The following is a talk that I gave at Oberlin College on November 7, 2017 after being invited by the staff of Wilder Voice, Oberlin’s magazine for long-form journalism and creative nonfiction. Some of the points I made here, I’ve made elsewhere on the web, most notably at Quartz. …

A lesson from the media coverage of the Trump campaign — The headline of a recent, thought-provoking piece by Jamelle Bouie — Slate’s senior political correspondent — is absolutely correct. “There’s No Such Thing as a Good Trump Voter,” it reads. The problem comes later, in the second sentence of the subhead: “People voted for a racist who promised racist outcomes…

I haven’t read Julia Cagé’s book Saving the Media: Capitalism, Crowdfunding, and Democracy, but it sounds right up my alley. I think I’d enjoy it, and not simply because Serious Media Thinkers (which, alas, I am not) have panned it. Frederic Filloux has faint praise in front and a knife…

My first year at Oberlin, my friends and I had a little ritual. Every Friday, we’d pick up a crisp copy of the OBERLIN REVIEW, open it to “The Review Security Notebook,” and look for signs of ourselves. 8:18 p.m. Officers and the Oberlin Fire Department responded to a fire…

How Jonathan Chait trolled the Internet for fun and profit — I wish the Internet came with a manual. I wish my parents had sat me down as a lad and told me, “John, this is when you should argue in good faith; this is when you should hold your tongue; and this is when you should just troll.” Of course…

How do we engage with reactionary movements? — On the 17th of December in 1773, George Hewes smeared coal dust on his face, dressed up as an Indian, and threw tea into Boston Harbor. “I have never gotten over,” writes Garret Keizer in Harper’s, “the notion that the history of the United States begins with an act of…

Really. — This story starts in Bangladesh on a Wednesday morning. It was early—say 8:56—on April 24, 2013. There were 3,000-odd people crammed into an eight-story building called Rena Plaza. …