It probably won’t surprise you to learn that I agree with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s long piece making the case for reparations, which you should really find time to read in full. It’s interesting, though: I’m not that interested on the question that tends to stoke the most controversy about this issue, the moral claims of descendants […]

Steve Hyden, writing at the True North of the American Middlebrow: “But an album that the majority of pop fans will have no interest in hearing (in part because it’s been rigged to turn those people off) can never be meaningful.” Once again: it’s not the “snobs” who close doors and forbid some kinds of […]

One of the most obvious ways in which the status quo is defended in this country is through the inconsistent way in which  general rules are derived from particular examples, when it comes to countries and ideologies and social systems. For a perfect example of this, consider this piece in City Journal, which purports to […]

As a way to help pay the bills during his time in the New York experimental theater scene of the 1970s, my father worked for the National Endowment for the Arts. His job was to help start art and theater projects for inner city children, at a time when the city was broke and the […]

John Dickerson remembers his mother, this Mother’s Day. It’s lovely. I think of my own mother, gone 25 years, somehow, this year. To me, my mother now is all old feelings, vague impressions, dim images in a fogged mirror. But all love, all love. I think of her now as those parts of her that […]

I would really like to let all this go, but I’ve been repeatedly challenged, so here goes. After this, no more of this stuff for awhile. I consider myself a socialist. In that, I mean that I don’t believe that our problems can be solved by more or better capitalism, but by systemic reform that […]

So some guy at Salon wrote a piece saying that we aren’t in a Golden Age of TV. And if you do a little Twitter search for that link you find that the people were not pleased. Seriously, what has happened to our species where we are in a position to worry about this stuff? […]

It’s a cliche at this point that the past decade of American foreign policy has been dominated by the idea of humanitarian intervention. The idea of aggressively deploying the American military to save people from the world’s (very real) troubles has outlived the war it is most deeply associated with, our second Iraq excursion, now […]

Online liberalism, as I’ve said many times, is not actually a series of political beliefs and alliances but instead a set of social cues that are adopted to demonstrate one’s class background– economic class, certainly, but more cultural class, the various linguistic and consumptive signals that assure those around you that you’re the right kind […]