shakespeerreview.bsky.social
@shakespeerreview.bsky.social
I love my family, our dogs, teaching, playing pickup soccer, Shakespeare, really good poems, and people willing to think and care.

https://english.ucla.edu/people-faculty/watson-robert-n/
My review of a controversial new book about US politics over the past 5 years is now up on the Los Angeles Review of Books site. Please have a look at:
lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-...
The Goldilocks of Bothsidesism | Los Angeles Review of Books
Robert N. Watson investigates Thomas Chatterton Williams’s “Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse.”
lareviewofbooks.org
September 22, 2025 at 9:46 PM
The guy whose Trump University went bankrupt and owed its students $25 million for defrauding them thinks he should be micro-managing our country’s top-ranked public university (UCLA) and the world’s top-ranked university (Harvard) – and destroying them (and their life-saving research) if resisted.
September 22, 2025 at 4:38 PM
But, NY Times headline writer notwithstanding, these "stops" (which are much more than stops) are precisely NOT "indiscriminate." They are targeted racial discrimination!

(Attn. NYTimesPitchbot!)
September 8, 2025 at 11:28 PM
Aren’t these the same "conservative" judges who made it illegal for college admissions to consider an applicant’s race, despite the fact that Black/Latino/Native Am applicants are disproportionately likely to have endured burdens and obstacles that the average white applicant wouldn’t have endured?
September 8, 2025 at 10:19 PM
That 2-second glimpse of Trump grimacing sourly at the moment Carlos Alcaraz won the US Open reminded me of Hitler seeing Jesse Owens dominate the Olympics. I guess Trump was rooting for a big very white Sinner to beat a guy with one of those, you know, drug-smuggler names.
September 8, 2025 at 5:12 PM
My piece on why people should fire their AI ghostwriters is up on Slate at slate.com/life/2025/06...
We’re Finding Out More About What Using A.I. for Writing Does to Your Thinking. The Timing Couldn’t Be Worse.
Writers, teachers, and anti-fascists can tell you: Originality is the point.
slate.com
July 3, 2025 at 11:06 PM
From my 2019 book: "The strong tradition of academic freedom in the United States, which confers far greater liberty from government control than in most other countries, seems to have made US universities by far the best in the world." At least 3/4 of the top unis by most surveys. Now canceled.
April 2, 2025 at 6:47 PM
Also Team Trump: If you educators don’t do EVERYTHING to protect a historically oppressed race (such as Jewish Americans), including punishing anybody who laments the agony in Gaza, we will destroy you. You have an obvious obligation to teach the right attitude on such politically charged stuff! 2/2
March 13, 2025 at 12:45 AM
Trump: If you educators try to do ANYTHING to protect a historically oppressed race (such as Black Americans), or even teach their history, we'll destroy you financially and any other way we can! How dare you teach people some supposedly right attitude on such politically charged stuff! Yet..

1/2
March 13, 2025 at 12:45 AM
Historical perspective on the attack on our universities (from my 2019 book, "Cultural Evolution and its Discontents"):
February 14, 2025 at 3:47 PM
Loving the climate under these skies, and my dogs agree!
November 14, 2024 at 2:44 AM