Episode 7 of my video and podcast series, Salon of the Refused, is now available. I talk with an old friend, Bob Garmong, who spent most of the past decade as a lecturer at Dongbei University of Finance and Economics in Dalian, China, about his experiences there and the prospects for the country’s future. The […]
Tag Archives | China
Social Media Was a Mistake
Top Stories of the Year: #1 I’ve been counting down the top stories of the year, looking back at the big events of 2018 and reviewing my coverage of them. At the top of the list this year is what we have discovered about the impact of digital media on our public debate—particularly the second […]
Salon of the Refused, Episode 4
Episode 4 of my video and podcast series, Salon of the Refused, is now available. I talk to Scott Lincicome about President Trump’s trade war. The conversation includes: why tariff power was delegated to the president, how trade changes jobs instead of taking them away, and how Flashdance and Bruce Springsteen explain Donald Trump’s trade policy. […]
The New Counterculture
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 […]
World News Roundup
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 […]
Collusion
Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. Rule by Executive Order During his final years in office, Barack Obama leaned heavily on attempts to bypass an uncooperative Congress and use “a pen and a phone” to achieve his goals by executive order, whether or not he had the authority to do so. A few […]
Who Stole Self-Esteem?
Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. Who Stole Self-Esteem? How did “self-esteem” become a pejorative associated with the most contemptible trends in contemporary culture? How did it turn from an earned expression of self-respect to an all-purpose form of coddling for the incompetent? The phenomenon should not be such a surprise. Ayn Rand […]
IT-Backed Authoritarianism
Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. “IT-Backed Authoritarianism” If you want to know where Google’s social-engineering aspirations are headed, you don’t need to look to the future. Look to China’s “social credit system,” a merger of Western-style financial credit scores with a more nebulous and politicized measure of a citizen’s orderliness—and political loyalty. […]
A Giant Effigy of Marx
Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. Jaw-Jaw Is Better Than War-War I recently responded to a claim, reflecting the conventional wisdom of the Trump-era right, that “ideas and persuasion are insufficient” for the pitched culture war we are currently in. This is often expressed in the conviction that scribblers like me are useless […]
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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
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 […]