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The Absurdity of the 2024 Democratic Primary and Maybe of the Current Primary System in Total
One of the least serious arguments pushed out there about Biden staying in the race is that “we had a primary and the people decided they wanted Joe Biden again.” A sizable number of LGM commenters love this line. This is patently unserious. First, the Democratic Party has not had a seriously co...
The Spectacular South Siders
Doff of the cap for the performance art extravaganza which is the 2024 Chicago White Sox: The 1970 White Sox went 56-106, setting the mark with a loss on the last day of the season, Oct. 1, 1970. The 2024 team is much more efficient at losing. Now that the local goal has been met, […]
Trump claims public schools are performing transgender surgery on children without parental knowledge
Bouie points out that: (1) Trump is making totally deranged claims. (2) Trump is also now incapable of speaking cogently in any sense on any topic for any length of time. (3) Trump has deteriorated in regard to both of these behaviors quite markedly since 2020. (4) That a major party presidential ca...
Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,696
This is the grave of James Warren. Born in 1726 in Plymouth, Massachusetts into what passed for the Puritan elite of the time. But even the elite were pretty much working on little farms. He went to Harvard beginning in 1742 and finished in 1745. He already had become interested in reforming colonia...
General strike in Israel
In response to Hamas recently killing six hostages — hostages that could have been returned safely if not for Benjamin Netanyahu prioritizing the nearly indiscriminate bombing of civilians — there will be a major strike in Israel tomorrow: Much of Israel’s economy was set to grind to a halt Mo...
Starbursts Two: Peter Thiel Boogaloo
It looks like Rich Lowry is getting the same tingly feeling that he did the last time a Republican candidate made a disastrous vice presidential pick: Rich Lowry, editor-in-chief of the conservative National Review, told a bemused Chris Wallace in a Saturday appearance on CNN that Republican vi...
Duo and Sunday Open Thread
How are folks doing on their Duolingo? It seems as if everyone I know is trying to learn some language or another on Duo. I started with Korean two years ago (in preparation from my trip to Seoul), then started again with Ukrainian last year (in prep for my trip to Kyiv), then started again […]
Hotel Strike
If you are going to a professional conference in the near future, you need to make sure it is at a hotel where the workers aren’t striking because a lot of them now are and probably a lot more will be doing so in the near future. Thousands of hotel workers in major cities across […]
The 4-Day Week Comes to Japan. Maybe.
I recently discussed the toxic work culture of South Korea. Well, Japan is equally notorious as a nation with a toxic work culture. So the Japanese beginning to respond to the reality of the labor market instead of doubling down on a staid ideology about work is remarkable given Korea doing the oppo...
Incumbency in an Anti-Incumbent Age
One of the major issues in the late contretemps over Old Man Biden needing to step away for Harris is the idea of loyalty. Let’s face it, a lot of the strong feelings about him staying among many readers of this blog stem from the idea of loyalty from Democratic partisans who really like Biden. [....
What Are You Doing To Get Out The Vote?
What are you doing to Get Out The Vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz??? I’ll start: Probably not as much as I should. I’ve sent money and bought a tote bag that I will use to bag groceries. I write stuff here. But I haven’t engaged with the direct people-to-people stuff. My contributions have...
And I said to myself: This is the business we’ve chosen
At some point this stuff just gets exhausting: CU buys $3.75M home for Boulder chancellor The CU Foundation closed on the home for $3.75 million, which is located adjacent to the University Hill neighborhood and less than a mile from campus. “The CU system and CU Foundation determined after carefu...
Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,695
This is the grave of Marilyn Monroe. I don’t think we need a regular biography of one of the most famous women in American history and one that literally every reader of this site knows well, so let’s just discuss some of the issues with her life. First, my God did this woman overcome a […]
An as***le, a female incubator, and a doughnut
A new romantic comedy: The man was out at a business establishment with his peers and associates, imbibing liquid refreshment and debating which comestibles were best to ingest. Then he saw the female. Even from across the room, he could see that it looked fertile. It had hair protruding on top of i...
An opportunity. To what? To make money? Perhaps. To lose money? Perhaps. To indulge and learn about ourselves? Perhaps. They’re an opportunity.
There are many funny details about Trump’s latest round of tacky NFTs. But my favorite is about the Tremendous Dinners you are promised with Trump if you buy 75 virtual cards at 99 bucks a pop (with virtually no resale value): The fine print, vis-a-vis those Tremendous Dinners, reads: “In the ev...
Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,693
This is the grave of Paul Brown. Born in 1880 in Hartwell, Georgia, Brown went to the University of Georgia and then got a law degree from the same school in 1901. He passed the bar almost immediately and started a practice in the town of Lexington, Georgia. He got involved in politics pretty quickl...
First seditionist to breach the Capitol on 1/6 sentenced
The Supreme Court’s Republicans got his sentence reduced but couldn’t get him off the hook altogether (at least not yet): The first rioter to breach the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack was sentenced Tuesday to more than four years in prison. The big picture: Michael Sparks, a Kentucky m...
This weird as***le came as a weird as***le
Another reminder that having your coke-addled alt-right failson pick your vice presidential candidate is probably not a great idea: "I hate to be so personal about this" is a reeeeeal obvious lie, he loves this creepy s**t https://t.co/vUQxvcdSeZ — Nicole Chung | on Bluesky (...
Cornell Strike
There’s a big strike going on at Cornell, as anyone who watched Shawn Fain’s speech at the DNC knows. Cornell is going all-in on scabbing when it can, starting with the president. And of course there’s lots of whining about move-in. With students moving back in on August 19, UAW members and so...
Chipotle Union Busting
Not only is Chipotle almost comically overrated, but it is as bad on its workers unionizing as any other company and is happy to commit labor law violations to bust unions. The US National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel office concluded that the burrito chain violated federal law by exclu...
Cell Phones and Classrooms
Here’s an interesting thing and perhaps a good debate to have: Students returning to school in a growing number of states and districts are facing tight restrictions and outright bans on cellphone use as evidence mounts of the damaging impact persistent connection to the internet has on teenagers....
Trump to name RFK and Tulsi Gabbard honorary co-chairs of his transition team
Per Maggie: Donald J. Trump plans to name his former rival, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard, a onetime Democrat, as honorary co-chairs of a presidential transition team that will help him select the policies and personnel of any second Trump administration, according to a campaign senior ad...
Adventures in university administrative grifting: Ben Sasse edition
I’m so old I remember that when you quit a million dollar a year job in an act of noble self-sacrifice to (supposedly) care for your ailing spouse, you didn’t actually keep getting paid your monstrous salary anyway: After defending his office’s vast spending as University of Florida president,...
Podcast: Talking About Canon-Building With Critical Friends
After staking out such a strong position in favor of negative reviews on my last appearance on their podcast, it’s perhaps a little surprising that Dan Hartland and Aishwarya Subramanian, hosts of the Strange Horizons reviews department podcast Critical Friends, invited me back. This time, our top...
Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,692
This is the grave of Richard Brodhead. Born in 1811 in Lehman Township, Pennsylvania, Brodhead grew up in that small town and then moved to the big city in 1830. Yep, Easton. Now, laugh if you will, but Easton was a much bigger deal then than it is today. OK, it wasn’t Philadelphia, but it […]
They told me to go fash but I was already there
At some point, the cognitive dissonance has to get unbearable. It feels better to just let it out: You see, The Party Left Her (because only people who answer caller IDs from “The Federal Wallet Inspector” didn’t know a right-wing crank cosplaying as a vaguely progressive populist when they se...
Let he who has never beheaded a whale with a chainsaw, strapped the severed head to the roof of the family minivan, then driven five hours down the highway streaming clouds of whale offal cast the first stone
Is this just a little weird? Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once decapitated a dead whale with a chain saw on a beach, according to his daughter Kick Kennedy. In a resurfaced interview with Town & Country in 2012, Kick Kennedy described the event as “normal.” The story resurfaced over the weekend after R...
Teacher Strikes Help Everyone Who Matters
Turns out that teacher strikes make life better for teachers without harming student learning, according to this new study: Their data set — which covers 772 teacher strikes across 610 school districts in 27 states between 2007-2023 — took four years to compile. The three co-authors, plus seven ...
Slavery in Your Past Means Wealth Today
There’s a new study out looking at the wealth of members of Congress whose ancestors owned slaves compared with members of Congress whose ancestors did not own slaves. Will it shock you that those with slaver ancestors are a lot wealthier 179 years after the institution’s abolition? It should no...
Say What You Mean
For years, I found Democrats’ fear to engage in an open defense of abortion frustrating. How did it help to couch your defense as “safe, legal, and rare” for example? Why not just say it’s a human right? Well, things sure are different today. Rick Perlstein makes an excellent point about thi...
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