I generally find radical transparency kind of creepy, but I think Gawker Media opening up its internal discussion about a union effort is useful, so I encourage you to check it out. [edit: useful to me. Maybe not so useful to individual employees who feel intimidated about it, it occurs to me.] The particulars of […]

Well folks, grad school has come and gone. It’s beautiful on campus. I grew up on a college campus; my earliest memories are of playing under my father’s desk while he met with students. My parents met on campus. My maternal grandfather ran the post office and general store at a college; my paternal grandfather […]

Last night TNR unleashed this thoughtful, restrained profile of Suey Park by Elizabeth Bruenig. I thought Bruenig played her hand well. The profile genre elicits sympathy for the profiled by its nature, and Bruenig was investigating with compassion, and yet she does not dismiss or trivialize the reasons many turned on Park. Unfortunate, then, that […]

This post contains minor spoilers about the movie Mad Max: Fury Road, which is one of the best movies I’ve seen in ages and my favorite blockbuster in forever. 1. Because hot damn, real physical objects look good on camera. I know it’s a cliche by now to complain about CGI and nothing being or looking real, […]

Allow me to reiterate. Awhile back, Conor Friedersdorf wrote a piece echoing the widespread claim that anti-Semitism is rising in Europe. That piece was bad. It was bad in large measure because it made large claims with little evidence. Worse, it almost entirely walked back its own claims in the last paragraph, admitting “The degree […]

I have two memories tonight, both from Wilbert Snow School, my childhood school, my childhood home. In the first, it was a typical day on the blacktop, which means it could have been pretty much any grade, K-5. In those days the school was an actual campus; there was a main building with the office, […]

On the one hand, I agree with a lot of the people pointing out the problems with Jon Stewart’s long reign as the public conscience of American liberalism. For a long while, I’ve been among many arguing that the broad left-of-center has to move on from telling jokes about the absurdity of our opponents and […]

“… as of this writing, neuroscience knows of no plausible mechanism for carrying a large amount of information forward over indefinitely long intervals in a form that makes it accessible to the mechanisms that effect the primitive two-argument functions that are at the heart of computation. Until the day comes when neuroscientists are able to […]

Noah Berlatsky Blatarsky carried out an in-depth interview with the trans activist Julia Serano, where she speaks at length about the issues of how to make left-wing activism more inclusive while maintaining rigorous condemnation of insensitivity. I highly recommend it. Serano: Sometimes, the unwritten codes of conduct in certain activist or progressive spaces may be especially […]