No one, I’ve come to think, would be less happy about our latest canonization of James Baldwin than Baldwin himself. I’ve been rereading a lot of Baldwin, this early fall. I’m doing so to rescue him, for myself only, from what he’s been made of by the mob, the sermonizing left that owns media and […]
Continue reading →This summer, Alan Jacobs had a great post responding to a recent biography of Virginia Woolf. In the post, Alan points out that actually respecting Woolf means taking seriously her heart-wrenching last letter to her husband, in which she praises him in some of the most genuine and intense language I’ve ever read. Instead, the […]
Continue reading →Hey gang, I’ve got a piece in The New Republic today, riffing on my upbringing at Wesleyan University, my piece for the New York Times Magazine, and campus activism. I talk about why I have love for college activists in general and Wesleyan students in particular, and then lament the way in which today’s campus activists tend to […]
Continue reading →I am disturbed, frequently, by what seems like a growing cultural tendency to teach children that their fantasies are real, to insist to them that they should will a belief of fantasy into being when the natural process of life begins to erode that faith. Because Superman isn’t real, and neither is Dr. Who, and […]
Continue reading →Gang, I’ve got a piece I really loved writing in the new issue of Full Stop Quarterly, an online magazine that’s available here for $5 in both PDF and epub formats. I know we live in an era where writing is assumed to be free, but they’re paying me as well as a bunch of other […]
Continue reading →I’m trying to hate this blog a little less, lately, and part of the way I’m gonna do that is just write stuff that I think is interesting and worthwhile to me, to be a little more esoteric and a little more weird. For most people, this may be translated as “even more self-indulgent.” In […]
Continue reading →I haven’t yet read Leonard Cassuto’s new book The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It. I’m trying to get my hands on a copy. I’m encouraged by its initial feedback, though, because it seems to offer exactly what I’ve been calling for: a non-sensationalist, clear look at a very deeply disordered […]
Continue reading →I read Kate Bolick’s book Spinster today. My initial, jerky instinct was to write a one sentence review: “In Spinster, Kate Bolick spends 300 pages on what she claims to not be hung up about.” But that’s rude, although I do think that tension animates the book. Bolick’s desire, it seems to me, is to scratch an itch […]
Continue reading →Today I shared this post from Bruce Dixon at Black Agenda Report on social media. As he has done often, Dixon critiqued the coziness of someone associated with #BlackLivesMatter, Deray McKesson, with an institution of establishment power, here Yale University. (McKesson’s relationship to BLM is controversial.) Dixon, a longtime activist and organizer himself and a […]
Continue reading →Some months back, I turned off comments on this blog for good. I have always maintained an affection for comments, despite everything, and I really do believe that comments at their best can offer a kind of populist counterweight to bad ideas and bad writing. I have, in my time online, seen essays that did […]
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