Yesterday turned into yet another Twitter conflagration about how a post of mine is an uncool thing written by an uncool guy. But, you know, I was right. The thing is, this isn’t really about David Foster Wallace, although I feel like he’s become this locus for weird shit because writer culture is an ostensibly literary […]
Continue reading →Here are the four gentlemen who are in charge of beloved sadkid blog The Awl. So: which of these gentlemen strikes you as the picture of quintessential masculinity? (Note: Balk picture may not be Balk. Who knows.) The correct answer, of course, is “that question is fucking gross and reactionary and terrible and you should […]
Continue reading →A couple people have asked if I’ll weigh in on the latest piece on campus politics in The Atlantic. I’m not going to, because what would be the point? It’s hard to imagine a conversation that is more bound up in a useless and calcified binary. If I wrote about that piece here, it would be […]
Continue reading →A couple years ago, the PC game Divinity: Original Sin was crowdfunded on Kickstarter. It’s not entirely clear to me why they needed crowdfunding, given that its developer, Larian Games, had been around and producing games in the Divinity series since 1996. Maybe they needed the extra million people crowdfunded to make the game more ambitious, I […]
Continue reading →Some have lamented about the increasingly bitter and acrimonious fight going on right now about #BlackLivesMatter and the Bernie Sanders campaign. It’s true that this is a classic left-wing circular firing squad. And it has certainly brought out the worst in performative white anti-racism, the kind where people care more about being perceived as one […]
Continue reading →Several people have asked me to weigh in on the deepening BlackLivesMatter/Bernie Sanders fracas, but I’m keeping my mouth shut because I don’t have necessary information. I don’t know what the specific demands on the Sanders campaign are, so I can’t say anything useful. When I find out the demands of the protesters, I’d be […]
Continue reading →A point and then a meta-point. Got into a bit of a debate with a friend of mine recently. I was saying that the working conditions of a lot of online writers out there are unambiguously exploitative — many of them work long hours for low pay and no benefits. My friend launched into the […]
Continue reading →I’m writing today to announce a little project, one that’s of natural interest to very few but potential interest to a few more. At my feet sits a large box of papers, photos, and ephemera that once belonged to my father and his father. My grandfather John died in 1969, twelve years before I was […]
Continue reading →Just as an addendum to my last post — I’m frustrated by the rise of false choice thinking, in general, within the left. There’s so many bogus binaries people try to push you into now. We can be the side that insists on the horrors of sexual violence, offers comfort and respect to victims, pushes […]
Continue reading →In the 1980s and 1990s, a sex panic of unprecedented scale and destruction swept the United States and several other places. In over a dozen cases, day care workers were accused of ritual sexual abuse of young children. Often, these accusations included references to Satanic worship and other outlandish details that should have raised red […]
Continue reading →