North Korea is an invaluable nation for America’s cultural and political industries. A genuinely brutal dictatorship with a genuinely crackpot dictator, the site of almost unthinkable human rights abuses which can be used to distract our broken, destructive nation from its brokenness and destruction. Like all good Big Bads, North Korea’s capabilities shift back and […]

Tonight, as I have often before in my life, I got into a stupid, pointless, wearying argument about digital piracy. I read this post by Darren Orf of Gizmodo, and I criticized it. I did so knowing full well that the typical throng of piracy apologist tech-head commenters would descend on me with the typical […]

So the perennial habit of lefties playing protest police has struck again, this time in the form of arguments that white people are too prominent and present at protests inspired by Michael Brown and Eric Garner. I’m not sure how a mass protest movement can emerge in a country that is still 78% white without […]

It seems like half my Facebook friends have posted this image. Hey, gang: those swipes at never leaving your hometown and Olive Garden? Like your complaints about gross teeth and the chrome on your Macbook, those are ways to express class disgust without actually coming out and saying it. Not everybody who uses TweetDeck and […]

So clearly, sexual assault and how we discuss it is a big story right now, with the continuing Rolling Stone saga attracting a lot of digital ink and Emily Yoffe’s vast, deeply disturbing reporting about how colleges have investigated rape cases just coming out. It’s a fraught issue in many ways, and demands real care no matter […]

I for one am shocked that a website predicated on mob justice, thinly-sourced evidence, easily manipulated images, and an intentional, existential lack of accountability and due process would have ugly unintended consequences. It’s great that the truth came out about poor Brianna Rivera but she’s gonna have racist images associated with her name online for […]

I’ve learned a lot in six and a half years of writing online, but the single most consistent, most powerful message is this: people care much more about you being part of their culture than about the things you actually believe, politically, morally, conceptually. I can write 2,000 words against affirmative action, with data and […]

You will have already been deluged with analysis about the grand jury’s refusal to indict the police officer who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, so I’ll be brief. I guess the essential thing that has to be repeated, again and again, is that this outcome, and so many like it, are the result of a […]