Quick note--I think you mean “mambo,” not “orisha.”

and sand and hills and rings, don’t forget

An entire list could be made featuring only Killers lyrics—my favorites being “we’re burning down the highway skyline on the back of a hurricane,” which is the greatest/worst Springsteen pastiche ever written.

Cosign on Chris Brown, too

George Soros, born 1930, was 9 years old when WWII started. We are definitely post-facts here.

“I crashed my van into Jesus”

I want to pause on that Ginuwine video for a second—it’s not an arbitrarily diverse bar, but rather a cowboy bar full of skeptical white patrons. Simply by air-humping on stage, Ginuwine magically attracts Black clientele to the bar, turning it into a bastion of racial harmony. I’ll stop there to let everyone think…

I mean, ideas around gender have never been a hallmark of consistency, but I think this has to do with ideas around masculine toughness in relation to disease more than being about mask wearing per se. The idea of being vulnerable to a small invisible thing (as opposed to the more visible hazards one encounters at…

I appreciated this headline, for the record.

I appreciated this headline, for the record.

I very much share your concerns. The discussion around relativism and objectivity has a ridiculous amount of bad faith wrapped up in it. Every so often you get a critical theorist (Bruno Latour in “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” is one example) who looks at things and says “we fucked up,” and I think a certain…

I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting that we throw out scientific method, but rather that scientific method is, at bottom, based on a set of assumptions that can’t be objectively “proven” because they’re tied to human perceptions, which are necessarily incomplete and partial. We may collectively agree that the…

I think a lot of what you’re saying here is fair. Where I think the Smithsonian runs into trouble here is in not recognizing that in a world so full of race-thinking and other essentialism, anything associated with “white culture” is generally going to be assumed as having an “opposite” in “Black culture.” (I’m being…

As you may know, there’s a really long debate in the philosophy of science about the possibility of objectivity. I’m not in the pure relativist camp by any means, but I think that there are some pretty devastating critiques of objectivity that say one way or another it’s always built around background assumptions that…

This is a really difficult needle to thread, because while I think we get what they were going for, the execution is a definite misfire. The goal here seems to be to critique the idea of what constitutes success, history, ways of knowing, etc., which is a worthwhile idea, right? Rugged individualism isn’t real; the…

This video and its aftermath for D’Angelo could inspire a book-length analysis. I’ve only gotten as far as writing a long-ass radio commentary, but I swear, the history of this video is one of the keys to the universe.

A roommate’s friend shows up one day for a visit, then doesn’t really leave. He’ll disappear for short periods of time only to show up again. Then he starts getting mail at our place. Then a couple of metal crates with scooters in them show up. It turns out he’s using our apartment as his base of operations for his…

I’m having trouble seeing where you think we’re disagreeing here. Like I said in my comment, DeVos’s statement is specious and designed to be inflammatory (and it’s not the first time this rhetoric has been deployed—see Alan Keyes on Obama’s supposedly “pro-slavery” position on abortion). What I’m saying is that it’s…

Not to sound like a scold, but we need to be careful here. Let’s read that quote again:

We could definitely play business jargon bingo with what she says: http://www.theofficelife.com/business-jargon-dictionary-A.html

There is just no coming back from “May God ruin him.” Go home, Donald. You lost.