Over at the Columbia Journalism Review, the premier repository of old-guard journalistic “seriousness” and Ivy League pedantry, Sarah Grieco has a very odd critique of Gawker. I don’t find it odd just because I disagree with it; I find it odd because it defines bullying in a particular way, then immediately abandons that definition. Grieco […]
Continue reading →Since Austin Kleon and his merry gang are up to their old tricks, defining what pleasure has to be for other people, I would like to reup this post I wrote about difficult reading, and why it can still have value even though absolutely everything in your culture, and every penny in capitalism’s coffers, tells you […]
Continue reading →Just saying.
Continue reading →So I’m not one of those pedants who thinks a misplaced comma invalidates an argument or ruins an essay, but seriously, you guys. There is no Disney movie called The Rats of NIMH. There is a movie made by Don Bluth, who had a notorious falling out with Disney and left to form his own studio, called […]
Continue reading →Since I’m still getting hate mail that misunderstands what I think — no, I don’t want to burn every comic book — let me lay this stuff out in easy readin’ listicle format. Pop culture and (especially) geek culture are frequently represented by fans as disrespected and marginalized, but are commercially dominant and increasingly critically acclaimed. […]
Continue reading →I’ve written in the past that Jacob Weisberg’s attack on Ned Lamont’s supporters is one of the worst things I’ve ever read, in the sense that it demonstrates so many of the worst instincts and presumptions of our political class. Well, Weisberg has really been covering himself with glory again, and for precisely the same […]
Continue reading →I’m excited to say that I’ve been invited to join the team at Kairos, an online peer-reviewed academic journal, as their Communications Editor. I am really excited for the opportunity. I admire and enjoy Kairos because it works to expand the definition of what academic work can be, publishing podcasts, visual art, interactive texts, and more. I also […]
Continue reading →I could go into a whole song and dance about all my own biases and self-interest here, but I’ll just go ahead and say simply that I’ve given up on the hope that our media, particularly our digital media, will ever be anything but unremittingly hostile to our higher education system. It’s one of the […]
Continue reading →When Vox was still a young site, they published a piece on technology adoption rates that was just fundamentally misguided. The methodology simply didn’t work, as Paleofuture’s great writer Matt Novak detailed. Mistakes happen, particularly for young publications, but Vox compounded the issue by being cagey and evasive in addressing the problems. I criticized them […]
Continue reading →Just to build on my update to my last post– there seems to be a bit of an argument about Joan Rivers and how to talk about her death, given that she called for the destruction of the Palestinian people shortly before her death. It’s the Wagner thing, one more time. I confess that I […]
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