This was originally published at Public Seminar on January 24 2019. Everyone has a #CovingtonBoys story, and this is mine. It is a story about clickbait. It is a story about how an unknown political operative captured a real event that might never have been noticed at all, and turned it into a news tsunami during a … More How I Knew the #CovingtonBoys Video Was Clickbait
A little more than two years ago, I launched a regular column that I named Purple Wednesday, a series that comes to a close today. The title post, “The Mo(u)rning After” riffed off the theme song for The Poseidon Adventure(1972), sung by an otherwise little-known singer named Maureen McGovern, was written a few hours after Donald … More Making America Good Again
In true old school blog style, you will have to read this post backwards, as the most recent entries will be at the top. This may cause you to want to go straight to the original, published throughout the day of November 7 2018 at Public Seminar. 10:23 p.m. NBC projects that Democrats will take the … More Election Day, 2018
This essay followed Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test, in which she refuted the Tar Baby in Chief mocking her relentlessly as “Pocahontas.” It’s Monday morning. I open up my Twitter feed and see the video Elizabeth Warren made to answer charges made by Donald Trump, taken up by Trump enthusiasts everywhere, that she has pretended to … More Is Elizabeth Warren Native American?
In this essay, I reflected on the damage that the GOP-led Senate Judiciary Committee has done to democracy, in its insistence that as damaged a candidate as Brett Kavanaugh be confirmed. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last Thursday, and Brett Kavanaugh’s unhinged response to her charges, was an epic installment of … More Post-Kavanaugh Stress Disorder
And I still do. These were my thoughts as this dumpster fire of a SCOTUS confirmation proceeded. What will come of the allegation by Christine Blasey Ford, a clinical psychologist and professor at Palo Alto University, that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when he was seventeen and she was fifteen? As of today, … More I Believe Christine Blasey Ford
This post was written two months before the general election. Was I right, or what? When Democrats go to sleep at night, they dream of sticking it to Donald Trump in November. But that’s not how you win elections — or at least, not how you should win elections. While the media outrage machine often … More Don’t Run Against Trump
Back in the 1970s, when I was leaving for college, my mother gave me a piece of advice: “Don’t sign anything.” Her skepticism was forged in the 1950s, when petitions that public figures had signed as students, and organizations they had belonged to, had sometimes destroyed their lives. In college, however, I discovered the thrill … More Why Taking a Stand on the Internet Can Turn a Problem Into a Catastrophe
