Marc Singer

My "are we the baddies?" greatcoat is answering lots of questions raised by

Harry Frankfurt, oracle of the 21st century.

Better to get owned by Fetterman in March than to get owned by Susan Collins in November.

Does Greenwald oppose imperialism? Or does he just oppose US foreign policy?

As always, Ukraine is the unfailing test of whether someone is anti-imperialist or anti-democracy.

And I'm proud to have called this one when I did:

Receipts:

I have said it before and I'll say it again: there is a reason why people keep confusing Naomi Klein with Naomi Wolf, and Klein wouldn't like it.

Living through the end of the Cold War was pretty great.

People who were alive in the US in the 1950s (say, post-polio vaccine) must have felt like they dodged a whole lot of bullets.

They got through it. We can get through this.

I hope this is true, but I mean, we'll see what happens in Maine.

"I must wear a disguise that will strike terror into their hearts! I must be a creature of the night, like a... a..."

(gets pelted with a snowball)

In the voting booth.

I'm not suggesting Ilhan Omar is that person. I'm suggesting that any abstention campaign fueled that person's worst instincts.

So yes, people should always be free to vote their conscience in a primary. But if their conscience leads them to lie about a candidate and promote abstention, don't be surprised if there are consequences.

...and the insistence on casting Biden's support for Israel in absolutist terms (how do you climb down from "genocide Joe"?) and the uncommitted campaign was priming people to abstain from the general.

A rival candidate might have avoided this dynamic, but only if they concede & endorse afterwards.

I think the problem is that lots of voters don't distinguish between primaries and the general election (as seen in current discourse over Newsom) and a movement to abstain from the primary becomes a movement to abstain from the general.

Add the refusal to back down fueled by social media...

We can rebuild him. We have the technology. Better. Stronger. Faster.

Piping hot take here: maybe your Spider-Man cinematic universe should start with a movie featuring Spider-Man.

Opinion | Peer Review Is Breaking Under Its Own Weight The system is operating at a scale and speed it wasn’t designed to support.

Another piece about the growing breakdown of peer review. I wish the suggestions at the end were a little more actionable, but we have to start somewhere.

The easiest lift here is probably counting reviewing and editing towards workload and promotion decisions.

How far back in time can you understand English? An experiment in language change

A remarkable piece of writing. Reading it, you might conclude that English peaked somewhere between 1800 and 1900, but I think that just means it peaked somewhere between Laurence Sterne and M.R. James. Certainly not LiveJournal.

And that too many faculty simply didn't care to catch it in the first place.

It kills me that I can't use this quote in my upcoming book about the growing convergence between science fiction and literary fiction, which opens with William Gibson and closes with Colson Whitehead.

Although... (eyes copy edits dangerously)

I'm not sure I buy the premise. We know what the aesthetic of liberalism is: midcentury modernism, cool jazz, abstract expressionism. The TWA flight center and the starship Enterprise.

The fact that no *contemporary* liberal aesthetic leaps to mind is a problem, but it's a different problem.

There was no reason not to make that an "In this House We Believe" sign.

NIMBYs: it is time to use your powers for good.

Kiss up, kick down.

I (don't) hate to say this, but basically if you're looking for a political affiliation in the year 2026 that won't force you to eventually climb into bed with and defend some kind of fascist, authoritarian, or general bigot, you have precisely one option, and that's unapologetic liberalism.

Maybe it should be a bigger deal that the president is decompensating?

At least Ruben Bolling will get a good strip out of this.

5 authors I’ve read at least 5 books by:

Francis Spufford
Colson Whitehead
William Gibson
Thomas Pynchon
Joan Didion

Honestly, not just white guys. I have seen faculty use it to shout down white and Asian colleagues at meetings.

It has always been a free pass for people to be racist and misogynist but leftishly, to the point where I can't tell if it uses the racism to justify the misogyny or vice versa.