Identity Politics
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A Farewell to Norms January 27, 2025
In my second semester of law school, just after the upheavals of 2020, I studied criminal law under a visiting professor whose progressive bona fides were stellar. She was a full-on prison abolitionist who had imbibed and presented for discussion eve...
Who's Afraid of Red Scare? January 20, 2025
“It cannot become old-fashioned because it is not part of a fashion.” Preface to the Decoration Designs of Francis Crease, Evelyn Waugh.“Beware of identity politics. I'll rephrase that: have nothing to do with identity politics. I remember very well ...
The Ethics of Self-Interpretation November 21, 2024
The polemical intensity that made a set of radical ideas about race and gender seem, for a time, to be the new moral consensus of media, academia, and corporate management, is over—maybe. Kamala Harris’ losing presidential campaign was muted in its i...
Is Academic ‘Wokeness’ in Remission? November 01, 2024
It’s undeniable that identity politics plays a different role in American life than it did four years ago. Far-fetched tales of omnipresent racism, once received with deference, are now out of vogue. For some, in light of this substantial cultural ch...
The Crisis of Performative Kitsch September 06, 2024
In October 2008, Fadi Abboud, president of the Lebanese Industrialists Association—he would be appointed minister of tourism by Saad Hariri the next year—made the following statement: “It is not enough they [Israelis] are stealing our land. They are ...
