Kathleen Geier

Back in 2008, I used to argue that Sarah Palin didn’t really exist — that she was actually an incredibly elaborate Tina Fey performance art project, an Andy-Kaufman style hoax. Because, seriously — Palin was so staggeringly vapid that it stretched credibility that she could be for real. It almost seemed more likely that she […]

This story is from earlier in the week, but somehow I missed it. Noted fraudster and gun policy researcher John Lott has apparently been admitted back into polite society again. As Media Matters reports, on April 25, Lott published a garbage, error-riddled op ed in the New York Daily News about Florida’s infamous “Stand Your […]

It is a truth universally acknowledged that all the most virulently homophobic wingnuts must eventually be discovered trolling for male escorts on rentboy.com. Or so it often seems. And from this Sunday’s New York Times comes the news that social science seems to confirm this impression. Researchers Richard M. Ryan and William S. Ryan write […]

Here is some interesting stuff I’ve found on the interwebs to keep you busy until this blog returns to the capable hands of Ed Kilgore tomorrow: — Dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar has apparently won a seat in her country’s parliament. It’s hard to say what this […]

I have an addendum to my earlier post about bullying. I mentioned that in his WSJ piece, Nick Gillespie defended life-threatening child labor practices. The facts are these: as Michelle Chen of the excellent In These Times labor blog, Working, reported earlier this week: Advocates have for months been pressing the Labor Department to finalize […]

I have to say, I saw this coming. In an era which has been so full of all manner of public nastiness and viciousness (much but by no means all of it emanating from the right), one of our society’s more heartening trends has been a growing public concern about bullying, and a heightened sensitivity […]

We’re hip-deep into a year that’s been overflowing with virulent antifeminist backlash. Another outbreak of the epidemic as occurred, but this time it’s in a most unexpected place: the New York Times’ Ethicist column. Ethicist columnist Ariel Kaminer has announced a contest inviting omnivores to write essays about why it is ethical to eat meat. […]

From the “now-they-tell-us” files: the Los Angeles Times reports that some Reagan-era judicial conservatives are worried that conservatives on the Supreme Court are “going too far” and practicing “judicial activism.” Why, the idea! Former Solicitor General Charles Fried is among those who are “concerned”: If the court were to invalidate the healthcare law, “It would […]

The other day I was thumbing through my copy of Winner-Take-All-Politics, the excellent book by political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson which, better than any other work I have read, explains how and why, over the past few decades, income inequality in America has increased so dramatically. I came across a passage which I […]

The new issue of Tom Frank’s journal, The Baffler, has finally arrived. So far, the only article from the new issue that’s available online is this essay by Frank himself, about the recent catastrophic failures — the neoliberal fever dream of the the “New Economy,” the Iraq War, and the Wall Street-induced global financial crisis […]