Archive | Commentary RSS feed for this section

The War on the Brains of the Right

Commentary by , December 15, 2018

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” […]

Comments are closed

Salon of the Refused, Episode 5

Commentary by , December 12, 2018

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 […]

Comments are closed

The Psycho-Epistemology of Pathological Altruism

Commentary by , December 11, 2018

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 […]

Comments are closed

Fast Times at Ben Trovato High

Commentary by , December 4, 2018

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 […]

Comments are closed

I Don’t See What Could Possibly Go Wrong

Commentary by , November 21, 2018

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 […]

Comments are closed

The People Does Not Know What It Wills

Commentary by , November 16, 2018

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 […]

Comments are closed

Be Careful What You Wish For

Commentary by , October 31, 2018

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 […]

Comments are closed

A Formula for Power

Commentary by , October 5, 2018

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 […]

Comments are closed

The New Counterculture

Commentary by , September 24, 2018

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. The New Counterculture Partisanship makes people into idiots. The Brett Kavanaugh media circus is providing us with plenty of examples, and I’ll cite just one on each side. On the left, I give you Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono, who was asked, “Doesn’t Kavanaugh have the same presumption […]

Comments are closed

World News Roundup

Commentary by , September 17, 2018

American politics is more of a circus than usual these days, and aside from distracting us from the really important domestic issues–the growing economy, but also this administration’s total failure to rein in government spending and debt–it also distracts us from what is going on in the rest of the world. So I decided it […]

Comments are closed