I am 100% with Will Leitch when he says that the internet has made it easier to live in enclaves, and that this is a political and social problem with profound negative consequences. However. “this is now accepted public policy. You don’t have to find anyone to contradict you, if you don’t want to. This […]
Continue reading →This letter to the editor was written in response to my father’s obituary and published in my hometown paper, The Middletown Press. My stepmother had a copy, I think, but with the dissolution of my relationship with her in the years after his death, I had no way to get my hands on it. For years […]
Continue reading →I am and have always been cool with people not liking me or what I write; being disliked is as comfortable for me as my old coat. But I would really, truly appreciate it if people would stop attacking me for a position that I don’t hold and didn’t express on the issue of TNR […]
Continue reading →Hey friends, I’m writing from my home in Connecticut on Christmas morning, which I’m celebrating with family. I just wanted to take a moment and thank you all for your various forms of support. The Christmas Funding Drive was far more successful than I could have imagined and saved my bacon this holiday season. I […]
Continue reading →Sadly necessary preamble: please, read this post to see what it actually does and doesn’t say Long layovers make for good blogging time. So Jeet Heer has a response to Andrew Sullivan’s response to Ta-Nehisi Coates, in the form of one of his long Twitter considerations. The topic, this time, is on the legitimacy of publishing portions […]
Continue reading →It’s tough to be a professional writer, but there are beats you can work. There are roles you can occupy and never go hungry. Few are safer than to be an imperial scribe, the kind of writer who tells Americans that their country is good and that others are evil. Grantland’s Louisa Thomas, an enterprising […]
Continue reading →So Michelle Dean has a typically sharp post on the accusation of “making it about gender.” She’s 100% right. The basic reality is that, if you find yourself asking why someone is making it about gender, it was already about gender. The fact that things are always about other things than gender too doesn’t change […]
Continue reading →North Korea is an invaluable nation for America’s cultural and political industries. A genuinely brutal dictatorship with a genuinely crackpot dictator, the site of almost unthinkable human rights abuses which can be used to distract our broken, destructive nation from its brokenness and destruction. Like all good Big Bads, North Korea’s capabilities shift back and […]
Continue reading →We know, beyond all doubt, that this country engaged in the routine torture, sexual abuse, and murder of prisoners, and for years. We know for a fact that we tortured. We know for a fact that some of those we tortured were innocent. We know for a fact that some of those we tortured, we […]
Continue reading →Will Wilkinson has long labored to square the circle and advocate “liberaltarianism.” I’m more amenable to conditional alliances on particular issues with libertarians than your average lefty, but often these efforts amount to using progressive language to advocate for boilerplate libertarian ends. You can see that urge in this post of his guest-blogging at the […]
Continue reading →