A long review, with further musings, of "Cynical Theories". Read more (30 min, 7600 words).
The Woke-up Call: A Review of Cynical Theories
Tag: identity politics
Political Capital Flow Management and the Importance of Yutting
I discuss how you can dismiss, acknowledge, or generalize from the particular to the general, and how this matters for the way political capital is created and accumulated. Read more (11 min, 2800 words).
Turnabout Trash: An Exercise in Lowbrow Cryptonormativism
I roleplay being a culture warrior in response to something unusually irritating, and decide not to do it again. Read more (15 min, 3800 words).
Postmodernism vs. The Pomoid Cluster
It's common to hear "postmodernism" used as a snarl word against an ill-defined lump of ideas and attitudes hostile to the idea of objective truth and standards. I sympathize with this but also recognize that this is an inadequate conception of postmodernism. In this article I talk about what it is, what it's often used to mean, and how we need words to refer to vulgarized academic ideas. Read more (17 min, 4200 words).
A Deep Dive into the Harris-Klein Controversy
A long postmortem of the conflict between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein over Harris's podcast with political scientist Charles Murray. I explain their disagreement as stemming from differences in interpretation of the original podcast, cultural expectations and psychological tendencies. Read more (36 min, 9100 words)
Everything Studies 