Whenever I write about controversial issues, such as intersectionality politics or Israel-Palestine or any number of things, I receive a certain kind of counsel, sometimes admonishment. Sometimes  it’s a kind of well-meaning advice from people who agree with me, sometimes a kind of scolding by those who don’t. But in each case, the argument is […]

Here’s a collection of random  books from around my office, all of which have recently been a part of some sort of academic work of mine — my dissertation, articles I am trying to send out, a book proposal, or most of all, the hundreds of pages stuffed into my hard drive of ideas and […]

David Carr died last night. The outpouring of genuine, deep grief from many of his peers and friends has been deeply moving. I don’t know what it’s like to have known or worked for him, but public sadness of this depth is impossible to fake. It seems clear that the Times and journalism have lost a remarkable […]

There are all kinds of arguments in the world — right ones, wrong ones, constructive ones, destructive ones, sincere ones, disingenuous ones, funny ones, serious ones. But at this stage in my life as an arguer, none is as consistently, exhaustingly unhelpful as “no one is arguing that.” This has become an absolute stock response […]

I owe many, many emails. I hope to get to them soon. It’s just a crazy time right now, for a variety of reasons. Hang tight.

My grandfather was not alone in his radicalism. My grandmother, Henrietta deBoer, was his equal, as an organizer, a champion for civil rights and civil liberties, and as a keen political mind. This remarkable document is a transcript of a speech given in her honor when she won an award from her local ACLU branch. […]

My little buddy Suavecito had a little surgery last week. He’s feeling all better now, so here we are celebrating. It was the first day of my last (?) semester of grad school today. First day is always exciting. Hard to believe this will (probably) be my last one as a student. Lots of writing […]

These two environments, Twitter and Tumblr, have something important in common, which they share with most social media sites: they invite you to measure people’s response to you. For many people this probably means nothing, but on me it has always had an effect. Over the years I developed a sense of how many RTs […]

One point that, I hope, runs through a lot of my work is the use and abuse of dead moral questions. In that, I mean the tendency for political types to bring a lot of rhetorical and mental weight to bear on questions that are not politically live, in any meaningful sense. This focus is […]