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 […]

We’ve entered late August. The days are growing shorter and cooler. Before you know it, the first leaves will start to change, and autumn will be with us. If you’re keeping your ear to the ground, though, you’ll note another season, just as certain and predictable, is coming near: Jonathan Franzen season. The internet does […]

A couple years ago, the PC game Divinity: Original Sin was crowdfunded on Kickstarter. It’s not entirely clear to me why they needed crowdfunding, given that its developer, Larian Games, had been around and producing games in the Divinity series since 1996. Maybe they needed the extra million people crowdfunded to make the game more ambitious, I […]

In the 1980s and 1990s, a sex panic of unprecedented scale and destruction swept the United States and several other places. In over a dozen cases, day care workers were accused of ritual sexual abuse of young children. Often, these accusations included references to Satanic worship and other outlandish details that should have raised red […]

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 […]

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 […]

This Jonathan Rauch response to me in Politico is indicative of most of the negative responses I’ve gotten from supposed progressives: defensive, non-responsive, filled with ad hoc arguments and temporary moral frameworks of convenience, propped up by bald assertion, and generally indicative of a profound discomfort with having to actually think through this issue. Here, […]

I thought that this piece by J.K. Trotter on Tom Hardy’s past partial admission, then sort-of-denial of having sexual encounters with other men was interesting. It simultaneously made me feel a little sad that Hardy (or more likely, his people) would feel the need to be aggressive in defining the story, while also making me […]