What is the Name of Our Desire?

Most everyone in my part of the world can feel, at some level, that we’re stuck. The culture, the institutions, the ideas, the leaders – almost everything is moving like a dream of being chased, dragged to slowness by the kudzu of practical constraint: “concerned” colleagues, bureaucratic frustrations, ambient trepidation, a crippling lack of new ideas, and hard matters of fact about where our funding actually comes from . . . We must be realistic, we realize, and realistically, there’s not that much we can actually do.