Interesting piece. I give Bari Weiss a lot of kudos for walking away, but I sure ain’t no fan of that entitlement whiff she carried over from NYT. You can take a Bari Weiss out of the NYT but you can’t completely take the NYT out of Bari Weiss… Or in other words: it would be amazing if she was a writer / publisher based out of Kentucky rather than NYC.
I have been an on/off subscriber to the Free Press, but I can’t seem to figure out who and what they after or for, leave alone finding solid every day pieces on socio-economic matters or substantial policy analysis. It feels like a never ending roll of op-Ed pieces, albeit by some prolific writers - Niall Ferguson and Matti Friedman being among them.
I think that’s very fair criticism. Bari has shown no small amount of courage, and obviously has a talent for both journalism and enterprise, but I do wish The Free Press was more willing to push back on the bipartisan consensus about economics.
Economic matters don't yet appear to be a focus of TFP, but it's still relatively early days, and they could get there. I'm enjoying what they have in the meantime.
She says a lot of nothing…she’s a lot like Clay Travis who parlayed #fakenews into stardom. Clay Travis did it with the “ESPN is making sports woke” and she did it with the “NYTimes is making news woke”!!! Her Substack even had one of the initial #fakenews articles about the female Olympic boxer being a male and Clay Travis had Trump on first thing on Monday to rant about a woman they believed was a man beating a woman in the Olympics in an attempt to derail Kamala’s rollout.
So she’s a part of the right wing echo chamber that is responsible for so much of the asinine things America has done this century like invading Iraq and shipping jobs to China and splooging dollars to wealthy Americans so they can tank the economy. I joke Bari Weiss is a bi-neocon…sometimes when she’s flicking her bean she dreams of Bush, and other times she dreams of Dick! 😝
Except, the boxer DID turn out to be male, confirmed by his training program manager in an interview after the Olympics; who said he had had him re-tested and put on a program to lower his T.
The story was ignored, of course, by the center-left media.
Thanks for providing a perfect example of why TFP is so sorely needed. The lefty media and the denizens inside its bubble are rapidly getting as Fake News-y as Faux.
“Flick her bean”, clever but rude. If you were my daughter I would scold you to get some class. If you were my son, I would stop and say get out of the car.
I hope your not going to claim that the Democrats and their far left masters made all right decisions since 2000. The NYT is nothing more or less that a progressive Democrat propaganda sheet.
Bush bears the blame for most of the problems Trump ran on fixing in 2016. The only thing is Obama had pretty much fixed everything which is why Republicans view Trump’s first 3 years as a huge success. Republicans’ views on the state of the country literally turned positive in November 2016 before Trump was even president!?! So hilarious! 😆
You seem highly ignorant. You do know personally you’ll never be anything important; a veil of pseudo erudite none sense is all you’re worth. My guess is you fail at persuading yourself as well.
Inequality only matters to the resentful. Who cares what the 1% have, so long as they got it fairly and nobody is starving?
The Left talks about paying their fair share, but people in the top two quintiles of _income_ already pay the majority of federal income taxes. The federal government will have to tax lower quintiles more to raise revenue for existing spending, let alone any new spending.
The Left talks about wealth inequality, but the super rich have mostly paper fortunes. Those don’t translate to spending without selling part, which will crash the value and risk losing control.
Wealth taxes may be an effort by old money families to prevent the creation of new fortunes. New fortunes are often built by disrupting existing businesses. Old money families are usually diversified into existing, income generating businesses. They could better afford to pay wealth taxes.
Hi Bob. You might well be correct in your analysis but I do think it’s a conversation that should be had. If economic precarity contributes to the rise of extreme politics — on the left and the right — it is at least worth a debate as to whether public policy can lessen that precarity.
Instead of sensible discussion, we get the politics of resentment, and wild schemes to confiscate wealth.
A better approach would be to reduce or remove the overhead which government adds to the cost of labor, particularly at the lower end of the market. Regulation, taxes, and payroll accounting may raise the cost of labor above its marginal value to the employer. That margin is thinnest at the low end.
I agree with that progressives don't do policy. It isn't their thing. The prefer to denounce villains and accomplish nothing. That said, just repeating the free-market-no-regulation catechism ("everything would be much better if we just did more of the same thing that isn't working for you) isn't going to wash with most Americans. Like many, I'm looking for new thinking, new directions, new focus. This stale sauce isn't it. The Democrats won't do any of this, giving the Republicans a golden opportunity to do something other than complain. Will they stand up to the challenge?
There's a curve in economics that represents the fundamental tradeoff between social equality and economic output. Every bit of social equality costs something in terms of economic output. I gather that you value maximization of economic output, and don't value social equality much if at all. You're at a particular part of the curve. Most Americans would rather trade off some level of economic output for some level of social equality and would be at a different part of curve. So recognize your position for what it is, not an insight or a truth, but merely a preference of yours. It needs to be argued for. How would we be better off overall (not just economically) if we did those things?
I value everyone having a chance to contribute. We’re not smart enough to plan that. It might be possible to recognize when government gets in the way.
> Who cares what the 1% have, so long as they got it fairly and nobody is starving?
As to get into 1% is not really much (that's a salary of around $500K/year), let's ask this for the 0.01%:
Who cares what the 0.01% have, so long as they got it fairly and nobody is starving?
People who
(a) don't believe it's good for society, democracy, etc to amass so much power (money IS power) in individuals ,
(b) don't believe the fairy tales that people get to 0.01% "fairly",
(c) know that the mechanisms that create and increase the profits of that 0.01% are making other people starving
care.
Also people who see that "resentment" is pop-psychology, and could be said to justify any injustice: "Oh, it's not that he is a jerk, you're just resentful of his success".
The assets of the ten most wealthy people in the USA wouldn’t cover one year’s federal budget deficit. Then those assets would be gone, and their enterprises, too.
Anybody starving in the USA only does so because they are too impaired to help themselves. Most of our poor people are fat. Our homeless population can’t be helped short of institutionalizing them. Most don’t want to be helped. They cluster where governments enable their lifestyles.
No system in history has taken care of everybody. The West comes closest.
If you see a real problem, find a local, practical way to work on a piece of it. If you succeed, the rest of us can imitate you.
Part of the reason I like Weiss and TFP is that I often don’t agree with them. That’s a good thing, healthy for discussion and democracy. I also like her deep dives into stories that followed expected narratives in, oh , say, The New York Times and others. Two specifics: the Central Park dog walker story and the Matthew Shepard story. Suffice to say, the truth was much more complex; and in the case of the dog walker, a real miscarriage of social justice.
Fantastic peice Stephen. As Eric Hoffer once wrote in The True Believer, "The worst thing that can happen to a cause is for it to be successful". American Liberalism won years ago. What it should stand for now seems to be a constant internal struggle and along the way it has become divided and intolerant of open debate. In my opinion, Anna Kasparian of The Young Turks could be next to reject the new left's cultural excesses . Bill Maher and Sam Harris continue to call some of it out from time to time. The worry is that while all of these voices are successful in the digital square, with the exception of Maher, none are mainstream. Or young.
Solid work. One thing I find fascinating about Weiss is that she has recognized the current, um, “situation” (for lack of a better word) for twenty years. Here’s a letter she wrote to the Columbia Spectator, as a College sophomore, in 2004 (in connection with the polemical (and, sadly, far-sighted) film, “Columbia Unbecoming”. https://www.columbiaspectator.com/2004/11/16/name-academic-freedom/
I don’t think TFP ignores economic issues at all. Batya Ungar-Sargon is pretty vocal about her support for economic populism, while some contributors defend classical liberal economics. It’d be wise of those who criticize independent outlets like TFP to stop and ask themselves what speaks to so many readers:
I read The Free Press daily. It dawns on me that Progressive ideology is now “The Man” (er, sorry that was so the 60s, I mean “The Woman”) as the entrenched incumbent social power guarding its flanks from attack while Conservatives (miraculously!) are now the Counter-Culture. So deliciously ironic!
Think Neil Young. Once, a young angry counter culture hippie defending scrappy protestors and despising Nixon in Ohio. Now? He IS Nixon. “If Spotify doesn’t shut down dissident opinions - I will punish them by withholding my music”.
Our current era reminds us of a timeless and universal truth: no human POV is innately superior. Once it gains power - it metastasizes into stench filled rot and becomes abusive in its self preservation. When Conservatives acquire power? Abuse! When Progressives acquire it - they exercise it every bit as ruthlessly (albeit with the female bent toward guilt and shame vs the male proclivity toward violence).
Power is the ultimate evil. Its acquirer succumbs to its diseased logic and must be taken down to be freed of it. It is the story of the human condition. It is why societies move in such volatile, cyclical ways. The duality of our spiritual yin and yangs forever pushing and pulling in the systole and diastole of power. Nietzsche would have much to say on Substack if he were alive today!
IIRC Peggy Noonan writes about this in her first book, What I Saw At The Revolution. About how, by the Eighties, liberals were the establishment and suddenly found themselves under siege from young, free-marketeer upstarts. There’s probably something in that.
Because we live in a “Fourth Turning” (yes, I’m one of those guys 😂) - society’s zeitgeist is outward focused: power, institutions, organizations, structure. In Second Turnings - societies refocus on the inner life of culture, religion, values. Spiritual things.Things of the soul. Speaking of soulful, spiritual things today (like power being humanity’s ruination) is as anachronistic as John Lennon singing “you better free your mind instead” in Revolution. But it’s still true. The lust for power and destruction of its enemies is the zeitgeist of our day and violence its inevitable currency.
I’m a paid subscriber to the Free Press and admire Bari but…I hope she is able to maintain her position as a serious journalist. I’m thinking that it is too early in TFP’s evolution to begin weakening the brand by doing things like book clubs & cutesy stories. Nellie does a great TGFN but I wouldn’t subscribe to simply read that. I’m a subscriber to Schellenburger & Tiabbi so that’s where my head’s at…honest to god serious investigative journalism with a minor focus of humor or satire. But…maybe I’m not the reader who she’s trying to satisfy.
I get what you mean. I disagree with Tiabbi on a bunch of things but he’s a really good reporter and an engaging writer. And I love Nellie’s posts, too.
I'm very pleased to find you substacking, a great writer whose urban Scottish Labour politics I cordially loathe (your one blind spot! You can destroy the SNP with a paragraph but stick a new Labour leader in the Scottish Parliament and you purr like my much-missed cat which, as I hope the allusion makes clear, isn't entirely a bad thing) but whose wit and charm and open-mindedness and facility with words is ever, always welcome. I like reading you, in other words, for many of the same reasons mutatis mutandis I like reading Bari Weiss and others at TFP. I still love the Spectator and UnHerd but I'm very glad to have TFP and other writers available on Substack too. Pluralism, eh! Who'd have thought it such a necessary virtue, other than all of us who aren't staring-eyed wokesters. Are we getting middle-aged, yet?
This piece is great, reflects much erudition and experience.
This bit made my day:
“Furthermore, it is alleged that Comrade Weiss made disparaging remarks about the Five-Year Plan for Revolutionary Wheat Rationing at the third plenum of the ninth People’s Congress.”
…although ‘plenum’ might should be ‘plenary?’ Autocorrect again no doubt.
As for gratuitous Manhattan digs at Los Angeles check out the later parts of Annie Hall or SNL’s The Californians skits.
I don’t know enough cultural history to know if it’s rot or not, but relevant to that Northeast vs SoCal rivalry, I think I remember hearing years ago that the reason Northern Europe was so cerebral was the harsh winters. Trapped inside for months people said, “Damn, I guess I’ll finally read that book” or would write one, whereas those closer to the Med could frolic and cavort in the sun instead of inventing Calvinism or psychotherapy.
Certainly you never hear the phrase “Florida Intellectual”
In the Lewis & Clark expedition, holed up in tiny Fort Clatsop for the winter,
“From the 4th of November 1805 to the 25th of March 1806, there were not more than twelve days in which it did not rain, and of these but six were clear”
On economics, this article tells us everything we need to know, but never ties the knot. Bari Weiss has created a wildly successful startup, identifying an unmet need, taking a huge personal and financial risk, and getting rewarded by the market she identified. The lefties would like to grab as much as possible of those rewards. Perhaps Bari doesn’t think that would be fair…..
My similarly aged lesbian daughter and her wife consider Bari to not be an authentic Lesbian. Authentic lesbians can only have a single pov. It wouldn’t include an in-depth discussion of JK Rowling.
Nice bit of news jacking here. And your points have some heft.
If I read between the lines, you'd like BW to show more appreciation for socialesque economic ideas, collective public good kind of policies. But you appear to be more interested in the means than the ends - no? I honestly can't say.
I suspect you lean towards collectivism, and you'd like BW to lean that way as well. Good luck with that.
This piece was an immensely entertaining read. I haven’t laughed out loud reading an essay in years, and I did so multiple times here. Really good cutting humor, which also hit the nail on the head. I’m a recent college graduate, and I have to say there did seem something very red guard-esque about how students/NYT journalists denounce professors/Bari Weissand by parrotting leftist talking points, and I think some of the humor in this essay sort of hints at that. Particularly don’t like how “follow the science” has been co-opted.
Interesting piece. I give Bari Weiss a lot of kudos for walking away, but I sure ain’t no fan of that entitlement whiff she carried over from NYT. You can take a Bari Weiss out of the NYT but you can’t completely take the NYT out of Bari Weiss… Or in other words: it would be amazing if she was a writer / publisher based out of Kentucky rather than NYC.
I have been an on/off subscriber to the Free Press, but I can’t seem to figure out who and what they after or for, leave alone finding solid every day pieces on socio-economic matters or substantial policy analysis. It feels like a never ending roll of op-Ed pieces, albeit by some prolific writers - Niall Ferguson and Matti Friedman being among them.
I think that’s very fair criticism. Bari has shown no small amount of courage, and obviously has a talent for both journalism and enterprise, but I do wish The Free Press was more willing to push back on the bipartisan consensus about economics.
Economic matters don't yet appear to be a focus of TFP, but it's still relatively early days, and they could get there. I'm enjoying what they have in the meantime.
Agreed!
She says a lot of nothing…she’s a lot like Clay Travis who parlayed #fakenews into stardom. Clay Travis did it with the “ESPN is making sports woke” and she did it with the “NYTimes is making news woke”!!! Her Substack even had one of the initial #fakenews articles about the female Olympic boxer being a male and Clay Travis had Trump on first thing on Monday to rant about a woman they believed was a man beating a woman in the Olympics in an attempt to derail Kamala’s rollout.
So she’s a part of the right wing echo chamber that is responsible for so much of the asinine things America has done this century like invading Iraq and shipping jobs to China and splooging dollars to wealthy Americans so they can tank the economy. I joke Bari Weiss is a bi-neocon…sometimes when she’s flicking her bean she dreams of Bush, and other times she dreams of Dick! 😝
Except, the boxer DID turn out to be male, confirmed by his training program manager in an interview after the Olympics; who said he had had him re-tested and put on a program to lower his T.
https://www.lepoint.fr/monde/2024-olympics-imane-khelif-was-devastated-to-discover-out-of-the-blue-that-she-might-not-be-a-girl-14-08-2024-2567924_24.php#11
The story was ignored, of course, by the center-left media.
Thanks for providing a perfect example of why TFP is so sorely needed. The lefty media and the denizens inside its bubble are rapidly getting as Fake News-y as Faux.
You don’t even know what a female is!!! You just want to be Olympic genitalia checker!! 😂
Thanks for continuing to illustrate the point. 😊 Like the MAGAts, the wokies have little to offer except vitriol and ad hominem.
You supported the torture and slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent Muslims by Bush/Cheney!! 😂
Remember how much libs complain about MAGAts who go flying off on unrelated tangents when you try to debate an issue with them? 😀
Yep. More like a MAGAt with every post 🤡
“Flick her bean”, clever but rude. If you were my daughter I would scold you to get some class. If you were my son, I would stop and say get out of the car.
The point is she is a neocon…do you still think highly of Liz Cheney??
No, I don ‘t like Liz Cheney at all
Bari Weiss is a neocon like Lizard Cheney.
I hope your not going to claim that the Democrats and their far left masters made all right decisions since 2000. The NYT is nothing more or less that a progressive Democrat propaganda sheet.
Bush bears the blame for most of the problems Trump ran on fixing in 2016. The only thing is Obama had pretty much fixed everything which is why Republicans view Trump’s first 3 years as a huge success. Republicans’ views on the state of the country literally turned positive in November 2016 before Trump was even president!?! So hilarious! 😆
You seem highly ignorant. You do know personally you’ll never be anything important; a veil of pseudo erudite none sense is all you’re worth. My guess is you fail at persuading yourself as well.
A few thoughts on economics:
Inequality only matters to the resentful. Who cares what the 1% have, so long as they got it fairly and nobody is starving?
The Left talks about paying their fair share, but people in the top two quintiles of _income_ already pay the majority of federal income taxes. The federal government will have to tax lower quintiles more to raise revenue for existing spending, let alone any new spending.
The Left talks about wealth inequality, but the super rich have mostly paper fortunes. Those don’t translate to spending without selling part, which will crash the value and risk losing control.
Wealth taxes may be an effort by old money families to prevent the creation of new fortunes. New fortunes are often built by disrupting existing businesses. Old money families are usually diversified into existing, income generating businesses. They could better afford to pay wealth taxes.
Hi Bob. You might well be correct in your analysis but I do think it’s a conversation that should be had. If economic precarity contributes to the rise of extreme politics — on the left and the right — it is at least worth a debate as to whether public policy can lessen that precarity.
Instead of sensible discussion, we get the politics of resentment, and wild schemes to confiscate wealth.
A better approach would be to reduce or remove the overhead which government adds to the cost of labor, particularly at the lower end of the market. Regulation, taxes, and payroll accounting may raise the cost of labor above its marginal value to the employer. That margin is thinnest at the low end.
I agree with that progressives don't do policy. It isn't their thing. The prefer to denounce villains and accomplish nothing. That said, just repeating the free-market-no-regulation catechism ("everything would be much better if we just did more of the same thing that isn't working for you) isn't going to wash with most Americans. Like many, I'm looking for new thinking, new directions, new focus. This stale sauce isn't it. The Democrats won't do any of this, giving the Republicans a golden opportunity to do something other than complain. Will they stand up to the challenge?
Do you deny that regulation, payroll taxes, and associated accounting raise the cost of labor?
Do you deny that businesses hire when the value of the labor is worth more than its cost to them?
“If you tax something, you get less of it.”
There's a curve in economics that represents the fundamental tradeoff between social equality and economic output. Every bit of social equality costs something in terms of economic output. I gather that you value maximization of economic output, and don't value social equality much if at all. You're at a particular part of the curve. Most Americans would rather trade off some level of economic output for some level of social equality and would be at a different part of curve. So recognize your position for what it is, not an insight or a truth, but merely a preference of yours. It needs to be argued for. How would we be better off overall (not just economically) if we did those things?
I value everyone having a chance to contribute. We’re not smart enough to plan that. It might be possible to recognize when government gets in the way.
> Who cares what the 1% have, so long as they got it fairly and nobody is starving?
As to get into 1% is not really much (that's a salary of around $500K/year), let's ask this for the 0.01%:
Who cares what the 0.01% have, so long as they got it fairly and nobody is starving?
People who
(a) don't believe it's good for society, democracy, etc to amass so much power (money IS power) in individuals ,
(b) don't believe the fairy tales that people get to 0.01% "fairly",
(c) know that the mechanisms that create and increase the profits of that 0.01% are making other people starving
care.
Also people who see that "resentment" is pop-psychology, and could be said to justify any injustice: "Oh, it's not that he is a jerk, you're just resentful of his success".
The assets of the ten most wealthy people in the USA wouldn’t cover one year’s federal budget deficit. Then those assets would be gone, and their enterprises, too.
Anybody starving in the USA only does so because they are too impaired to help themselves. Most of our poor people are fat. Our homeless population can’t be helped short of institutionalizing them. Most don’t want to be helped. They cluster where governments enable their lifestyles.
No system in history has taken care of everybody. The West comes closest.
If you see a real problem, find a local, practical way to work on a piece of it. If you succeed, the rest of us can imitate you.
Otherwise, yes, it’s resentment.
💯
Part of the reason I like Weiss and TFP is that I often don’t agree with them. That’s a good thing, healthy for discussion and democracy. I also like her deep dives into stories that followed expected narratives in, oh , say, The New York Times and others. Two specifics: the Central Park dog walker story and the Matthew Shepard story. Suffice to say, the truth was much more complex; and in the case of the dog walker, a real miscarriage of social justice.
Fantastic peice Stephen. As Eric Hoffer once wrote in The True Believer, "The worst thing that can happen to a cause is for it to be successful". American Liberalism won years ago. What it should stand for now seems to be a constant internal struggle and along the way it has become divided and intolerant of open debate. In my opinion, Anna Kasparian of The Young Turks could be next to reject the new left's cultural excesses . Bill Maher and Sam Harris continue to call some of it out from time to time. The worry is that while all of these voices are successful in the digital square, with the exception of Maher, none are mainstream. Or young.
Thanks. Maher is becoming a rarity on TV: a host with a sense of humour.
Solid work. One thing I find fascinating about Weiss is that she has recognized the current, um, “situation” (for lack of a better word) for twenty years. Here’s a letter she wrote to the Columbia Spectator, as a College sophomore, in 2004 (in connection with the polemical (and, sadly, far-sighted) film, “Columbia Unbecoming”. https://www.columbiaspectator.com/2004/11/16/name-academic-freedom/
That’s a great find. I wish I could have written like that as a sophomore. (I wish I could write like that now.)
I don’t think TFP ignores economic issues at all. Batya Ungar-Sargon is pretty vocal about her support for economic populism, while some contributors defend classical liberal economics. It’d be wise of those who criticize independent outlets like TFP to stop and ask themselves what speaks to so many readers:
I read The Free Press daily. It dawns on me that Progressive ideology is now “The Man” (er, sorry that was so the 60s, I mean “The Woman”) as the entrenched incumbent social power guarding its flanks from attack while Conservatives (miraculously!) are now the Counter-Culture. So deliciously ironic!
Think Neil Young. Once, a young angry counter culture hippie defending scrappy protestors and despising Nixon in Ohio. Now? He IS Nixon. “If Spotify doesn’t shut down dissident opinions - I will punish them by withholding my music”.
Our current era reminds us of a timeless and universal truth: no human POV is innately superior. Once it gains power - it metastasizes into stench filled rot and becomes abusive in its self preservation. When Conservatives acquire power? Abuse! When Progressives acquire it - they exercise it every bit as ruthlessly (albeit with the female bent toward guilt and shame vs the male proclivity toward violence).
Power is the ultimate evil. Its acquirer succumbs to its diseased logic and must be taken down to be freed of it. It is the story of the human condition. It is why societies move in such volatile, cyclical ways. The duality of our spiritual yin and yangs forever pushing and pulling in the systole and diastole of power. Nietzsche would have much to say on Substack if he were alive today!
IIRC Peggy Noonan writes about this in her first book, What I Saw At The Revolution. About how, by the Eighties, liberals were the establishment and suddenly found themselves under siege from young, free-marketeer upstarts. There’s probably something in that.
Because we live in a “Fourth Turning” (yes, I’m one of those guys 😂) - society’s zeitgeist is outward focused: power, institutions, organizations, structure. In Second Turnings - societies refocus on the inner life of culture, religion, values. Spiritual things.Things of the soul. Speaking of soulful, spiritual things today (like power being humanity’s ruination) is as anachronistic as John Lennon singing “you better free your mind instead” in Revolution. But it’s still true. The lust for power and destruction of its enemies is the zeitgeist of our day and violence its inevitable currency.
I’m a paid subscriber to the Free Press and admire Bari but…I hope she is able to maintain her position as a serious journalist. I’m thinking that it is too early in TFP’s evolution to begin weakening the brand by doing things like book clubs & cutesy stories. Nellie does a great TGFN but I wouldn’t subscribe to simply read that. I’m a subscriber to Schellenburger & Tiabbi so that’s where my head’s at…honest to god serious investigative journalism with a minor focus of humor or satire. But…maybe I’m not the reader who she’s trying to satisfy.
I get what you mean. I disagree with Tiabbi on a bunch of things but he’s a really good reporter and an engaging writer. And I love Nellie’s posts, too.
I'm very pleased to find you substacking, a great writer whose urban Scottish Labour politics I cordially loathe (your one blind spot! You can destroy the SNP with a paragraph but stick a new Labour leader in the Scottish Parliament and you purr like my much-missed cat which, as I hope the allusion makes clear, isn't entirely a bad thing) but whose wit and charm and open-mindedness and facility with words is ever, always welcome. I like reading you, in other words, for many of the same reasons mutatis mutandis I like reading Bari Weiss and others at TFP. I still love the Spectator and UnHerd but I'm very glad to have TFP and other writers available on Substack too. Pluralism, eh! Who'd have thought it such a necessary virtue, other than all of us who aren't staring-eyed wokesters. Are we getting middle-aged, yet?
This piece is great, reflects much erudition and experience.
This bit made my day:
“Furthermore, it is alleged that Comrade Weiss made disparaging remarks about the Five-Year Plan for Revolutionary Wheat Rationing at the third plenum of the ninth People’s Congress.”
…although ‘plenum’ might should be ‘plenary?’ Autocorrect again no doubt.
As for gratuitous Manhattan digs at Los Angeles check out the later parts of Annie Hall or SNL’s The Californians skits.
I don’t know enough cultural history to know if it’s rot or not, but relevant to that Northeast vs SoCal rivalry, I think I remember hearing years ago that the reason Northern Europe was so cerebral was the harsh winters. Trapped inside for months people said, “Damn, I guess I’ll finally read that book” or would write one, whereas those closer to the Med could frolic and cavort in the sun instead of inventing Calvinism or psychotherapy.
Certainly you never hear the phrase “Florida Intellectual”
Ha! As a Scot, I can relate to that. In Scotland, it rains roughly 400 days out of 365, so that’s maybe why we ended up inventing so much.
You canna beat a canny Scot!
In the US our version is the “Pacific Northwet.”
In the Lewis & Clark expedition, holed up in tiny Fort Clatsop for the winter,
“From the 4th of November 1805 to the 25th of March 1806, there were not more than twelve days in which it did not rain, and of these but six were clear”
My kinda climate.
Seems you could grow rather a lot of rice in that environment, yet I don’t associate rice with Scotland or coastal Oregon
Good point. When I lived in San Diego(as a native Easterner) I felt guilty reading a book in a beautiful day. Every day was beautiful. 😎
On economics, this article tells us everything we need to know, but never ties the knot. Bari Weiss has created a wildly successful startup, identifying an unmet need, taking a huge personal and financial risk, and getting rewarded by the market she identified. The lefties would like to grab as much as possible of those rewards. Perhaps Bari doesn’t think that would be fair…..
My similarly aged lesbian daughter and her wife consider Bari to not be an authentic Lesbian. Authentic lesbians can only have a single pov. It wouldn’t include an in-depth discussion of JK Rowling.
Nice bit of news jacking here. And your points have some heft.
If I read between the lines, you'd like BW to show more appreciation for socialesque economic ideas, collective public good kind of policies. But you appear to be more interested in the means than the ends - no? I honestly can't say.
I suspect you lean towards collectivism, and you'd like BW to lean that way as well. Good luck with that.
You could tell they were holding back even more snark too.
They also determinedly avoided, on reflection, addressing the merits of Weiss's accusations of ideological bullying. It was the perfect opportunity.
Their silence to me seems a tacit admission.
This piece was an immensely entertaining read. I haven’t laughed out loud reading an essay in years, and I did so multiple times here. Really good cutting humor, which also hit the nail on the head. I’m a recent college graduate, and I have to say there did seem something very red guard-esque about how students/NYT journalists denounce professors/Bari Weissand by parrotting leftist talking points, and I think some of the humor in this essay sort of hints at that. Particularly don’t like how “follow the science” has been co-opted.
It’s Red Guard-esque and also very clique-ish. ‘You can’t sit with us because you don’t agree with the cool kids about everything.’
P.S. Congratulations on graduating. I hope you find every success and bring absolutely nothing you were taught into the outside world.
I read and re-read this - it's just such a fabulous example of Stephen's art
What a lovely thing to say!