Spoilers ahoy. At the end of writer and director George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road¸ a rebooted continuation of his classic post-apocalyptic series, a quote appears: “Where must we go, we who wander this wasteland, in search of our better selves?” The quote is attributed to “The First History Man,” a nod to the time […]

The pressure to avoid criticizing current progressive practice is intense. More and more, though, people seem to acknowledge that we have a problem, a really deep problem that we seem to have no way to find our way out of. To understand it, I present Allan Brauer. Brauer is a partisan Democrat and Obama zombie […]

You may remember that a couple years ago, a couple of young black metalheads from New York City got some deserved positive press for their band Unlocking the Truth. What’s less well remembered is that there was a backlash against them, on comments and Twitter, because one of them said in an interview “hip hop […]

So people keep sending me this Choire Sicha review of Jon Ronson’s recent book on public shaming, I guess because I’ve been something of a critic of those tactics. Several emailers have represented Sicha’s review to me as a kind of silver bullet argument against criticisms like mine, and in effect a strong argument for […]

When my father got sick, the insurance company sent him to Los Angeles. He was on the organ donor list and I guess the hospital there was better, or cheaper, even though living in Connecticut, we didn’t suffer for world-class hospitals. Like so much of life as a teenager, that decision seemed bewildering at the […]

This post contains significant spoilers about True Detective and The Fall. So I just finished watching the second season of The Fall, with Gillian Anderson. It’s really very well done, smart and political and beautifully shot. Anderson is a standout as detective Stella Gibson, but the cast is overall excellent too. It’s got the overall quality […]

At New York Private Schools, Challenging White Privilege From the Inside Establishment power is defended with the baton and tear gas  only as a last resort. In the first instance, it is defended with far subtler, far more insidious means. On a recent morning, 20 or so high school students, most of them white, milled […]

Conor Friedersdorf has a piece out today, headlined “Europe’s Increasingly Targeted Jews Take Stock.” (No doubt the head was written by editors.) In it, Friedersdorf spends the requisite amount of time showing Grave Concern about the increasing threat to Europe’s increasingly threatened Jews, who are threatened, at an increasing level. Near the end, he helpfully […]

So I’ve made the actual argument many many times, and you’ll ding me for linking to some random Tumblr, but this is too perfect. At Pyrrhic Comedy, there is this picture of a bunch of tween types in the Rijksmuseum, checking their cell phones instead of looking at The Night Watch. The big reveal is that they […]