Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. A Little More Enlightenment I recently re-posted my series of articles from last year on the legacy of the Enlightenment, including my review of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now. One year after the publication of that book, Steven Pinker looks back, in an article in Quillette, and responds […]
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The War on the Brains of the Right
Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. The War on the Brains of the Right At the very beginning of the Trump phenomenon, I warned about a war on the brains of the right. Along with many friends and colleagues, I have found it grimly amusing to find myself dismissed as an “establishment” “elitist” […]
Salon of the Refused, Episode 5
Episode 5 of my video and podcast series, Salon of the Refused, is now available. I talk with Tom Nichols, professor at the Naval War College and Harvard Extension School, about the “death of expertise.” The conversation includes: what happens when experts get it wrong, how both left and right have contributed to contempt for expertise, and […]
The Psycho-Epistemology of Pathological Altruism
Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. The Psycho-Epistemology of Pathological Altruism By now, we all know what to expect on college campuses, right? Here’s the latest: an Indian-American comedian and former Saturday Night Live writer was shooed off the stage at Columbia University—they literally cut off his microphone—for telling jokes that were offensive […]
Fast Times at Ben Trovato High
Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. Let No More Be Heard of Confidence in Man I speculated a while back that the legal problems of Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, might come back to haunt the president–and lead to “The Clinton Impeachment Rerun We Didn’t Want But Probably Deserve.” It looks […]
I Don’t See What Could Possibly Go Wrong
Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. Making America Timid Again I think America’s uncomfortable alliances with certain unsavory regimes can be excused as a necessary evil—i n those cases where overthrowing or undermining the regime is unrealistic and the alternatives are probably worse. There’s a case to be made that this applies to […]
The People Does Not Know What It Wills
A lot of my recent work—and your support—has come to fruition with the launch of my new video and podcast series, Salon of the Refused. You can follow links to both the video and the audio-only podcast of the first episode here. My first installment is an interview with Sean Trende, the main political horserace […]
Be Careful What You Wish For
Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. Be Careful What You Wish For I vividly remember about two decades ago a lot of fevered talk about the “digital divide.” The idea was that only the well-off could afford computers, so only their children would be prepared for the new digital economy, while the poor […]
A Formula for Power
Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. The Weird Neo-Puritanism of the Anti-Kavanaugh Crusade The contemporary left, with its nannyish campus sex rules and “rape culture” panic, has been inching itself toward a kind of neo-puritan ethic regarding sex. But during the controversy over Brett Kavanaugh, this new puritanism has been oddly widening to […]
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- Salon of the Refused, Episode 10 February 13, 2019
- Fauxcahontas’s Last Stand February 11, 2019
- The Democratic Party’s Psychotic Break February 10, 2019
- That Noise the Kids Are Listening to These Days January 30, 2019
- Salon of the Refused, Episode 9 January 25, 2019
- The Parasite That Kills Its Hostess November 18, 2012
- Radical New York City Democrats December 31, 2013
- Confessions of a Reluctant Culture Warrior December 20, 2014
- Pathological Altruism July 3, 2013
- The 25 Craziest Things Said at the Democratic Debate October 14, 2015
That Noise the Kids Are Listening to These Days
Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. But He Fights I’ve been editing videos and working on other writing projects for much of the last week, so I wanted to do a roundup of news that happened while I was doing all of that–and a lot of interesting things happened. The first item is […]