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In a New Yorker piece titled “The Queer Backlash to Pete Buttigieg Explained,” Masha Gessen ends by calling Buttigieg “a straight politician in a gay man’s body.”

A queer reader of Buttigieg’s memoir and life story is left to project

Conflating gayness with any particular moral, political, or aesthetic value the observer has deemed good, though, is an act of hijacking—one weirdly similar to the rhetorical move homophobes use when they say gay people are immoral.

the chatter painting Buttigieg as virtually straight points to something that’s harder to talk about: the ways in which a Democratic front-runner is, in fact, unmissably gay, and how the backlash to him is itself tinged with its own strain of queer shame.

These arguments that present Buttigieg as not really gay so obviously flirt with the essentialism queer people fight against that it’s a bit shocking to see them get traction at all.

If he ever pithily sums up the psychological motive underlying all the hustle, I haven’t quite caught it. But I have thought a lot about the stereotypes of gay men as hyper-successful, image-conscious, and wounded. I have revisited Alan Downs’s widely read 2005 book, The Velvet Rage, which diagnosed gay men’s defining motive as shame.

the psychologist Downs describes queer children’s impulse toward parent-pleasing: What would you like me to be? A great student? A priest in a church? Mother’s little man? The first-chair violinist? We became dependent on adopting the skin our environment imposed upon us to earn the love and affection we craved.

“Queer people don’t grow up as ourselves,” Leon began. “We grow up playing a version of ourselves that sacrifices authenticity to minimise humiliation & prejudice. The massive task of our adult lives is to unpick which parts of ourselves are truly us & which parts we’ve created to protect us.”

Buttigieg’s performances invite terms such as calculating, cold, and studied. These have a marked resemblance to the terminology often tagged to female politicians, whose affects have inevitably been shaped in response to sexism

The super-rehearsed presentational tics shared by Buttigieg and, say, Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris remind viewers of the outsize work that’s been required for these people to be taken seriously. They suggest that thriving as someone other than straight, white, and male in America can require making yourself into a politician—and not only in politics.

The way he’s presented his marriage and his life story underlines the ways in which a gay life can resemble a straight one. The routine has been so deft that, according to one viral video from the Iowa caucus, people might actually cast ballots for him without realizing he’s gay.

Money itself, especially the importance of “gay economic might,” also takes center stage in Issenberg’s book. “A galaxy of covert donors orbiting around Denver software millionaire Tim Gill remade the gay-rights movement in their own image,” he writes, “ideologically conservative and strategically radical.”

In addition to broader racism and transphobia within the mainstream gay rights movement, marriage was always primarily a white, cisgender issue.

In his postscript, Issenberg recognizes that the fight for gay marriage left much of the L.G.B.T.Q. community behind. “Transgendered Americans were certainly no better off than they had been,” he writes

This admission raises the question: What was lost in spending untold millions of dollars on same-sex marriage instead of a more expansive form of queer liberation? Given that queer and trans people of color had been offering alternative visions of freedom since the beginning of L.G.B.T.Q. organizing, what if we had instead focused on the most marginalized members of our community, those who put their bodies on the line at the Stonewall riots of 1969?

Last month, New York City Pride did announce a new policy limiting police presence at its events until 2025. This includes participation of the NYPD's Gay Officers Action League, which normally marches in the Pride parade.

Pride is a crucial economic season for most LGBTQ bars.

Many LGBTQ bars are also having trouble predicting what Pride month will look like. Alexi Minko, owner of the Black queer bar Alibi in Harlem, says he was surprised when the city announced that many dining and event restrictions would be lifted by June.

He is still figuring out the logistics of putting an event together by the end of the month. But he's excited that people can celebrate Pride at Alibi this year.

One in-person event planned for New York City is the Queer Liberation March. It's an alternative rally that started a few years ago. Organizers said corporations and police were too present at the official Pride parade.

She reopened indoor seating for fully vaccinated people. But customers still cannot stand inside. That means crowds can't pack in, shoulder-to-shoulder, like they normally do during Pride.

Menichino expects to see a lot of joy and relief from customers this Pride month, even if they're sitting at carefully placed tables rather than dancing.

She says crowds might be smaller anyway because so many public events are still virtual. But she's grateful for a partial return of Pride programming.

In fact, campus-carry supporters maintain that the law will keep the peace, enabling students and faculty to defend themselves effectively, and deter would-be shooters.

It turns out, for example, there were armed students at Umpqua Community College in Oregon on the day of its shooting last fall. Their presence did not deter the attack, nor did they halt it; the students wisely decided not to jump into the fray for fear it would compound the mayhem.

Stand Your Ground laws protect citizens from prosecution in cases where they feel threatened in public, and fire their weapons.

It’s unclear whether campus carry does and will in fact undermine the freedom of expression, but if there’s one place in society where the citizenry must not tolerate such threats, it’s the college classroom.

Few young adults have put significant thought into these kinds of issues; they must experiment with them to understand them properly and deeply, and to develop mature and critical views.

Will guns encourage speech and invite people to discussion and debate in the classroom?

In short, they argued that guns in the classroom pose an intolerable threat to free speech.

Gun owners have shot and killed unarmed citizens—and sought Stand Your Ground protections—in cases in which they misjudged or overestimated the threats before them.

In 2014, a Montana man invoked Stand Your Ground after he shot and killed an unarmed German exchange student trespassing in his garage.

One University of Houston professor, Maria Gonzalez, expressed her concerns over campus carry in the context of her own classes, which cover Marxist and Queer Theory.

Expansions of civil rights are almost always deeply unpopular at first; this was the case in the fight for women’s rights, suffrage for African Americans, and marriage equality for gays and lesbians.

I fear that campus carry will make students and faculty less inclined to engage in the critical intellectual work that must take place in the classroom, the courageous inquiry and experimentation American democracy requires.

It’s impossible to measure the cost of campus carry. But I wager that the cost will be evidenced in the mounting silence on college campuses, and the trepidation, timidity, and lack of creativity among new generations of voters. American democracy will be the poorer for it.

Carson and the real estate developer are not so different from one another in this predilection for outrageous utterances, it’s just that one smiles and the other scowls.

This is the same Ben Carson who on a radio show in 2013 said of white liberals:“Well, they’re the most racist people there are because, you know, they put you in a little category, a little box — you have to think this way. How could you dare come off the plantation?”

he and the front-runner are two sides of the same coin: they are both dangerous, but one is a narcissist who just might win the nomination and the other is a near-narcoleptic who never had a chance.

I was reminded by a recent study on the effects of social-justice “multicultural” ideology compared with the “color-blind” liberal alternative. The study, which was published in the Journal of Social Psychology and Personality Science, found that exposure to multiculturalism can paradoxically deepen race essentialism, by which the authors mean the idea that “racial group differences are valid, biologically based, and immutable.” Money quote:

Study 1 (N = 165) shows that participants exposed to multiculturalism expressed greater race essentialist beliefs compared to those exposed to color blindness. Study 2 (N = 150) replicates this effect and also finds that exposure to multiculturalism, compared to color blindness, decreased participants’ belief that racial equality is a problem. These findings raise the ironic possibility that well-intentioned efforts to portray the value of differences may reinforce the belief that fixed, biological characteristics underpin them.

the mechanism the first study describes among students is a fascinating one. It’s simply that the more focus you put on race, the more conscious people are of it as a valid and meaningful distinction between people, and the more likely they are to reify it.

At today’s diversity-driven campus or corporation, often your first instinct when seeing someone is to quickly assess their identity — black, white, gay, Latino, male, trans, etc. You are required to do this all the time because you constantly need to check your privilege.

so college students — and those who hire and fire in business — are trained to judge a person instantly by where they fit into a racial and gender hierarchy, before they even engage them. Of course they’re going to end up judging people instantly by the color of their skin

Another study from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found: [I]n three experiments, White American college students received a message advocating either a color-blind or a multicultural ideological approach to improving interethnic relations and then made judgments about various ethnic groups and individuals

Relative to a color-blind perspective, the multicultural perspective led to stronger stereotypes, greater accuracy in these stereotypes, and greater use of category information in judgments of individuals

[P]rimed with multiculturalism, participants liked racial minorities who displayed stereotypical preferences (i.e., liking basketball and hip-hop) more than racial minorities who displayed non-stereotypical preferences (i.e., surfing and country dancing).

In other words, teaching people to see other races as completely different from one’s own may encourage us to define others by stereotypes.

When the deep tribal forces in the human psyche are constantly on alert for racial difference, we run the risk of exacerbating racism

anti-racism could facilitate what it is attempting to destroy.

the core contradiction of ideological transgenderism. By severing the link between sex and gender completely, it abolishes the core natural framework without which the transgender experience makes no sense at all.

It’s also a subtle, if unintentional, attack on homosexuality. Most homosexuals are strongly attached to their own gender and attracted to traditional, natural expressions of it. That’s what makes us gay, for heaven’s sake. And that’s one reason the entire notion of a common “LGBT” identity is so misleading. How can a single identity comprise both the abolition of gender and at the same time its celebration?

Exceptions, in other words, need a rule to exist. Abolish gender’s roots in biology and sex — and you abolish gay people and transgender people as well.

You can’t assault the core identity of most people’s lives and then expect them to vote for you. As a Trump supporter in Colorado just told a reporter from The New Yorker: “I’ve never been this emotionally invested in a political leader in my life. The more they hate him, the more I want him to succeed. Because what they hate about him is what they hate about me.”

Transgender people exist and should be treated with absolutely the same human respect, decency, and civil equality as anyone else. But they don’t disprove traditional notions of gender as such — which have existed in all times, places, and cultures in human history and prehistory, and are rooted deeply in evolutionary biology and reproductive strategy.

Intersex people exist and, in my view, should not be genitally altered or “fixed” without their adult consent. But they do not somehow negate the overwhelming majority who have no such gender or sexual ambiguity.

the entire society does not need to be overhauled in order to make gay or trans experience central to it. Inclusion, yes. Revolution, no.

The added problem with this war on nature is the backlash it inevitably incurs. There’s a reason so many working-class men find it hard to vote for Democrats any more. And there’s a reason why a majority of white women last year voted for a man who boasted of sexual assault if the alternative was a triumph for contemporary left-feminism.

Yes, there’s a range of gender expression among those of the same sex. But it’s still tethered among most to the forces of chromosomes and hormones that make us irreducibly male and female. Nature can be interpreted; it can even be played with; but it cannot be abolished. After all, how can you be “queer” if there is no such thing as “normal”?

it would actually impose civil and criminal penalties on American citizens for backing or joining any international boycott of Israel because of its settlement activities. There are even penalties for simply inquiring about such a boycott. And they’re not messing around. The minimum civil penalty would be $250,000 and the maximum criminal penalty $1 million and 20 years in prison. Up to 20 years in prison for opposing the policies of a foreign government and doing something about it!

One of the features you most associate with creeping authoritarianism is the criminalization of certain political positions. Is anything more anathema to a liberal democracy? If Trump were to suggest it, can you imagine the reaction?

And yet it’s apparently fine with a hefty plurality of the Senate and House. I’m referring to the remarkable bill introduced into the Congress earlier this year — with 237 sponsors and co-sponsors in the House and 43 in the Senate — which the ACLU and the Intercept have just brought to light. It’s a remarkably bipartisan effort, backed by Chuck Schumer and Ted Cruz, among many solid Trump-resisting Democrats and hard-line Republicans.

I’m not in favor of boycotting Israel when we don’t boycott, say, Saudi Arabia. But seriously: making it illegal?

Every now and again, you just have to sit back and admire the extraordinary skills of the Greater Israel lobby. You’ve never heard of this bill, and I hadn’t either. But that is partly the point. AIPAC doesn’t want the attention — writers who notice this attempted assault on a free society will be tarred as anti-Semites (go ahead, it wouldn’t be the first time) and politicians who resist it will see their careers suddenly stalled.

pointing out this special interest’s distortion of democracy is not the equivalent of bigotry. It’s simply a defense of our democratic way of life.

Speaking of ideology versus reality, there is, it seems to me, a parallel on the left. That is the current attempt to deny the profound natural differences between men and women, and to assert, with a straight and usually angry face, that gender is in no way rooted in sex, and that sex is in no way rooted in biology.

This unscientific product of misandrist feminism and confused transgenderism is striding through the culture, and close to no one in the elite is prepared to resist it.

Worse, we have constant admonitions against those who actually conform, as most human beings always have, to the general gender rule.

And so we have the establishment of gender-neutral birth certificates in Canada; and, in England, that lovely old phrase, “Ladies and Gentlemen,” is being removed from announcements on the Tube

We have dozens of new pronouns in colleges (for all those genders that have suddenly sprung into existence), and biological males competing in all-female high-school athletic teams (guess who wins at track).

Schools rarely provide education about relationships. Teenagers aren’t often taught that extreme jealousy is not romantic, but is a sign of an unhealthy relationship.

As anyone can tell you — as history can tell you — this is ultimately a fool’s errand. Ideas don’t disappear when they’re challenged; banned books have a funny way of enduring. But that doesn’t mean these efforts are without consequences.

Today in the United States, books that feature characters who are Black, Latinx, Indigenous, queer or trans — or are written by authors who identify that way — frequently make up a majority of the American Library Association’s annual list of the top 10 books most often censored in libraries and schools. These book bans deprive students of a better understanding of themselves and each other. As a writer, I believe in the power of words to cross boundaries at a time of deep division. Now more than ever, literature matters.

Now that it’s out in the world, I receive easily a dozen messages a week from readers. They thank me; they open up to me; they describe the life-changing experience of feeling seen. More than one person has told me my book gave them the clarity and strength to leave an unhealthy relationship.

I understand that for a parent, it’s almost unthinkable to imagine that your child could experience such trauma. But preventing children from reading my book, or any book, won’t protect them. On the contrary, it may rob them of ways to understand the world they’ll encounter, or even the lives they’re already living. You can’t recognize what you’ve never been taught to see. You can’t put language to something for which you’ve been given no language.

Was it radical to be correct too soon? What gets called the left is often just ahead of the game, when it comes to human rights and environmental justice; the right is often denying the existence of the problem, whether it’s pesticides and toxic waste or domestic violence and child abuse. There is no symmetry. A lot of what are now considered moderate – AKA centrist – positions were seen as radical not long ago, when this country supported segregation, banned interracial marriages and then same-sex marriages, prevented women from holding some positions and queer people from others, and excluded disabled people from almost everything. The center is biased, and those biases matter.

For Carter, it's about more than just social justice movements. He believes his city's leadership, especially the executive office, should reflect the population.

For Carter and other activists-turned-political candidates, making the decision to run felt like an actionable step after a year of such frustration and anger.

Tate took on criminal justice reform years before protests for Floyd took over streets across the country.

He created a name for himself while leading marches and protests following the deaths of Floyd and Breonna Taylor, a Black woman shot and killed by police in Louisville, Kentucky.

LaTonya Tate is not new to the fight to make the justice system more just. As a Black woman in the South and part of a family with a history of activism, it has been ever-present. And as a retired parole officer, she knows a good deal about the justice system and its failures.

She believes she can lead desperately needed and uncomfortable conversations if she is elected to the city council in Birmingham, Alabama.

Ossé is running for a seat on the city council representing his district in Brooklyn, New York. If elected, he would become one of the youngest, and one of the first self-described queer city council members in New York City.

Tate is advocating for community policing. She believes in reallocating funds from police to invest in the community with mental health training, health care, education, youth programs and social services.

Francois Alexandre believes that a community policing role is crucial for accountability. It's what he'd like to change when it comes to law enforcement in his district in Miami if he wins a seat on the Miami City Commission.

Charlotte, North Carolina City Council member Braxton Winston knows the path these activists are taking well. He was the subject of an iconic photo depicting the tension between police and protesters after an officer shot and killed Keith Scott, a Black Charlotte resident in 2016.

Winston's gained victories to defund chemical agents for crowd control, which he says led to a broader conversation about the overall role of government in ensuring public safety. He says he has learned that support and political will are essential and in ways he is not set up to succeed.

The Black Voters Matter organization, which aims to increase power in the black community through voter outreach and advocacy, says efforts are underway to engage black voters and to build voting power.

In June, the organization plans to launch a bus campaign to engage Black voters while commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Freedom Rides movement, bus tours taken by civil rights activists in the '60s to fight segregation in the South.

Carter hopes this can be a moment where the country looks deep into its soul and reckons with its past.

Kirby said making an exception for the rainbow pride flag could leave the Pentagon open for additional policy challenges down the road.

President Biden acknowledged Pride Month with an official proclamation earlier this week. Nearly 14% of his federal agency appointees identify as LGBTQ+, he announced.

Potential foster parents who agree to be chosen on an exclusionary basis would perpetuate anti-L. G.B. T. Q. stigmas. They would be unfit to provide foster care to L.G.B.T.Q. young people — or to their cisgender/straight peers.The impact would extend beyond Philadelphia. Other agencies across the United States would also feel free to exclude L.G.B.T.Q. parents. According to Family Equality, 11 states have laws allowing faith-based foster care agencies to exclude L.G.B.T.Q. parents. Family Equality says more states are considering similar discriminatory legislation.

As an L.G.B.T.Q. American, I’ve spent the past four years fearing that every new day will bring some new indignation — like Ben Carson calling women like me “big hairy men,” or the time the administration considered erasing transgender individuals as a legal entity altogether. Or simply the policy enacted as Mr. Trump was on his way out the door, wiping out nondiscrimination protections for queer Americans.

I actually stood up for the Pledge of Allegiance and sang along with the national anthem. Nonetheless, the scars of the Trump years are likely to endure. A new era, alas, doesn’t mean that the last one didn’t happen.

As Mary Tyler Moore imitating Abe Lincoln might have said: “Oh, Mr. Grant. Let us strive on to finish the work we are in and to bind up the nation’s wounds.”

“Thank God for the deep state,” John McLaughlin, a former deputy and acting director of the C.I.A.

Anthony Fauci is the steely superhero of my deep state, and he’s flanked and fortified by all the government health officials who also pushed back against the quackery of Scott Atlas, the Trump-flattering pandemic adviser who resigned on Monday.

a senior College Board official now acknowledges the organization was mindful of how “systemic” and certain other words in the modern lexicon of race in America would receive intense scrutiny in some places.

Jason Manoharan, vice president for AP program development. He said the College Board worried some phrases and concepts had been “co-opted for a variety of purposes” and were being used as “political instruments.” So the organization took a cautious approach to the final edits even as it sought to preserve robust content on historical and cultural impacts of slavery and racial discrimination.

“We wanted this course to be adopted by 50 states, and we wanted as many students and teachers as possible to be able to experience it,” Manoharan said. His acknowledgment underscored the inherent politics behind promoting a course that deals so squarely with race in America.

John K. Thornton, a professor of African American studies and history at Boston University, who contributed to the planning, said he was pleased the course opens with five weeks on early Africa. But he lamented that reparations and Black Lives Matter ended up only as optional research topics. “It did upset me a little bit,” he said. “Those things obviously feel very much a part of what a college course is about.”

DeSantis, a potential presidential candidate, has accused the course architects of promoting “a political agenda.” He also criticized an early course plan’s references to Black queer studies and “intersectionality,” a concept that helps explain overlapping forms of discrimination that affect Black women and others.

Teresa Reed, dean of music at the University of Louisville, said her work as one of 13 members of the AP African American studies committee resembled similar assignments she has undertaken for other AP courses. Reed supports the African American studies course plan and said it will continue to be revised as pilot teachers give feedback. She said she saw no evidence of political meddling in the course design. “That was absolutely not my experience,”

Two luminaries in the field, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, both of Harvard University and both of whom advised the College Board, also issued statements vouching for the course.

The first 81-page draft of the course plan, in February 2022, drew topics and sources from the syllabi of introductory classes at historically Black universities, Ivy League schools and other prominent institutions. The College Board said it was produced as a preview for 200 college professors at a March 2022 symposium. Faculty recommended cutting 20 percent to 25 percent of the proposed topics, the College Board said, and as much as half of suggested readings.

The April version, 299 pages, was the pilot course guide, a road map for teachers before classes began in the fall. It included much more detail on goals, essential knowledge and potential source material. It also made an important switch on contemporary issues: Certain lessons on reparations, incarceration and movements for Black lives became optional and would not be covered on the AP exam. At this stage, the guide included a week of instruction on Black feminism, womanism and intersectionality, and it used the word “systemic” nine times.

One of the most consequential decisions made last year was to set aside significant time — ultimately, three weeks — near the end of the course for a research paper of up to 1,500 words on a topic students would choose. The project will count for 20 percent of the AP score for those who seek college credit.

Among 40 sample topics in the official plan are Black Lives Matter; intersectionality; reparations debates; gay life and expression in Black communities; and Black conservatism.

College Board officials point to the development of an extensive digital library for the course — including a 1991 text on intersectionality from Crenshaw — as evidence that they are not censoring writers or voices. Crenshaw teachers, they say, use the course framework as a starting point to design their own syllabi of readings and assignments.

the Telluride workshops were being organized by two college-age students, filled with the spirit of the times

From what I gleaned, they involved crudely conveying certain dogmatic assertions, no matter what topic the workshops were ostensibly about:Experiencing hardship conveys authority. There is no hierarchy of oppressions—except for anti-black oppression, which is in a class of its own. Trust black women.Prison is never the answer.Black people need black space.Allyship is usually performative.All non-black people, and many black people, are guilty of anti-blackness.There is no way out of anti-blackness.

It is tempting to add: Such is life. Such is democratic life. We each have different, partial knowledge. We each get things wrong, over and over. At our best, we enter the fray by listening to each other and complementing and challenging the insights of our fellows. In the process, over years, decades, we are oriented toward justice and truth.

Specific words, phrases, arguments, and images from a text offer essential friction for conversation, holding seminar participants accountable to something concrete.

The seminar assumes that each student has innate intelligence, even as we come from different backgrounds, have different amounts and sorts of knowledge, and different skills. We can each be formed best if we take advantage of our differing insights to push each other, over time, again and again. When this practice is occasioned by carefully curated texts—not exclusively “great books,” but texts that challenge each other and us as they probe issues of essential importance—a seminar succeeds.

Each intervention in a seminar is incomplete, and gets things wrong. Each subsequent intervention is also incomplete, and also gets things wrong. But there are plenty of insights and surprises, for each participant looks at a text with different eyes

By its nature, a seminar requires patience. Day by day, one intervention builds on another, as one student notices what another student overlooked, and as the professor guides the discussion toward the most important questions

The effects on the seminar were quick and dramatic. During the first week, participation was as you would expect: There were two or three shy students who only spoke in partner or small-group work, two or three outspoken students, and the rest in the middle. One of the black students was outspoken, one was in the middle, and one was shy. By the second week of the seminar, the two white students were effectively silent. Two of the Asian-American students remained active (the ones who would soon be expelled), but the vast majority of interventions were from the three black students. The two queer students, one Asian and one white, were entirely silent

“Two of the Asian-American students would be expelled from the program.”In the 2022 anti-racism workshops, the non-black students learned that they needed to center black voices—and to shut up.

If the seminar is slow food, the anti-racist workshop put on by college-age students is a sugar rush. All the hashtags are there, condensed, packaged, and delivered from a place of authority. The worst sort of anti-racist workshop simply offers a new language for participants to echo—to retweet out loud.

In their “transformative-justice” workshop, my students learned to name “harms.”

In the language of the anti-racism workshop, a harm becomes anything that makes you feel not quite right. For a 17-year-old at a highly selective, all-expenses-paid summer program, newly empowered with the language of harm, there are relatively few sites at which to use this framework. My seminar became the site at which to try out—and weaponize—this language.

John McWhorter asserts that anti-racism is a new religion. It was an idea I quickly dismissed. Last summer, I found anti-racism to be a perversion of religion: I found a cult

the features of cults have become familiar in popular culture. There is sleep deprivation. Ties to the outside world are severed. The sense of time collapses, with everything cult-related feeling extremely urgent. Participants are emotionally battered. In this weakened state, participants learn about and cling to dogmatic beliefs. Any outsider becomes a threat.

The feature of a cult that seems to be missing from this story is a charismatic leader, enforcing the separation of followers from the world, creating emotional vulnerability, and implanting dogma. Enter Keisha

Pushing anti-racism to its limits, what we reach isn’t just hollow doctrine, but abuse: Pathological relationships that cut us off from the world, from the give-and-take of reasons and feelings unfolding over time that makes up life in the world.

We see this crystal clear in the paradoxes that I encountered

The experience was supposed to be organized around a “transformative justice,” rather than a punitive model, yet the community managed to expel two of its members.

Students continually voiced their desire to find practical actions to help change the world, but after four weeks, they had learned to say that anti-blackness is so foundational, the world could never change

The students wanted freedom, for themselves and for all, but they started to say that the only route to freedom is indoctrination: having me tell them what to think.

Saddest of all, for me, was hearing what the black students said. They needed extra help, they were struggling to understand anything from the readings, and they couldn’t even know what questions to ask unless they had guidance—first Keisha said this, then the black students said it, then their “allies” repeated it in solidarity with them

The dissociated feeling some of us have gotten watching politics play out in 2024 came in part from watching conventional media and sensibilities fail to process this brutish, multilayered, densely referential, meme-drenched idiom

Mr. Trump dominated TV during a time when the shouty, humorless alpha white guy was a dominant cable archetype

When Mr. Trump promises that he will be a dictator but only on “Day 1,” is it a joke or a terrifying threat? Possibly both, but in muddying the distinctions, he makes liberal warnings about constitutional norms seem like ninnyish Karening

But if there’s one thing that’s true for all TV genres, it’s that the medium is always looking for the next new thin

Traditional discourse looks for stage directions, for mainstream media, which once had the power to define reality, to referee, and judge. Big-R Reality values are judgment-free, however: Attention is attention is attention.

In recent years, the freshest and most popular reality shows have been more ironic, more infused with queer sensibility, more, dare one say, joyful.

Mr. Trump’s recently cast political opponent seems to have grasped the vibe shift. The playfully self-deprecating memes and the repeated invocation of joy: She’s reality lite