bingo cards go both ways
So this piece in Time by Jess Zimmerman, I think, is a pretty good example of why the internet can be such a uniquely useless place to try and play politics. Zimmerman provides a brief history of the...
View Articleread Nate Silver on Piketty and Piketty’s critics
I have a set of concerns about FiveThirtyEight and data journalism in general, but I also think that there’s a lot of interesting work being done there, and that there’s lots of reasons to be excited...
View Articlethe limit
Alan Jacobs considers the phenomenon of the Twitter tsunami, which crucially is a matter of mutually-acknowledged agreement and, inevitably, transactional. To me these tsunamisfeel like desperate...
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human beings are amazing creatures
In response to a post on Gizmodo about the humane and sensible NYPD program of police officers carrying Narcan to give to overdosing heroin users, this comment appears: So that’s the opinion of...
View Articlewhich women deserve the protection of feminism?
Jacobin published an excellent piece by Amber A’Lee Frost. I would love to discuss the piece, because it has a ton to say about empiricism and the left-wing and how we talk about research. But I can’t,...
View Articlelove and hate (but mostly hate)
It’s hard for me to think of a piece that I’ve agreed with more vigorously, this year, than this piece by Andrew Sharp on how annoying both Lebron James haters and Lebron James defenders are. And for...
View ArticlePeter Beinart, still shameless after all these years
Since a new sexy war on Iraq is now being discussed, with “liberal interventionists” like Anne-Marie Slaughter and Samantha Power finally going ahead and collapsing any distinction between themselves...
View ArticleI don’t recognize the world Peter Frase is critiquing
Peter Frase is ordinarily a writer of great clarity, which makes his latest piece for Jacobin even harder to understand. It’s a meandering, directionless complaint that seems to me to be addressing a...
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people, not instruments
Here is a response from Karl Steel. Please take a moment and read it. I am only asking to be judged for what I actually believe and what I’ve actually said, and I have never said, suggested, or implied...
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HIV after the death of nuance
So to continue with my complaints about how, in a world where nuance is dead, we’re unable to tell the truth, here’s a piece from Gawker’s Dayna Evans going after Vine star and moron Nash Grier for an...
View ArticleIsrael and the privilege of being non-partisan
So since I’m talking about the Atlantic‘s biases: today Jeffrey Goldberg, the credulous Iraq war shill, contributed more to his long history of attacking critics of Israel by equating such criticism...
View Articlea proud, indecorous tradition
I wanted to be sure to share this remarkable letter from Natalie Zernon Davis, an emeritus professor of history from Princeton, in protest of the firing of Steven Salaita for his criticisms of Israeli...
View ArticleTime for the Libya mea culpas
A perennial question among the more thoughtful political types is why things don’t change, why the discourse doesn’t get better. A big part of that is that we have no history. The news cycle is...
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the racism you get to keep
In the comments of Gawker’s obituary for Joan Rivers, I pointed out that nobody seems to be remembering the fact that just a month or two ago, Rivers claimed that Palestinians deserve to die. This is...
View Articlethe Wagner thing, again
Just to build on my update to my last post– there seems to be a bit of an argument about Joan Rivers and how to talk about her death, given that she called for the destruction of the Palestinian people...
View Articleah, civility
If you have any interest in the continuing controversy of the Steven Salaita affair, or academic freedom in general, or the fetish for civility and the way it is used to suppress unpopular political...
View Articlecarceral progressivism
The recent scandals involving NFL players Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson, for me, have revealed again this central contradiction in contemporary left-of-center thought. We have broad consensus on the...
View Article“you’ll never get that window open!” say men nailing it shut
Jon Chait and Will Wilkinson got together on some sweet, Democrat-defending neoliberalism, going after poor old Tom Frank with the whole “you don’t know the complicated maths!” routine. Chait, of...
View Articlethose other men, those other white people
I thought that this piece by Mychal Denzel Smith on why feminism shouldn’t make men comfortable was interesting and well-argued, but it has this central problem that is endemic to left-wing writing...
View ArticleI’m as confused as you are
So some people are sending around this interview with Berkeley grad students in their Rhetoric program as they largely avoid the question of what rhetoric is. I agree that it is not very helpful to...
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