Author: Steve

  • Summer Potential

    The summer always starts with this overwhelming, absolute feeling of potential, like there’s just tons of open space ready for development. And so much less of it is needed for recovery as it used to be, when I was doing debate full time and when I was teaching high school all those years ago. So…

    Read More

    //

  • Being Wary of Debate Champions, Championships, and Debaters

    Just read the Financial Times piece “What the Rise of the Debating Champion Tells us about the World” Sadly, it’s super locked down and paywalled, and not even my university can get me a good link to it. So if you click that link be warned – that’s all you are going to get unless…

    Read More

    //

  • Two Rhetorical Definitions of Protest

    I know that I make a lot of promises on this blog for multi-part series of things, and I’ve left two of them incomplete, but today I have been trying to work through the definition question of what a protest is. Since I’m a rhetorician, my definitions start with two very basic explorations around the…

    Read More

    //

  • Is This the Time for Persuasion?

    One of the commitments that I have that’s hard for me to shake is the idea that everyone can change their mind given the right amount of time, the right place, and the right conversation with the right person. There are so many factors involved here that it might be easier to just say, “It…

    Read More

    //

  • What Will Broadway Theater Look Like after the Quarantine?

    I think that many media companies will not be able to resist the symbolic value of owning a Broadway theater. Get ready for the Netflix theater, the Amazon theater, the Epic Games theater, the Dreamworks theater, and on and on. All will run live theater shows like Fortnite and Trolls World Tour as sort of…

    Read More

    //

  • Public Speaking Transformed, Part 1

    Always a bit of whiplash to read the brilliant work in composition studies. I really shouldn’t do it; it depresses me when I compare it to the seething vista of nonsense that counts as pedagogy in speech communication. There’s nothing but discussions of how to grade, how annoyed they are at students, and how teaching…

    Read More

    //

  • Feeling Pretty Useless Today

    Feeling kinda useless right now. Wish I was a bit more helpful or had some means to be helpful. I am still a firm believer that formal education is one of our finest ways to avoid the state of affairs we find ourselves in. This education is unfairly constructed, serves the interests of established power,…

    Read More

    //

  • Waiting on a Game to Download

    Tried to sing this title to the tune of “Waiting for a Star to Fall,” but no luck. It appears now that I won’t have access to play the game until 4AM tomorrow, so no dice tonight.  Been writing a lot, but not here, so here’s a post that contains several threads, kind of like…

    Read More

    //

  • Principles of Public Speaking

    Finished with my grade submission, so I’ve been doing some reading and watching these amazing bird feeder videos. They are so great, and I get to see a lot of birds I wouldn’t normally see. I don’t have a yard, or really any good scenery here in my New York City apartment, so this is…

    Read More

    //

  • Rhetorical Insights for the Public

    Joined a friend’s podcast and did all the things I know shouldn’t be done when you are giving a talk in an online format, but it was still a pretty good time. Used it as an excuse to put off all the actual work I need to be doing, yet again. Good times.  The podcast…

    Read More

    //