PicoBlog

John McWhorter and I had to postpone our regularly scheduled conversation, as he was feeling under the weather. He’ll be back next week, along with Tyler Austin Harper and Daniel Bessner. This week, my guest is political scientist Yascha Mounk. He’s the author of several books, most recently The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time. Yascha’s book traces the intellectual history of our current cultural obsession with identity back to its origins in the theoretical work of figures like Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Derrick Bell.

I'm going to do something I never do. I'm going to write this, and I'm going to stop writing it, and then I'm going to press 'publish' before I read it back. I want you to know how I feel right now. And I want to say exactly what's on my mind. I don't know why I have to write the same things over and over, and I don't know why thousands of years of history isn't good enough to motivate a shift or a sea change.

We live only a fifteen minute walk from the Orient Hotel (photo on the left below), which is situated on the corner of two very busy streets, Emek Refa’im Street and Bethlehem Road. By virtue of the vagaries of where we shop, take walks and walk to restaurants and the like, that’s a corner we drive by all the time, but hardly ever stroll by. Last weekend, though, despite how close it is to our home, we actually stayed at the Orient for a few days as part of a long (and wondrous) wedding celebration.

(Listen to theradio version here.) My birding friend Bruce Munson lives next door to my daughter Katherine, and we text each other whenever one of us spots a cool bird, usually in the backyard along Tischer Creek. I babysit Walter five days a week, so when Bruce or I spot something good and text about it, the other just runs to the window or backyard and can see it within moments.

Each year, the same cycle of events plays out. Time magazine announces its pick for “Person of the Year” (or “Man of the Year” as it originally was). The media report the pick. People who think someone else should have been Person of the Year, along with people who simply don’t like the news media, note that Time chose Adolf Hitler as Man of the Year in 1938. And they make some nasty comment about the media’s moral bankruptcy, or stupidity, or both.

Dear Mr. Brooks, Your column might be the best thing written in the New York Times in the past seven years. You’ve undoubtedly been subjected to a fair amount of abuse for it. You should probably never have written it if the comments are any indication. But those are people in the bubble. They don’t represent either the majority or the future. They think they do, but they don’t.

On the night before Thanksgiving 2023, I attended AEW Dynamite. It’s become my annual tradition to go to that show because it usually falls a few days after my birthday and I love a Chicago trip. The first year I went I had one of my best live wrestling experiences, I sat in Chicago and watched as CM Punk battle MJF on the mic for the first time. The second year The Elite had a memorable match with Death Triangle in their Best of Seven series and Chris Jericho versus Ishii was very, very good.

As of this week, teachers are being trained to use "Lightspeed Classroom Management," a software that allows them to not only see students' laptop screens, but also control them remotely. According to the company that created it, Lightspeed Systems, the program aims to, "Enhance the interactive classroom experience for any learning environment. Lightspeed Classroom Management gives teachers real-time visibility of student activity and control over their online workspaces. Teachers can see student screens, close distracting tabs, and push URLs to all students to keep students focused on exactly the right content—precisely when they’re supposed to be.

We started contemplating a move to Texas because we were tired of the cold. Two long winters with snow that never left our Fort Wayne, Indiana front yard and no break from the constant below-freezing temperatures convinced us that we were done. We had both spent our entire lives in the northern half of the United States and we were ready for something different. So we moved to Southeast Texas in the middle of July, during the worst of the summer months, braving the weeks in a row of 100+ degree days and humidity that hung in the air like a sopping wet quilt.