If you have any interest in the continuing controversy of the Steven Salaita affair, or academic freedom in general, or the fetish for civility and the way it is used to suppress unpopular political opinion, you really have to read this post from Corey Robin. In it, Dr. Jean O’Brien, professor of history and chair […]
Continue reading →In my opinion:
Continue reading →When Vox was still a young site, they published a piece on technology adoption rates that was just fundamentally misguided. The methodology simply didn’t work, as Paleofuture’s great writer Matt Novak detailed. Mistakes happen, particularly for young publications, but Vox compounded the issue by being cagey and evasive in addressing the problems. I criticized them […]
Continue reading →Just to build on my update to my last post– there seems to be a bit of an argument about Joan Rivers and how to talk about her death, given that she called for the destruction of the Palestinian people shortly before her death. It’s the Wagner thing, one more time. I confess that I […]
Continue reading →In the comments of Gawker’s obituary for Joan Rivers, I pointed out that nobody seems to be remembering the fact that just a month or two ago, Rivers claimed that Palestinians deserve to die. This is about as gross and racist a thing as someone can say, but is permissible in American media because Arabs are […]
Continue reading →I quite liked Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essay on learning French (and intend to write long on it soon), and I don’t agree at all with Rod Dreher’s take on it. So I appreciate Phoebe Malz-Bovy’s defense of Coates’s essay. But in an oddly underwritten ending, Bovy goes badly wrong. Taking Dreher to task for pointing out […]
Continue reading →A perennial question among the more thoughtful political types is why things don’t change, why the discourse doesn’t get better. A big part of that is that we have no history. The news cycle is relentless and people never seem to look back. It takes failure of world-historic proportions to prompt retrospective consideration of the […]
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