Hey gang, so here’s the latest. While I am up for a few more potential academic jobs, which I’d love to take, I’m also preparing for the possibility that I won’t get one in the coming months. So I’m currently set to teach at Purdue again as a continuing lecturer this fall, go back on […]
Continue reading →You can be a writer with a conscience; but if the publication you write for has a revenue model based on advertising alone, I’m not sure how you can act in a way consonant with your conscience. You can start a publication with a specific politics; but the drive to secure eyeballs has no politics. […]
Continue reading →This post has spoilers about the new movie Trainwreck. I checked out the new Judd Apatow movie Trainwreck the other night. It stars and was cowritten by Amy Schumer, the star of Inside Amy Schumer. Schumer is very talented, funny, and sexy, and she deserves a movie. She’s recently been anointed The Symbol of 21st Century Feminism […]
Continue reading →The problem with building a reputation on the internet is that character is defined by behavior, not by language, but on the internet all we have is language. Almost all of our interactions online are waged through language. That’s a problem, because as a species we tend to say that language is an inadequate guide […]
Continue reading →So I wanted to wait a day or two to say this, because it’s never a good idea to try and get distance when I’m in the middle of one of these internet scrums. I’m still close enough to it that a bunch of people are yelling at me to behave, which is pretty much […]
Continue reading →Michael Ross decided he wanted to die, to begin with. Ross was a horrific serial killer, a man who in the early 1980s raped and murdered 8 women, most of them teenagers. He had been on death row for two decades when he decided he would like the state to end it; he had converted […]
Continue reading →Some things don’t change.Today was one of my recurring internet storms, this time about Ta-Nehisi Coates and how liking him a lot is not liking him enough. Like every other internet storm I’ve been in, people want to believe that this is the big one — that this is the one that will really matter, […]
Continue reading →When I wrote this piece, I said to myself “It doesn’t matter how sincerely and expressly I register my praise for Ta-Nehisi Coates; some people are going to lose their shit about this.” And lo, on Twitter, it came to pass. That was part of my point in that piece: that people take anything other […]
Continue reading →I had a piece in the Observer about the “born this way”/immutability argument after the gay marriage decision that I hope you’ll check out. I was on TheLipTV, talking polygamy, and you can check it out here. Lots of great questions, perceptive and informed host. I had a similarly good time on Al-Jazeera English this […]
Continue reading →A friend of mine Gchatted me this Benjamin Wallace-Wells profile of Ta-Nehisi Coates. She said, “congrats! You have the closest thing to a negative word in the whole piece.” But the quote, it turns out, is about his commenters. I tend to disappoint people in that way. Some have come to me looking for a […]
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