Seeing "Dr. Ford" trending reminds me anew of how much I hate when PhDs who are not medical doctors want to be addressed as "Dr." It undermines authority rather than underscores it. That goes for you, too, Dr. Jill Biden.
Increasingly pissed abt this story. Teen makes poor choice, another teen weaponizes social media in revenge. Then NYT comes along and pours on gasoline in the name of "reckoning." Perfect encapsulation of the “no adults in the room” dynamic of the moment.
On January 20, 2022, FAIR filed a federal lawsuit to stop New York City from enforcing its unconstitutional order prioritizing Covid-19 treatments based on racial categorization and ethnicity.
Beginning to think the world is divided between those who can spot Narcissistic Borderline Personality types from miles away and those who've never had reason to develop that ability.
If we're going to talk about
#ToxicMasculinity
we must recognize the existence of Toxic Femininity. Then get rid of both of these stupid terms and go about the business of being human. My latest for
@medium
.
“And though sex differences in sports show advantages for men, researchers today still don’t know how much of this to attribute to biological difference versus the lack of support provided to women athletes to reach their highest potential.”
My podcast is small enough that I think I could take it off Spotify as a publicity move, gain some listeners, and then put it back on without anyone really noticing.
"If it were possible to wave a magic wand and make all Americans freeze in place for 14 days while sitting six feet apart, epidemiologists say, the whole epidemic would sputter to a halt."
Seeing predictable pushback to this along the lines of "lol all these people with large platforms complaining abt censorship boo hoo."
Actually, it's the DUTY of people with large platforms to use their reach to stand up to the nonsense and talk honestly about what's going on.
A statement signed by 150 people incl. Bill T. Jones, Wynton Marsalis, Jennifer Finney Boylan, Noam Chomsky, J.K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood, and Salman Rushdie expresses concern over the illiberal trend intensified by our national reckoning.
Unearthed audio: JD Vance says he agrees that “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female” is to help raise grandchildren and that helping raise children is a “weird, unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman”
I'll be happy to see
#Biden
honor his promise to pick a female running mate (if he gets that far). I'd have been even happier if he’d said “I’ll choose the most qualified person” and THEN picked a woman. Instead, he set her up to be seen less as a solid choice than a checked box.
Just read the Emily Gould piece and all I can say is that this platform is filled with tin-eared prigs who've had very little contact with actual writing. The piece is wryly deadpan and draws from a venerable literary tradition that's hard to get right but is transportive when it
Am I the only one actively avoiding coverage of Kamala Harris because I know it's going to be banality after banality? I can't even fathom an original take at this point.
One of the most wonderful things about this particular window of this time of the year is that you can say "have a great holiday" and it also means "don't communicate with me any further for the next several weeks."
Tuned into local NPR for first time in ages, thinking maybe I'd been judging unfairly. Immediately heard announcement saying they'd be marking 9/11 anniversary with a special series about policing.
This sort of distorted logic -- and worse, the masses otherwise-reasonable people so eager to jump onboard -- feeds my suspicion that we're about to enter a new version of Satanic preschool panic. The last one didn't end well.
Incredibly gifted writer (I just taught her work to my grad students). Mostly incoherent piece. Even gifted writers can be incoherent—regularly! I remember a time when editors saved us from ourselves—regularly! What happened here?
I spent the last five days driving across the country, not taking in any news and listening only to podcasts that had nothing to do with politics or the culture wars. It felt amazing.
A lot of debates that sell themselves as being about free speech are actually about power. And there's *a lot* of power in being able to claim, and hold, the mantle of free speech defender.
" . . . Antifa is a marginal non-organization with next to no political power or popular support . . . [But it] will come to symbolize the left and everything that is wrong with it." Smart and true take from
@kittypurrzog
.
I can't believe this is still going on. The misrepresentation and (willful?) misinterpretation of the Google Memo remains one of the most egregious examples of media malpractice in recent memory. And that's saying a lot.
We are experiencing a moment right now where everyone just saw the same thing, in real time, with their own eyes. I can't remember the last time that happened in politics.
I have mixed feelings about this article, not least of all the assumption that there's an agreed-upon definition of "bad, conservative or offensive opinions." But
@BridgetPhetasy
's quote says it all: “They can’t cancel you if you don’t care."
I sincerely think there are many good points here. But
#KillAllMen
is not "another way of saying 'it would be nice if the world sucked less for women.'" It's another way of saying "I have no intellectual imagination and I'm a Twitter dopamine junkie."
Headline makes this sound like a generic tell-all, but it's a dazzlingly trenchant and hilarious look at both a specific situation and the larger milieu that bred it. This kind of piece gives me hope for the thinking world.
@theorygurl
, I shake your hand.
Men, we may not be Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby, but we are collectively complicit with a sexist mind-set rooted in the same toxic culture from which these men emerged.
#IamSexist
Going through old
@latimesopinion
columns and struck by the freedom, the whimsy, the lack of self-consciousness. Ten yrs ago I was saying much the same stuff I do now, but without the hedging and sanitizing (ty, editors). My god, how did we all become so paranoid and constipated?
I believe Christine Blasey Ford. I also believe the
#BelieveWomen
#BelieveSurvivors
tropes are hollow, counterproductive and actually insulting to her and to the fundamental humanity of all women.
in this thread, literalist loons on the right join hands with literalist loons on the left and live happily ever after in Missing The Point Land. Sounds like a premise for a Stephen King novel.
John McCain's finest moment (for me) came in 2008, when a woman at a rally referred to Obama as an Arab. "No, ma'am," McCain replied. "He's a decent family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with." That's manning up.
I'm struggling when it comes to
#KamalaHarris
. Rationally I know she might be the least bad choice. But those with hypersensitivity to phoniness and bullshit will have a VERY hard time tolerating her for any length of time. I'm trying to work through it, but it's tough.
The teen who accused her is now being dragged all over social media (and beyond) in incredibly ugly, often racist, ways. An entirely predictable (make that GUARANTEED) outcome that the NYT surely knew would occur. What's the end game here?
Was intrigued when NYT came to me asking if I'd interview a "conservative therapist." I found Dea Bridge to be insightful, reasonable and very good with boundaries. Is that "conservative?" Should politics enter into therapy at all? Much to think abt here.
Sure, go ahead and co-opt the title of a project that taught a generation of kids that gender stereotypes were limiting and silly and that they were fine just as they were. Good for you. Go, you! Also . . . f*ck you.
I fucked up on the podcast with Douglas Murray and said that people got arrested lighting fires in Portland. That turns out to not be true. I was very irresponsible not looking into it before I repeated it. I read one story about a guy getting arrested for lighting fires...
And now for something completely different (if tangentially related): I've been teaching this
@MichaelWolffNYC
piece for years. It remains among the finest examples of rigorously honest personal essay writing I've seen.
Is this making your head explode?
@SarahTheHaider
and I recorded a new episode of A SPECIAL PLACE IN HELL last night and discussed it at length. Will get it edited up and up for you asap.
What is a woman? It’s a question that’s suddenly everywhere, and it turns out the answer is complicated. Jon breaks down the gender binary and gender spectrum in this week’s episode. Stream the free episode now on Apple TV+.
So glad to see
@powellnyt
cover this controversy. I caught a screening of the film this summer and have been scratching my head about its supposed problematic-ness ever since. The zombie pile-on has been shocking even by the usual zombie pile-on standards.
Nothing like reading a review of a comedy show in which all but one sentence is about how terrible, unfunny and horrifically offensive the jokes are. The remaining sentence: "Every person around me was in hysterics over every single one of his bits."
Snapped this on my walk last evening. No filter. For me, Los Angeles has never been about the weather. It's the light. Even as it gets hotter and harder to live here, the magic hour remains.
Single women own and occupy more homes than single men in the U.S., despite earning only about 83 cents for every dollar that men earn, according to a new study. Here's a look at where the ownership gap is greatest and smallest across the country:
The number of people not getting that this is very obviously satire shows just how fraught this issue remains. The best part is that it's poking fun at the "you're selfish if you don't have kids" crowd as well as the "rah rah childfree my life's a vacation" crowd. I love it.
New research finds that young girls and boys have "indistinguishable" math abilities — contradicting the idea that men largely dominate STEM fields because their brains are wired that way.
Happy birthday to
@CaitlinPacific
, one of the greatest essayists of our time (and by "our time" I mean a long, long time). Read this and then see to it that you've read everything else by her. And pay attention.
As riveting as this is I actually had to take a break when it got to the part where Amy Cooper reads from the obscenely cruel messages she received from strangers. We live in a world of so much misplaced anger and lazy thinking. A destructive combination.
Had an Uber driver last night who informed me that there was no evidence that any babies had been killed by Hamas and that if I wanted to know the truth I should listen to NPR and Democracy Now.
Serves me right for not taking public transportation or driving my own damn car.
16th paragraph: "Prosecutors did not charge Celeste Burgess under Nebraska’s abortion law. She pleaded guilty in May to removing or concealing human skeletal remains, a felony."
One of the worst things about Twitter is how it disincentives clarification because doing so will be taken as "digging yourself in deeper.” Best to let the misunderstanding & invective run its course. But the idea that I don’t respect PhDs—or don’t know what they mean—is absurd.
"It was genuinely one of the worst, most embarrassing recent moments in professional journalism, and there was never any real reckoning among those who screwed it up."
@jessesingal
on the systemic dysfunction that fueled the
#covingtoncatholic
episode.
Good column and very true. Just because men are more likely (for all kinds of reasons) to commit this sort of abuse doesn't mean that women can't and don't. To assume otherwise is infantilizing to women. Smart feminism understands that.
Women are hypocrites. Women are abusers. Women are liars. Just like men. This obvious fact — that women are fully human — bears repeating in light of the Asia Argento news and should inform the
#MeToo
movement going forward. My latest:
This contends that those who question the Farrow narrative are upset bc we're "used to a world where women were simply told to shut up."
Uh, no. We're upset bc the case is so emblematic of the demise of critical thinking skills among otherwise smart ppl.
Been keeping this under my hat because I'm superstitious, but, if all goes as planned, my new podcast THE UNSPEAKABLE will launch next Monday 7/27. Candid interviews with interesting people. Conversations the way we used to have them. More info very soon.
My latest column for
@Medium
, inspired by
@EricRWeinstein
, who identified and coined the concept of "groupfeel." It's also about the Jussie Smollett story (yes, I went there).
On top of everything else, watching the hearings on cable news has reminded me anew how cheesy and hyperbolic and terrible just about all TV news is. Honestly, compared to CNN, Twitter is like a party of intellectuals. That is a sorry statement.
It’s telling that the most extreme manifestation of online mobbing in the name of social justice (that I know of) resides in YA Twitter. It suggests there’s something fundamentally adolescent about callout culture, as if the whole practice has an undeveloped frontal lobe.
WOW. The woman who got raked over the YA Twitter coals because people apparently made up a bunch of stuff about her and her highly anticipated debut novel has agreed to not publish it at all!
This is meant to be excoriating, but it's actually completely validating. The perfect embodiment of the kind of bad faith engagement and willful misconstrual I talk about in the book. Maybe I'll use it in a future edition as an example.
#meta
Thrilled to announce that my book has been shortlisted for the Taken Out Of Context Prize.
There are 900 other finalists this year, but it’s an honor just to be nominated.
CNN correspondent in Italy says you see the same dog being walked by different people because they know it’s the only way to go outdoors. Deadly for humans but this is the best thing that ever happened to dogs.
Ground shaking piece by
@AbigailShrier
via
@bariweiss
. The oped that the NYT felt was "outside our coverage priorities" was coauthored by Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper, who's featured in two parts of
@TheUnspeakPod
's 3-part Gender Nuance series this week.
In exclusive interviews with
@AbigailShrier
, two of the most prominent providers in the field of transgender care sound off on puberty blockers, ‘affirmative’ care, the inhibition of sexual pleasure, and the suppression of dissent.
Freddie deBoer's words here about the "gentrification of disability" are among the most insightful I've heard on any subject all year. Via
@bariweiss
.
Excellent thread. Especially point about "in-group enforcers" making examples of dissenters "so that onlookers can see the potential cost of dissent."
Onlookers, look a little closer. Speaking up is survivable. And the costs are low compared to the bankruptcy of nodding along.
It’s getting harder and harder for me to tell the racists apart from the anti-racists. Neither make or respond to arguments so much as stick you in a identity box and try to insist you stay there.
Before you fan the flames of the firestorm, I'd suggest taking a moment to ask yourself how these changes are anything but reasonable. You can hate Trump and love Obama and still recognize that the Obama administration's guidelines on this were an overreach.
The Trump administration's guidelines for how the nation's schools should handle allegations of sexual harassment and assault boosts protections for the accused—and is almost certain to ignite a firestorm
To think that in this day and age so many people would still read a 6500-word, not very hashtaggable essay and take the time to thoughtfully respond, well . . . wow.
Guys, my father had a Doctorate, which he worked hard for and was a huge deal, especially given his background. He also felt that being called “Doctor” outside a specific professional setting was overkill and in that sense actually kind of diminishing.
The tantrumming over this also reveals how illiterate people have become about the arts. This may not be high art but it's high in technique and draws from important and deeply American musical and choreographic traditions. Duke Ellington, Jack Cole, Busby Berkeley . . . But all