In politics, our journalists believe, it is better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It’s better to be savvy than it is to be just, good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere, thoughtful or humane. Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves […]
Continue reading →The purported job of journalists is to find out facts. You know, figure out true things about the world by investigating it, asking questions, picking up the phone once in awhile. One factual question is whether or not I am a Bernie Sanders supporter. The factual answer to that factual question is no. This is […]
Continue reading →Obviously, I have a bunch of complaints about professional politics and culture writing. But one complaint I see floating around just doesn’t jibe with my experience at all. I frequently read people saying (often on Facebook) that “nobody knows how to write these days,” that the web writing generation doesn’t have the prose chops that […]
Continue reading →You may remember a book called This Town that came out a couple years ago. Written by Mark Leibovich, it’s one of those DC-insider dealies that skewers Washington culture and yet was beloved by the people who make up that culture. One of the sturdier aspects of DC journalism is that nobody is more cynical about […]
Continue reading →“The meaning of findings in behavioral genetics for our understanding of human nature has to be worked out for each case. An aberrant gene that causes a disorder shows that the standard version of the gene is necessary to have a normal human mind. But what the standard version does is not immediately obvious. If […]
Continue reading →Erik Loomis has an excellent response to Vox and friend’s neoliberals-circle-the-wagons routine. As he and Jeff Spross point out, the “if you care about the American poor, you hate the Chinese poor” claims are bogus, eliminating other alternatives that would improve living conditions for both Chinese and American workers alike, playing both against our capitalist […]
Continue reading →As you know, I’m part of a nascent but growing movement within the left to question the efficacy of current left political and rhetorical tactics, particularly concerning the privilege frame that now frequently seems to be the only discourse we take part in. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe privilege is real; it certainly is, […]
Continue reading →Alan Jacobs has, in the past, tried to put his finger on why some of us find podcasts so unsatisfying, even as they’ve become wildly popular. (I remain convinced that there are more people making podcasts than listening to them, but still.) Alan hits on a couple plausible problems here, but I don’t think that’s […]
Continue reading →Like most everybody, I found this New Yorker article by Emily Nussbaum an unusually sharp piece from a preternaturally sharp writer. In it, Nussbaum considers not just paid advertising and product placement in TV, but TV’s relationship to commerce, and art’s in general, and ours to art and commerce and commerce in art. As I often […]
Continue reading →Many people I know would assume that pretty much anything published by Breitbart is not worth rebutting, and particularly not this missive by Milo Yiannopoulos, arguing that the real source of America’s perpetual mass murder problem is, of course, feminism. Yiannopoulos argues that these lone wolf killers, like the one responsible for the horrific recent Oregon […]
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