geeks and grievance
The New York Times asked me to write a little for them about geek culture and grievance. You can check it out here.
Continue reading →Month: September 2014
a plurality of failing students are white
The great education journalist Dana Goldstein made this point some years back, but I can’t find the piece, and it bears rewriting: while a greater percentage of black and Hispanic students fail to meet educational performance standards in this country than their white counterparts, due to the demographics of the United States, a plurality of […]
Continue reading →a little news
I’m excited to say that I’ve been invited to join the team at Kairos, an online peer-reviewed academic journal, as their Communications Editor. I am really excited for the opportunity. I admire and enjoy Kairos because it works to expand the definition of what academic work can be, publishing podcasts, visual art, interactive texts, and more. I also […]
Continue reading →yes, privacy matters
Corey Robin: One of the hallmarks of a repressive state, particularly in the twentieth century, is the use of blackmail against gays and lesbians in order to get them to collaborate and inform on their friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and other potential or actual dissidents. The Stasi was notorious for turning gays and lesbians into collaborators […]
Continue reading →“you’ll never get that window open!” say men nailing it shut
Jon Chait and Will Wilkinson got together on some sweet, Democrat-defending neoliberalism, going after poor old Tom Frank with the whole “you don’t know the complicated maths!” routine. Chait, of course, is the Andrew Cuomo of the hippie punching press, holding the Mickey Kaus Endowed Chair of Fake Liberalism and spending most of his time […]
Continue reading →carceral progressivism
The recent scandals involving NFL players Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson, for me, have revealed again this central contradiction in contemporary left-of-center thought. We have broad consensus on the left wing that we imprison too many people in America and that our police forces, in general, are overly aggressive and overly protected from punishment when […]
Continue reading →goodies and baddies
Perhaps no instinct in American foreign policy debate is more destructive than the tendency to think that the world’s various conflicts always involve good sides and bad sides. This 25-minute Frontline documentary on Boko Haram, and the horrific excesses of the Nigerian government in hunting them, makes plain that the Manichean philosophy of foreign policy cannot withstand […]
Continue reading →everything that you need to know about pop culture and adulthood
A.O. Scott wrote a smart, long, deep piece about the death of adulthood in art and culture in contemporary times. He’s right about most stuff, though very, very safe about everything. It has of course inspired and will inspire a vast number of Hot Takes. Some will praise him. Some of them will be part […]
Continue reading →no way out
You can’t see ideology because you live in it; you are the fish who wonders what water could be. We’re going to war again. We’re going to war in Iraq again. And we’re going with no better idea of how to win or when to get out or what victory could mean than the last […]
Continue reading →same as it ever was
I could go into a whole song and dance about all my own biases and self-interest here, but I’ll just go ahead and say simply that I’ve given up on the hope that our media, particularly our digital media, will ever be anything but unremittingly hostile to our higher education system. It’s one of the […]
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