The cowardly and unmanly decision of Tiger Woods to go back into therapy is yet another disturbing sign of America’s obsession with sex and its simultaneous inability to deal with a highly over-sexed but healthy man.           

Tiger&rsquo… Read full post »

As the nation marks the one-year anniversary of Barack Obama’s ascendance to the presidency, we will once again be subjected to endless discussion about the significance of the nation’s first non-white president.  For many African-Americans, this may be a time to again celebrate the/… Read full post »

I love kids. Honestly. For years I dreamed of adopting one, but my partner has no interest in being a parent and, truth be told, the happier I became with my own life the less I wanted a child. We have a lot of friends with children. In fact, most of… Read full post »

Today marks my first anniversary as an OS writer. I’d written and published one academic book, articles for Salon as well as editorials for several newspapers and magazines over the years. My writing life came to a halt when I was diagnosed with bipolar a few years back. Between the Lithium… Read full post »

Why Do Gay Men Like Bitchy Women, aka Divas? This is what my friend asked me a few weeks ago. He adores bitchy women and I can’t say I haven’t had my fair share of admiration for a few of them. He says the reason gay men like bitchy women is that… Read full post »

A friend of mine who is an atheist recently converted to Judaism--said she wanted to convert to the Jewish culture, appropriate the symbolic ethnicity of he Jews. Something about this is wrong, I told her. I thought about it and here are my thoughts. Your feedback is always welcome.

Given… Read full post »

So, I did not get Editor's Pick for my article: The British Monarchy Must Go!

But Lynne Sloan from KGO Radio San Francisco read it and loved it and I just finished a fifteen minuite radio show with them. I also received a request from  two online magazines to reprint it.… Read full post »

Recently, it seems that several of my straight friends have been having children. And they are having them in their forties. Hello, are they pulling a Sarah Palin or what? These are people who were philosophically, morally and aesthetically opposed to having children—all their lives. They had a… Read full post »

Students ask the most astutue questions, such that, sometimes I could either choke them or hug them. One of my students asked me, during office hours last week, what was the fundamental nature of a radical. I thought for a while and then offered him the following definition which I'll divide… Read full post »

Dr. J’s Daily Affirmations

45—48 are the twilight years.

You need to be well into the game at that point.

Do not give up. It is not right not to care.

Remember the ultimate phrase: We have one shot. It’s not a dress rehearsal.

Believe your own rap.

Take your ass off the mat.

Keep your eye… Read full post »

  This post is for all those who want to see what a hellacious letter to an irresponsible student looks like. I used to use the same template with minor variations for other students in the days after 9/11. Nowadays, I just ignore the students. But once in a while the ominous… Read full post »

Hey Guys:

Here I go begging again for technological help. I'm shameless. I'm writing a 300 page document in Word Vista and a dotted line keeps appearing at the bottom of the page--sometimes in the middle of a paragraph, like some unwanted page and paragraph breaker. I have tried everything and… Read full post »

I travel a lot. I’ve been in a loving commuting relationship for eleven years and so I’m on a plane at least twice each month flying between Chicago and New York. I go to Europe at least three or four times per year—once for vacation, two or three times to give… Read full post »

The worst job I ever had was as a Visa credit card collector at First Atlanta bank in Atlanta, Georgia. I’d been in America for only three weeks and had no banking experience, having worked as a journalist in Jamaica before leaving. But times were getting tough. I needed to save… Read full post »

So I’m playing with this little piece of walnut-looking growth on my leg—about twelve inches up from my ankle. It’s hard, crusty and black. It’s been something of a friend of late. I run my fingers over it through my trousers whenever I’m nervous. Something about its sma… Read full post »

America was born with a terrible birth defect. It covered broad swaths of its quirky body and took hundreds of years to begin correcting itself. That birth defect, of course, was slavery, the moral compromise made in this nation’s conception, and whose lasting influence has destroyed the lives… Read full post »

This Is A Satirical Romp by A Male Feminist.

When one looks out at the dismal panoply of male behavior regulating female behavior, the sight is not at all pretty. The macho swagger of the hyper-masculine male, innocent as it might be in its purely physical manifestation, often reflects an internal… Read full post »