ESSAY: Sounds of Silence

ESSAY: Sounds of Silence

By Tom Robotham For the last decade or so, I’ve been in the habit of turning on CNN first thing in the morning, and letting it run for hours until it was time head to campus for afternoon classes. Often, it was background chatter while I prepared lectures, graded...
ESSAY: Sounds of Silence

ESSAY: The Resilience of Hope

By Tom Robotham In the wake of the election, as I noted here last month, I felt a profound sense of despair—and it lingers still. But in recent weeks, it’s been counterbalanced by meditations on hope—how it “perches in the soul,” as Emily Dickinson put it, “and sings...
ESSAY: Sounds of Silence

ESSAY: Mourning in America

By Tom Robotham When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, I disagreed with many friends who thought there was no way he could win. The book I mentioned in my last essay—Amusing Ourselves to Death—kept coming to mind, and Trump personified author Neil Postman’s dark...

Degrading Our Public Discourse

By Tom Robotham Kamala Harris has been subjected to a lot attacks since she became the Democratic nominee for president: She’s a communist; she’s not really Black; she’s morally suspect because she never gave birth; she laughs too much.  They’re all so idiotic that...

Bodies in Motion

By Tom Robotham Over the years, I’ve written a lot about my love of music and the cultivation of that love, from the first piano lessons that my mother gave me at the age of 5 to my foray into the New York City jazz scene after college. Something few people know about...