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1. Kevin Bacon
2. Milton Friedman
3. Joe Paterno
4. Keanu Reeves
5. Diana Ross
Hint #1: I grew up three blocks from Kevin Bacon's Upper West Side apartment.
Hint #2: I went to school with Diana Ross's daughters.
Hint #3: In college, I canvassed State College, PA, for the reauthorization of the Clean Water Act.
Hint #4: I did indeed once come into the immediate vicinity of Keanu Reeves.
(Oh, that sounded interesting. It was not very interesting. He wasn't really famous yet.)
Hint #5: When I joined The Economist, they arranged for me to interview Milton Friedman. Sadly, Friedman died two weeks before the day of the interview, and one of my great regrets is that I never got to meet him.
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Megan McArdle
@asymmetricinfo
I used to get letters from tenure-track but untenured profs saying "Please don't print this, I'm not tenured" ("this" being some mainstream conservative opinion like "abortion is wrong".) Now for the first time, I'm hearing tenured professors express worries about being fired.
And not because they have craftily concealed their crypto-racism, but are worried that the canny investigators of cancel culture are onto them. These are people expressing thoughtful, careful opinions that range from center-right to center-left.
Now, those worries could be paranoia, but as I said the other day, then people within institutions who keep insisting that cancel culture doesn't exist should think about how to reassure their colleagues that they are safe.
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Megan McArdle
@asymmetricinfo
Well, I've had the weekend to round up the responses to my column on cancel culture, so now I'll run through them. A lot of them will be familiar from the broader arguments about this stuff.

Column is here: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/…
First argument: Cancel culture doesn't exist.

This is actually a cluster of arguments, which can be roughly subdivided as follows:

1) No one is getting canceled
2) The people getting canceled deserve it
3) People get canceled but its rare
4) The right cancels people too
Argument one is just false.

The fact that Twitter has failed to cancel someone you personally hate and think should be cancelled post haste does not mean that no one else has been canceled.
Read 62 tweets
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Megan McArdle
@asymmetricinfo
"Twitter, with its 280-character limit, is most effective at signaling the things you can’t say ... handing over the reins of power to the Twittersphere ... means offering control to those who are especially adept at not making arguments."

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/…
I could have written yet another ode to free speech. But we've had those arguments before. I believe 'am all, but no one's mind gets changed.

So instead I wrote about Twitter: why it's very good at making coalitions to pressure institutions, and very bad at making institutions.
A lot of Twitter dynamics are toxic to any kind of institution--most notably, bringing public pressure to bear to win any dispute in which one party feels they can assemble a large enough coalition to turn the tide.
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