Sublime

Maybe those were the last days when something could be truly obscure. Not in the basic sense that a style or song might be esoteric. But there was a precariousness to out-of-the-way knowledge, a sense that a misfiled book or forgotten magazine could easily be lost forever. Learning about something a few minutes before everyone else converted to a k

So that is the why of Donald Trump. He was the chosen instrument of an insurgent public, and no established centers of power stood in his way. The somewhat different question of how this transpired now needs to be posed. In 1980, 1990, even 2000, Trump’s bizarre trajectory would have been not just impossible but politically suicidal. What has chang

Ever since Reagan, the Republican Party has been a coalition of business interests and downscale whites, many of them evangelical Christians. By 2010 it was like a figure in a hall of mirrors whose head and body have been severed but continue to move as if they’re still attached. The persistence of the coalition required an immense amount of self-d

Now pretty much every journal uses outside experts to vet papers, and papers that don’t please reviewers get rejected. You can still write to your friends about your findings, but hiring committees and grant agencies act as if the only science that exists is the stuff published in peer-reviewed journals. This is the grand experiment we’ve been runn

Shame, horror, and humor are cast upon Appalachia. It is the Whitest region of the South and among the poorest, plagued by failed American dreams. Whether or not people use the distasteful pejorative “trash,” they often imply and apply it to the people here.

The Paper Millionaire, by some Arab-turned-Englishman named Roger Shashoua. He sat

In the twentieth century, the biodiversity crisis, as it eventually came to be known, only sped up. Extinction rates are now hundreds—perhaps thousands—of times higher than the so-called background rates that applied over most of geological time. The losses extend across all continents, all oceans, and all taxa. Along with the species formally cate

1 POSTMODERNISM

It is especially odd since the public does apparently have to go to work: this is why, as leftist critics often complain, the media will always talk about how, say, a transport strike is likely to inconvenience the public, in their capacity of commuters, but it will never occur to them that those striking are themselves part of the public—or that i