Longtime reader and correspondent Joel writes in, “Hey Freddie, I’ve seen that you’ve written a little bit about the ‘Berniebro’ phenomenon on Twitter and on your blog, but I feel like you haven’t really made your definitive case, and I really need it. It’s one of those times where I am just pulling my hair […]

  I have said, many times, that the deepening progressive obsession with pop culture minutia is a profound strategic and analytical mistake. It devotes scarce political resources to concerns that are inherently disconnected from the actual lived oppression of most members of marginalized groups. It convinces a generation of young liberal people that the work […]

  So I want to talk for a minute about my writing on geek culture and why I think it’s relevant to the questions of racism and sexism and similar problems. I write, too often, about how frustrated I am with the self-definition of geeks/nerds/whatever as marginalized. I think that these claims are untrue, failing […]

Right now I just think there’s this fundamental problem where so many people who identify themselves as being part of the broad left define their coalition based on linguistic cues, cultural overlap, and social circles. The job of politics, at its most basic, is finding common cause with people who aren’t like you. But current […]

So I listened to Vox’s The Weeds podcast on the relationship between public policy, public health, and eating yesterday. They are particularly interested in the use of nudges and nags to improve healthy eating and healthy outcomes. It made me think of a few things. There’s no grand point here, just some impressions. 1. Maybe […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]