One of my hobby horses recently is lamenting that Substack is almost, but not quite, resurrecting what I liked so much about the golden age of the blogosphere. As I wrote a few weeks ago:

Substack is a return, in many ways, to the spirit of the old blogosphere. What the whole thing is not, however, is something that really travels. … there’s nothing cumulative about it, no real linkages from one person to another that build on each other and ultimately take on the shape of a conversation. … as a reader it feels much more like a series of mostly parallel, occasionally intersecting tubes whose main function is to connect the writers to their subscribers rather than a network oriented toward bringing writers into connection with each other (with ancillary benefits for the readers).

The vigorous back and forth this week around Naomi Kanakia’s essay “The Function…

My guest on the show today is Rogers Brubaker, professor of sociology at UCLA and author of many books, the most recent of which, Gender Identity: The Career of a Category, is our subject for discussion on this episode.

If you want a really good kind of primer on this book before you listen to this episode, I recommend you pause and go read the review essay of it, by Shreeharsh Kelkar, that I published on my Substack recently.

Both the book and Shreeharsh’s review of it have the double virtue of taking on a really fraught topic, one that very easily tends to dysregulate people, with both analytical dispassion and also genuine consideration and compassion for the people for whom these questions of gender identity, and gender identity at variance with biological sex, are not primarily or exclusively analytical ones.

I wanted that kind of access point to…

Naomi Kanakia has a fascinating new piece on her Substack where she applies her style of no-bullshit, see-through-the-mythology, count every penny analytical lens to the world of the little magazine (i.e. .N+1, The Point, The Drift, Jacobin, The Baffler, etc. - i.e. all heirs to Partian Review).

It’s great! I love it. But I’m unpersuaded by her overall assessment of the function of the little magazines. She writes:

these journals … feel like transient entertainment for a certain type of person—an aspiring intellectual—to read on the phone or to browse on their toilet. They are a space for individual circles of writers—scenes—to constitute themselves and to create community around shared ideas. And this community tends to get built most strongly by dismissive polemics where they shower scorn on the out-group: the unsophisticated middlebrow consumer.

The purpose of these journals is really to build and preserve an attitude…

Of all the ways to think about antisemitism—as a bigotry, as a conspiracy theory, as “the oldest hatred”—one of the most useful is as a kind of brain rot. Something about Jew hatred (sort of like Trump hatred, come to think of it) is that it infects not only the holder of the opinion but the people around her; it is also a form of stupidity that makes people stupid in other ways. It’s like the odor of skunkweed: you don’t have to be the one who smoked it, it’s enough just to have been in the room—Snoop Dogg on the radio, burrito wrappers balled up on the floor—while your besties smoked the weed, and the stench will cling to you. And so you find much-laureled opinionators M Gessen and Roxane Gay both driven to their worst takes by the topic of antisemitism. Antisemitism not only makes the antisemite stupid,…

My guest on the show today is writer Ann Manov, the artist formerly known as personality girl and the author of a recent essay in Harper’s Magazine, “Republican Machines: Can the GOP save the humanities?”

In it, Manov goes back to her alma mater, University of Florida, to report on the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, perhaps the best known of the growing number of schools and centers around the country, typically at state universities in red states, dedicated to some mix of the great books and what has come to be called “civic thought.” On their website, the Hamilton school says that it teaches “the ideas and habits of thought that founded our country and sustain our free society.”

This is the shiznit

Dear friends and readers,

I have a new piece out today in Persuasion, a tour of the why, what, and how of liberal education. I call, among other things, for the wholesale reconstruction of the undergraduate curriculum and a fundamental shift in the professoriate’s conception of its purpose.