After our conversation for Bloggingheads the other day, I chatted with Michael Brendan Dougherty about the enormous increase in the values of baseball teams. The Los Angeles Dodgers were sold for a shocking $2 billion a couple of years ago. This value is reflected in the staggeringly high salaries teams can afford to pay to […]
Continue reading →Having argued online for going on six years now, I’m always a little surprised by who bothers to get mad. Despite getting in a scrap or two in my time, I’m never really able to predict why some people get upset and some don’t. Today’s case in point: Deadspin’s Tom Ley, a bright guy and […]
Continue reading →Check out the whole video here.
Continue reading →People sometimes think I like fighting. I hate it. I hate every minute of it. It suits me to argue, but that doesn’t mean I like it. I probably hate it more than anybody else who writes a lot. Although I often think and say that the way we are doing all of this is […]
Continue reading →I do, for the record, believe that rape culture is real, and I don’t see that Aaron Bady has cause to accuse me of not. I will cop to thinking that the term “rape culture” itself has acquired some of that buzzwordy fuzziness that comes from the rise of left-wing-politics-as-popularity-contest. But I deeply believe that […]
Continue reading →Part of the reason I’m forever pouring cold water on the idea that the internet has made journalism or commentary egalitarian is that this canard threatens to obscure how powerfully the elite nature of media colors our understanding. Education is one of those places where this really hits home. Andrew Sullivan was kind enough to […]
Continue reading →Back in the 90s, there was a kind of clumsy course correction by the entertainment industry when it came to the portrayal of black men. In its typical ham-fisted way, Hollywood attempted to assert its benign, market-driven progressivism by filling its middle brow shlock with impossibly noble black characters. Every other movie seemed to feature […]
Continue reading →Book arrived! Thanks so much, you guys. Off to get regressive….
Continue reading →I want to advance an understanding of someone’s political value as a simple ratio of number of political interactions that are primarily negative or critical in character total number of political interactions This is based on a crude theory of political economy that interactions between those who substantially agree are necessarily interactions where there is […]
Continue reading →I have no coherent response to the allegations against Woody Allen, just feelings of powerlessness and sadness. The substance of those allegations is so horrific and heartbreaking that coherence is beyond me. It’s physically nauseating to think of. So I’m left speechless. I feel the need to react to an ancillary point that is growing […]
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