Just back from another National Communication Association convention, and as usual I have the same reactions: Great to see all of my friends and colleagues from around the country. I regret that I have not spent every waking moment of my life before the conference reading books. My work is more influential than I thought…

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I was asked to give a talk at the University of Chicago this afternoon to some MBA students about the Presidential debates.  The lecture was done via WebEx, and this is the audio from my audio recorder that I sat down next to the laptop. You can’t really hear their end very well, but to…

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Rhetoric outlived ancient Athens, Ancient Greece as a whole. Rhetoric outlived Imperial China, Maoism, and is at the table as China develops as a global economic power. Rhetoric outlived the Russian tsars. Rhetoric outlived the Russian Communists. It outlived the Soviet Union. It outlived Rome, as a republic, and an empire. It outlived the Holy Roman…

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Here’s my full analysis which was posted on the great ElectionDebates Website, but some had to be removed. This is the full version of what I wrote:  Presidential debate scholar Sydney Krause argued that Presidential debates are “joint press conferences.” This seems like an insult to those of us who think debate is an incredibly…

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The time has come as it does every few years where I must watch most everyone destroy and mock the thing I’ve spent most of my life trying to understand. Debate appears to most as a very simple operation of placing facts on a conveyor belt and turning it on. The facts then go down…

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There’s a nice moment in teaching, somewhere around May when the exams are nearly graded and the summer is before you where you start to think about the possibilities of next fall’s courses.  It’s a lovely time, but a dangerous one, at least it is for me. We have strict rules at our University, spurred…

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It’s hard to find a faultless conference. But the Tokyo Argumentation Conference might just be the best model of a conference that balances a critical and serious approach to teaching with respect and space for the consideration of research developments in the field.  The reason that this conference is one of my favorites is that…

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“Why do I go to conferences?” is the question on my mind right now, as it always is in the days leading up to a big conference trip. I’ve sort of (emphasis on “sort of”) gotten used to the dismissal of my papers and ideas as really weird, strange, or perhaps maybe not serious enough,…

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Just finished reading Ben Lerner’s short but good The Hatred of Poetry in which he attempts in great Burkean fashion to “create gain out of loss” by claiming poetry exists in order to show us the critical lack between Poetry, the abstract hope of transcendence and poems, those sometimes great and sometimes rancid attempts to get…

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Talking this morning with people from Student Affairs once again connected me to the classroom as a place, a topoi, a site of inquiry, and possibly the most occupied and least thought about space on campus for most people.  We suffer from an addiction to materiality. We turn all of our investigative power toward the…

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