by Jeff Maisey | Apr 18, 2019 | News & Views, Robotham
By Tom Robotham For the past year or so, my life has been marked by a series of unsettling disruptions. It all started last spring when my 15-year-old car, which I loved, finally bit the dust. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t that big a deal. But it turned...
by Jeff Maisey | Mar 15, 2019 | News & Views, Robotham
By Tom Robotham Recently an old friend shared on Facebook a link to a two-year-old article in The Staten Island Advance—a paper for which I used to work—about a New York City resident who was upset by a vocabulary question on his 11-year-old daughter’s homework...
by Jeff Maisey | Feb 20, 2019 | News, News & Views, Robotham
By Tom Robotham Two years ago, I delivered a talk at the Tidewater Community College Literary Festival called “Scenes from a White Boy’s Life,” in which I reflected on my lifelong efforts to understand “the problem of the color line,” as W.E.B Du Bois put it. I talked...
by Jeff Maisey | Dec 23, 2018 | News, News & Views, Robotham
When George H.W. Bush died, I watched with mixed feelings as pundits lionized him. I couldn’t help thinking about a book I’d read while W. was president: American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush, by Kevin Phillips, a...
by Jeff Maisey | Sep 25, 2018 | News, News & Views, Robotham
By Tom Robotham The other day in a class I teach at ODU called Music, Culture & Media, I asked the students if any of them had heard of Pete Seeger. “Is he related to Bob Seger?” one of them asked. I thought the anecdote was sufficiently amusing to share it on...
