When Vox was still a young site, they published a piece on technology adoption rates that was just fundamentally misguided. The methodology simply didn’t work, as Paleofuture’s great writer Matt Novak detailed. Mistakes happen, particularly for young publications, but Vox compounded the issue by being cagey and evasive in addressing the problems. I criticized them […]
Continue reading →Just to build on my update to my last post– there seems to be a bit of an argument about Joan Rivers and how to talk about her death, given that she called for the destruction of the Palestinian people shortly before her death. It’s the Wagner thing, one more time. I confess that I […]
Continue reading →In the comments of Gawker’s obituary for Joan Rivers, I pointed out that nobody seems to be remembering the fact that just a month or two ago, Rivers claimed that Palestinians deserve to die. This is about as gross and racist a thing as someone can say, but is permissible in American media because Arabs are […]
Continue reading →I quite liked Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essay on learning French (and intend to write long on it soon), and I don’t agree at all with Rod Dreher’s take on it. So I appreciate Phoebe Malz-Bovy’s defense of Coates’s essay. But in an oddly underwritten ending, Bovy goes badly wrong. Taking Dreher to task for pointing out […]
Continue reading →A perennial question among the more thoughtful political types is why things don’t change, why the discourse doesn’t get better. A big part of that is that we have no history. The news cycle is relentless and people never seem to look back. It takes failure of world-historic proportions to prompt retrospective consideration of the […]
Continue reading →Alright, I give up. Throwing in the old towel. I’ve had a good run. I’ll be at the bar if you need me.
Continue reading →1. Given the economics of current professional online journalism and commentary, blanket condemnations of what is conventionally called clickbait are essentially arguments that paid online writing should contract substantially. You don’t have to like clickbait and SEO stuff– I don’t– but if there’s gonna be such a thing as professional writers whose work appears online, […]
Continue reading →I wanted to be sure to share this remarkable letter from Natalie Zernon Davis, an emeritus professor of history from Princeton, in protest of the firing of Steven Salaita for his criticisms of Israeli actions in Gaza. She writes in part, I write you as an admirer of the remarkable achievements of the historians, literary […]
Continue reading →So a study came out saying that social media causes conformity. 1. I actually almost avoided talking about this story, because it would seem to play too much to my biases, and that’s always boring. 2. I’ve seen people complaining (on social media, naturally) that this study can’t possibly be right because they see plenty […]
Continue reading →So since I’m talking about the Atlantic‘s biases: today Jeffrey Goldberg, the credulous Iraq war shill, contributed more to his long history of attacking critics of Israel by equating such criticism with anti-Semitism. Indeed, even by Goldberg’s incredibly low standards, this is pretty ugly: many protesters are challenging Israel’s very right to exist, not its policies in […]
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