The movement should be Materialist. In the style of Marx, a functioning, healthy left political movement would be concerned with the material reality of the present world. It would not necessarily be anti-religious, and it wouldn’t require everyone within it to be an atheist, but it would be anticlerical and would not take religious arguments as […]
Continue reading →I was quoted in a couple prominent publications yesterday, repeating my complaints with Oberlin’s protest against the supposed cultural appropriation of bad cafeteria food. Predictably, this resulted in both a lot of praise and a lot of criticism on social media. I don’t take either too deeply to heart. But I am disappointed that, from […]
Continue reading →Today I shared this story, about Oberlin students complaining that bad cafeteria food is cultural appropriation. The story blew up, because it seems to confirm so many of the stereotypes of college students. (Among other things, even if you buy into the idea that food that was intentionally spread by members of other cultures into […]
Continue reading →You know I got caught up in the “nerds are oppressed war!” again today, which is just useless. I started because, of course, at a time of the most powerful cultural hegemony in the history of mass culture, when Star Wars is an unavoidable behemoth that has the entire weight of capitalism behind it and whenthe […]
Continue reading →There’s a Missouri state legislative bill that would force student athletes to play unless injured, and thus prevent strikes of the type that the University of Missouri’s football team used to such great effect. Nora Caplan-Barker points out that this (hopefully doomed) bill represents a chilling imposition on the free speech rights of college athletes, yet […]
Continue reading →If, for whatever reason, you wanted my opinion. Best Book, Fiction: The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro This selection doubles as a “most overlooked” award. I genuinely believe that this novel, the story of an elderly couple in medieval England searching for both their son and their memories, is a masterpiece. Yet its reviews seemed to peak […]
Continue reading →I’m so excited to tell you that my piece on Louis Farrakhan and the future of black political organizing, titled “The Charmer,” has been published in the new issue of Harper’s, which should be on sale now. You should grab a copy. Alternatively, you can read it here, and if you like it, please share it. […]
Continue reading →Last week on Twitter, I shared a few excerpts from an assignment I had my freshman composition students do. In that in-class assignment, I had them rewrite sections of classic literature (once class got the opening to Moby Dick, the other the opening to A Tale of Two Cities) in the voice of another author or genre […]
Continue reading →I found out about this sad Damien Walker piece (edit: Walter, not Walker!) in the Guardian only via this wonderful piece by Lincoln Michel, and I suppose the real purpose of this post is to ask you to read Michel’s piece. It’s a sharp, data-driven look at why so many complaints about book culture, and so many of the claims […]
Continue reading →Hey gang, I’m excited to say that the first entry in my new column for the Observer came out in print yesterday and is now available online. It’s on the need for addressing workplace gender inequality with structural solutions, and argues that it takes more than well-meaning men in positions of power to solve these […]
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