There’s a lot not to like about this David Frum piece concern trolling Ta-Nehisi Coates’s reparations essay. For instance, Frum asks as a hypothetical “If African Americans are due payment for slavery and subjugation, what about… Japanese Americans, interned during World War II?,” apparently unaware that we already did that. But here’s one that I […]
Continue reading →This tweet is just one of many. It’s just an example, and not a particularly egregious one, and one with the right intentions at heart. I like Ta-Nehisi Coates’s writing. A lot. And I loved his case for reparations, for a lot of reasons, but mostly because of what it brings to the public consciousness, or […]
Continue reading →A couple people have asked me, since Piketty’s Capital is on my summer reading list, if I’ll review it. The answer’s no, for the simple reason that I’m not equipped to offer an informed review. I just don’t have enough background in economics to say anything worth reading. There’s tons of reviews you can read from […]
Continue reading →Google is taking some well-deserved heat for the lack of diversity of their employees. You can read plenty of people prosecuting that case, so I won’t add much beyond saying that if we accept it when these companies say “we know we have to get better” and leave it at that, they can just keep […]
Continue reading →So I argued recently that traditional masculinity has to die. Although I’m friends with some traditionalists, and I think that there are strains of traditionalism that really exemplify a politics of caring that is quite rare, I am generally antagonistic to traditionalism writ large. Tradition inevitably puts constraints on the free expression of human behaviors that […]
Continue reading →So I alluded to this in my last post, but it’s worth making it more explicit: unless you can name three of Maya Angelou’s collections without Googling, and unless you are familiar with her work from before, say, 1990, you probably shouldn’t be publicly critiquing her work. Because the initial wave of commemoration for her […]
Continue reading →Maya Angelou has long been the type of artist whose work gets consumed by reputation. It’s been hard to have a conversation about her that doesn’t get bogged down in parody or the inevitable self-emulation that comes to prominent poets. A lot of people, I think, suspect that her image as a kind of New […]
Continue reading →In response to a post on Gizmodo about the humane and sensible NYPD program of police officers carrying Narcan to give to overdosing heroin users, this comment appears: So that’s the opinion of MartiniGuy. Here’s a chart showing the harm factor of different drugs, according to a major study from Imperial College London, which considered […]
Continue reading →Alan Jacobs considers the phenomenon of the Twitter tsunami, which crucially is a matter of mutually-acknowledged agreement and, inevitably, transactional. To me these tsunamisfeel like desperate signaling, people trying to make sure that everyone knows where they stand on the issue du jour. I can almost see the beads of sweat forming on their foreheads as they […]
Continue reading →I have a set of concerns about FiveThirtyEight and data journalism in general, but I also think that there’s a lot of interesting work being done there, and that there’s lots of reasons to be excited about some of the developments in how people are disseminating and reacting to research online. I want to endorse […]
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