"[I]f you’re a college graduate with a humanities degree and want to make a salary while still vaguely doing something that deals with reducing racism in America..."

"... D.E.I. is one of the few possible career paths. The problem, at a grand scale, is that D.E.I.’s malleability and its ability to survive in pretty much every setting, whether it’s a nearby public school or the C.I.A., means that it has to be generic and ultimately inoffensive, which means that, in the end, D.E.I. didn’t really satisfy anyone.... Both the inspired and the terrified built out a D.E.I. infrastructure in their workplaces.... Trump... is taking a relatively powerless program, vilifying it, and using its dissolution as proof that he has single-handedly ended the woke era.... [T]he war on D.E.I. is almost certainly a catchall scapegoat meant to distract from Trump’s larger plans to gut the federal government, but I also can’t imagine it will hold the public’s attention.... Trump is going to need a better distraction, but one thing we know about him is that he stubbornly sticks to a theme. He might not be able to credibly blame diversity for everything from plane crashes to children’s reading scores, but I imagine he will try."

Writes Jay Caspian Kang, in "What’s the Point of Trump’s War on D.E.I.? To distract from his larger plan to gut the federal government, the President has taken a relatively powerless program and turned it into an excuse for everything that goes wrong in the country" (The New Yorker).

"One of the books that I find myself tapping on repeatedly—without ever getting past forty per cent, somehow—is Richard Brautigan’s novella 'Trout Fishing in America.'"

"I’m not being compelled by an algorithm. But there’s a surf spot in Marin County that I used to go to which is very near the house where Brautigan, in 1984, died by suicide. Over the years, I told a handful of other surfers about the links between Brautigan and this spot, and later, whenever I would make it back out there, I would see the cropping of little houses on the hill overlooking the ocean, many of them with chicken runs and ruined vegetable-garden projects, and I would think to myself, with a great deal of embarrassment, that I still hadn’t actually finished 'Trout Fishing in America.'... What’s particularly distressing to me is that, although I can imagine a world in which careful regulation and avoidance of algorithms makes phones less addictive, I cannot imagine myself freed from such stubborn vanities."

I'm reading "What Phones Are Doing to Reading/It’s becoming harder, or at least less common, to read the old-fashioned way. But the new ways of reading are not all bad," by James Caspian Kang (in The New Yorker).

"The whole point of the First Amendment is to give ordinary citizens the power and the tools to decide for themselves what information to listen to and what ideas to find persuasive."

"That’s the foundational principle of the First Amendment and a foundational principle of any democracy—that the power to decide what information to access and listen to and how much weight to give it are left to the ordinary citizen and not to the government."

Said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, quoted in "The Misguided Attempt to Control TikTok/The freedom to use social media is a First Amendment right, even if it’s one we should all avail ourselves of less often" (by Jay Caspian Kang in The New Yorker).

I'm afraid that young people today are losing the power and the inclination to decide what to listen to and to sift through things and decide what to think. Why bother when the failure to think the right thing will bring all sorts of trouble? And how can you really believe anything if that's how you acquire your "beliefs"? Everything is completely shallow, even the fear that leads people to say that they believe what they've been told they're supposed to believe.

But yes, at the very least, keep the information flowing, even what the prescribers of correct thought condemn.

"In the early days of online life, there were 'flame wars,' performatively absurd and vitriolic debates among the people who posted messages on various bulletin boards."

"These endless arguments prompted efforts to better moderate discussion. The resulting desire, on the part of posters, to depose the moderators, or 'mods,' has been a constant of the Internet’s existence ever since—on Usenet groups, on Reddit, and on every form of social media. Who are the mods? The big ones are establishment institutions that aim to govern and to regulate, to maintain credentials and decorum. The mainstream press, obviously, which includes me and my employer, is a mod, and we are the target of endless ire, often rightly. The academy—particularly its most élite schools, the Harvards and the Yales—is another mod. But the mods have been weakening for some time.... The mods do have supporters: 'normie' liberals and conservatives who still put a degree of faith in the expert and media classes and who want, more than anything, to restore some bright line of truth so that society can continue to function...."

Writes Jay Caspian Kang, in "Arguing Ourselves to Death/To a degree that we have yet to fully grasp, what rules our age is the ideology of the Internet" (The New Yorker).

The article title "Arguing Ourselves to Death" is a play on the book title, "Amusing Ourselves to Death." The book, by Neil Postman, came out in 1985, and mostly took aim at television.  

The article's subtitle reference to "the ideology of the Internet" is also inspired by "Amusing Ourselves to Death." There's this quote from the book:

"Nobody really gets scolded for being a sellout anymore. In the three decades since its heyday, in the late eighties and early nineties..."

"... the term has grown to seem a bit old-fashioned. The people who came of age during or after the 2008 financial crisis, for example, understandably do not have much patience for Gen X-ers who wax nostalgic about bands that ignored major-record-label attention or Adbusters or whatever else. The rent is high, and the bills don’t stop. Precarity is everywhere...."

That's the first paragraph of "Ibram X. Kendi, Hasan Minhaj, and the Question of Selling Out/Is it possible to reap all the rewards of the mass market and still maintain a sense of political purpose?" by Jay Caspian Kang (The New Yorker). 

"Is California headed for a right-wing backlash? This question has hovered over the state’s politics for years now..."

"... as the public’s frustration with homelessness and property crime has escalated.... Last week in San Francisco, London Breed, the city’s mayor, announced a bill to deny welfare benefits to anyone 'suffering from substance-use disorder' who was not enrolled in a drug rehabilitation or treatment program. 'No more handouts without accountability,' Breed said. 'In order to receive resources from our city, you will need to be in a substance-use-disorder program and consistently seeking treatment.'..."

Writes Jay Caspian Kang, in "London Breed’s Cynical Swing to the Right/The mayor of San Francisco, who is up for reëlection next year, is channelling the public’s anger over crime and homelessness" (The New Yorker).

"The short time line around [Oliver] Anthony’s virality and the seemingly synchronized way in which right-wing pundits, such as Matt Walsh and Jack Posobiec, have tweeted enthusiastically..."

"... and almost apocalyptically about 'Rich Men North of Richmond' have turned the singer into a messianic or conspiratorial figure. Depending on your politics, he is either a voice sent from Heaven to express the anger of the white working class, or he is a wholly constructed viral creation who has arrived to serve up resentment with a thick, folksy lacquering of Americana.... Whether this gambit will work or if Anthony is in on the trick is anyone’s guess. He has said that his political views are 'pretty dead center,' and he does seem to rail against both Republicans and Democrats, but, until his big break last week, his songs were mostly apolitical small-town anthems that sounded like they were written with a fountain pen dipped in Merle Haggard’s ashes.... I should say here that I am not immune to these charms. When I first heard Townes Van Zandt, I felt that some truth had been revealed about how life can break and drag, but in a glamorous way.... The markers of authenticity—the wood-panelled kitchen, the woman who alternates between cleaning dishes and smoking a cigarette, the grizzled Black man who, himself, also stands in for authenticity—could be pulled apart and declared problematic by any freshman in a critical-studies class. But they also work...."

Writes Jay Caspian Kang in "A Close Listen to 'Rich Men North of Richmond' The viral country song by Oliver Anthony has been embraced by right-wing pundits" (The New Yorker).

Read the lyrics here (at Genius). Here's the song:

"Asian Americans, the group whom the suit was supposedly about, have been oddly absent from the conversations that have followed the ruling...."

"During the five years I spent covering this case, the commentators defending affirmative action almost never disproved the central claim that discrimination was taking place against Asian Americans, even as they dismissed the plaintiffs as pawns who had been duped by a conservative legal activist. They almost always redirected the conversation to something else—often legacy admissions...."

Writes Jay Caspian Kang in "Why the Champions of Affirmative Action Had to Leave Asian Americans Behind/The original concept in pursuit of diversity was vital and righteous. The way it was practiced was hard to defend" (The New Yorker).

"The minute someone is, like, 'Hey, we're going to take these nerdy white guys and hire them a staff of thirty people,' you’re no longer sympathetic."

Said Nate Silver, quoted in "What Was Nate Silver’s Data Revolution? Silver, a former professional poker player, was in the business of measuring probabilities. Many readers mistook him for an oracle" (The New Yorker).

The article is by Jay Caspian King, who writes:

"The journalist’s need to humanize everything in sight can be useful, even revelatory, but it can also obscure."

"[Zappos' 'founder' Tony] Hsieh, in the end, was a rich guy who, early in his career, used his Harvard connections and some seed money to buy a series of lotto tickets in the tech boom, and then used his expanding wealth and influence to spread a bunch of marketing, in the form of pseudo-psychology, into the world. He slept with his employees and terrorized his closest friends. His descent into addiction and his untimely death were certainly tragic, but I couldn’t find much to admire about Hsieh in 'Wonder Boy,' nor did I understand why I was reading dozens of meticulously reported, almost snuff-film-like pages about his journey into ketamine addiction and mania.... [We never learn] how and why so much of the press and the public got suckered in by Hsieh’s generation of tech evangelists."

Writes Jay Caspian Kang, in "Tony Hsieh and the Emptiness of the Tech-Mogul Myth/A new biography of the Zappos executive depicts him as a narcissist and an addict who tossed around half-baked ideas and rarely saw them through" (The New Yorker).

Is there a "journalist’s need to humanize everything in sight"? I hadn't noticed. Once you decide to write a whole book about someone, you're committed to "humanizing" that one human being, I suppose. There's always the question: Why write a book about this person?

A biographer has got to feel pretty sensitive as he struggles with the dullness of the facts he's got to inflate to book length. This is the story of a shoe saleman! He took drugs, but drug stories are basically alike. Why read about a tech exec on drugs when there are so many episodes of "Behind the Music" to watch?

There is one extraordinary thing about Hsieh, his fiery death. I'm guessing the book puts that scene in the beginning so the reader — the creepy reader — doesn't get impatient waiting for it. Is that humanizing — waiting for a man to be consumed by flames?

"The suspect is not a deranged lunatic or career criminal left free to roam the hills of the city by a district attorney who left office nine months ago..."

".. but, rather, a fellow tech entrepreneur with whom [tech executive Bob] Lee was familiar.... [This] will not quiet the doomsayers who see San Francisco as a post-apocalyptic zombie set filled with violent psychotic homeless people.... The fear of crime often gets presented as a response to numbers—murder rates, numbers of robberies, carjackings, and assaults—but it’s primarily an anecdotal phenomenon that very often runs counter to what all the metrics would suggest. Today, the bulk of the fearmongering appears to exist online, where an informal rubric of virality determines how much the country, at large, hears about one crime or another.... [V]iolent crimes will happen, they will be sensationalized by the local media, which will blame the progressive district attorney; this, in turn, will activate local online networks, which, most likely, will also blame the progressive district attorney.... The future of how crime—especially violent crime—is handled in big American cities will be determined along the fault line between those progressive voters and the angry residents who feel as if all the criminals are being dumped on their block once they get released by a lenient district attorney...."

Writes Jay Caspian Kang in "Bob Lee’s Murder and San Francisco’s So-Called Crime Epidemic/The killing of a tech executive reveals the cycle of outrage that puts enormous pressure on progressive district attorneys" (The New Yorker).

The cycle of anecdotalism, fearmongering, sensationalism, and blaming doesn't operate only against progressives. Progressives engage in it too, for example, when guns are used.

"Despite his best efforts, Jake has recently hit a wall in his career and personal life. He feels stuck..."

"... and unfulfilled, and has begun to question whether the path he has chosen is really the right one for him. Jake is intelligent and resourceful, but he can also be impulsive and reckless. He has a tendency to act without fully thinking things through, which has gotten him into trouble in the past. Jake is good-looking and charming, but he has never been able to settle down in a committed relationship. He has had many casual flings and short-term relationships, but has never found someone who truly understands him. Overall, Jake is a complex and multifaceted character who is struggling with a deep sense of uncertainty and disillusionment. He is at a turning point in his life, and the events of the story will force him to confront his fears and doubts, and to ultimately make some difficult decisions about his future."

That's A.I., responding to a fiction-writer's request for a good fictional character, quoted in "Could an A.I. Chatbot Rewrite My Novel? As a young fiction writer, I dreamed of a technology that would tell me how to get my characters from point A to point B. Could ChatGPT be it?" by Jay Caspian Kang (The New Yorker).

It's terrible — isn't it? — or do I just need it to be terrible because I don't want any machine-written fiction? But am I clinging to a desire to love real, human fiction-writers? Maybe A.I.'s idea of a good fictional character is bad, and it's actually as good as what the humans do? If so, my desire to hate any machine-written fiction could lead me to hate the human fiction writer.

Here's what the real human writer — who needs us to continue to want him (and perhaps has never found someone who truly understands him) — has to say:

"One would think... that Democrats... would be more than happy to defend the idea that racism exists at every level of American schooling and tout the work of educators to address inequality."

"Instead, many have embarked on a great campaign of denial. This is particularly strange, because significant, equity-based changes in schools across the country should be seen as progressive victories. The problem seems to be that some small portion of what’s produced in the name of equity in schools is pretty embarrassing. That stuff, which mostly can be found in diversity trainings, then gets blasted out to the world as proof that the race hucksters are taking over the schools.... If you’re getting mad at an equity or antiracism idea gone wrong, make sure it’s either an actual policy or part of a curriculum or a training program. This means not getting worked up over singular examples in which a teacher says something in a classroom and then suddenly every 'woke' teacher in America has to answer for them. Try to disregard ephemera like quotes from random parents and, especially, students. Do critically engage with school board members, especially in big cities, and, of course, politicians. As much as possible, try to talk in concrete terms. This goes for both sides. Moral panics feed off ambiguity and confusion...."

From "Can We Talk About Critical Race Theory?" by Jay Caspian Kang (NYT).

"Many of the op-eds and articles on trigger warnings published this week have argued on behalf of the sanctity of the relationship between the reader and the text."

"For the most part, I have agreed with them," writes Jay Caspian Kang in The New Yorker.

A trigger warning reduces a work of art down to what amounts to plot points. If a novel like José Saramago’s “Blindness” succeeds because it sews up small yet essential pockets of human normalcy against a horrific backdrop, a preëmptive label like “Trigger Warning: Violence and internment” strips it down to one idea.

I relayed these thoughts to [Alexandra Brodsky, an editor at the Web site Feministing], along with the anecdote about my professor and “Lolita.” 

His professor had proclaimed: "When you read ‘Lolita,’ keep in mind that what you’re reading about is the systematic rape of a young girl."

“What a delight it must be to read a book full of graphic accounts of sexual violence and still have the book not be about sexual violence to you!” she said. “Why is the depersonalized, apolitical reading the one we should fight for?” I admit, this was an angle I had not yet considered, and I recalled the severe annoyance I’d felt in college seminars and coffeehouse conversations whenever a white person would say a bit too ringingly that a book written by a person of color somehow “transcended race,” as if that was the highest compliment that could be paid to a work written by one of us poor, striving minorities. Every reliable figure, whether from academic study or from the Obama Administration, says that somewhere between one in four and one in five women are sexually assaulted during their time in college....

Every reliable figure?! That sentence really undercut Kang's credibility for me. I note that he says "sexually assaulted" and not "rape" (a word that appears 7 times in his article), and depending on what the meaning of sexually assaulted is — does it include getting grabbed? — the number is up for grabs. But we're seeing that notoriously spurious statistic in a paragraph that's in the middle of Kang's essay. It's a sop to the feminists, a place on his narrative arc before he ultimately delivers us back where he started and agrees with his own original orientation against trigger warnings.

In his final paragraph, he announces that "In a good novel... every word matters." So: "Any excess language—in the form of a trigger warning—amounts to a preëmptive defacement." The author should control the roll-out of shocks — lulling and luring you into a dark alley where — if it's his way — he can rape you mentally assault you.