… before they’ll even consider letting you work for pay. “First: Create a profile on BuzzFeed and publish a number of posts that show off your internet chops and writing prowess. How well do you get the BuzzFeed voice and style? Check out these posts to see what kinds of things perform the best on our site: http://www.buzzfeed.com/hot Then, and only […]

It’s tough to be a professional writer, but there are beats you can work. There are roles you can occupy and never go hungry. Few are safer than to be an imperial scribe, the kind of writer who tells Americans that their country is good and that others are evil. Grantland’s Louisa Thomas, an enterprising […]

Here’s a piece I wrote for The Week on this topic. The simple version is that when we adopt a blanket policy of believing all sexual assault accusations, as Zerlina Maxwell and others have advocated, we actually make it harder to publicly work against rape, as we tie our credibility to allegations that are eventually […]

Six and a half years of writing online and I still really have no idea how people come up with the notions of decorum and civility they do. There lots of argumentative behaviors that I don’t do. I don’t use racial, ethnic, or similar slurs. I don’t make insults about people’s identities or value independent […]

Longtime readers will know that I’ve spent a lot of time arguing against race science, the claims that intelligence is distributed unevenly between races, with black and Hispanic people tending to be less intelligent and Asian people tending to be more intelligent. I think this claim is flat wrong, and in multiple dimensions. I also […]

… and we need to factor that into our worries about plagiarism. While I appreciate the concern of the eagle-eyed tipster who pointed this out to me — do I think funny and talented writer Jeb Lund plagiarized a goofy joke I told in the comments on Deadspin five months later? I do not! Of […]

Although it has a distinct feeling of too little, too late, President Obama deserves considerable praise for his immigration speech and his administration’s apparent decision to pursue legitimate reform. (Dara Lind has the details.) Since I don’t believe in the nation state, I don’t believe in the legitimacy of their borders, and even if we […]

And, frankly, I’m sick of pretending that they don’t. You will likely have seen that Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media has parted ways with Matt Taibbi, the longtime Rolling Stone writer and former co-editor of Moscow’s The Exile, a tabloid newspaper that he co-edited with former NSFW Corp, current Pando Media writer  Mark Ames. In a very long […]