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Education & Culture

A Critical Review

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Interviews

Freed from Trying to Explain the World

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I also feel freed a bit from trying to explain the world—to others and to myself. Especially to offer guidance on how to think, on what is true and what is illusory. “Just telling a story, mate. Nothing serious.” (Maybe that’s a factor in why I created a perpetually confused narrator who claims to have no answers to anything.)

I’ve gone so far as to say, “I got tired of telling people what to think, so now I’m just telling a few tales.” To which more than one reader has responded, “Oh, you’re still telling people what to think.”

Busted, I guess I’d have to say.

Immigration—Where to Start?

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Today’s news features several stories bearing on immigration to the US, international migration, and refugees around the world. How would you describe the present moment? Is there something distinctive about this juncture in time—an immigration crisis—or is that an exaggeration? How should we be responding?

Going Where La Salle Went

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The last voyageurs were a group of recently graduated high school students, five high school teachers, a priest, and a playwright who traveled 3,300 miles over a period of eight months in 1976, trying their hardest to re-create the lifestyles of 17th-century French explorers . . . . The original voyageurs were the riverine version of frontiersmen. They crisscrossed North America in birchbark canoes, mostly transporting furs but also sometimes naturalists, physicians, Jesuit missionaries, and more. The “last voyageurs” weren’t transporting furs, but knowledge.

Who Owns the Past?

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A conversation with Chip Colwell, the senior curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and author of Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Culture, just published by the University of Chicago Press.