After years of fragmentation, Israeli society seems to be consolidating anew – fusing Jewishness and nationalism, and decidedly on the right. Since the 1970s the meta-story of Israel has been the steady crack-up of Labor,[…]
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Author: Drew Kaplan
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “has become a handy and versatile symbol — the representative representative”
The congresswoman has become a handy and versatile symbol — the representative representative. For the leftward and younger wings of the Democratic Party, she serves as a figurehead and a hero; for conservative media outlets,[…]
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“Likability is associated with an emotional connection between candidate and voter that makes a politician worthy of trust”
Likability seems to have emerged as an important personality trait in the late 19th century, when it became closely associated with male business success. Before this, people liked or disliked one another, of course, but[…]
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Anti-vaxxers are “emblematic of too many people’s willful disregard of evidence, proud suspicion of expertise and estrangement from reason”
…the anti-vaccine crowd (or anti-vaxxers) aren’t trafficking in anything as concrete, mundane and quaint as facts. They’re not really engaged in a debate about medicine. They’re immersed in a world of conspiracies, in the dark[…]
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“Spreading conspiracy theories once had a price — printing or even mimeographing a tract costs money — but now…, anyone can post a madcap theory or a doctored photograph virtually for free”
Democracies depend on buy-in; citizens need to believe in certain basics, starting with the legitimacy of elections. Trump both runs the government and runs it down. The electoral system, he asserts, can’t be trusted. Voter[…]
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“In the early days of coding, women flocked to programming because it offered more opportunity and reward for merit, more than fields like law. Now software has the closed door.”
If biology limited women’s ability to code, then the ratio of women to men in programming ought to be similar in other countries. It isn’t. In India, roughly 40 percent of the students studying computer[…]
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“American cultural history could probably be parcelled out as a sequence of sensational murder cases”
American cultural history could probably be parcelled out as a sequence of sensational murder cases. There was nothing remotely “typical” about the Manson murders or, for that matter, about the O. J. Simpson case, but[…]
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“as the culture of the mid-twentieth century was replaced…, the notion of students grappling with their yeshiva and college educations…, producing a grand synthesis called ‘Modern Orthodoxy’, seemed increasingly quaint”
Yeshiva College has also changed along with the broader landscape of higher education. We still have impressively bright, industrious, passionate students. But as the culture of the mid-twentieth century was replaced by that of the[…]
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Bibi “has no true ideological home, so he has made his home the Prime Minister’s Office”
It’s a mistake to put Netanyahu in the same category as the strongmen riding Europe’s rightist wave. But it is not a mistake to say he learned their language and cultivated ties with them, some[…]
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“…some magical place where a total lack of any discernible talent or intelligence or interpersonal skills had never interfered with anyone’s success”
When it finally sunk in that I’m not the next Nabokov, I got pretty depressed for a while. I started to wish that there was some magical place where a total lack of any discernible[…]
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