Peter Frase is ordinarily a writer of great clarity, which makes his latest piece for Jacobin even harder to understand. It’s a meandering, directionless complaint that seems to me to be addressing a strawman left. For all its digressions and myriad targets, it can be boiled down to saying, “Class is real and important but it’s not […]
Continue reading →Since a new sexy war on Iraq is now being discussed, with “liberal interventionists” like Anne-Marie Slaughter and Samantha Power finally going ahead and collapsing any distinction between themselves and neoconservatism, the old war on Iraq has come up again. There have been, of course, several half-hearted spasms of apologetics from those liberal supporters of […]
Continue reading →It’s hard for me to think of a piece that I’ve agreed with more vigorously, this year, than this piece by Andrew Sharp on how annoying both Lebron James haters and Lebron James defenders are. And for more than just his take on the Heat and Lebron, but for how this dynamic plays out in […]
Continue reading →Jacobin published an excellent piece by Amber A’Lee Frost. I would love to discuss the piece, because it has a ton to say about empiricism and the left-wing and how we talk about research. But I can’t, because it’s been swallowed by yet another bullshit controversy. In her piece, originally, the line “And I just […]
Continue reading →In response to a post on Gizmodo about the humane and sensible NYPD program of police officers carrying Narcan to give to overdosing heroin users, this comment appears: So that’s the opinion of MartiniGuy. Here’s a chart showing the harm factor of different drugs, according to a major study from Imperial College London, which considered […]
Continue reading →Alan Jacobs considers the phenomenon of the Twitter tsunami, which crucially is a matter of mutually-acknowledged agreement and, inevitably, transactional. To me these tsunamisfeel like desperate signaling, people trying to make sure that everyone knows where they stand on the issue du jour. I can almost see the beads of sweat forming on their foreheads as they […]
Continue reading →I have a set of concerns about FiveThirtyEight and data journalism in general, but I also think that there’s a lot of interesting work being done there, and that there’s lots of reasons to be excited about some of the developments in how people are disseminating and reacting to research online. I want to endorse […]
Continue reading →So this piece in Time by Jess Zimmerman, I think, is a pretty good example of why the internet can be such a uniquely useless place to try and play politics. Zimmerman provides a brief history of the “not all men” meme, which is the new new hotness in the world of people who take their politics […]
Continue reading →Via the Dish, I read Shikma Dalmia making the case against California’s attempt to increase black and Hispanic enrollment at their best public universities– still, after all of the neoliberal assaults and constant funding cuts, the best public university system in the world– and arguing that this defeat was a natural priority of California’s large […]
Continue reading →The Conference on College Composition and Communication, where I’m hanging out right now, is organized by the National Council of Teachers of English. It’s good to be a part of that organization; John James deBoer, my paternal grandfather, was the 32nd president of the organization. A professor of Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, […]
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