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Grabbag and Chills

Politics, history, philosophy, my favorite pieces of internet candy, and other things that I can’t squeeze into my other publications

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Politics

Jess Brooks in Grabbag and Chills

Nov 16, 2019

“Hereditary”

“Belief in the devil (and all his works) is, I believe, an attempt to grapple with the same fear that drives and sustains Pizzagate and The Storm, the same fear that drove the Satanic Panic and the Salem trials, and the blood libel, and all of the other expressions of that same fear that are re-emerging…

Jess Brooks in Grabbag and Chills

Nov 16, 2019

“Innocence Abroad”

“to explain everything through the lens of American power is to explain less. One ends up reflecting back the mirage of American omnipotence instead of the reality of U.S. blundering, blindness and internal dissent, of our inability to address the most basic needs of our own society (gun…

Jess Brooks in Grabbag and Chills

Nov 13, 2019

“Fuck civility”

“Puzzlingly, columnists in mainstream newspapers — who are typically the first group to raise alarm whenever Trump violates a norm or deviates from standards of decency set by George Washington — are also fond of the idea that the president and his cohorts are holding back their worst impulses as…

Jess Brooks in Grabbag and Chills

Oct 31, 2019

“Wisconsin’s Voter-ID Law Suppressed 200,000 Votes in 2016 (Trump Won by 22,748)”

“A new study by Priorities USA, shared exclusively with The Nation, shows that strict voter-ID laws, in Wisconsin and other states, led to a significant reduction in voter turnout in 2016…

Jess Brooks in Grabbag and Chills

Oct 22, 2019

“Old people can’t open new tabs and it’s fueling our descent into hell”

“It should go without saying that, outside of maybe the executive level, there are very few grandparents working at tech companies. Because of this, there’s rarely anyone in the room who’s truly able to…

Jess Brooks in Grabbag and Chills

Oct 14, 2019

“Liberals, It’s Not About Being Nice”

“Next to race, issues facing transgender Americans are perhaps the next most commonly cited wedge issue splitting sanctimonious Democrats from the rest of the country. Historians will likely take great interest in the question of how the plight of a population…

Jess Brooks in Grabbag and Chills

Aug 21, 2019

“The Duality of the Southern Thing”

“That’s my Alabama: a lot of hard-working people trying to get by while publicity-seeking retrogrades live to embarrass the rest of us. This manifested in last month’s special election for the U.S. Senate, as the perfectly sane candidate Doug Jones stood up against…

Jess Brooks in Grabbag and Chills

Aug 4, 2019

“Can Wikipedia Solve YouTube’s Conspiracy Theory Problem?”

“It’s concerning that YouTube, a company that generates billions of dollars of revenue a year, decided to outsource one of its biggest problems to a nonprofit organization, but research shows that Wikipedia does have a good…

Jess Brooks in Grabbag and Chills

Apr 16, 2019

‘Don’t you agree?’

“At some level, Trump seems to know that “the way I feel” isn’t true or good or real. This is why, like everyone trying to live within a lie they partly recognize is unreal, he seeks support and confirmation from others. This is why it was so important for him to say, “Don’t you agree?” The…

Jess Brooks in Grabbag and Chills

Apr 9, 2019

“HOW POLITICAL IDEALISM LEADS US ASTRAY”

“Gaus shows that your theory of the ideal social system, whatever it may be, is almost certainly wrong. And even if it isn’t, it probably can’t work as a useful guide to political decision-making — especially not in a diverse liberal society, like ours, rife…