Here we go again. Devin Faraci is one of my favorite film writers. He really has a wonderful sensibility, a kind of grumpy enthusiasm for movies and tons of experience that really shows up in his writing. In a world of film criticism where anybody with a broadband account can (and probably has) given you […]
Continue reading →“I haven’t read any superhero comics since I finished with Watchmen. I hate superheroes. I think they’re abominations. They don’t mean what they used to mean. They were originally in the hands of writers who would actively expand the imagination of their nine- to 13-year-old audience. That was completely what they were meant to do and they were doing it […]
Continue reading →Salon has been kind enough to print (and pay me for) an essay I’ve written about neoconservatism in the post-Bush world. Please read it if you’re inclined.
Continue reading →Intellectual culture, like most social phenomena, is subject to pendulum swings, to backlashes and overcorrections. Right now, I think we’re witnessing a pretty wild back and forth about statistical reasoning, under the (not entirely helpful) frame of Big Data. I recently expressed some reservations about how statistical significance testing can lead us astray, but I […]
Continue reading →This is me, studying from my rapidly approaching language exam. As I successfully (if not painlessly) passed my prospectus defense a couple weeks ago, it’s the last hurdle between me and my dissertation. Should I successfully complete the exam (two hours, 250 words, a text I won’t know about in advance), I will officially have […]
Continue reading →I should probably know enough to just leave it alone at this point. But look: I sometimes get the impression, from the emails that I get – which, let me say, I truly cherish – that what some (only some) people who disagree with me want is more acknowledgement that I might be wrong. Well, […]
Continue reading →Michelle Goldberg writes about the #CancelColbert fiasco and, naturally, uses it as an excuse to go after radicals, and does so, naturally, at The Nation, America’s preeminent source of bloodless, fretting progressivism. She blames the radical left for the rise of censoriousness and the focus on affective politics in the broadly defined left. It’s a classic liberal […]
Continue reading →Via Yasmin Nair, this piece on Quartz lends credence to a phenomenon I myself have observed very often: people who attack the value of a college degree a) all went to college themselves and b) don’t extend that thinking to their children. Now I happen to think that a healthy economy and social system will […]
Continue reading →I don’t want to bore you by adding too much to the #CancelColbert pile. I just want to ask this question: do intentions matter, when it comes to political speech? I ask because it seems like the current conventional wisdom on the question is schizophrenic. Many people have been arguing that intentions don’t matter, that […]
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