Tyler Austin Harper
@Tyler_A_Harper
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Contributing Writer @TheAtlantic . Teaching @BatesCollege . Professional Doom-Monger. Co-host of @ttsgpod podcast. Mayor Vaughn was right. Striped Bass in Bio.
Joined November 2022
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I wrote about Montauk, a fisherman, and a dying extreme sport for the October Issue.
It’s a story of a gentrifying town, a changing ocean, obsession on the knife-edge of madness, and a man who swims through shark-infested water—at night—in pursuit of a great American fish. 🧵
“Wetsuiters” swim out into the surf at night, often during storms, and spend hours in the darkness attempting to catch striped bass.
@Tyler_A_Harper
reports on this alluring and addicting sport—and why he can’t get enough of it:
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When I was 10 a man in Borders asked me to meet him in the bathroom. I ran and told mall security. They apprehended him and asked my mom and I to wait outside the tiny security room where they held him until the cops came. Then they loudly beat the shit out of him for 10 minutes.
Do you recall acquiring any specific item or having a memorable experience at Borders Books?
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Walked into the UPS to find an employee standing over a large open box, peering into its depths, muttering my god, we will ship anything.” Then he closed the box and taped it up in a fury like it contained horrors not imagined since Pandora. I must know what is in this box.
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I grew up working class. When I arrived at fancy college, I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with all the smart rich kids. It took one week before I had a revelation: most of these people are idiots. The PMC’s self-mythologizing about their brainpower is so funny.
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So in summary: Biden refused to say he’d take a cognitive test, refused to say he would consider stepping down if key allies asked him to, said the polls are fake news, and that he wouldn’t fret if he lost as long as he tried his best. This is all Trumpian bullshit. Just madness.
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“30 Rock” provides a fascinating window into changes in progressivism over the last decade. When the series ended in 2013, Ta-Nehesi Coates observed, “One thing that I don't think 30 Rock gets enough credit for is how it handles race.” He said no show had “handled race better” 1/
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DeMOcraCy is ON thE ballOT
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Today, I bet those security guards wouldn’t be allowed to beat the shit out of aspiring pedophiles, because of wokeness. In early 2000s America we were a proper country.
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I did ask what was in the box (of course) and he just shook his head and said “some people,” which I took to be a lament about the person sending the package and not a description of the contents of the box, but can’t be sure.
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I’m horrified by the events at NYU and Columbia. The naked, fluorescent hypocrisy of institutions that have spent the last four years bleating about anti-racism and police reform sending in cops in riot gear to round up students the moment it’s convenient is appalling. 1/
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I wrote about the Claudine Gay fiasco.
Harvard’s president is not the real story. The real story is that academics and journalists have spent the last few weeks debasing our professions by insisting that plagiarism isn’t plagiarism. That it doesn’t matter. That we all do it. 🧵
"Rufo won this round of the academic culture war because he exposed so many progressive scholars and journalists to be hypocrites and political actors who were willing to throw their ideals overboard,"
@Tyler_A_Harper
writes:
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This is going to be a disaster for our country. Just a nightmare.
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Almost a decade later, I purchased Derrida’s Writing and Difference in that same store after my freshman year of college, and it was that book that made me decide that I wanted to get a literature PhD. So anyway, my life was both saved and then later ruined in that Borders!
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Bernie bros—who are always tarred as immature, impractical, and even secretly wanting Trump—have made a loud case in support of a VP we don’t even like and are willing to be team players. Whereas moderates are saying: “if we don’t get our way we’ll burn this motherfucker down.”
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Not gonna dunk on a kid not getting into college. But as a former tutor I’ll say this: the scandal of elite college admissions is not middle/upper-class white kids with a 1460 SAT not getting into Cornell. It’s dirt poor Asian kids with a 1560 SAT not getting into Cornell.
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I wrote about the book White Rural Rage and the scapegoating of rural people.
I talked to over 20 experts in the field of rural studies and found a pattern of errors, distortions, and misleading uses of scholarship in Schaller and Waldman’s book. It’s egregious.
Buckle up. 🧵
“As serious scholarship has shown, the right-wing rage we need to worry about is not coming from deep-red rural areas,”
@Tyler_A_Harper
writes. “It is coming from cities and suburbs.”
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If I see one more person call this a “bad debate” I’m going to lose my mind. Bad does not cover what we saw. Nixon sweating through his shirt was bad. What we witnessed was a 90-minute medical event foisted on us by arrogant lunatics who’d rather lose than admit they were wrong.
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I find it *insane* that the Ivy League does crazy grade inflation and — seeing that — so many people at non-Ivies insist on grading “rigorously,” thereby re-enforcing the pre-existing opinion of employers that elite uni kids are geniuses (he’s a 4.0!) and state school kids idiots
Why do Yale and Harvard have grades at all if 79% of students are getting As? Employers must think As are still valuable signals and maybe they are. But my guess is they haven't computed how weak the signal is. (1/2)
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A huge part of me becoming a leftist in college was realizing that meritocracy was a lie, and that many of the rich kids I went to college were mediocrities who had been catapulted into elite academia — and later, prestigious jobs — by money, private school, and connections.
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I’m not defending Tina Fey. I just think it says something interesting about the last decade that 30 Rock went from daring to damaged goods. It’s probably because it doesn’t let its audience feel either guilty or self-righteously smug: the two dominant progressive moods today.
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I feel like I’m losing my mind. People are talking about his mastery of the substance in that press conference. By which they mean he succeeded in remembering which countries are the good countries and which are the bad ones. Now let’s all clap like trained seals! This is a cult.
To answer the question on everyone’s minds: No, Joe Biden does not have a doctorate in foreign affairs.
He’s just that fucking good.
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lol fuck this dude into the sun what a cretin
Shai Davidai is demanding THE NATIONAL GUARD come in to violently disperse the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. How the fuck does this guy still have a job?
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These “it’s irresponsible to speculate as to why a Parkinson’s doctor has visited the White House 8 times” takes are inane. No, actually it’s on Biden’s team to explain why a Parkinson’s doctor is frequenting the White House! Speculation is a symptom of a lack of transparency!
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Anyone who sees this video and thinks this is a strong performance rather than incoherent rambling is in a cult.
BREAKING: The media was looking for off the cuff, powerful moments, and when President Biden delivers, they ignored it. Retweet so all Americans see this powerful clip and call the media out on their BS.
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A few years back I taught the horror film Blood Quantum. It’s a brilliant film about a zombie apocalypse on a reservation and it’s written and produced by, and stars, native people. All my students HATED it. When I asked why, one student raised her hand after a long silence 1/
many fiction students right now struggle with irony. not that they dont get it. i mean they feel like its not ok. when a work allows for full and proper irony on a character we get to see all the good and bad and students have been told thats not ok—esp with women/poc characters.
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Ok I gotta say this White Dudes for Harris call is relentlessly mean-spirited about the GOP and I'm here for it. Less "eww haha they're weird" and more "let's send these dolphin-fucking freaks to hell." Good energy.👍🏽
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@BarryPCotter
No no ignore the people telling you to stuff it. I dig it, carry on sir. The world needs grammar police!
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I wrote about the crackdown on campus protests.
Universities like Columbia, Cornell and Emory trade on Vietnam Era protests to market themselves to student activists. Protest is part of their brand and sales pitch. Now they're punishing students for taking them at their word. 🧵
Critics of colleges are seeing "the unstoppable force of years’ worth of self-righteous rhetoric and pseudo-radical posturing meets the immovable object of students who took them at their word,"
@Tyler_A_Harper
writes:
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The reason people scoff is that, at least in academia, "indigeneity" has become a magic word that is evacuated of both historical and cultural specificity, flattens all differences between indigenous groups, and is accompanied by exoticizing appeals to pre-rational "wisdom" 1/
Is there some cure for that part of the left that hears "Indigenous" and starts scoffing and rolling their eyes? Like a serum?
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We are rushing headlong into a hell of our own making. This is evil and this woman is evil. These freaks are determined to algorithmically strip mine every last scrap of your personhood so that engaging in basic human conduct without technical mediation becomes anxiety inducing.
Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd says the future of dating is having your AI date other people's AI and recommend the best matches for you to meet
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The correct response to the Hitler painting debate is not trying to pedantically prove that Hitler was a bad painter on technical grounds. The correct response is “who gives a shit whether or not Hitler was a proficient painter you absolute fucking freak!?!”
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People are struggling to grasp that Biden has good days and Very Bad Days, and when he has more of these Very Bad Days — which is inevitable — it’s all over. The check engine light is flashing and we’re still driving the car because it hasn’t made a funny sound in a few minutes.
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This basically summarizes my view. I have no particular hostility to Shapiro (or Buttigieg, etc.). But I think doubling down on being the party of the college educated professional class is a losing proposition, and Walz represents a real opportunity to take a different road.
.
@GovTimWalz
represents the course-correction on class, rural & regional messaging that Dems have needed for decades. As someone for whom PLACE outstrips every other identity, I've never felt seen or represented in the White House in my lifetime & that would change with VP Walz.
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My layman's two cents re Kamala's pitch to America:
It's desperately important that her campaign understands that undecided voters don't believe the fascism talk. Those voters have a decade of evidence about Trump's inclinations. If they don't believe it by now, they won't. 1/
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He should resign. That interview was ridiculous. A complete embarrassment.
can we please circle back to that whole "joe biden should drop out" thing we'd been talking about
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Guys like, the Gaza situation is the lowest hanging fruit, morally speaking. It’s super duper easy to say “stop bombing the children and stop sending the people who are bombing the children bombs” without sharing weird antisemitic star-of-david-dollar-sign cartoons. Jesus Christ.
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Ok because this has now gotten an inordinate amount of views I feel compelled to clarifying that the wokeness tweet was obviously a joke. (This should be clear.) The first tweet and the one blaming Derrida for ruining my life are all too serious, however!
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This is morally nihilistic. I don’t pretend to know whether or not Aaron Bushnell suffered from mental illness, but baseless claims that he did is a disservice to his memory and family. Liberal elites can’t fathom any kind of sacrifice that doesn’t take the form of check-writing.
I strongly oppose valorizing any form of suicide as a noble, principled, or legitimate form of political protest. People suffering mental illness deserve empathy and respect, but it is wildly irresponsible to praise them for using a political justification to take their own life.
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Honestly I am all for Maxine Waters and other vigorous elderly politicians coming out with their “I’m older than Biden!” speeches because they very helpfully illustrate that what we are looking at is not simple aging but cognitive deterioration and serious physical decline.
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Bernie Sanders, a Jewish man, is arguably the most beloved active politician in America. His approval rating is higher than any sitting Democratic senator. Many of the same people who didn't like Shapiro would climb a mile of barbed wire fencing to see him on the ticket. Stop it.
I guess you can’t be on a Democratic Presidential ticket and also a Jew in 2024.
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American Fiction mines its laughs from good white liberals who can’t recognize racial satire as satire. And I think it points to a real phenomenon in the 2020s: today progressives can only see black representation as “problematic” (i.e racist) or “authentic,” but not satirical 4/
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And that its attempt to realistically represent reservation life was pushing back against white audiences who want sentimental depictions of indigenous people communing with nature. After I explained that, I asked if they still thought it was racist. Almost every hand went up.
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A few prominent black critics are not the final arbiter of what is or is not good black representation. But since seeing American Fiction + witnessing the 30 Rock chatter, I am struck by the extent to which progressives have lost the ability to even recognize race satire today 3/
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Actually I think much of the opposition to DEI is that people really don’t like it when puffed up HR departments for billion dollar institutions lecture them about social justice and make them sit through cult-like reprogramming sessions that help nobody and solve nothing.
Much of the opposition to DEI is based on the premise that a Black person with any measure of power or authority will automatically treat white people like white people with power have historically treated Black people.
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On Monday I drove by a house as a woman was taking down a Biden sign, I’m assuming discouraged by the debate. I drove by later that day and a RFK Jr. sign had been put in its place. Drove by again now and—post-RFK dog eating scandal—the Biden sign is back. America is doing well.
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Show us the painting you cowards.
Museum worker hangs up his own painting hoping for a big break, gets fired instead
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I think the problem is the exact opposite: many left-wing views are quite popular, but many leftists are terminally addicted to being marginal, irrelevant, and wielding no power, and so they often retreat into small-tent weirdness and pseudo-academic babble. Political hipsterism.
I maintain the problem leftists face is thinking their views are popular
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I would cordially invite academics who belong to the “we all borrow writing it’s a normal practice” crowd to voluntarily submit examples from their own work where they have duplicated full paragraphs of another scholar’s writing without attribution. It’s no big deal right?
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This is what we're witnessing – the dismantling of public higher ed in conservative states – and we've created the conditions for what's going on at UNC. How did anyone think we could get away with being nakedly ideological for years without any chickens coming home to roost? 1/
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I do resent how the humanities are the favored academic punching bag when there are entire fields of the social sciences that are built on smoke, mirrors, and fraud. There are whole disciplines — well-funded disciplines! — that seemingly can’t replicate a study. It’s maddening.
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Translated: people should go to grad school because we require feudal labor for tenured faculty. We can’t downsize PhD programs—even though there are no professor jobs—because we maintain class privileges for “real” profs by offloading teaching duties onto exploited PhD students.
Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dean Emma Dench said students should pursue graduate degrees out of passion for their research rather than a desire for professorship during a Tuesday interview.
Adina R. Lippman and
@angelinajparker
report.
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Since the debate, Biden has consistently attacked the media, called polls fake, bragged about crowd sizes, called voters bedwetters, and on and on. At what point do we conclude that this is not a coincidence, and his team is adopting the Trump playbook as a deliberate strategy?
Biden: I'm just saying, you may have noticed that since the debate, the press and they're good guys and women up there, they have been hammering me.
Crowd: Boo
Biden: Trump has gotten a free pass
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Re the Biden/King Lear thing: one of the benefits of a humanities education is that it reveals that the events and crises that you may be tempted to treat as singular modern phenomena are in fact timeworn human problems, like aging gracefully, that admit of no permanent solution.
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Yes, advocating calling the National Guard on students, as Davidai has done, is vile. And this is vile too: people like Davidai would have you forget that Jewish students are at the heart of these protests. But their safety doesn't count because they no longer count as Jewish. 1/
Vile? Because of an event 54 years ago? Obviously then cops should never be called ever, according to your logic. Also, Shai Davidai is an Israeli and has his country’s own history to worry about. You know what’s vile? The protests.
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The gravest threat to academia is the transformation of universities into luxury resorts staffed by part-time professors and an expanding fleet of overpaid, rapacious senior bureaucrats. The second gravest threat is people like this, who think our job is political cheerleading.
The best, most important reason to enter academia is to then agitate for good and progressive causes within one of the largest and most impactful social institutions in the country. Your teaching and research are what you do to cement that position, not its primary justification
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If this was happening during a Trump presidency CNN and MSNBC would be insisting that we’re living in a fascist dictatorship.
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Here's a list of things Biden defenders expect us to believe. 🧵
1. The Biden we see on TV – rambling, exhausted, confused – has no relationship to the Biden that is running the country. He's too old to campaign vigorously but not too old to be president, which is less taxing.
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She found the frank depiction of drug use, poverty, etc. on the reservation to be racist and said that even though the filmmaker was native the movie was offensive. I explained that the film was rejecting the “noble savage” trope that plagues representation of native people 2/
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I’m having a hard time putting into words how angry I am after watching Biden’s performance. Dropping out of the race isn’t enough. He should resign. It’s unacceptable that this is our commander in chief as we’re entangled in multiple overseas conflicts, one with a nuclear power.
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Yeah I mean I’ve been thinking Boeing’s problems must be pretty bad since they murdered that guy.
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I genuinely do not know a single normal human being who saw that debate and had a reaction other than “oh shit, we’re fucked.” The attempt to paint this retroactively as media spin is both delusional and dishonest. Biden’s OWN TEAM was despondent *as the debate happened.*
The reaction to Biden's debate performance has been immeasurably more destructive & damaging than the debate itself.
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The great black film critic Wesley Morris wrote a long, hagiographical review of the show upon its conclusion and praised Tracy’s character in particular as a daring satire of black experience and exploitation in Hollywood. Today, of course, Tracy’s character is “problematic” 2/
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The responses to this article are a reminder that a big chunk of the public no longer believes journalism is about seeking truth or holding power to account. Instead they see the media as a kind of jack-in-the-box that is supposed to pop up and say “Trump is bad!” over and over.
Wrote about Kamala, the candidate who wasn’t there. She hasn’t done an interview, answered a tough question,has no policy section on her website, and turned a vague vision for the country into a huge polling surge.
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@katiedimartin
Dude with a stupid hat turns out to be an asshole. That’s a bet I’ll take 10/10 times. Never fails.
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At NYU I once had a kid vape in my class of ten or so students. I said “Bobby man you can’t vape in my class.” And he looked me dead in the eye and said “but it’s bubble gum flavor.”
students can blow vape smoke directly in your face if their accessibility accommodations say they smoke more different than anyone
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If liberals don’t understand or are made uncomfortable by race satire, I think it’s because satire trades on critical distance to race as a subject, and more importantly, because its primary register is not an emotional appeal to either rage (at racism) or pity (at oppression) 5/
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I appreciate that there might be legal reasons why this question is being answered in this way. But you cannot tell me in good faith that if these presidents responded in the same way to a similar question about black Americans that there would not be a world historical meltdown.
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I wrote about everyone’s favorite topic: the crisis in the humanities.
Here’s the truth: the humanities aren’t being wrecked by woke professors. They’re being wrecked by woke university bureaucrats and a debt-driven financial model that pushes students into “useful” majors. 🧵
"The conservatives are right, albeit not in the way they think: The humanities are useless in many senses of the term. But that doesn’t mean they’re without value,"
@Tyler_A_Harper
writes:
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Kamala needs to campaign not on "threat to democracy" chatter – which undecided voters tune out – but actually provide a future-oriented vision for the country that offers voters a clear picture of what America will be like if she wins, that goes beyond "still a democracy." 2/
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Academia would be healthier if more professors were empowered to focus on teaching, rather than producing work they don't care about for journals nobody reads. We are incentivized to prioritize the part of our jobs that matter least, cutting corners on the part that matters most.
This article wasn't the place to go into it, but, we need to face a difficult truth in academia: Original thought—truly original, creative research ideas—are extremely rare now. Scholarship is mostly careerist incrementalism, the profession deserves sneers for it.
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I feel about Nancy Pelosi like I feel about that movie Zero Dark Thirty which is that it shouldn’t exist and is a product of government corruption and self-dealing and I feel guilty watching it but by god I can’t help but enjoy seasoned operators at the top of their game.
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I would love it if we stopped pretending that every outdoor hobby is “unsafe” for black people. People ask me all the time if I feel safe fishing alone in Maine at night. You know what might help diversity in the outdoors? Not stoking weird race panics about doing outdoors stuff!
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If you are an academic lambasting the “white privilege” of the economics professor who got violently arrested while trying to intervene on behalf of a student also getting violently arrested, I’d kindly invite you to stop being an embarrassment to our profession. Please. Thanks.
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I love that Ezra Klein was forced to return to Twitter by the sheer ineptitude of the DNC. It's like Liam Neeson in Taken, dragged back in for one last orgy of violence. You just gotta substitute "daughter kidnapped by traffickers" for "democratic party governed by imbeciles."
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This a remarkable cultural document. You must read to the final post in the thread. M. Night Shyamalan has nothing on her.
My dad was diagnosed with cancer when I was in 4th grade. Stage four. My mom never told us or my dad that the reality was the doctor had privately told her he had a 20% chance to make it.
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Biden: “Sure well…” [hacks up a lung, eyes watering] “you have your Russia, your China, your South…your North Korea.”
Pundits: [weeping] “He is our Churchill.”
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She’s actually quoting Merleau-Ponty’s “Phenomenology of Perception” from memory here so this is way more impressive than you think.
I refuse to believe this is reality and not a scene from VEEP
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Biden was asked by Lester Holt what happens if he has another episode like he had during the debate, and Biden’s response was — literally — to laugh and say “What happens if dahdahdahdah?” He had an episode responding to the question about the episodes. What are we doing?
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Are we safe yet? Is the safety going well? Y’all having a nice safe?
@MiddleEastEye
Here’s
@EmoryUniversity
economics professor Caroline Fohlin knocked to the ground with her head on the concrete. Her glasses are thrown off. She shouts “I’m a professor”
#Gaza
#Protesters
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Am I the only one who finds it weird that people love racially Balkanizing themselves into a bunch of siloed Zoom calls based on gender and pigment?
Update
The White Women for Kamala organizing Zoom call has well over 100,000 participants tonight.
Organizers say that there are so many participants on the call that Zoom is having glitches.
The “White Women For Kamala” group came about after Black women and Black men
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Those cheering on the NYPD and Columbia's crack down like to invoke the safety of Jewish students and combating anti-semitism. Strangely, almost no mention is ever made of the many Jewish student protesters and their safety. Such as the 20 Jewish students arrested at Brown. 2/
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Anyone who thinks this is an acceptable performance from a sitting president is unmoored from reality. We’ve thrown every sane standard out the window. He’s been babbling for 40 minutes and you can hear his voice echoing off the coffin wood. My god we have to be better than this.
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A sure sign that the hardcore ridin’ with Biden crowd is rapidly dissolving into a political cult is that they talk about “loyalty” more and more and about “winning” less and less.
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I continue to be completely and utterly baffled that we all collectively agreed to let a bunch of rich nerds call next-word-prediction machines “artificial intelligence.”
Why is 'artificial intelligence' not called 'cognitive automation'?
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Are Biden defenders not troubled that Trump and Republicans desperately want him to stay in this race? Does that not give you even a teensy bit of pause?
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This isn’t just a contradiction coming to a head, it’s an intractable problem that may well light elite academia on fire. You have a customer base that demands social justice and a donor base that is concerned with elite reproduction. The financial model requires both groups. 1/
This is because the left critique of academia (“an engine of neoliberal elite reproduction”) and the right critique (“a hothouse of woke indoctrination”) both have a strong element of truth. The contradiction between these is coming to a head.
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I think the more pressing problem with “lived experience” discourse is that it’s a nihilistic retreat from reason that succumbs to total epistemic collapse the minute two “marginalized” groups have conflicting experiences. That’s one way to understand the college campus meltdown.
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Inane opinion. The underlying assumption is that black people are exotic, unknowable others and so the only reason a white guy might be interested in black history is if they have a weird intellectual fetish. Let people study what they want. Also Black history is American history
there is something off about white people taking degree programs where they study black people
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Everyone is having a debate about what the political math will look like 4 months from now, rather than a conversation about the fact that the president of our country is—right now, at this very moment—incapable of doing his job during a time of global crisis. He needs to resign.
This is as much about fitness as electability for me. Read the WSJ reporting on the G7 meeting. He needs to resign, not just bow out of the race
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It's *because* I'm a leftist humanities professor that I think we need institutional neutrality. The survival of higher ed, the humanities, absolutely depends on universities being officially non-political so that faculty/students have the academic freedom *to be* political. 7/
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In Shamus Khan’s book “Privilege” on how the educated elite learn elite mannerisms and cultural habits, he points out that learning how to mime nonchalance about one’s accomplishments—so that they seem to be a product of naturally endowed gifts—is a bedrock of elite education.
A guy who’d been homeless completed a program that helped him find a job, and he told me he’d hung the certificate on his wall “Like I’m sure you did with your high school diploma.” And it got me thinking about how this kind of “I don’t care about my diploma” flex looks to others
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Can someone please remind me: are college students blue-haired ickle snowflake babies, or hardened terrorist revolutionaries out for blood? Having a hard time keeping it straight.
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The poet discourse is such a bummer. So odd that some people seem to think it’s progressive to pretend a black person who is transparently bad at a thing is actually good at that thing even as we all can all plainly see they’re actively bad at it. Soft bigotry, low expectations.
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I tutored tons of Asians from very poor families that blew that kid’s scores and extracurriculars out of the water and they still got rejected from the Ivies constantly. It made me sick. I support AA and thought the SC made a mistake but admissions for Asians is racist as fuck.
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People may under-price that Kamala could gin up enthusiasm simply by being visibly alive. But the way pundits talk about picking someone else over Kamala (that would offend black voters!) is both infantilizing and ignores that she's not that popular with black people either.
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You have no plan to replace Biden!
Kamala is the plan.
But you're not even saying who should replace Biden!
It's...what? I'm saying Kamala.
Just tell me who you want to replace him!
Kamala! Kamala! You know, the qualified black lady he's photographed with a lot?
But who...
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@janecoaston
It’s so funny he’s wandering around on a beautiful sunny day being left alone I bet if he shut his mouth for two seconds you could hear birds singing
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I wrote about Israel/Palestine, "decolonization," and the fantasy that American universities are hotbeds of leftist indoctrination. Conservatives get one thing right: universities are a breeding ground for extremist ideology. But it's not leftism, it's corporate radicalism. 🧵
"Elite universities are in a bind, floundering in their attempts to navigate the Israel-Palestine conflict, because they have passed the better part of a decade making themselves political,"
@Tyler_A_Harper
writes.
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Impeccable thread. Public universities should be free. Profs should be weird little freaks that ponder stuff, not gig laborers scraping together a living by teaching at three different schools. This isn’t utopian. College used to be affordable. Most profs used to be tenure-track.
The disconnect between public perception of academia vs. the reality is so immense. Anti-intellectuals on the right and left assume that academia is run by--and full of cushy tenured jobs for--"Marxists." The reality is that universities are run like neoliberal businesses. 1/
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