Jokes entail risk, because in order for them to work, they need to be a bit unsettling, and to get better at telling them we need to be allowed to fail.
The novel’s composition is a bit cobbled, which Amis acknowledges when he says that he pities the reviewer who has to cross the whole thing front-to-back, recommending instead that the book be taken up at random and read in leaps and snatches.
The activists seeking to eliminate TJ’s meritocratic admissions systems attribute this latter result to systemic racism.
Yglesias proposes that the United States ensure its position as global hegemon by tripling its population over the course of this century.
Many of these cultures surely had their share of Elon Musks—beings who wished to colonize other worlds.
I support helping the homeless—but with meaningful measures that have been proven to work, as opposed to policy that’s heavy on virtue signaling and ultimately short on humanitarian substance.
The ideology that inspired this insurrection hasn’t disappeared. Various kings have dealt with the fire of fundamentalism either through granting concessions or enacting purges.
Our profession functions well because constructive criticism, the need for empirical data, and a willingness to change have hitherto been so deeply entrenched.
Instead of relying on impractical edicts from politicians, and the costly labor of municipal employees who gather a jumble of mostly worthless material that needs to be sorted, let the market determine what’s worth recycling, and let private operators figure out how to collect it efficiently.
The announced intention of reframing the country’s origin date struck many readers across the political spectrum as an implicit repudiation of the American revolution and its underlying principles.
Beethoven is a truly odd target for progressive critics, because his views on geopolitics are known to have been, by the highly regressive standards of his time, quite progressive.
Some nonbinary people will say that they don’t like labels such as “gay” or “lesbian” because they are binary terms; attraction to a man or a woman, even in the context of being gay, is still considered attraction to a binary gender.
Quillette Editor Jonathan Kay talks to scientist and author Dr Debra Soh about the misinformation being peddled to young people about biological sex and transition—and the most humane ways to help people who experience gender dysphoria. Debra has just published The End of Gender.
Compared to the titans of modernism, postmodernists—despite a handful of interesting thinkers like Barthes and Derrida—are no more than garden gnomes.
And it turns out that she was, because despite the best efforts of her critics, she hasn’t yet been truly cancelled.