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That Noise the Kids Are Listening to These Days

Commentary by , January 30, 2019

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 […]

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A Little More Enlightenment

Commentary by , January 17, 2019

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

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” […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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