A national primary would require candidates with minimal national name recognition to find a way to overcome the myriad organizational and institutional disadvantages that come with being not particularly well-known without offering them any of the tools that could be used to do so.

You could. You could also just ask the party leaders to come up with a candidate. There’s no shortage of bad fixes that are at least possible. 

Eh. Iowa and Nevada are the only early states that actually use a caucus, and it’s the caucus system that is the real problem. There’s actually a perfectly legitimate argument for beginning the process in states like these, though not necessarily these states or in this specific order.

There are fewer caucuses this year than ever before, which is a positive step forward. I get that caucuses are probably much cheaper than an actual primary, but they’re an artifact of the early days of “democracy.” A century or two ago, they at least kind of made logistical sense. Today, it’s just another way of…

The point is that most of the world, including most of China has nothing to really fear. It’s a genuine concern for world governments to mobilize and contain, but the global hysteria is what leads people to fall back on dumb bigotries out of unreasonable fear. 

I’m not trying to suggest that it is nothing. I’m saying there are far more pressing issues for the average person in the West (and most of the East) to concern themselves over than this.

Global pandemics are abjectly terrifying, but especially so with coronavirus, a fast-spreading flu-like virus that originated in Wuhan, China.

The thing about Bake Off is that there’s no prize. You just win. And that’s it. You won. There’s no monetary or other kind of objective career advancement. Plus, they don’t live together, in some kind of forced artificial arrangement that will allow tensions or hard feelings to be created outside of the competition. 

No insinuation at all, but if there were, that would not be it. The irony is that everything that enabled their success and that eventually led them to a place that would make their support for him seem significant is largely seen as evidence of a unfair and corrupt society in Bernie Sanders’s world view.

Well, I didn’t really watch the show. I was in grad school while it was in its peak and it kind of happened at the edge of my cultural awareness. I knew it was there in the same way I know the Bachelor and Survivor are still...somehow...things, but I didn’t watch.

There’s a fun irony in the fact that the Strokes is all in for Bernie Sanders. Nothing against the band itself—they’re kind of great some of the time—but that band is a bunch of trust fund kids who were handed basically overnight success thanks in no small part to the fact that their parents had crazy connections.…

I’ve had more than one conversation with more than one French person (educated but not especially moneyed or “elite”) where Roman Polanski’s rape of children was portrayed as ordinary, especially for the time, and that it was really American puritanism that led me to think otherwise. I don’t claim to suggest that…

The whole genre of reality television-themed game shows (i.e., where there is a winner and many losers) has always been more about voyeuristic cruelty than it is about the greater aspirations of the individual candidates. I’m old enough to remember when American Idol first premiered and was an overnight sensation in…

The rest being what? Their cultural nationalism that allows them to endorse laws specifically designed to target migrant Muslim populations that do not meet their standards of being a true Frenchmen with the hopes of driving out of the public square? Is that part of the rest?

The French are obviously not a monolith, and this kind of thing isn’t representative of all of French culture, but it’s also not not French culture. In the same way that being horribly nationalistic, racist, Islamophic and xenophobic is not-not French culture, so too is this not-not that. 

There are so many things to love about the French and the French culture, but most of those things are hundreds of years old. 

I don’t think the nominating process will sustain a third candidate past Super Tuesday. Warren may remain on ballots, but she needs to collect delegates. Once your candidate stops earning delegates, you’re either staying home or picking another candidate.

That’s a bit revisionist. It’s better to think about Fox as a parallel to the news channel that would later share it’s name.

In your mind, is sharing a link to a story you didn’t write an act of journalism? Applauded? For what? This wasn’t a profile in courage type of moment. It was a look-at-me-I’m-on-the-internet kind of moment.

One of the amazing abilities of Barack Obama was his ability to navigate his flaws or weaknesses by more or less directly addressing them and eventually explaining to you why they were actually strengths.