Here are a few things I have done this morning. Bought shuttle tickets to get me to and from Chicago for my flight home to Connecticut for Christmas. Paid the gas bill. Paid my cellphone bill. Salted down my credit card. Bought Christmas presents for my nieces. Enjoyed a nice seasonal IPA. I also have […]
Continue reading →Tonight, as I have often before in my life, I got into a stupid, pointless, wearying argument about digital piracy. I read this post by Darren Orf of Gizmodo, and I criticized it. I did so knowing full well that the typical throng of piracy apologist tech-head commenters would descend on me with the typical […]
Continue reading →I wanted to see how people were responding to my piece for the Week, on how the presumption of the truth of all sexual assault accusations actually makes it harder for us to fight rape. I was particularly interested because the topic is so controversial. So as I often do, I plugged the link into […]
Continue reading →Here’s a piece I wrote for The Week on this topic. The simple version is that when we adopt a blanket policy of believing all sexual assault accusations, as Zerlina Maxwell and others have advocated, we actually make it harder to publicly work against rape, as we tie our credibility to allegations that are eventually […]
Continue reading →This morning I received a gift, from an anonymous reader, of Dana Goldstein’s The Teacher Wars. I’m super excited to read it over Christmas break, and once again grateful and humbled by the generosity of my readers. I’m afraid I am once again going to test that generosity. It’s the holidays and I’m broke. There’s several […]
Continue reading →So the perennial habit of lefties playing protest police has struck again, this time in the form of arguments that white people are too prominent and present at protests inspired by Michael Brown and Eric Garner. I’m not sure how a mass protest movement can emerge in a country that is still 78% white without […]
Continue reading →It seems like half my Facebook friends have posted this image. Hey, gang: those swipes at never leaving your hometown and Olive Garden? Like your complaints about gross teeth and the chrome on your Macbook, those are ways to express class disgust without actually coming out and saying it. Not everybody who uses TweetDeck and […]
Continue reading →So clearly, sexual assault and how we discuss it is a big story right now, with the continuing Rolling Stone saga attracting a lot of digital ink and Emily Yoffe’s vast, deeply disturbing reporting about how colleges have investigated rape cases just coming out. It’s a fraught issue in many ways, and demands real care no matter […]
Continue reading →So I oppose stop and frisk on basic racial equality and civil liberties grounds — the policy looks like a straightforward excuse to harass poor people of color — and believe that we should end the War on Drugs immediately, etc. I also recognize that every such interaction, in the world we live in, amounts […]
Continue reading →Six and a half years of writing online and I still really have no idea how people come up with the notions of decorum and civility they do. There lots of argumentative behaviors that I don’t do. I don’t use racial, ethnic, or similar slurs. I don’t make insults about people’s identities or value independent […]
Continue reading →