Although it has a distinct feeling of too little, too late, President Obama deserves considerable praise for his immigration speech and his administration’s apparent decision to pursue legitimate reform. (Dara Lind has the details.) Since I don’t believe in the nation state, I don’t believe in the legitimacy of their borders, and even if we […]
Continue reading →I bet if you polled the writers who all wrote the same post about Michel Phelps reportedly having sex with a woman who was born intersex, almost all of them would say that being born intersex does not immutably determine someone’s gender identity and that it’s therefore no big deal if he did. But the […]
Continue reading →“Social justice” is an awkward term for an immensely important project, perhaps the most important project, which is to make the world a more equitable, fair, and compassionate place. But the project for social justice has been captured by an elite strata of post-collegiate, digitally-enabled children of privilege, who do not pursue that project as […]
Continue reading →If you want to see exactly why our media is, comprehensively and in every sense, complicit in the oppression of the Palestinian people, you could do much worse that observing the way in which the attack on a synagogue last night is being discussed. Because almost without exception, in every kind of publication, across the […]
Continue reading →Best Thing Having to do with Jonathan Franzen: that Ben Marcus Harper’s essay This essay by Ben Marcus in which he destroys Franzen’s weird, destructive, dumb war on experimental fiction and William Gaddis. So good, so richly deserved. Really Very Good: The Corrections That was a good’un. Grown on me a lot. Seriously. You should […]
Continue reading →Today I received two wonderfully thoughtful, generous gifts from my Amazon Wish List from readers of this blog. These beautiful images were taken with a camera lens from a reader that arrived today. I also received the book Text Analysis with R for Students of Literature by Matthew Jockers, which though I am not in literature […]
Continue reading →Here’s a regression line from a study purporting to show a relationship between Global Index on Legal Recognition of Homosexual Orientation, a multivariate index of gay rights, and GDP, relayed by Jay Michaelson of the Daily Beast. (via The Dish) Do you see a problem here? That is not a particularly strong relationship to begin with, […]
Continue reading →It’s not a rhetorical question. I’m generally unimpressed with mobile gaming. I’ve always felt that the combination of small screens and touch-based controls narrow the range of the possible to a really constricting degree. There are exceptions, of course, but I’m deeply underwhelmed by most games for smartphones. I got the Android version of Another […]
Continue reading →If every time someone you know speaks, your hands reflexively clench; if you follow someone’s work obsessively, driven by annoyance and resentment; if the mere mention of someone’s name causes you to furiously type out your angst; if you feel so moved by your negative feelings towards someone or their work that you have to […]
Continue reading →I do, in general, believe in the standard old arguments for civil liberties, and I am disturbed by the broad left-wing flirtations with abandoning them on those grounds. Even beyond the fact that I think people should have the right to hold and express unpopular beliefs, even vile beliefs, simply as a matter of basic […]
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