Introducing Dr. Small Talk
I dream in paragraphs. Sometimes I get well-crafted sentence fragments instead, or qualifying clauses just awaiting their subject. It is usually around 4:30 am that I wake up with my thoughts, though I try to coax myself back to sleep (sleep is precious, I need a lot of it, and I have been perennially tired since having kids). But sometimes I give up and pull on my slippers, open my laptop and try to catch the torrent of words.
I need to write the way my children need to run around outside – to rid myself of pent-up energy before I burst. I’ve heard other writers describe this state as well, when the words are all queuing up in your brain. Some people smoke or drink or exercise to process the dismal flow of events around them. I write my way through, if never quite out. I offer these paragraphs of feeble justification for the sin of introducing yet another newsletter into the world.
I am naming this newsletter after my short-lived late blog, Dr. Small Talk, which is meant to be a joke because I am constitutionally incapable of it. This incapacity drives my mother insane, because she is conflict adverse and all the topics I’m drawn to tend to generate it. She once interrupted a lively debate about US foreign policy toward Iran by positioning herself at the head of the table and pounding on it repeatedly until silence fell. “At dinner,” she proclaimed, “we do small talk, nice talk, we talk about nice things like the weather. Small talk.” Unfortunately for my dear mother not even the weather is a bastion of safety these days. But perhaps I can be a better dinner companion if I have a separate outlet for my thoughts about history, politics, religion, violence, and everything else she has banned from the dining table.
This, dear reader, is what to expect: I’m going to aim for something of substance twice a month. I am a historian by training and a teacher by trade, and this newsletter will reflect that. I am more comfortable with analyzing sources than offering pure punditry, and will usually bring a bit of text to unpack. This could be an archival document, a few paragraphs of scholarly work, or an advertisement. Though I have a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies, I am generalist at heart — drawn to far too many topics for a traditional academic career built upon hyper-specialization. You can expect to see all of them pop up at some time: contemporary politics, history, religion, philosophy, literature, and even the occasional film or television show.
As for the biographical bits, I am a writer and educator based in Oxford. I completed my PhD in 2014 and spent the next eight years helping to build Brooklyn Institute for Social Research into what it is today. In 2022, I stepped away from my director role to focus on research and writing, though I still teach for BISR. I’m currently a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College working on a book about risk, and the lead organizer of Risk Reconsidered, an interdisciplinary working group that brings together scholars working in the humanities, natural and social sciences to explore risk as a form of social and political rationality.
My prior books include a study of the relationship between religion, education, and mass politics in Palestine, and an examination of jihad as a contemporary political and social phenomenon. My essays (all small talk) have appeared in The New Republic, Mother Jones, The Washington Post, Jewish Currents, New Statesman, Foreign Policy, n+1, and Aeon among other outlets. Time permitting (HAHAHA), I’m also writing a book about the relationship between state power and public virtue, based on my work on the New Right.
If you detect a whiff of Great Plains progressivism in my work, that’s because I was born and raised in Chamberlain, SD, where I had my first writing job at the local paper. Thanks to Deb, if you ever read this. And thanks to you all for being here!
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