In the fall of 1997, he struck out from Dallas to find his cultural fortunes at Colgate University, in upstate New York. His time there produced even more profound amnesia, and he doesn’t say much about it, except that he starred in a production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. It is not a play especially beloved in Texas bro culture, and classmates who saw Spencer in that period report that he took on a Wildean air, dressing foppishly and affecting accents.
We do not watch tennis to see a ball go over a net. We watch for the metaphors; to experience, as Venus Williams put so perfectly earlier this year, “triumph and disaster witnessed in real-time.”
I’m pretty sure I’d sell Trump-leaves-office-early stock (whether because of removal from office or other reasons) at even money (50 percent), and I’m pretty sure I’d buy it at 3-to-1 against (25 percent). I could be convinced by almost any number within that range.
The GOP is in the best political position it has seen in nearly 100 years, and the party enjoys a mandate to pursue serious conservative reforms. The election of a game show host to the presidency may have spoiled it all. If the last two weeks are any indication, Trump will continue to invite controversy and sow chaos, making the GOP’s life in Congress that much harder. In all likelihood, the Republican Moment is already lost. Pundits of the Right can bray about media bias, fake news, squishy moderate RINOs, and “deep state” subterfuge all they want, but posterity will record precisely who it was that lost it.
As president-elect, Trump did not know the pedigree and importance of the “one China” policy. About such things he can be, if he is willing to be, tutored. It is, however, too late to rectify this defect: He lacks what T. S. Eliot called a sense “not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.” His fathomless lack of interest in America’s path to the present and his limitless gullibility leave him susceptible to being blown about by gusts of factoids that cling like lint to a disorderly mind.
Trump appears to strut through the world forever studying his own image. He thinks out loud, and is incapable of reflection. He is unserious, unfocussed, and, at times, it seems, unhinged. Journalists are invited to the Oval Office to ask about infrastructure; he turns the subject to how Bill O’Reilly, late of Fox News, is a “good person,” blameless, like him, in matters of sexual harassment. A reporter asks about the missile attack on Syria; he feeds her a self-satisfied description of how he informed his Chinese guests at Mar-a-Lago of the strike over “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen.”
If this seems a practice only of years long past, consider that today we need merely replace “Japanese-Americans” with “Muslims” for the parallels to emerge. Once again, we are told by our government that a blanket ban is needed. So brazen is this same troubling logic that a Trump surrogate even cited Japanese-American internment as a precedent for the Muslim ban. Both rely upon the presupposition of guilt, one by race, the other by religion. Most chilling of all, both arise out of government policy and action.
I guess I can imagine this being a thing at the client end, but at the ad agency end? At what point did ad agency clients start coming to us because we're the same as them? Never, I would guess. But somewhere along the line (perhaps it was pitch "chemistry" sessions?) agencies came to believe that the best way to win was to look, sound, be like the client.
It makes for an incredibly appealing work environment for legends of the industry and the best and brightest new minds, a startling number of whom have now found a home at Apple. It's a dream job that doesn't just let them dream but actively encourages them make those dreams into a reality.
History has ended. Magic has been born. You can either choose to be among the magicians, or among the muggles. Choose wisely.
Here the notion of sexual-difference-as-illusion is not performing the work it was built to do, rather the opposite. Ironically, it works to convince alienated men that sex/gender has marked them as unique sort of outsider/failures, who cannot be accepted even into the multicultural coalitions that define themselves by their capacity for acceptance. In this way, 4chan’s virulent hatred of gender-bending “safe spaces”, though not justified, makes at least a perverse sort of sense, one tangled in wounded masculine pride.
Factors outside of our control—jobs and families and light pollution, to name a few—can make this hard to do. But when possible, here are a few simple ideas that many experts recommend. Try to keep a somewhat constant bedtime and wake-up time, even on weekends. Keep caffeine use moderate, even if you don’t feel like a nighttime coffee affects you. The same goes for nightcaps. (Not necessarily a joyless suggestion—maybe you can meet a friend for a beer at 4 p.m. instead of 10 p.m.) Use screens judiciously, too. Remember that even on night mode, a phone is shooting light into your brain. Have sex with someone instead. Or, sometimes preferable, read something on paper.
What Obama was able to offer white America is something very few African Americans could—trust. The vast majority of us are, necessarily, too crippled by our defenses to ever consider such a proposition. But Obama, through a mixture of ancestral connections and distance from the poisons of Jim Crow, can credibly and sincerely trust the majority population of this country. That trust is reinforced, not contradicted, by his blackness. Obama isn’t shuffling before white power (Herman Cain’s “shucky ducky” act) or flattering white ego (O. J. Simpson’s listing not being seen as black as a great accomplishment). That, too, is defensive, and deep down, I suspect, white people know it. He stands firm in his own cultural traditions and says to the country something virtually no black person can, but every president must: “I believe you.”
President Trump loves to set the day’s narrative at dawn, but the deeper story of his White House is best told at night.
Optimizing your information environment means curating your social graph by blocking some voices, amplifying others, choosing your news sources, verifying news and arguments before sharing.
The emperor had no clothes, but there wasn't a prophet in the house who was prepared, like the boy in the story, to point out the obvious.
All administrations lie, but what we are seeing here is an attack on credibility itself.
That is to say, the administration is testing the extent to which the DHS (and other executive agencies) can act and ignore orders from the other branches of government. This is as serious as it can possibly get: all of the arguments about whether order X or Y is unconstitutional mean nothing if elements of the government are executing them and the courts are being ignored.
How to compose a successful critical commentary: