Apropos this convo between @benyt and @WesleyLowery on the convention of "objectivity," inspired by the unjust firing of an Associated Press reporter, I'm reminded of an obscure but powerful example of how that conceit has gone wrong that I'm privy to for personal reasons. 1/x
It will surprise some of you to learn that in 2011 some Occupy Wall Street protesters put a critique of Goldman Sachs that I wrote on a protest sign and chanted my words on the streets of New York City. 2/x
The sentence in question, describing a dubious deal Goldman did, was, shall we say, amusingly unwieldy--had I known it might appear on a sign I'd have done one more draft.
This wound up costing a public radio employee her job:
This was an especially absurd instance of objecting to non-objective behavior because *the wrongness of what Goldman did was not disputed even by the investment bank*
By that point I'd already been reading @jayrosen_nyu for years, so critiques of The View From Nowhere weren't new to me, but that absurd termination caused me to articulate a lot of my own thoughts on it: theatlantic.com/politics/archi…
In part, in a way that @kmele may appreciate, I anticipate Martin Gurri
I think this, from me and then from @jayrosen_nyu still holds up
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Actually, the whole conference is online now, so a quick thread. Here's the always excellent and nuanced Randall Kennedy on race and freedom of expression
The next session was "What are the empirical facts about lack of intellectual diversity in academia and what are the causes of existing imbalances?"
At The Wedge, it's rare to see someone turn right. After all, if you turn right your hurtling toward a rock jetty. The day I was there, I saw just one person turn right all afternoon. A look at his ride in twelve tweets, starting here:
At first the ride seemed uneventful. But at The Wedge, there's the wave coming in from the ocean and the mini-wave bouncing back off the jetty. Here he is looking at that mini-wave:
It bears mentioning that he's moving pretty fast here.
Here's my article urging that we investigate police killings in the same way that we investigate plane crashes. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… In this thread I'll engage a critique from the left:
First, there is a bit of common ground here, in that the writer suggests some reforms I've repeatedly advocated. For example: theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… Nothing about these reforms is incompatible with adding an NTSB-like approach.
Second, the idea that there is an expert consensus for the writer's views is simply incorrect. Police killings are a hugely complicated phenomenon, criminologists argue a lot about them, treating them all as "murders" is simply false, and the writer doesn't even mention
Some thoughts on a reader email that I just received (apropos this interview with a Black school board candidate theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…), which begins:
First, if there's a viewpoint that black as well as white people hold, isn't "white fragility" a very strange name to give it?
Second, if you're a black kid with rich, highly educated parents, attending school in a wealthy suburban district, there is, in fact, no system that forecloses your ability to be a lawyer, let alone *the same system* as enslaved people faced.
I interviewed Ndona Muboyayi. She worries that the public school system is teaching her Black children in ways that disempower them while prejudicially stereotyping whites.
Reflecting on an ascendant term, she told me, "It’s white supremacy to teach Black and brown children that they’re weak, they’re victims, it isn’t up to them if they get ahead. And it teaches the white children that the Black and brown children are weak!"
A thread on sardonic videos of OSHA violations, a TikTok trend that began with an ingenious twist on a Willy Wonka song:
At least 4 elements are necessary for this thread: 1) people doing things of dubious safety and legality 2) that they videotape because of those qualities 3) and upload to the Internet 4) and set to public.
Many require multiple willing participants and look kinda fun.