At New York Private Schools, Challenging White Privilege From the Inside Establishment power is defended with the baton and tear gas only as a last resort. In the first instance, it is defended with far subtler, far more insidious means. On a recent morning, 20 or so high school students, most of them white, milled […]
Continue reading →I learned this idea from a mentor of mine, and thus I can’t give proper credit to whoever thought it up. Perhaps it’s one of those pieces of lore that’s been floating around between teachers forever and belongs to no one. In any case. Anyone who’s been a teacher for long enough has probably encountered […]
Continue reading →So here’s a perfect example of how actually-important political debates get lost in the haze of useless slapfights, observe David Corn vs. Bill O’Reilly on the subject not of foreign policy or really even media ethics but the personal integrity of Bill O’Reilly. Sure, I’m happy to see a lying blowhard get called out in […]
Continue reading →I have, for same reason, spent a couple hours on Fusion tonight. (.net, teehee.) And, you know, as much as I might want to make light of Felix Salmon’s cool guy Monty Burns routine, the site itself is… fine. It’s fine! I mean, it’s whatever. Fine is fine. But it just isn’t about anything in the way that […]
Continue reading →1. Of course I take the question of European anti-Semitism seriously. And taking that question seriously involves discussing it responsibly, and discussing it responsibly means meeting an evidentiary basis. It’s a mark of how unhealthy our conversation about this topic is that discussion of that evidentiary basis occurs under the shadow of threat, threat of being […]
Continue reading →Conor Friedersdorf has a piece out today, headlined “Europe’s Increasingly Targeted Jews Take Stock.” (No doubt the head was written by editors.) In it, Friedersdorf spends the requisite amount of time showing Grave Concern about the increasing threat to Europe’s increasingly threatened Jews, who are threatened, at an increasing level. Near the end, he helpfully […]
Continue reading →Here’s a collection of random books from around my office, all of which have recently been a part of some sort of academic work of mine — my dissertation, articles I am trying to send out, a book proposal, or most of all, the hundreds of pages stuffed into my hard drive of ideas and […]
Continue reading →David Carr died last night. The outpouring of genuine, deep grief from many of his peers and friends has been deeply moving. I don’t know what it’s like to have known or worked for him, but public sadness of this depth is impossible to fake. It seems clear that the Times and journalism have lost a remarkable […]
Continue reading →On the one hand, I agree with a lot of the people pointing out the problems with Jon Stewart’s long reign as the public conscience of American liberalism. For a long while, I’ve been among many arguing that the broad left-of-center has to move on from telling jokes about the absurdity of our opponents and […]
Continue reading →Something weird is going on in this Kashann Kilson piece, and I think understanding it is key to understanding the progressive side of our media class. Kilson writes what is, in many ways, a paint-by-numbers “Iggy Azalea and Race” column, which has become a cottage industry in liberal circles. (If you’re a young liberal writer […]
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