Taylor Swift has always been a strong songwriter with a special talent for storytelling. Folklore takes it to the next level, with her collaboration with @aaron_dessner of @TheNational, one of my favorite bands of the last 15 years. Give it a chance. 2/4
Next is @seanhowe's fantastic Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.
It covers everything from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's strained relationship, the moral panic over comics of the '50s, to the tragic untimely death of the great John Verpooten. 3/4
Finally, as I previewed last week, @DavidAFrench's Divided We Fall, which imagines the unimagineable-but-getting-less-so scenario where the US literally breaks up. David is a great friend, and this is a great book. 4/4
@DavidAFrench Check out last month's August 2020 Prestigious awards here (featuring Nietzsche vs Buddha artwork in the style of Street Fighter II from @AdGo)
THREAD: My latest Eternally Radical Idea newsletter responded to @DavidColeACLU’s review of my & @RIKKISCHLOTT’s newest book, The Canceling of the American Mind in @nybooks. 1/16
David says Rikki & I claim #CancelCulture was worse than McCarthyism. The closest comparison we make is between Cancel Culture on campus & the 1st & 2nd Red Scare. We found that neither Red Scare threatened profs or students as much as Cancel Culture (check out the post for the numbers) & nothing comes VAGUELY close to it since the law was established between 1957 & 1973. 3/16
THREAD: With FIRE’s expansion to off-campus work, I’ve gotten a lot of questions about #freespeech philosophy. My series with former ACLU President, the great Nadine Strossen answers common arguments against free speech. 1/18
Part 1: Free speech does NOT equal violence. We discuss whether freedom of speech rests on a false notion that words & violence are distinct. SPOILER: It doesn’t!. 2/18
Much virtual ink is spilled over the term “cancel culture.” Conservatives complain about it while perpetuating it, some progressives deny that it exists. @TheFIREorg’s @Komi_Tea & I explain in our recent piece for @thedailybeast. 1/12
Last week, @nytimes published an editorial on America’s “#FreeSpeech problem,” citing a poll that showed that over the past year, 55% of respondents self-censored for fear of retaliation or harsh criticism. 2/12
Former @TheFIREorg intern @emmma_camp’s @nytimes op-ed on self-censorship at @UVA provoked some unhinged reactions, demonstrating the censorial behavior Emma warned of. 3/12
THREAD: Free speech culture didn’t come out of nowhere, it’s been built on the foundation of centuries of conflict, philosophy & law. If you want to brush up on the history, look no further than my #FreeSpeech Culture Study List. 1/18
With a unique & international perspective, @JMchangama’s timely & thorough “Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media” shows how ancient & global the fight for free speech has been. 2/18
The most important book of 2021 IMO was @jon_rauch’s Constitution of Knowledge. Jon covers crises in our knowledge producing fields, higher education & journalism, & reveals the true value of The Enlightenment: the discovery of our profound ignorance. 3/18 amzn.to/2RyyxtS
THREAD: Former @TheFIREorg intern @emmma_camp_ published a terrific essay in @nytimes about the stifling climate on college campuses. As if to prove her point, her piece was met with outrage & denial in a predictable culture war pattern. 1/16
As @JordanmHowell & Sean argue, most of the critiques of the survey data @emmma_camp_ cited are baseless. The detractors misrepresent the cited campus free speech survey’s methodology. 3/16
THREAD: This week I am in @reason Magazine with a feature on ‘The Second Great Age of Political Correctness.’ By the mid-90s “PC” had become a joke, derided across the political spectrum See: the (not good) Jeremy Piven movie PCU. 1/14
Many students stopped calling it “PC,” but the trend it described didn’t disappear, it just went off the public radar in the “ignored years” of campus #freespeech. During that time problems persisted & got worse. 2/14
Stanford’s infamous speech code banning insults & stigmatization was struck down in court in 1995, one of a half dozen losses for speech codes, but they STILL proliferated. By 2009 74% of universities had extremely restrictive speech codes. 3/14