So my prediction is that both Selma and Boyhood will be nominated for Best Picture in the Oscars, they will be the two runaway favorites, and their status as such will prompt an endless, wearying, vituperative inter-liberal squabble that will bring out absolutely everything wrong with contemporary media progressivism. It’s going to suck so hard. We’re in for a […]
Continue reading →My grandfather was not alone in his radicalism. My grandmother, Henrietta deBoer, was his equal, as an organizer, a champion for civil rights and civil liberties, and as a keen political mind. This remarkable document is a transcript of a speech given in her honor when she won an award from her local ACLU branch. […]
Continue reading →My little buddy Suavecito had a little surgery last week. He’s feeling all better now, so here we are celebrating. It was the first day of my last (?) semester of grad school today. First day is always exciting. Hard to believe this will (probably) be my last one as a student. Lots of writing […]
Continue reading →Seriously: is there a more worthless cliche in our well-stocked bag of worthless cliches? It’s made a non-ironic comeback with The Interview and Charlie Hebdo, and it’s such a ponderous, self-important method for achieving profundity. It’s especially egregious given that the topic of terrorism would seem to have enough intrinsic seriousness that it doesn’t require that kind […]
Continue reading →These two environments, Twitter and Tumblr, have something important in common, which they share with most social media sites: they invite you to measure people’s response to you. For many people this probably means nothing, but on me it has always had an effect. Over the years I developed a sense of how many RTs […]
Continue reading →Because you demanded politely requested it!
Continue reading →Emailer Dennis writes, “Have you been following the latest Serial developments? What do you think about the interviews in the Intercept?” No offense to anybody else, just my preference and all, no accounting for taste, but at this point I would really rather gargle bleach than spend another second reading about Serial.
Continue reading →So here’s this Gawker piece about Fred Armisen that accuses him of being a bad boyfriend. (A point he readily concedes, as it happens.) I don’t want to get into some useless, wearying discussion of celebrity and privacy. I don’t get why this is news; of course Gawker has the right to run unsubstantiated rumors. […]
Continue reading →One point that, I hope, runs through a lot of my work is the use and abuse of dead moral questions. In that, I mean the tendency for political types to bring a lot of rhetorical and mental weight to bear on questions that are not politically live, in any meaningful sense. This focus is […]
Continue reading →After writing a lot about the current plight of adjuncts and how to effectively address it, I pretty much stopped for a long while. I’ve always agreed with the basic complaints as laid out by adjuncts and their allies: the university exploits them, paying them absolutely terrible wages with no benefits or job security, at […]
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