Our political system, of course, is broken, in part because our political media is broken. And that brokenness stems in large measure from the fact that we have, essentially, two competing tribes of conservative media that think they are actually on opposite sides. Recent weeks have seen a large, simultaneous anti-Bernie Sanders effort by Democratic […]

For years I’ve said that there’s a wagon-circling function in media that makes criticism of certain connected people appear professionally risky. A lot of people in the media question the accuracy of that criticism, and I fully admit that at times I can be too sensitive to it. But I’m not inventing it, either. Here’s […]

Jay Rosen coined a term to describe the basic attitude of our professional journalism and commentary class, the Cult of the Savvy. Rosen: “In politics, our journalists believe, it is better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It’s better to be savvy than it is to be […]

Here’s a piece on pandering in the book industry, I guess. It’s ostensibly a complaint about cultural bubbles, though it’s written in an idiom — the impossibly self-satisfied lecturing tone of the 21st century — that’s shared by maybe a few thousand liberals with a college education and a Netflix account. But here’s an attitude […]

The movement should be Materialist. In the style of Marx, a functioning, healthy left political movement would be concerned with the material reality of the present world. It would not necessarily be anti-religious, and it wouldn’t require everyone within it to be an atheist, but it would be anticlerical and would not take religious arguments as […]

I was quoted in a couple prominent publications yesterday, repeating my complaints with Oberlin’s protest against the supposed cultural appropriation of bad cafeteria food. Predictably, this resulted in both a lot of praise and a lot of criticism on social media. I don’t take either too deeply to heart. But I am disappointed that, from […]

Today I shared this story, about Oberlin students complaining that bad cafeteria food is cultural appropriation. The story blew up, because it seems to confirm so many of the stereotypes of college students. (Among other things, even if you buy into the idea that food that was intentionally spread by members of other cultures into […]

You know I got caught up in the “nerds are oppressed war!” again today, which is just useless. I started because, of course, at a time of the most powerful cultural hegemony in the history of mass culture, when Star Wars is an unavoidable behemoth that has the entire weight of capitalism behind it and whenthe […]

There’s a Missouri state legislative bill that would force student athletes to play unless injured, and thus prevent strikes of the type that the University of Missouri’s football team used to such great effect.  Nora Caplan-Barker points out that this (hopefully doomed) bill represents a chilling imposition on the free speech rights of college athletes, yet […]

If, for whatever reason, you wanted my opinion. Best Book, Fiction: The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro This selection doubles as a “most overlooked” award. I genuinely believe that this novel, the story of an elderly couple in medieval England searching for both their son and their memories, is a masterpiece. Yet its reviews seemed to peak […]