One point that, I hope, runs through a lot of my work is the use and abuse of dead moral questions. In that, I mean the tendency for political types to bring a lot of rhetorical and mental weight to bear on questions that are not politically live, in any meaningful sense. This focus is […]
Continue reading →After writing a lot about the current plight of adjuncts and how to effectively address it, I pretty much stopped for a long while. I’ve always agreed with the basic complaints as laid out by adjuncts and their allies: the university exploits them, paying them absolutely terrible wages with no benefits or job security, at […]
Continue reading →… before they’ll even consider letting you work for pay. “First: Create a profile on BuzzFeed and publish a number of posts that show off your internet chops and writing prowess. How well do you get the BuzzFeed voice and style? Check out these posts to see what kinds of things perform the best on our site: http://www.buzzfeed.com/hot Then, and only […]
Continue reading →One of my basic beliefs about politics is that, over a long enough time frame, all political movements become indistinguishable from the parodies their opponents make of them. So in the world of conservatism, you see things like rolling coal, a kind of performative idiocy in which the other side’s exaggerated definition of what you […]
Continue reading →1. Studies say pirates pay for more content than people who don’t pirate. Those studies are old, small, and of dubious methodology, involving self-reported data. Of course, none of the people who constantly invokes them cares to look at them too closely. They are believed because they tell people what they want to hear. But even […]
Continue reading →Lauren Davis of io9 has a collection of internet comics that, she claims, “shut down terrible internet arguments.” I suppose that depends on your definition of “shutting down.” If that just means “insult and dismiss the person you’re arguing with,” then sure, those comics are very effective. They suggest the superiority of the people who […]
Continue reading →Whenever I get into these correlation and causation battles (and I do frequently, both in the university and online), they seem to go wrong in two ways: one, people often insist on an entirely unhelpful definition of the word “implies,” and two, people often presume some quantitative signifier of absolute causation that does not exist in […]
Continue reading →I’ve written, in the past, that I think the reflexive statement “correlation is not causation” has actually become more dangerous than people naively assuming that correlation does equal causation. I was reminded of this recently when I was reading Siddartha Mukherjee’s magnificent “biography of cancer,” The Emperor of All Maladies. The relationship between lung cancer and […]
Continue reading →I am 100% with Will Leitch when he says that the internet has made it easier to live in enclaves, and that this is a political and social problem with profound negative consequences. However. “this is now accepted public policy. You don’t have to find anyone to contradict you, if you don’t want to. This […]
Continue reading →This letter to the editor was written in response to my father’s obituary and published in my hometown paper, The Middletown Press. My stepmother had a copy, I think, but with the dissolution of my relationship with her in the years after his death, I had no way to get my hands on it. For years […]
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