My disdain for Matt Yglesias knows few bounds (the feeling is mutual, I may be the only person he's ever blocked on Twitter). However, as much as it bugs me that he took the Slow Boring handle for his Substack because he misses the point...
The Left
Last week, we had a very unfortunate comment thread when I mentioned that one of the bombers portrayed in The Battle of Algiers still lives. Too many commenters basically preferred.
I suppose it's fairly well-known that I do not have the reflexive obsession with nonviolence in politics that dominates the minds of American liberals. Violence is usually a bad idea.
There's a long history of leftists believing their workers should have no union rights because their job is to exploit themselves for the cause of revolution. This goes back to the kind of self-sacrifice required by the Communist Party. Communism may be pretty much dead...
Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone is a somewhat overrated book that seeks to put a lot of phenomena into a single box of Americans losing their social spaces. But it's not.
Greg Sargent has a good interview with Mike Konczal about the latter's new book (I interviewed him for the LGM podcast as well). I thought this tidbit was especially important:.
So much of our discourse about the left today is twisted by our focus on a few online figures, Jacobin, the Chapo cokeheads, and a few other sources. This is really wrong. There is so much vitriol from liberals toward the left because of a...
This is the grave of Eugene Dennis. Francis Waldron was born in 1904 in Seattle (some say 1905), he seems to have grown up poor. He became a worker as.
Max Weber, 1864-1920 tl;dr: The New Yorker ran a piece by Corey Robin that elaborated a rather idiosyncratic reading of Max Weber, one of the canonical thinkers of western social.
That the police are nightmarish in this nation is a huge understatement. We hardly need to explain it at this point. Calls to defund or abolish the policy are morally correct. But they are also probably impossible and exist far more at the level of...
Whether Democratic Socialists of America's decision not to endorse a presidential candidate is important enough to merit a New York Times op-ed is an open question. I'd probably say not..
I really appreciated this Politico interview with Sean McElwee on how the left needs to be thinking about electoral politics. McElwee, who co-founded Data for Progress, came into the spotlight.