I’m friends with a guy from my Chicago days who believes strongly in the need to reform alimony and child custody laws. He married and had a child with a woman who would later suffer a relapse into alcoholism and drug abuse. He went through a ton of difficult times, sticking with her through repeated […]
Continue reading →In my first ever Bloggingheads appearance, I told Conor Friedersdorf that I felt the traditional notion of meritocracy — that your economic outcomes are largely or solely the product of your work ethic and your talent, whatever talent is — was becoming empirically indefensible. Take a look at this chart from this worthwhile piece by […]
Continue reading →If you’d like yet-more proof that elite, educated, white, bourgie “leftist” culture online has ceased to have any political convictions any more and has instead become a set of vapid social and cultural postures adopted to borrow the righteousness we associate with politics for social gain, look no further than the reaction to this pumpkin […]
Continue reading →Amber A’Lee Frost critiques this (excellent) Jacobin post by Victoria Law about carceral feminism: Here are the interpretations of the term I am able to come up with. a) There is a feminist movement for whom imprisonment is the primary political project or cornerstone policy. I know of no such feminist subculture, and I consider myself pretty well-versed […]
Continue reading →So I want to say that I’m sorry for being such a crabby patty lately. I’m not reversing course on any opinions I’ve shared, but I have been shorter with people than I intend, and I apologize for that. As far as excuses goes, I’m just busy and stressed. At the moment, I’m dissertating, on […]
Continue reading →Since Austin Kleon and his merry gang are up to their old tricks, defining what pleasure has to be for other people, I would like to reup this post I wrote about difficult reading, and why it can still have value even though absolutely everything in your culture, and every penny in capitalism’s coffers, tells you […]
Continue reading →I’m writing from the 10th Biennial Thomas R. Watson Conference at the University of Louisville, where the conference theme is Responsivity– responding to student need, to public desires, responding to the world outside of the academy. Public engagement and bringing our work to the wide world has become something of an obsession in the field, […]
Continue reading →I have been told, in all seriousness, by people who argue vociferously not only for the passage of the bill in question but that the bill in question is such an obvious good that those questioning it are deluded or acting on ulterior motives: That the bill does not at all specify explicit verbal consent but simply […]
Continue reading →There’s a lot of meat in the 2014 High School Benchmarks Study from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, and I encourage you to dive in yourself. I’m just digging into it now. I want to flag something fairly simple: in terms of both college enrollment rates immediately following high school graduation and the crucial […]
Continue reading →Ezra Klein has a piece out about affirmative consent laws that, in many ways, belongs in a time capsule. I can hardly imagine a document that is a better encapsulation of the performative morality of the educated media class that dominates our national conversation, wedded to the broken economics of online journalism, wrapped up in […]
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