If you have a lot of friends who teach university courses, as I do, your social media feed at this time of year is probably filled with complaints. Instructors keep being asked to do more for less pay. The higher-ups who shape their conditions of employment treat them with blatant disrespect. Most of their students show little interest in working hard. And they’re getting worse, too. (More…)
It is bad form for commenters on politics to devote column inches to the dissection of the work of other commenters on politics. This is particularly true when one has already done so fairly recently. But the falling away of the last of the Republican challengers to Donald Trump has occasioned such paroxysms of despair among the right-wing commentariat that one simply cannot resist the opportunity to troll. (More…)
“I can’t believe he’s our president!” It was the sort of declaration that millions of people understandably made after Obama’s inauguration back in January, 2009. But that my daughter still felt the need to make it last night, May 4th 2016, speaks volumes about the strangeness of his two terms in the White House. Even now, many of his enemies on the Right still refuse to acknowledge his legitimacy. (More…)
One of the most persistent domestic critiques of Donald Trump is that his proposals are not truly American. From the White House to the protests at his rallies, he has been savaged for promoting the sort of extremism the United States has long ascribed to its enemies, thereby calling into question the self-righteous presumptions that undergird the nation’s foreign policy. (More…)
The last day of the NBA regular season made for remarkable television. While Kobe Bryant, the first superstar to make his mark in the wake of basketball’s massive global expansion, was playing the final game of his illustrious twenty-year career in Los Angeles, the Golden State Warriors, the league’s best team and defending champions, were winning their record-breaking 73rd game. (More…)
It has been over a year since my friend and I visited the haunted compound of the abandoned Forest Haven mental asylum and since I began chronicling what we discovered there: a horrific testament to bureaucracy at its worst and the ragged remains of so many lives that wasted away on the outskirts of Washington D.C. (More…)
It felt like a rock concert. Security was tight. Fans were so desperate to attend that the ones who had failed to get tickets before they sold out were streaming into one of the biggest rooms at the University of Arizona to watch a live feed of the event with each other, even though it was being simulcast over the Internet. (More…)
It’s hard to tell who is more alarmed by the prospect of Donald Trump as the Republican presidential nominee: Democrats or Republicans. Democrats are upset by Trump’s overt racism. Republicans worry that these things might make it hard to get him elected. (More…)
Even now, long after Donald Trump has ascended to Republican frontrunner for the presidency, people are still talking about him the way they did a year ago, when his candidacy seemed more of a sideshow than a serious threat to politics-as-usual. It’s a state of affairs the man himself seems eager to perpetuate, promoting his brand at the expense of traditional propriety. (More…)
Patriotism was once defined as “the last refuge of a scoundrel”; and somebody has recently remarked that when Dr. Johnson gave this definition he was ignorant of the infinite possibilities contained in the word “reform.” Of course both gibes were quite justifiable, in so far as they were aimed at people who use noble names to cloak base purposes. (More…)
Sometimes, when you get distracted from your distraction, it can all seem like a cruel joke. You have paid a lot of money and will no doubt be paying more, once you factor in souvenirs and sustenance, to pass most of your time standing in line. And you are supposed to be celebrating this purgatory, because this is Disneyland, the self-proclaimed “happiest place on Earth.” (More…)
Politics in the world of industrialized neoliberal states is subject to a sort of compression. Neoliberalism, as a mode of thought and organization, is characterized by the shifting of ever greater regions of the social order out of the realm of political deliberation and into the ostensibly more “objective” realm of economic competition. (More…)