Tonight I read a 110-word piece, on a professional website, aggregating a tweet, celebrating it as a snappy comeback to another tweet, without bothering to explain what the comeback was a comeback to, ending by telling an objectively horrible woman “bravo,” written by an associate editor “focusing on innovation.” And given the economics of professional online […]

Ezra Klein has a piece out about affirmative consent laws that, in many ways, belongs in a time capsule. I can hardly imagine a document that is a better encapsulation of the performative morality of the educated media class that dominates our national conversation, wedded to the broken economics of online journalism, wrapped up in […]

Recently on Real Time with Bill Maher, self-impressed television host and disco movie extra Maher got himself into quite an argument with Ben Affleck. Maher, along with torture apologist and New Atheist icon Sam Harris, insisted as he so often does that Islam is a religion of unique violence, and that despite what those PC […]

This cover story from New York magazine on campus activists working against sexual assault is deep and challenging, and you should read it in full. I want to talk a little bit about the burgeoning movement for explicit consent laws. These laws change the typical standard from “no means no” to “only yes means yes.” As the article […]

Five years or so ago, I was reading in the Russell Library in my hometown in Middletown, Connecticut, while two blocks away on Broad Street, Stephen Morgan was pumping bullets into Johanna Justin-Jinich. By then, the bookstore where she worked was called Broad Street Books, but I will always think of it as Atticus. I […]

Perhaps no instinct in American foreign policy debate is more destructive than the tendency to think that the world’s various conflicts always involve good sides and bad sides. This 25-minute Frontline documentary on Boko Haram, and the horrific excesses of the Nigerian government in hunting them, makes plain that the Manichean philosophy of foreign policy cannot withstand […]

You can’t see ideology because you live in it; you are the fish who wonders what water could be. We’re going to war again. We’re going to war in Iraq again. And we’re going with no better idea of how to win or when to get out or what victory could mean than the last […]

My all-time favorite blogger and true mensch Jacob Bacharach has a conversation with liberaltarian writer and cartoonist Will Wilkinson on Bloggingheads. I can’t wait to go check it out. You come, too.  

Above is the image that the august Atlantic has chosen to run alongside an article by David Frum, the Axis-of-Evil coining, unhinged former George W. Bush speechwriter. The headline is “Russia Has Become Dangerous Again.” Illustrating Russia’s danger, apparently, is such a confusing endeavor that you end up with a graphic depicting a German philosopher and economist who […]