Life at home was like any kid’s life — safe, numb, warm, days stretching out forever, no sense at all of the passage of time besides the markers of our heights, penciled next to the basement door, until she got sick. My mother, wild and warm as a spare sunbeam, a human presence of […]

Gawker has just linked to Yasmin Nair’s interesting provocation “Your Sex Is Not Radical.” I’m happy more people will read Yasmin’s piece, as she’s a great writer that everyone should be reading, and that piece is her in fine form. In particular, it demonstrates her absolute refusal to trod a well-worn ideological path. Some have interpreted that piece […]

Hey guys, I’m in the Observer today, arguing that, rather than being a clear-cut win for social liberalism, today’s sexual culture is at once radical and profoundly conservative. Check it out.

Yesterday turned into yet another Twitter conflagration about how a post of mine is an uncool thing written by an uncool guy. But, you know, I was right. The thing is, this isn’t really about David Foster Wallace, although I feel like he’s become this locus for weird shit because writer culture is an ostensibly literary […]

Several people have asked me to weigh in on the deepening BlackLivesMatter/Bernie Sanders fracas, but I’m keeping my mouth shut because I don’t have necessary information. I don’t know what the specific demands on the Sanders campaign are, so I can’t say anything useful. When I find out the demands of the protesters, I’d be […]

I’m writing today to announce a little project, one that’s of natural interest to very few but potential interest to a few more. At my feet sits a large box of papers, photos, and ephemera that once belonged to my father and his father. My grandfather John died in 1969, twelve years before I was […]

Just as an addendum to my last post — I’m frustrated by the rise of false choice thinking, in general, within the left. There’s so many bogus binaries people try to push you into now. We can be the side that insists on the horrors of sexual violence, offers comfort and respect to victims, pushes […]

Hey gang, so here’s the latest. While I am up for a few more potential academic jobs, which I’d love to take, I’m also preparing for the possibility that I won’t get one in the coming months. So I’m currently set to teach at Purdue again as a continuing lecturer this fall, go back on […]

So I wanted to wait a day or two to say this, because it’s never a good idea to try and get distance when I’m in the middle of one of these internet scrums. I’m still close enough to it that a bunch of people are yelling at me to behave, which is pretty much […]

Some things don’t change.Today was one of my recurring internet storms, this time about Ta-Nehisi Coates and how liking him a lot is not liking him enough. Like every other internet storm I’ve been in, people want to believe that this is the big one — that this is the one that will really matter, […]