As you know, I’m part of a nascent but growing movement within the left to question the efficacy of current left political and rhetorical tactics, particularly concerning the privilege frame that now frequently seems to be the only discourse we take part in. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe privilege is real; it certainly is, […]
Continue reading →Alan Jacobs has, in the past, tried to put his finger on why some of us find podcasts so unsatisfying, even as they’ve become wildly popular. (I remain convinced that there are more people making podcasts than listening to them, but still.) Alan hits on a couple plausible problems here, but I don’t think that’s […]
Continue reading →Like most everybody, I found this New Yorker article by Emily Nussbaum an unusually sharp piece from a preternaturally sharp writer. In it, Nussbaum considers not just paid advertising and product placement in TV, but TV’s relationship to commerce, and art’s in general, and ours to art and commerce and commerce in art. As I often […]
Continue reading →Many people I know would assume that pretty much anything published by Breitbart is not worth rebutting, and particularly not this missive by Milo Yiannopoulos, arguing that the real source of America’s perpetual mass murder problem is, of course, feminism. Yiannopoulos argues that these lone wolf killers, like the one responsible for the horrific recent Oregon […]
Continue reading →No one, I’ve come to think, would be less happy about our latest canonization of James Baldwin than Baldwin himself. I’ve been rereading a lot of Baldwin, this early fall. I’m doing so to rescue him, for myself only, from what he’s been made of by the mob, the sermonizing left that owns media and […]
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