Because you demanded politely requested  it!

Emailer Dennis writes, “Have you been following the latest Serial developments? What do you think about the interviews in the Intercept?” No offense to anybody else, just my preference and all, no accounting for taste, but at this point I would really rather gargle bleach than spend another second reading about Serial.

I’ve written, in the past, that I think the reflexive statement “correlation is not causation” has actually become more dangerous than people naively assuming that correlation does equal causation. I was reminded of this recently when I was reading Siddartha Mukherjee’s magnificent “biography of cancer,” The Emperor of All Maladies. The relationship between lung cancer and […]

This letter to the editor was written in response to my father’s obituary and published in my hometown paper, The Middletown Press. My stepmother had a copy, I think, but with the dissolution of my relationship with her in the years after his death, I had no way to get my hands on it. For years […]

We know, beyond all doubt, that this country engaged in the routine torture, sexual abuse, and murder of prisoners, and for years. We know for a fact that we tortured. We know for a fact that some of those we  tortured were innocent. We know for a fact that some of those we tortured, we […]

So I oppose stop and frisk on basic racial equality and civil liberties grounds — the policy looks like a straightforward excuse to harass poor people of color — and believe that we should end the War on Drugs immediately, etc. I also recognize that every such interaction, in the world we live in, amounts […]

I was born in 1981. The 1980s were a time of serious and entrenched racial inequality, but they were also a time of optimism about the long-term future of racial justice and reconciliation. Growing up in a world of Huxtables and presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, I was raised to believe that while ending black-white inequality […]

The New Republic was never anything but a warmongering racist antileft trashpile and I hope the whole enterprise burns to the ground and if you are nostalgic about it you’re nostalgic for The Bell Curve, the war on Iraq, and Marty Peretz’s Muslim Hating Neo-Fascist Jamboree. The whole enterprise was corrupt right down to its colonialist bones […]

If you want to see exactly why our media is, comprehensively and in every sense, complicit in the oppression of the Palestinian people, you could do much worse that observing the way in which the attack on a synagogue last night is being discussed. Because almost without exception, in every kind of publication, across the […]