This post contains minor spoilers about the movie Mad Max: Fury Road, which is one of the best movies I’ve seen in ages and my favorite blockbuster in forever. 1. Because hot damn, real physical objects look good on camera. I know it’s a cliche by now to complain about CGI and nothing being or looking real, […]
Continue reading →Since I frequently get praise and attention from conservatives and libertarians for my pieces critiquing the current state of progressive argumentative and political practice, I am also frequently accused by more partisan progressives of not being left-wing. The funny thing is that these people are frequently incapable of naming a single substantive policy on which […]
Continue reading →I’m working on a piece right now for another publication. I’m excited about it and hope to be able to share it soon. Below, you’ll find a section that the editor and I decided didn’t really fit with the rest of the piece. It’s a few recommendations in categories that are traditionally associated with the […]
Continue reading →The pressure to avoid criticizing current progressive practice is intense. More and more, though, people seem to acknowledge that we have a problem, a really deep problem that we seem to have no way to find our way out of. To understand it, I present Allan Brauer. Brauer is a partisan Democrat and Obama zombie […]
Continue reading →Somebody once said that cruelty has everything to do with abstraction. They probably weren’t talking about the endlessly simmering debates on college learning and college teaching, but they might as well have. Here’s a piece by Mark Bauerlein in the Times that is attracting a ton of criticism, which is sensible, because it’s bad. Bauerlein seems to […]
Continue reading →Here is a quite-long collection of odds and ends, written about in a directionless and loping manner, that anyone other than long-term readers who are interested in me personally may feel comfortable skipping. 1. As somebody pointed out on Twitter, I never actually came out and said that I successfully defended my dissertation. So: I […]
Continue reading →So Bill Simmons is leaving ESPN at last, and for good reason it’s spooking the herd a little bit. Grantland is what it is– it’s a bloated site, but bloated with a lot of good writers who deserve work, which is almost perfectly designed to be not my slice of bread, given the aggressively upper-middle-browness […]
Continue reading →This week marks the end of classes at Purdue, with finals to come next week. With the turning of that page, we reach one year of Purdue’s newest bauble, the Krach Leadership Center. The building is, of course, gorgeous, classic Purdue brick on the outside, a beautiful mix of brushed metal and glass inside, understated […]
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