You know there’s a certain level of persistent dishonesty online that’s one of the most frustrating aspects of existing on the internet. You get numb to it. But this… this is AP Dishonesty, here. It’s next level. So. Here’s that thread, which you may read if you’d like, to encounter someone deliberately, directly, intentionally, and […]
Continue reading →My piece on corporatism in the American university, and the ways in which it’s eroded intellectual and political freedom, is available today in the print edition of the New York Times Magazine, bundled with the Sunday paper. I have gotten a tremendous amount of feedback, the vast majority of it positive, and I really couldn’t be […]
Continue reading →Hey guys, for those of you who don’t yet know, I’m excited to say that I have a piece in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine on the real source of campus restrictions on free expression: not coddled students, but corporatism. You can get it in print in the Sunday edition of the paper, or you can […]
Continue reading →A few times now I’ve praised a couple of pieces by Grantland’s Bryan Curtis, in which he reflects on the sudden way in which social progressivism became the default orientation of mainstream sports commentary. In one of the pieces, Curtis writes “Something pretty interesting has happened to sports opinionating in recent years…. A certain opinion — and I’d […]
Continue reading →Five years ago this month, Jeffrey Goldberg staked The Atlantic‘s credibility on a sensationalistic cover story proclaiming that an Israeli attack on Iran was imminent. The story included the typical weasel words and qualifiers, but the message was unmistakable: an Israeli attack on Iran was coming, and coming soon, which Goldberg knew because he had such […]
Continue reading →I have always rejected the David Horowitz-style argument that our universities are indoctrination camps for left-wing politics. These claims seem to draw extensively on innuendo, rumor, and myth, with very little in the way of concrete evidence. Long, detailed investigations of such claims, such as Michael Berube’s 2006 book What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?, often […]
Continue reading →This piece on Graywolf Press is charming and sharp, but I leave it feeling even more sure that the “lyric essay” is not much of a definable thing. Any genre that could include Karl Ove Knausgaard and Joan Didion and John D’Agata and David Foster Wallace just can’t be much of a genre. It’s a genre […]
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