Our political system, of course, is broken, in part because our political media is broken. And that brokenness stems in large measure from the fact that we have, essentially, two competing tribes of conservative media that think they are actually on opposite sides. Recent weeks have seen a large, simultaneous anti-Bernie Sanders effort by Democratic […]
Continue reading →I just published my first piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a publication I’ve always wanted to write for. (I’m afraid the piece is behind a paywall.) I’m excited for the opportunity, and they’re paying me well. It’s about the pervasive sense of fear in academia, how it impacts the job market, and how the […]
Continue reading →I have said, many times, that the deepening progressive obsession with pop culture minutia is a profound strategic and analytical mistake. It devotes scarce political resources to concerns that are inherently disconnected from the actual lived oppression of most members of marginalized groups. It convinces a generation of young liberal people that the work […]
Continue reading →So I want to talk for a minute about my writing on geek culture and why I think it’s relevant to the questions of racism and sexism and similar problems. I write, too often, about how frustrated I am with the self-definition of geeks/nerds/whatever as marginalized. I think that these claims are untrue, failing […]
Continue reading →I’ve been reading David Copperfield for the last month or two. I figured Dickens was perfect for the winter, and so far I’ve been happily proven right. Most of my Dickens reading came from a single, great college course, where we read outside of the usual suspects — Oliver Twist and Bleak House, yes, but also Martin Chuzzlewhit and Dombey and Sons, […]
Continue reading →Without ever really intending to, I have come to be seen by some of my colleagues as the Guy Who Doesn’t Like Multimodal Pedagogy. By multimodal pedagogy I mean the contemporary yen for teaching mediums and technologies in writing classes that are not what most people would think of when they think of writing. So […]
Continue reading →For years I’ve said that there’s a wagon-circling function in media that makes criticism of certain connected people appear professionally risky. A lot of people in the media question the accuracy of that criticism, and I fully admit that at times I can be too sensitive to it. But I’m not inventing it, either. Here’s […]
Continue reading →Pause and consider this line in a very short post from Jeet Heer, sharing some videos of an interview with Vladimir Nabokov: “Parts of the show are dated: three white men sitting around a fake living room, smoking away while talking about books.” Honestly: what on earth does the reference to three white men mean, […]
Continue reading →Jay Rosen coined a term to describe the basic attitude of our professional journalism and commentary class, the Cult of the Savvy. Rosen: “In politics, our journalists believe, it is better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It’s better to be savvy than it is to be […]
Continue reading →Here’s a piece on pandering in the book industry, I guess. It’s ostensibly a complaint about cultural bubbles, though it’s written in an idiom — the impossibly self-satisfied lecturing tone of the 21st century — that’s shared by maybe a few thousand liberals with a college education and a Netflix account. But here’s an attitude […]
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