Goliath vs Goliath: Not a David In Sight
If free speech depends on plaintiffs not having money, then the problem isn’t that plaintiffs sometimes have money.
Monthly Archive: May 2016
The Pitch Meeting for Animaniacs – The Toast – The Toast
EXEC #1: How will kids feel when they watch this show? THE ANIMATOR: Disconcerted. Unmoored. Hyper-stimulated. Amused to the point of terror. EXEC #2: Oh good. Don’t want my nine-year-old daughter to feel too…moored....
How Oberlin Has Repeatedly Failed to Confront its Anti-Semitism Problem – Tablet Magazine
Last February, Oberlin College became the flashpoint of a national controversy when it was discovered that the liberal arts school was employing an openly anti-Semitic professor. On Facebook, social justice writing instructor Joy Karega...
Sunday!
Before I can tell you that story, I’m going to have to tell you this one.
On Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
She Is Bad At This
The best that can be said about this is that it’s not as bad as “Dangerous Donald.”
State Liquor Laws: Historically Irrelevant Or Actually Worth Something?
Many states across the US have historic liquor laws dating back centuries. Are they still relevant in 2016?
How that Machine Algorithm Ended up being Racist
Racism can be a direct consequence of excluding race as a factor when you make judgments
The Blue Lives Matter Movement & the Inherent Trouble With (and Need for) Hate Crime Laws
In order for hate crime laws to not succumb to the slippery slope, you need to pick a place to say “No.” The Blue Lives Matter laws are that place.
The Libertarian Choice — A Dated Governor Or An Internet Troll
What exactly Libertarians are is hotly debated; but the general gist as I understand it is Republican economic policies and Democratic foreign policies, with social issues favoring whichever side favors less regulations and restrictions...
Will Sanders demand veto power over Clinton’s cabinet picks? | New Republic
This sounds less definitive (viz. Sanders could really escalate his demands!) than CNN made it seem with its headline (“Reporter: Sanders wants say over Clinton cabinet picks”). But it’s been hanging out there for...
Yale students want to remake the English Major requirements, but there’s no escaping white male poets in the canon.
You’ve written that “it is possible to graduate with a degree in English language & literature by exclusively reading the works of (mostly wealthy) white men.” It is possible to graduate a lot of ways, and every English major is responsible for taking advantage of the bounty of courses the department offers to attain a full and deep education. What is not possible is to reckon with the racist, sexist, colonist poets who comprise the canon—and to transcend their failures—via a “see no evil, hear no evil” policy.
I want to gently push back, too, against the idea that the major English poets have nothing to say to students who aren’t straight, male, and white. For all the ways in which their particular identities shaped their work, these writers tried to represent the entire human condition, not just their clan. A great artist possesses both empathy and imagination: Many of Shakespeare’s female characters are as complexly nuanced as any in circulation today, Othello takes on racial prejudice directly, and Twelfth Night contains enough gender-bending identity shenanigans to fuel multiple drag shows and occupy legions of queer scholars. The “stay in your lane” mentality that seems to undergird so much progressive discourse—only polyamorous green people really “get” the “polyamorous green experience,” and therefore only polyamorous greens should read and write about polyamorous greens, say—ignores our common humanity.
