Selected Popular Publications
On why being impressed isn’t as good as feeling affection, for New York – February 2nd, 2023
On whether the SAT should be abolished (audio), for NPR – August 26th, 2022
On the radical tradition of abortion rights and the Civil War, for Sublation – August 8th, 2022
On Las Vegas as a land of myth, for Compact Magazine – July 22nd, 2022
On mental illness and mass shooters, for The Daily Beast
On Marianne Eloise’s memoir Obsessive, Intrusive, Magical Thinking, for UnHerd – April 29th, 2022
On why YIMBYs need to watch their Ps and Qs to win, for The Daily Beast – January 31st, 2022
On the socialist left’s self-delusions, for The New York Times – November 16th, 2021
On Donald Trump and the Cult of Smart, for the Washington Post – October 8th, 2020
On corporations as the greatest threat to free speech, for the Washington Post – August 11th, 2017
On the threat of Republican antipathy towards universities, for the Los Angeles Times – July 24th, 2017
On a progressive policy agenda in California and beyond, for the Forward – August 15th, 2017
On another charter school scandal, for Jacobin – April 11th, 2017
On the left’s fixation on easy victories, for Current Affairs – March 1st, 2017
On knowledge and knowingness, for Jacobin – December 30th, 2016
On declining absolute income mobility, for The Guardian – December 13th, 2016
On pro-globalization neoliberal pundits, for Current Affairs – July 28th, 2016
On Bernie Sanders and Election 2016, for The Washington Post – November 10th, 2016
On free expression and private forums, for the Los Angeles Times – July 22nd, 2016
On the identity crisis of the Democrats, for The Washington Post – June 22nd, 2016
On the Panama Papers, for Foreign Policy – April 5th, 2016
On the need to assess assessments, for the New America Foundation – March 24, 2016
On life in college towns, for The Towner – March 13th, 2016
On the limits of acknowledging white privilege, for the Washington Post – January 28th, 2016
On the university in a time of ambient fear, for The Chronicle of Higher Education – January 22nd, 2016
On Louis Farrakhan, the BlackLivesMatter protests, and the future of black political leadership in Harper’s – January, 2016
On the need for campus activists to work bottom-up, rather than top-down, when protesting in the New Republic, September 27th, 2015
On the corporatization of campus and the real source of campus speech codes for the New York Times Magazine – September 9th, 2015
On Google Deep Dream and the structural reasons the tech press is broken for Full Stop Quarterly – October 27th, 2015
On the Ashley Madison leak and the culture wars in the Observer – August 19th, 2015
On Bernie Sanders as a socialist in Politico, July 23rd, 2015
On bad arguments against polygamy in Playboy, (lost to the memory hole)
On gay marriage and the “born this way” argument for the Observer, July 13th, 2015
On polygamy for Politico, June 26th, 2015
On experimental metal in Vox, June 25th, 2015
On Rachel Dolezal for The Los Angeles Times, June 13th, 2015
On critique drift for In These Times, March 11th, 2015
On the Rolling Stone University of Virginia investigation for The Week, January 9th, 2015
On geek culture for The New York Times, September 14th, 2014
On my love for Diana Wynne Jones for The Dish – August 24th, 2014
On Israeli fears matching Palestinian realities for The Dish – August 20th, 2014
On the Brookings student loan debt story for Talking Points Memo – June 20th, 2014
On neoconservatism for Salon, April 8th, 2014
On Hartford, Connecticut, for n+1, March 13th, 2014
On the bogus notion that everything’s a remix – November 26th, 2013
On Gawker’s coverage of Rob Ford for Salon – November 10th, 2013
On liberal humanitarianism and counterfactuals for Jacobin – September 13th, 2013
On Twilight of the Elites for The New Inquiry – August 31st, 2012
On international college students for The Huffington Post – April 15th, 2012
On the fundamentals of conservatism for Wunderkammer, n.d.
On the resentment machine for The New Inquiry – November 7th, 2011
Academic Writing
Standardized assessments must account for non-standardized institutions, for eCampusNews
Standardized Tests of College Learning: Past and Future, for the New America Foundation
Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, where I served as Comm Editor
“Evaluating the Comparability of Two Measures of Lexical Diversity” for System
My review of Class Dismissed for Teacher-Scholar
My CCCC panel review for Kairos
“The First Person” for Writing Commons
“Singular ‘Their’ and the Grammar Wars”
“Review of Mary Soliday’s Everyday Genres”
“Eugene Debs’s Statement to the Court: A Rhetorical Analysis”
“Postmodernism in Rhetoric and Composition: Past, Passing, and Yet to Come”