. One of the salient features of the evolving massively networked media environment is the readier production than ever before of manufactured realities. Enough people simply assert something to be true, enough people virally lift the assertion across the MNM and write about it as true, and the idea takes almost unshakeable hold in the […]
The Unsound Judgment of Peter Beinart
. Just over two years ago, I wrote a post titled “The Unsound Judgment of Andrew Sullivan.” Sullivan, for all his true virtues, is a man of strikingly unsound judgment. He swings, he swings frequently, he swings with emotion from one impassioned response to another, a kind of journalistic Thaïs transforming regularly from the life of […]
The End of Memoir II: Allison Benedikt and Life before Thinking
(Yesterday: The End of Memoir, part I) Though he did it not well, Jose Antonio Vargas, in “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant,” had a compelling reason to write. He is not merely affected by illegal immigration: he is, individually, a story of illegal immigration. He has lived the subterfuge, the fiction, and the uncertain […]
Quote of the Day
Peter Beinart, unhappy with the public statements of Benjamin Netanyahu after Netanyahu’s meeting with President Obama: If this is what Obama gets for playing nice, perhaps he should consider going back to tough love. If that’s how quickly Beinart gets frustrated and seeks payback, then I imagine the Palestinians should be be happy he wasn’t […]
Mystery of Judgment Update
In my famous (in my own mind) email to Jeffrey Goldberg offering him a question for Peter Beinart, I closed by stating Ask him why this is not his focus, why this is not the article he published in NYRB. And “I’m a Jew, so I’m concerned with the behavior of Jews” is an evasion. […]