In the interregnum, after Los Angeles and before I split, my stepmother and I had a cold war to go along with the regular version. I would go out to hang out with my friends, and we wouldn’t talk about that anymore than we would talk about anything else. When I would come home, sometimes, […]
Continue reading →It’s dueling MLK quote season again. Both sides are making accusations of selective reading at the other, and given that many people on either side have probably read very little of his words that don’t appear on a poster, both sets of accusations are perennially accurate. We might make a policy of saying that if […]
Continue reading →I have been something of a critic of our professional online writing industry for some time, and I have never been shy about criticizing the people who work in it. Chief among my complains is that online writing is a culture that thinks it isn’t one — that is, our class of online writing professionals […]
Continue reading →You may remember that a couple years ago, a couple of young black metalheads from New York City got some deserved positive press for their band Unlocking the Truth. What’s less well remembered is that there was a backlash against them, on comments and Twitter, because one of them said in an interview “hip hop […]
Continue reading →So people keep sending me this Choire Sicha review of Jon Ronson’s recent book on public shaming, I guess because I’ve been something of a critic of those tactics. Several emailers have represented Sicha’s review to me as a kind of silver bullet argument against criticisms like mine, and in effect a strong argument for […]
Continue reading →Whenever I start a sentence “My dissertation…,” at least when speaking to a non-academic, I smile a little inside. It makes me think I’m in an episode of 30 Rock. I guess it’s just that I’ve absorbed the ambient cultural critique that grad students are inherently ridiculous. Like a lot of grads I have a kind […]
Continue reading →I’ve never thought of myself as a creative writer; I’ve always assumed that I wouldn’t have the talent for it, if I ever tried. But I do envy creative writers in the simple sense that they have much less pressure to make everything explicit. I am bored to tears of other people’s explanations and even […]
Continue reading →When my father got sick, the insurance company sent him to Los Angeles. He was on the organ donor list and I guess the hospital there was better, or cheaper, even though living in Connecticut, we didn’t suffer for world-class hospitals. Like so much of life as a teenager, that decision seemed bewildering at the […]
Continue reading →Allow me to reiterate. Awhile back, Conor Friedersdorf wrote a piece echoing the widespread claim that anti-Semitism is rising in Europe. That piece was bad. It was bad in large measure because it made large claims with little evidence. Worse, it almost entirely walked back its own claims in the last paragraph, admitting “The degree […]
Continue reading →As time goes on, I’m more and more convinced that the fundamental contemporary political failing is the inability or the refusal to sort “this is true” statements from “this is good” statements. So check out this piece in Gawker by Donovan X. Ramsey, titled “White America’s Silence on Police Brutality Is Consent.” It makes a moral […]
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