Teaching writing and ethics to engineers, writing a book on George Eliot.
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No clearer evidence of the tragedy then farce dynamic than the comparison between their thinkers and ours. at least the Victorian apologists/enthusiasts for empire could read a book and write a sentence. Ours have to have ChatGPT come up with the sacred tradition of the nation.
I think I like Bari Weiss, under the theory that posting is any activity in which the epistemic authority is purely the poster’s charisma, in which The Free Press is just one long post.
So I think this is true but it’s also disqualifying, because then her power doesn’t rest simply on posting.
thanks for this
And after it was abundantly clear that it was costing him politically. Tough to forgive the key players in the Biden administration for hating Gazans more than they loved American democracy.
But, to be clear and to push back gently on the criticism here, it it is objectively *good* that they are getting adventurous on comms.
It is really sad that the only way Dems will get adventurous on comms is if someone who absolutely sucks on policy shows them it's okay.
Right this was your original analogy, which I disagree with (I think family policy is very intentional), but I think at this point we’re just repeating ourselves.
One (hard, lots of tradeoffs) question is: what natal policy should the US have? I have no idea, although I also think abortion access and queer rights are important. The other (easier, empirical) question is: does the US currently have a natal policy, to which the answer is imo unequivocally yes.
I'm not sure how that's connected? The point is just that with stuff like the child and childcare tax credits, the US very clearly has a natal policy already, so the policy questions involve efficacy and efficiency rather than the broad "should this be an area of policy action at all."
little-known fact: the other side of Niagara falls is a giant mirror. If you try to cross to the *Canadian side* you bump into it, but no one ever does.
Sure, one wouldn't want to posit that just because X affects Y, it's necessary to make X a reflective engagement with Y. But that's not relevant to US family policy, where everyone agrees specific family structures are conscious endorsed and financially incentivized.
It is honestly insane that Greenwald's career survived Reality Winner.
This seems right, as a thick concept there's negative evaluation built in. What's puzzling is that it involves recognition of some reason for concern, and failure to see that reason entirely (if that's possible) has to be less fitting than panic. I like the comment that says panic isn't an emotion.
Thanks man
Dammit I got jinxed by my nine year old, can someone help me out here
I think Yglesias is right that it’s an analytic truth? Panicking might be more reasonable than some other reactions (like hiding your head in the sand), but it’s still not as fitting as quick attentive perception, deliberation, and decisive action.
Imo dynamic of *only the racists are truly authentic* flows from confused thinking about education and selfhood. It's empirically true that college makes you less bigoted, but pre-college selves aren't somehow more real. That's like thinking "No True Man knows how to read" or some shit.
I'm so convinced he's dying that i now suspect you're dying too, tbqh. I mean, a healthy person wouldn't need an illustrated avi.
Jerry you can't preannounce the announcement, that's not how parentheses work
People are dunking on this but there are versions of the point that are completely reasonable? Vague "democracy is DYING" really is unhelpful, what's actually valuable are close accounts of specific institutions disintegrating. Shame the follow-ups didn't clarify it.
Honestly it's such a failure that it hasn't been done already—Russian oligarch money making traitors out of British elites is an absolute classic Bond storyline.
The next Bond movie would make one billion dollars if it centered on MI6's failure to anticipate and prevent the op that brought about Brexit.
Oof, owned
One potentially interesting way to get into this: it'd be cool to figure out the first children's book that presented "policeman" as a desirable career one might want to have and not a glorified bouncer.
More specifically, while armed thugs have been with humanity forever, I'm tempted to argue that the *armed thug who has the social reputation and seeming benevolence of a Noble Crime-Solver" is new, or more precisely one of the major social innovations of the nineteenth century.
That tension—between the police as a public good investigating and solving particular crimes and the police as a tool of suppressing dissent—has been with us since at least 1829 (the foundation of the London Metropolitan Police). And I suppose I do think this combination is new, or new-ish.
That's one historical trajectory that fed into the police. The second—the idea of investigating and solving particular crimes—has a much different lineage: there's a key eighteenth century predecessor called the "Bow Street Runners."
There's a public outcry, and broadly speaking the British ruling classes process the fact that one needs a better form of crowd control than soldiers: killing people is too disruptive and unpopular. The social and technological innovation that fixes it: the baton charge.
There's a giant riot of unpaid veterans that's broken up by a cavalry charge. Eighteen people die (yes, this was a simpler time, when eighteen dead people were a tragedy and not a fraction of fraction of the daily interstate death toll) and a bunch are injured.
Quick thread on this, I think this is common knowledge to everyone in this conversation but maybe it's helpful, the key factor distinguishing modern policing is, oddly, nonlethal violence. The key moment here is post 1815 (i.e. post-Napoleon wars) England.
Turkish: it’s not justified, it is.
His ex: you mean haughtythorne?
Little known fact: he was commonly known as “Nathaniel Hotthorne”
Was gonna say, gotta tag this post #humbkebrag, look at Amanda having friends and being able to read
Between the Minneapolis shooting and the Madison shooting, I wonder if we're headed to a world where school shootings are disproportionately concentrated in conservative parochial schools. The NRA's imperial boomerang, if you will.
Arguing about Jonathan Haidt with my good friend yesterday, I got reminded that the peaceful, never disruptive debate fetishized by centrists is only possible for moral nihilists. "is abortion wrong?" can only be peacefully litigated by people who don't think there's a moral truth either way.
And —the false dimension of the argument — since this defunding is a way of hammering the deep-blue college towns, it was coming no matter what. There's no amount of "apolitical" research that would prevent educational polarization and thus the logic of smashing the New Havens of the world.
What I would say, though, is that a benefactor who is willing to bankrupt you because you're too friendly with your gay cousin is not one you can trust even if you do cut your cousin loose. One might even thank the gay cousin for revealing your benefactor's true nature.
Missed this discourse because I had a deadline to make, but I've been kinda wondering when someone would make this argument, which has the virtue of being partially true: I do think the sciences are getting hammered because that's the best way to get at the queer theorists they really despise.
I don't think this phrase means what you're implying? "salt of the earth" is a compliment. www.reddit.com/r/explainlik...
It’s also just deeply uncharitable. No, these people can’t possibly be trying to balance the authority of expertise with a democratic exchange of ideas: they’re just hypocritical poseurs with shitty taste.
OK now everyone who has given Mamdani shit over something he never said has to publicly explain how this quote by a member of the Israeli government makes them feel www.timesofisrael.com/far-right-mi...
I think whether orthopraxy or orthodoxy is more central to a religious identity can’t be settled abstractly: it’s something that gets established in the practical life of a specific community.
Hey everybody, i wrote a piece about one new organizational tactic I’m trying out in the attempt to build a resistance to fascism: I joined the church down the street. Hope you like it — www.liberalcurrents.com/reclaiming-o...
I did the thing you are never supposed to do. I wrote a (rough draft of a) textbook: Theories of Rational Decision It's technical, but from a philosophical perspective. It focuses on the normative theory but touches on some behavioral issues as well. raw.githubusercontent.com/kzollman/Rat...
Work with Lydia, people, she’s good stuff —
But check it out!
I try to make the case that there is nevertheless a sense in which she can be so recovered: that the idea the novels make arguments, with premises and conclusions etc., is still seriously disputed, and this aspect of Eliot’s thought is still under-appreciated.
For the interested, my piece is about what “recovering” Eliot as a philosopher might mean, given that—unlike many of the other figures discussed here—she’s been the recipient of a great deal of (brilliant) scholarly attention and has been for a long time.
I’m honored and humbled to have a piece about George Eliot in this volume alongside excellent company.
COME ON
These voters will say in the same breath that communism will never work because at root people are only motivated by money.
The medium is the message yet again.
The fundamental problem is that if your ad is saying, “I have principles and even people who disagree with me have respected them,” the *ad itself* is evidence that you’ll say anything you need to win power and do not in fact have any principles.
Yeah, this dude’s analysis does not uh align precisely with the historical record of these processes.
Filing for divorce on biblical grounds is a power move, I’m declaring hereby that I won the Powerball on constitutional grounds and expect my winnings forthwith.
Yeah, my wife put in a picture of our house because we’re thinking about painting our front door and then asked it to give the door a bunch of different colors. Nothing particularly earth shattering, but mildly cool to picture what a hot pink door would look like.
Oh hell yeah, next I hope he demands reparations from Denmark
The man crashed a press conference and got himself arrested, I think you’re barking up the wrong tree.
Yeah that came through, I took you to be saying that it’s bad but not the root of the problem, which, maybe! Idk enough about it to have a strong opinion.
Yeah, quote tweet via screen shot is a dick move, but also I loved eating at Red Lobster But also I think I’m here for the take that private equity is a symptom not the disease.
It’s not that Clarissa herself explained it all, it’s that all can be explained by reflecting on Clarissa.
I genuinely can't remember a single thing Clarissa explained
Love your posts, but this looks like MattY dunking on Murray, not agreeing with him.
I think a lot of doomerism is falling for Republican cope, tbqh. They wanted to win the Supreme Court in Wisconsin really badly, and it was only after they lost that the election didn’t matter.
Look we didn’t earn the nickname “sewer socialists” for our glamorous restaurants, okay
me: look the criticisms of the evangelical church are unfair, it's a big mixed institution with lots of people genuinely aspiring after the Good reality:
I regard all policy posters as the equivalent of anxious dogs out walking in a strange place, which is why I open any skeptical reply with the Bluesky Beggin Strip: "love your work, but"
I believe there is a dedicated Bouie Post officer hand curating it (it's a spoof, I'm just joshing)
And with this latest update, it sure looks like Bluesky is building the infrastructure for a supportive community
I honestly think the real problem here isn't writing so much as it is grade inflation: we're all used to giving Bs to anything that seemed basically serviceable, and that habit is going to have to go.
This essay is written in a pretty mournful tone, but if you get into the details it seems like actually college writing teachers are figuring out how to deal with ChatGPT? 1. More in-class writing 2. More drafting/revising 3. Higher standards www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
In case anyone was wondering how the local facebook group is going
I'd actually really like to know the ratio of coward-calling to online defenders/supporters (present company included). My feed has a lot more of the latter than the former.
I don’t have any opinions about that but I did watch one stage and figured out that the moment when a peloton breaks up should be called . wait for it . pelotoff
Love the defaults in the new fine tuning! a lot of attention to the real juice of the site:
Inception 2 (2026)
I was gonna say, the real chef's kiss is going to be when we learn that Mamdani did have a slot to get in but was bumped for a white legacy kid of a financier who pretended to do crew.
I appreciate the impulse behind this policy but maybe not the right way to handle it?
The phrase "Steppe Fjord Wife" has entered my brain and I need to make it everyone's problem
It’s from the old site, but I lost an irl friend in a debate about post-critique. Man, those were the days.
And wasn’t his first press conference basically, “just to get it out there, I have cheated on my wife many times”?
2026 blockbuster: Being Ken Paxton (Every Republican has to crawl through a Texas-shaped hole in order to post from trump’s Truth Social, which is now the only way to register to vote)
Look man, you’re doing the actually important work of suing fascists, us humble writing teachers will sweat the small stuff
So here, "the positions were vacated" (passive, past) "the positions had been vacated" (passive, past perfect) "the positions were vacant" (active, past) "the positions are vacant" (active, present) are all different thoughts and worth distinguishing
But we don't want to conflate passive constructions with predications that share a root, e.g. "The bucket had been emptied" is a different thought than "The bucket had been empty."
Note that whether a tense is perfect is a different question from whether it's passive, and the two can be combined: it had been done already it has been recorded it will have been explained are all both perfect and passive.
That's in contrast to the perfect tenses, which indicate simply that an action has been completed. This can occur in past, perfect, or future tenses: he had done it he has done it he will have done it
We form the passive in English by combining a conjugation of the "to be" verb with a past participle: is done was killed will be exonerated etc.
lol now let's do it what's confusing here is that often but not always a past participle is formed with an -ed form, and there are some irregular participles that look different parts of speech (was given, was shown, was done, etc).
"have vacated" would be the past perfect, I believe —
"were vacated" would be passive, but "were vacant" is just simple predication. "The bucket was emptied" vs "the bucket was empty"
"might have complicated" is past perfect, not passive.
love your work, man, but that is not the passive voice
To be clear, undergrads are great, but let’s remind ourselves what percentage of the reading we did.
The only good thing about Irish soda bread is that it doubles as a construction material.
I kinda doubt he's being honest in this, anyway. I think he's the voice that lets Republicans express anger at their own party before helping them see that Democrats are worse just before election time.
Ehhh at best this is partly right. There are no more Joe Strauses in the GOP, nor were there many left then. And bathroom bills just never found purchase the way school sports bans did.