Jay Caspian Kang and I are starting an exchange about hashtag activism, #CancelColbert, and related issues over at Medium. Please check it out. I’ve got some really cool professional gigs coming up in prominent places. They’re longer pieces so it’ll take some time before you see them, but it’s super gratifying to get these opportunities. […]

Since I frequently get praise and attention from conservatives and libertarians for my pieces critiquing the current state of progressive argumentative and political practice, I am also frequently accused by more partisan progressives of not being left-wing. The funny thing is that these people are frequently incapable of naming a single substantive policy on which […]

Here is a quite-long collection of odds and ends, written about in a directionless and loping manner, that anyone other than long-term readers who are interested in me personally may feel comfortable skipping. 1. As somebody pointed out on Twitter, I never actually came out and said that I successfully defended my dissertation. So: I […]

So Bill Simmons is leaving ESPN at last, and for good reason it’s spooking the herd a little bit. Grantland is what it is– it’s a bloated site, but bloated with a lot of good writers who deserve work, which is almost perfectly designed to be not my slice of bread, given the aggressively upper-middle-browness […]

In the interregnum, after Los Angeles and before I split, my stepmother and I had a cold war to go along with the regular version. I would go out to hang out with my friends, and we wouldn’t talk about that anymore than we would talk about anything else. When I would come home, sometimes, […]

It’s dueling MLK quote season again. Both sides are making accusations of selective reading at the other, and given that many people on either side have probably read very little of his words that don’t appear on a poster, both sets of accusations are perennially accurate. We might make a policy of saying that if […]

I’ve never thought of myself as a creative writer; I’ve always assumed that I wouldn’t have the talent for it, if I ever tried. But I do envy creative  writers in the simple sense that they have much less pressure to make everything explicit. I am bored to tears of other people’s explanations and even […]

It will probably not surprise you to learn that I really love this Alana Massey piece on why chill is dumb and destructive and shitty. It’s important and funny and so well written. Massey is writing from the perspective of social life and relationships, which is a very good place to write from. I have […]

I am not, as you’re aware if you’re reading this, a fan of the perpetual outrage cycle over verbal gaffes and imperfect vocabulary which has replaced politics for the contemporary American  left.  Because I think that human beings make mistakes; because I think that in any offense, you have to take into account intent to harm; because […]