A Spectacular Theory of Today’s Woke Advertising
Many companies have recently switched from aspirational to woke advertising—and a surprising number of them are engaging in self-satire and even self-abnegation as they do so. From Gillette, with its…
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The Pivotal Irony of American Racism
Is the problem of American racism structural or personal? Is racism a significant problem in the United States? Are the problems of the black community in particular a reflection of…
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What Cancel Culture Is Not
If you have a social media account, you must certainly have come across the phrase cancel culture. It describes the act of collectively unsubscribing from a person, the way you…
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The Problem with the Concept of Cancel Culture
The phrase cancel culture has been all over the internet over the past few weeks. The publication of the Harper’s letter defending free speech and a number of high profile…
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Systemic Racism on Campus? The Cautionary Tale of Joanne St. Lewis v. Denis Rancourt
The term systemic racism refers to institutions, procedures or processes that, whether by design or by effect, produce discriminatory or unequal outcomes or result in injustices disproportionately affecting an identifiable…
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Why Do Anti-Racists Give China a Free Pass?
Since the appalling killing of George Floyd in late May and the nationwide protests that followed, a growing number of Americans have been calling for a national reckoning on race.…
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Statue Switcheroo: Monumental Figures, Radical Politics and History
Call me a squishy centrist, but, while I think monuments to Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and King Leopold don’t deserve to stand in perpetuity, I sympathize with arguments that…
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A Therapist’s Plea for Freedom of Speech
To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.—Frederick Douglass. The single best predictor of a positive…
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Uncovering the Non-Obvious: The Case for Restorative Police Reform
We desperately need organizational reform of the US police force: an institution that has turned a blind eye to misconduct for decades. The public will no longer tolerate the police…
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Science and Technology Studies and Its Interdisciplinarity Problem
Science and Technology Studies (STS) is an academic discipline in the social sciences, which purports to analyse how society, politics and culture influence scientific research and technological innovation, and how…
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The Structure of Cultural Revolutions
―So you’d give the Devil benefit of law! ―Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? ―I’d cut down every law…
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Modern Anti-Racism Is a Historical Overcorrection
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.—James Baldwin, Notes Of A Native Son (1955) Our collective past, Baldwin argues, is carried over into the present through…
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The Why is Not the Same as the How: Levels of Analysis and Scientific Progress in Psychology
The emerald-colored jewel wasp (Ampulex compressa) parasitizes the common cockroach with a sophistication that beggars the imagination. Here’s how the morbid scene unfolds. The wasp begins by injecting a venomous…
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A First World Plague: Medical Error in the United States
Error and its more malignant cousin malpractice are quietly epidemic in the American medical industry. Read even a few of the chilling anecdotal reports that flood online forums and a…
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The Intersectionality of Chicago Institutions and a White Woman’s Tears
Nothing has let Chicago public school policy-makers off the hook more thoroughly than the ideology of white fragility. If below average academic achievement is the result of racism alone, then…
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The Historian Who Came in from the Chill
I am in the sunset of life, and I feel it to be my special mission to tell people what they are not prepared to hear.—Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Elizabeth Cady…
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Are Calls for Open Debate Too Little Too Late?
In Harper’s Magazine this past week over 150 prominent intellectuals and bestselling authors, such as Malcolm Gladwell, J. K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood, Noam Chomsky and others signed a letter that…
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