Unbalanced Lines

I have lived nearly all of my life within a slow-burning conservative revolution. The broad trends of the past 30 years of American life have been to atomize social bonds, redefine the citizen as a consumer, elevate corporate rights over those of the worker or the individual, lionize police brutality as an expression of justice, and cruelly mock anyone who thinks differently. As a person who supports none of these goals I feel like a stranger in an increasingly strange land.  Few things reinforce this alienation more than what now appears to be a truism of American politics: There is no tragedy so horrific that it will prompt America to re-examine its love for the gun. The mass shooting is now a defining fact of American life and culture--much like binding arbitration clauses, student debt, and the lack of meaningful parental leave. There are more firearms now in private ownership than there are people who live in America. The most reliable predictor of whether a person will buy a fire

As A$AP Rocky said, "everybody plays the tough guy 'til s**t pops off". For Mike Bloomberg, the corollary might be that every candidate is inevitable until the moment they aren't. Maybe Bloomberg can buy himself the nomination, but he had even Joe Biden smelling blood in the water. He looked remarkably out of his depth and, for large stretches of the debate, was a complete non-presence. One gets the arch impression that beyond being a huge asshole he just does not care about Democratic values so much as getting himself elected. It was an historically poor performance. Maybe he can buy himself the nomination, but no Democratic constituency will enthusiastically vote for him, and that's fatal. (See under Clinton, Hillary.) When you spend a decent chunk of the evening either not engaging or defending NDAs for your sexual harassment accusers, you are having a bad time. I thought Bloomberg's presence would accrue to the benefit of a progressive candidate,

Lost in the aftermath of the Chernobyl-level Iowa caucus debacle is a crucial point: Even if the count were not fucked up , we'd still be questioning Iowa's primacy in and centrality to our process of choosing a president.  For years, the counts Iowa reported on election night were not raw vote totals but "state delegate equivalents": a somewhat abstracted figure representing the total number of delegates to the state party convention  awarded to a particular candidate using a specific mathematical formula. (Not the number of delegates to the national convention, i.e. the count that matters; just the number pledged to the state convention.) In 2016, Hillary Clinton edged Bernie Sanders in this count by 0.3%, giving her a nominal victory. Bernie's crew maintained that he had won more caucus-goers, and if that  total were reported, he could reasonably have claimed a victory of his own (or a split decision at worst). But this was ultimately speculative, since the

Bullshit is the hallmark of the present age. Consider: fake news; alternative facts; gaslighting; trolldom; corporate journalism; social engineering. It is impossible to engage with the news, log in to social media, or function as a person in the world without wading in some degree of bullshit. By calling bullshit what it is we assert, in a small way, that there is still an objectively knowable reality.

This is where I grew up and, by turns, bought a house and started a family. Living here is occasionally bizarre  and maddening , but there are also moments of joy , lovable local institutions , a respectable food scene , and groups of people advancing the civic good simply by tending their respective gardens . It's a lot like anywhere else in that respect.  I genuinely believe all of that. A friend (who I had a hand in convincing to move here) asked me whether and how the feeling in Baltimore now compares to the Bad Old Days of the mid-90s. I don't have a single answer to this question, so I've fired up a blog again to try. A few points for context: I grew up in the city's most privileged neighborhood. The neighborhood where I grew up, and where my parents still live, literally invented the restrictive housing covenant . It is within the boundaries of Baltimore City but is better thought of as an internal upper-class suburb. The neighborhood where I n