So in response to this Michelle Goldberg interview with Vox, I want to point you in the direction of this piece I wrote awhile back. To put it simply: Goldberg is simply incorrect about who the people expressing “anti-liberal” sentiment are, and in fact, they are far more a part of the Clintonite triangulation lineage […]
Continue reading →I like Bob Dylan’s music a lot, and I do agree that there’s a history of lifting from other musicians in the folk and blues traditions that have inspired him. However, it makes me squeamish how many people in this article are working overtime to excuse Dylan for lifting large portions of his (National Book […]
Continue reading →This Molly Ball piece on the fight over GMO labeling is a perfect example of how culture war gets into everything, and more, how that culture war is ultimately operating at a different level than partisan or ideological politics. I don’t really care about this issue. It seems, from my perfectly amateur vantage, that there’s […]
Continue reading →I came to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series at probably the perfect age– I think 13 or 14, whenever my brother started to get the collections. I really loved them, and I still do, although they don’t move me quite as much as they once did. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’ve never been the type to feel […]
Continue reading →“It’s a TV channel aimed mainly at millennials, whose only real guiding rule is that it’s going to stay away from anything conventional….So here’s the idea: let’s say we can serve up high-quality Fusion-branded content to a new generation of digital natives…. Here’s where things start getting really cool. ” — Felix Salmon. The whole piece is like some […]
Continue reading →“I haven’t read any superhero comics since I finished with Watchmen. I hate superheroes. I think they’re abominations. They don’t mean what they used to mean. They were originally in the hands of writers who would actively expand the imagination of their nine- to 13-year-old audience. That was completely what they were meant to do and they were doing it […]
Continue reading →I’ve gotten a lot of good responses to my post on free speech and the social justice left. I appreciate both the praise and the criticism. I would like to take a moment and respond to one line of criticism, which is part of a particular frustration of mine: when I am told that attitudes […]
Continue reading →“Ricks is free to think what he wants about Greenwald and Snowden’s political beliefs and if he has some evidence that they have signed on to Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine agenda, as a top journalist I’m sure he can figure out a way to prove it. Otherwise this is just another example of a certain strain […]
Continue reading →This post contains spoilers for the first season of True Detective. The moderate, qualified disappointment being expressed about the ending of the first season of HBO’s True Detective, and with it the end of that storyline and characters, seemed highly predictable to me from the earliest stages of the show’s ecstatic critical reaction. You could argue […]
Continue reading →One of the hardest parts of being a researcher is getting access to data. This is particularly acute if you, like me, work in research fields where there is very little grant funding available, making it difficult to give language users incentives to give you samples created under the controlled conditions that are necessary for […]
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