, which is as old as humanity itself and as fragile and dangerous as ever. But the good host and the good guest have the opportunity to achieve great things.

We can welcome our migrants with generosity and enlightened self-interest; and the wretched “guests” of Hamas can go home to their sorrowing fathers, after both sides have shared their grief and mutual sorrow.

Views expressed in this column are the author’s own and not necessarily those of ������Ƶ.

Afraid of my country – or just of my government?
By Rosemary Haskell

Former American slave Harriet Jacobs, in her 1861 book “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” remarks: “It is a sad feeling to be afraid of one’s native country.” Jacobs is, with Frederick Douglass, one of the 19th century’s great voices of slave autobiography.

This powerfully shocking statement from a once-owned human being at least makes historical sense. Jacobs had good reason to fear her country and its violent hostility. But surely, in 2025, I myself shouldn’t have that “sad feeling”?

Yet only weeks into the second Trump administration, I wonder: am I, in fact, now afraid of my country? Are others in this great country also afraid?

I think many of us do now live in fear – if not of our country, then of our own elected government. We ask: What will President Trump’s administration do tomorrow? What swathe of American life will next fall to Grim Reaper Musk’s scythe?

Let’s start with the home front. We have reason to be afraid because the Trump administration is:

• Arbitrarily firing employees of federal agencies
• Ransacking or closing federal agencies, with consequent damage to their services
• Arresting and deporting non-citizens without due process
• Defying court rulings
• Damaging economic prosperity with a raft of tariffs
• Threatening millions with Medicaid cuts; cutting USDA food-and-farm aid to schools and the poor
• Annexing Columbia University’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies to monitor and correct its curriculum
• Denying the legitimacy of transgender people’s identities
• Rejecting the notion that we should aim for a society that includes all on an equal footing

In foreign affairs too we have reason to fear what our country is doing. The Trump administration is:

• Carelessly sharing war plans with a surprisingly-invited journalist
• Insulting and humiliating allies, such as Ukraine’s President Zelensky and Canada and its leaders
• Casually scorning European nations
• Parroting the Kremlin’s world view and lying about who started the war in Ukraine
• Continuing Joe Biden’s policy of arming and supporting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s murderous regime
• Gossiping foolishly about annexing Greenland

The United States’s valuable “soft” global power is also waning, with the evisceration of the USAID agency and the closing of Voice of America. Worldwide suffering – physical and mental – has increased since January 20, 2025.

Overall, I would say that President Trump’s policies have destabilized not only the material conditions of the electorate, but also its collective peace of mind.

As a naturalized American citizen, I sympathize with the anxiety provoked in the minds of all migrants, legal and illegal. If the Columbia University student with a permanent resident’s Green Card can be scooped up for participating in a campus demonstration and detained in a distant jail without the protections the law provides for him, then “migrant fear” must be widespread indeed. When masked government agents snatch a woman with a student visa from a city street and sweep – without due process – alleged Venezuelan gang members into an El Salvador dungeon when the court had declared a stop, civil liberties are indeed threatened. Freedom of speech is at risk, too, when joining an anti-war protest is grounds for arrest.

So, yes, I fear my government. And, like Harriet Jacobs, I know what a sad thing that is.

I am sad to realize that the people who should be looking out for the welfare and wellbeing of those they were elected to serve are instead – at least on the surface – enjoying a destructive campaign that will damage the confidence of millions and practically affect the prosperity and social harmony of millions more. Many wait for the unemployment axe to fall: all of us probably know someone – or two – whose livelihoods have succumbed, directly or indirectly, to Doge Musk’s passion for dramatic reductions in federal wage bills.

The actual dollar value of those reductions, and their cost, in services desperately needed by so many here and abroad, have yet to be calculated. The butcher’s bill hasn’t arrived yet.

These fears accumulate on the debit side of the ledger. But I don’t fear the country as a whole. I have faith in the humanity, kindness and practical good sense of Americans and believe that all of us will realize, sooner or later, that President Trump’s blizzard of executive orders and ear-twitching foreign policy statements, and unelected Musk’s passion for power, can only mean trouble for most of the population – and for our friends around the world.

In November 2026, voters will render a mid-term judgement. By that time, I hope that President Trump and his administration will themselves have realized that a hostile government, at war with its own people, cannot stand.

Rosemary Haskell is a professor of English at ������Ƶ. She can be reached at haskell@elon.edu.

Text-generating artificial intelligence devices such as ChatGPT send shivers down many spines, particularly the sensitive vertebrae of writing and literature instructors.

“Write a paper about Hamlet’s Oedipus complex,” I ask ChatGPT and lo, there is an essay… in some shape or form. The optimist in me says, well, a student will need to edit and add to and check sources for that text, and probably extend it. In fact, by the end of the process, he will actually have some understanding of the topic and of the play.

But will the student actually have to read Shakespeare’s drama? Will he or she actually have to struggle to sift the play’s components, to shape a focus and to develop the tiny germs of their own ideas? The answer appears to be “No.” The student, or anyone, won’t have to do any of those things.

How much does the absence of such intellectual activity matter? As often happens, we can ask George Orwell to sharpen our thinking. His 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” denounces contemporary English because it is stuffed with “convenient” off-the-rack phrases that writers reach for without thought and then “tack together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.” No tough brainwork is needed. We may become like the “dummy” speaker who, by “letting ready-made phrases come crowding in” and regurgitating them “has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine.”

But why did Orwell fear this semi-automatic method of merely producing text instead of composing a work themselves? He saw it as the abdication of thought leading to the concealment of meaning — from others but, more sinisterly, even from writers and speakers themselves. Using other people’s words and phrases — the ones already doing the rounds — eliminates the hard work of composition. Furthermore, Orwell said this thought-lite writing promotes political “orthodoxy” – the acceptance of the status quo.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT accesses a word hoard that’s “already out there.” To echo Orwell, I wonder if this huge warehouse of verbal garments that are off-the-rack rather than bespoke will limit our thought. To use another metaphor, will AI’s script keep us treading water rather than swimming forward to new thoughts, new ideas, which are formed partly through our idiosyncratic and probably less correct ways of expressing them?

Orwell was gearing up in his 1946 essay for the later horrors of his novel “1984,” where totalitarian Big Brother quashes rebellious thought by promoting the official language of Newspeak. That language drastically reduced the store of words and so, the novel argues, reduced the range of thought, especially politically unorthodox thought.

In my darker moments, I cannot help but consider the text-generating functions of Chat GPT as Orwellian agents of conformity by channeling the internet world into my brain. Of course, such linguistic Pavlovianism has been occurring for years: text prediction in my email writes things before I do. I’m becoming more compliant: why not let Bill Gates write my emails for me? His Microsoft brain saves me trouble. I think less.

As a teacher of undergraduate writing and literature, I feel as though I am on the leading edge of this newish text-generating territory. Students, and perhaps all of us, have always found ways to avoid reading assigned texts. Now that late-adolescent “don’t want to do my homework” temptation has been made much easier to succumb to.

Still, I try to put the AI robo-writer in perspective. After all, the internet didn’t destroy reading, writing and thinking but opened up a huge vista of more easily accessible information. To start my research, I no longer have to trek to a library, thumb through drawers full of moldering index cards, heave giant indexes off shelves and laboriously transcribe authors, titles, dates. The great electronic machine-brain can do all of these things for me. “When I was your age, I actually had to get up out of my chair and walk uphill both ways to the library,” was a common refrain. I don’t even bother to say that anymore, so distant are those analogue days.

And yet, if ChatGPT makes not reading “Hamlet” or Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” the default option, if it deprives us and our descendants of the intoxicating and painful pleasures of creating from scratch our own idiosyncratic and imperfect paragraphs, I won’t be able to forgive it.

—

Views expressed in this column are the author’s own and not necessarily those of ������Ƶ.

Antisemitism is widely understood as a form of racism, a product of sweeping negative generalizations about Jews.

The defines it as “discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish).” That definition is recommended by hundreds of Holocaust Studies, Jewish Studies and Middle East Studies professors throughout the world, including North Carolina scholars like me.

For fervent defenders of the State of Israel such a definition is not good enough. They’ve found their preferred framework in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s , which encourages labeling strong critiques of Israel as antisemitic.

North Carolina’s SHALOM ACT — this week and sent to Gov. Roy Cooper for his signature — adopts the IHRA framework. Cooper must veto this bill.

The enshrines a controversial definition of antisemitism into state law.

The IHRA framework is an effective tool for stifling criticism of Israel because its list of examples of antisemitism includes items such as “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” These examples are routinely used to label those who accuse Israel of apartheid or genocide as antisemitic — and silence them.

Those supporting this bill claim they are supporting Jews in North Carolina. But Jews in North Carolina, like Jews elsewhere in the country, are sharply divided over how to define antisemitism. While Israel-focused groups affiliated with the Jewish Federations of North America have backed the SHALOM Act, more liberal Jewish organizations such as Carolina Jews for Justice have strongly opposed it.

The bill is grounded in a misguided generalization about Jews, assuming that support for Israel is inherent to being Jewish. But harsh criticism of Israel is widespread among Jews.

A found that a quarter of American Jews believe that “Israel is an apartheid state,” while only 31% of Jews believe such a claim to be antisemitic. The SHALOM Act would have the perverse effect of encouraging state officials to label significant portions of our Jewish community as antisemitic, and such labeling will have limited support from our community.

The primary sponsor of the SHALOM Act, House Speaker Tim Moore, has claimed that he is seeking to protect Jewish college students. But as should be clear to anyone who has observed college campuses this year, many Jewish students are harsh critics of Israel. The 2021 survey found that 38% of Jews under 40 view Israel as an apartheid state, and such views appear even more common among today’s students.

Under Moore’s legislation, many of my Jewish students would readily be labeled antisemitic by the state of North Carolina. They typically see their critiques of Israel as expressions of their Jewish identities. It is unacceptable for the state of North Carolina to decide their expressions of Jewishness are out of bounds.

Strikingly, many advocates of the Shalom Act oppose applying these same sorts of standards to the protection of other ethnic groups. Many of them oppose Palestinian self-determination but do not believe that they are therefore guilty of anti-Palestinian racism, nor do they think it is a sign of bigotry to deny self-determination to thousands of other groups that do not have states of their own.

Why embrace a different standard when defining antisemitism? Better public policy would use the same sorts of standards to define racism and prejudice against Jews that are used to define racism and prejudice against other groups.

Those of us who teach about these issues on college campuses are dedicated to supporting all students, including our Jewish, Muslim, Israeli and Palestinian students, by confronting those who show racism and prejudice towards them. We’re also dedicated to defending them when they are accused of antisemitism merely because of their political views.

If Cooper wishes to support our diverse students, and the diversity of Jews in North Carolina, he must veto this bill.

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Views expressed in this column are the author’s own and not necessarily those of ������Ƶ.

Do your eyes ever roll when politicians on either side of the political aisle mention the topic of climate change? Many Democrats talk about climate change as if the world were about to end. Many Republicans either downplay its importance or ignore climate change altogether. A polarized media climate that eagerly blames “those guys” for “our” problems just adds fuel to the fire.

I might be a scientist, but this column focuses instead on the much messier topic of climate politics. If you want scientific proof that human-caused climate change is real and relevant, find a good source that strips out the politics – say a high school science textbook or a NASA website.

By nature, I am an optimist, but this will be a pessimistic column. U.S. politics just does not inspire much optimism these days. If my column is successful, however, I will frustrate and perhaps enlighten citizens across the political spectrum.

My main gripe with many Democrats is how they talk about climate change. Loaded terms like ‘crisis’ and ‘existential threat’ evoke an immediacy and a feeling of fear that are not helpful when thinking about climatesolutions. The 9/11 terrorist attacks and the onset of the 2008 housing crisis were crises. Climate change is a much different kind of problem. Fear might motivate quick action, but too often it leads to poor decision-making. (Remember the poor decisions our country made in Iraq following the 9/11 attacks?)

My main gripe with many Republicans is when they downplay or ignore the importance of climate change. Just as we need to balance the ballooning federal budget, we also need to balance the buildup of carbon in the Earth’s atmosphere. Ignoring an important problem does not make it go away. And just like the debt, delaying solutions only makes the solutions more expensive.

Here are some suggestions for how to have more productive political conversations about climate change:

Democrats: Please don’t treat ‘climate denial’ as synonymous with the Republican Party. If you listen carefully to Republican politicians and conservative media like Fox News, you will hear climate denial only rarely. My hunch is that most conservatives would be willing to entertain climate solutions that align with their values.

Republicans: Please don’t treat wacko climate solutions as synonymous with the Democratic Party. If you listen carefully to Democratic politicians and liberal media like NPR, you will rarely hear support for bizarre ‘solutions’ such as munching on insects or doubling federal spending to cover a Green New Deal. My hunch is that most liberals understand decarbonizing our economy must be balanced with other important needs, such as keeping energy affordable and preserving financial autonomy for ordinary citizens.

Democrats: Please don’t marginalize conservatives when talking about climate solutions. Privileging only climate solutions founded on liberal values is not an inclusive strategy. Plans to assist ‘climate refugees’ or to phase out gas-powered cars might inspire liberals, but they will not motivate conservatives. We instead need climate solutions that work across the political spectrum. Climate change is too important, and it is naïve to pretend our country’s stubbornly-even partisan split will magically disappear.

Republicans: Please don’t ignore climate change. To ensure a stable and prosperous country for your kids and grandkids, climate change must be one of many issues you care about. The best societal outcomes will be achieved only if the table of political solutions includes climate solutions that align with conservative goals like minimizing government spending and preserving a vibrant and innovative private sector.

Regardless of who wins this year’s elections, climate politics will still need resolution. Hoping “our side” will defeat and vanquish the “other side” permanently is just wishful thinking and counterproductive.

More realistically, we must grit our teeth, and expect political tradeoffs, regardless of how, or whether, we respond to climate change. Speaking beyond our political silo takes courage, but it is exactly the approach that will generate lasting climate solutions. Conservatives and liberals already share the same climate. We might as well start sharing political space for climate solutions.

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Views expressed in this column are the author’s own and not necessarily those of ������Ƶ.

I sometimes tell my first-year undergraduate writers that I will order T-shirts or possibly hats emblazoned with the slogan “Death to the Word ‘Issue,’” perhaps in fiery red letters. Occasionally, I write this exhortation in the margins of their papers.

What’s wrong with this very common word? Well, actually, that’s the problem: it is all too common. The word crawls kudzu-like over our sentences, invading our thoughts and speech.

“She has issues,” we used to joke, about a difficult friend. But now, everyone and everything and every situation has or is an “issue.” Climate change issues, along with mental health issues, pandemic issues, inflation issues, security issues, DEI issues: they’re everywhere.

Here, the word appears to mean “problem, difficulty,” both more usefully specific. But issue can also mean “topic, feature,” or even “I disagree,” as in “I take issue with that statement.”

Another dictionary definition of “issue,” almost defunct now is “outcome” or “result.” “What’s the issue?” rather than meaning “What’s the topic, or what’s the problem?” might mean: “What’s the outcome?”

Rivers, we note, issue into the sea. And to die “without issue” is to die without the offspring that might have been “issued into” the world. Dictionaries list other meanings but “problem” or just “topic” are now ubiquitous.

Words with multiple meanings like this one may become sources and drivers of vagueness and confusion, which may be lazy, unintentional or deliberate. What, for example, does it mean to say the following?:

“I have anxiety issues.”
“My cat has litter-box issues.”
“The issue of human rights is on life-support.”
“Climate issues are affecting hurricanes.”

We can write and speak with more useful specificity.

“I suffer from anxiety.”
“My cat refuses to use a litter box.”
“Human rights are endangered.”
“Warmer oceans may affect hurricane formation.”

People wearing my hats and T-shirts will remember that Newspeak, the totalitarian language in George Orwell’s 1949 novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” exerted its thought-crushing power by limiting word choice. Fewer words had to cover a greater range of meanings. Nuance is lost, so that –for example—something can be either “good” or “ungood,” but the potentially rebellious “bad” has been suppressed, along with other evaluative nuances. Relying on the Sapir-Whorf linguistic theory, the novel’s rulers (Big Brother and his colleagues) hope Newspeak’s limited vocabulary will prevent the formation of subversive thoughts by depriving people of the words to express or encapsulate them.

Orwell was not a professional linguist, but like others before him, he saw danger in careless word choice and in the lazy adoption of all-too-familiar terms. His 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” satirizes then-popular buzzwords and phrases like today’s “issue.” Orwell argues that the automatic deployment of over-used language has serious political consequences. If we write mechanically, snapping these tired words and phrases into place “like the sections of a pre-fabricated hen-house,” he says we will become mere spouters of ready-made political orthodoxies, the scripts of the status quo.

“Issue” on its own isn’t likely to be a totalitarian weapon, I have to admit. But there are dangers in its multifoliate richness, which indicates too many meanings, and in its off-the-shelf easy availability, which makes it a meaning-free “filler” word. Both qualities excuse us from the hard work of finding more nuanced and specific expressions and of recognizing those occasions when we simply don’t need a word. When spread through our writing and speech, such features threaten incisive thought and sharp analysis.

In Orwell’s 1945 novel “Animal Farm,” the dominant pigs quickly manipulate the meaning of “equal” to bamboozle the less literate animals. “All animals are equal” from Animal Farm’s founding revolutionary charter, now has a rider: “But some are more equal than others.” One word now has two opposing meanings.

With porcine guile or with mere acquiescent laziness, we enable over-used and multi-meaning words to impede the clear thought we need in a modern democracy, where we must understand the nuances of public discourse. The campaigns of Joe Biden and Donald Trump will display both the careless and the duplicitous use of language in acre-sized quantities. “Issues” of all kinds will run riot through election texts, as will promises to make America great again, to provide well-paying jobs, to tackle gun violence, to preserve individual rights and freedoms of choice, to solve the immigration crisis and to support our allies. Each of these promises is corrupted by the question-begging quality also deplored in Orwell’s “Politics” essay: without further definition, discussion and evidence, they mean everything and nothing.

“We will address health care issues.” Now there’s a campaign promise for the ages. We should all take issue with it so that we’re not too surprised by the issue of the general election in November.

I’ll get those T-shirts printed now.

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Views expressed in this column are the author’s own and not necessarily those of ������Ƶ.