Hey gang, I’m excited to say that Substack approached me recently and made an attractive financial offer for me to blog over there. Given that I’ve been out of work since last June, I c… | Continue reading
New York Times employee Will Wilkinson thinks the New York Times is doing just fine, thank you. In related news Frito-Lay employees think Doritos are snacktacular. Wilkinson’s checks are sign… | Continue reading
A really basic question in the Israel-Palestine debate is “is Israel different from all other nations, or is it the same?” And it’s a question that Israel’s defenders are ut… | Continue reading
When you are known to have a mental illness it is common to have people make concern trolling statements about your mental health as a way to unsettle or undermine you, to dismiss an argument or at… | Continue reading
Recently, after months of threats and intimidation tactics, the New York Times published a hit piece about Scott Alexander and his blog SlateStarCodex, by something named Cade Metz. You can read Al… | Continue reading
You will have seen memes on social media that catalog the accomplishment of Black people. And well enough, the accomplishments are impressive. The question is, what is the intended outcome of this … | Continue reading
I am sure that you have encountered, in our superheroes and Star Wars-addled world, the phenomenon of an overall positive review of fandom-style movies or shows that nevertheless prompt a ferocious… | Continue reading
I support affirmative action on conventional grounds – you give minority applicants a boost in job and college applications as a way to address inequality and as recompense for traditional in… | Continue reading
Martin Luther King, from his speech “A New Sense of Direction,” given in the last year of his life: Mass civil disobedience as a new stage of struggle can transmute the deep anger of th… | Continue reading
Longtime readers know that while I think campus activism is a good thing (and was a campus activist myself), I think college politics suck up too much attention within the left. Structurally colleg… | Continue reading
The USA is a failed state and it won’t surprise you why I think so. In the coming week you will be able to read (I imagine literally) tens of thousands of thinkpieces about the events in Wash… | Continue reading
I believe that series reductions on gun ownership would be necessary to make the United States a safer place, but I’m not a big gun control guy. It’s mostly because of the Drug War. The… | Continue reading
For years I’ve debated writing a book about the self-care industry. I probably couldn’t get one published, but it’s fertile ground. The self-care industry is dedicated to the prop… | Continue reading
Flattered and grateful to have been included on Vulture’s list of the ten best books of 2020. | Continue reading
As I write this I am currently heading home from a conference, one that took place far away from New York. I know that it’s selfish to travel but I said yes without really thinking and anyway… | Continue reading
Nobody likes genius, the idea, anymore. I have read more criticisms of the basic idea of genius more times than I can count, in long form and in short. Here’s one, and here’s one, and h… | Continue reading
It seems that there has been a revolt at Penguin Press over the publication of a new book by Jordan Peterson. Staff members apparently cried. This is, I think, indicative of some really deep proble… | Continue reading
For a long time now there’s been a certain kind of discourse about Covid that is moralizing before it is anything else. It assumes that the most pessimistic projects are always the correct pr… | Continue reading
I do not have any rigorously-assembled and current statistics about what percentage of people read or how much and how often they do. I know I’ve read, sometime in the past, that the median A… | Continue reading
My unemployment and my job hunt continue. It has been difficult lately. The jobs that seem like a perfect match are of course that much worse when you hear nothing. And of course no one sends rejec… | Continue reading
For as long as I’ve written for public consumption, I’ve had the same basic take on the media: that it is fundamentally a kind of social cartel rather than an industry. When the average… | Continue reading
A couple people have sent me this AV Club post about a newsletter from David Friedman that has the same basic idea as an old Tumblr post I recently shared on Facebook – that Vanilla Ice’… | Continue reading
Next Tuesday I will vote in relevant state and local races. (Maybe excluding the judges because the Democrat and Republican slates are the exact same people so truly who cares how I vote.) I will n… | Continue reading
I’ve done more podcasts than I can count at this point and won’t try to round them all up. But I did want to call your attention to this interview in Business Insider, which I think is … | Continue reading
I have recently read a book about depression by the boss. It was transporting. You should read it. Depression was the first way my brain chemistry got in touch with me. When I was 18, 19, I first g… | Continue reading
This post is not a fundraiser, and it’s not designed to elicit sympathy. It’s just to describe a little piece of the brokenness of the system. Every few months I need to get bloodwork d… | Continue reading
If you doubt my contention that the Cult of Smart exists, consider immigration. Immigration discussions are where the Cult of Smart is often most direct and explicit, as supporters typically defend… | Continue reading
Today I have a piece in the Washington Post up about Trump’s attacks on Biden’s intelligence at the debate, and how they are emblematic of the Cult of Smart. I am happy with how it turn… | Continue reading
Hello friends, as part of an effort to rebuild a professional life, I find that I need academic journal access. I can seek individual articles from friends, but that’s obviously laborious and… | Continue reading
There’s a famous story (perhaps apocryphal) where the legendary film critic Pauline Kael evinced shock that Nixon had won in ’68, justifying her shock by saying “no one I know vot… | Continue reading
I am not, despite requests, going to write a blow-by-blow response to Nathan Robinson’s review of my book. I don’t think those kind of things are very productive, and besides, the book … | Continue reading
I remember the last day of summer school, sophomore year. My beloved friend Matt and I walking out, finally free, as we had the year prior, and as we each would in years to come. We walked into the… | Continue reading
In regards to this – here’s a somewhat different reaction from the same author, Nathan Robinson. | Continue reading
Right now we’re in one of those times when people feel anguished about whether to support artists who they feel are immoral or politically undesirable, and where much art is coming out that i… | Continue reading
So when I started blogging in 2008, a thing that would happen would be that a conservative writer would publish something on a conservative website, and then liberals at liberal publications would … | Continue reading
There’s a weird thing that happens when we talk about diversity programs like affirmative action, where it is implied to be impolite or worse to say that they function as intended. Here’… | Continue reading
In light of the judge’s decision to forbid the University of California system taking standardized tests into account for admission’s decision, I’m resharing my piece from several… | Continue reading
The Tenant, the excellent activist newspaper published by my housing rights group, has put out a piece I wrote on how to break your lease if you live in New York City. | Continue reading
I have an excerpt out in the Chronicle of Higher Education today. I say without sarcasm that I appreciate the trolling headline.I got about as good of a review as I could expect to get from the Wal… | Continue reading
One thing I’m learning, I guess, is that all the post-apocalyptic and cyberpunk media I’ve devoured is essentially optimistic because there’s usually one moment, one break, one ev… | Continue reading
There’s not much news to report from me; the book continues to pop up here and there, most prominently the Wall Street Journal. I have been given no information about sales figures and will n… | Continue reading
You will have likely observed that social media has long since become a kind of perpetual fox hunt where a target is identified for social extermination and everybody joins in. Every morning on Twi… | Continue reading
I told my agent, early in the process, that the biggest criticisms of my book would be scientific, as I am a (well read) total amateur attempting to engage with scientific concepts. Science people … | Continue reading
Pour more dirt on grit. It seems that, with a representative sample, when you throw grit into a regression along with measures of intelligence, grit just explains very little on its own. Grit just … | Continue reading
There’s a couple of consistent threads in early responses to my book. People tell me it will be divisive, which of course was the plan. Several people have suggested that the descriptive port… | Continue reading
Very moving images! | Continue reading
(There’s gonna be a lot of this so get used to it.) The book’s out! Buy it! Here’s a Twitter thread by Paige Harden, who (unlike me) is a scientist studying genetics and behavior.… | Continue reading