One could say that the academy hates thinking. Thinking is a messy process of mulling over concepts, entertaining notions, both rejecting and accepting ideas, and still exceeds all these processes. Thinking rarely comes easily to us, but rather comes unexpectedly, and perhaps at inopportune times. Academia prefers when ideas and arguments are presented neatly. Innovative ideas are welcomed into the light of day only after peer review or other side constraints that confirm the

“Are you in the wrong bathroom?” This is a question I often get when I “androgynously” venture into a public women’s restroom—whether it is spoken aloud (as it was to me just this morning at the campus gym) or implied by an accusatory stare. What are people thinking when they ask this question? Perhaps the speaker assumes I am an adult who can neither read the sign that says “women” nor interpret the person-with-a-dress icon. Perhaps. But, frankly, I am somewhat skeptical of

I’ll wrap up my semester-long look at nostalgia with some insights on Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” that occurred to me while reading Marcos Piasan Natali’s “History and the Politics of Nostalgia.” In this later essay, Natali criticizes the prevailing notion in 19th- and 20th-century thought that nostalgia makes for both “bad politics” and “bad history” (13, 18). On the “bad politics” front, we have Marx, whose belief in stages of history necessarily leading to a sociali

A watershed is a geographic feature that divides water into different systems. A watershed also represents the tributaries and gathering ground for a central body of water. As graduate students at the University of Nebraska, we acknowledge the significance of watersheds to the agricultural industry as well as the ecology of the Great Plains region. However and perhaps most popularly, a watershed is known to be a crucial event or occurrence recognized as causing a turning poin