Culture

One of the great things about not being obsessed with racism is that you don’t have to put yourself through the mental twisty turns required to see racism in everything. For example, I don’t have to pretend that moving from New Jersey to Manhattan to find a new job was, for a free black man in the nineteenth century, the same thing as an Irish immigrant boarding a “coffin ship” hoping to survive the Atlantic journey, knowing his only alternative was to die of starvation during the Potato Famine.

When I was 16, I threatened to carry out a school shooting. Okay, not really. I was sitting in math class with my hand up, trying to get the teacher’s attention. He called on one student, then another, then another. After the fourth or fifth time he failed to take my question, I became frustrated and said to myself something along the lines of “Oh my God, I’m gonna start shooting people.” I had no plans to harm anyone. It was a dumbass thing to say, even under my breath. You were 16 once, and I’m sure you said your share of dumbass things too. The timid farm girl in front of me overheard my comment and reported it to the principal. I was suspended for a few days and had to get a letter from a shrink saying I posed no threat to my fellow students. Soon, I was back in school.

We hear lot of talk these days about anti-natalism: the ethical view that procreation is morally wrong. Young women and men are choosing not to have kids and, in extreme instances, choosing sterilization in their late teens. “I got my uterus thrown out voluntarily at 19!” a young woman boasts on an internet forum devoted to this topic. Climate anxiety often tops the list of reasons cited by contributors. Call them the “baby doomers.” When I went down the rabbit hole to read what these young folks are saying, they sounded exactly like me in my twenties. My climate anxiety peaked in the early 2000s (thanks, Al Gore). The inconvenient truth is that I loudly told anyone who would listen that I was never having children.

After thirteen years, the queen of pop is free. Britney Spears is liberated from a court-ordered conservatorship that gave her father immense control over her personal life and finances. This is a victory for Spears, for the fans who have campaigned for her — and for other, less famous Americans who are trapped in conservatorships. Spears recently requested a court remove her father, Jamie, as conservator, testifying in March that the conservatorship was “abusive” and that she was “depressed” by the lack of power she had over her own life. The court ruled to remove Jamie in September and dissolved the conservatorship in full on Friday. For Britney’s fans, the ruling couldn’t have come soon enough.

Last weekend, eight people were killed and over 300 were injured at rapper Travis Scott’s Astroworld music festival in Houston, as the crowd surged toward the stage. If a nine-year-old boy who fell from his father’s shoulders fails to emerge from his medically induced coma, the death toll could increase to nine. Scott took the stage at 9 p.m. By 9:38, authorities had deemed it a “mass casualty” situation. Instead of stopping the performance and attempting to defuse the situation, as musicians often do, Scott continued performing for another 37 minutes. An ambulance entered the throng. The crowd chanted “STOP THE SHOW!” Two concertgoers climbed on stage screaming “People are dead!” at a camera crew.

I'm holding a Polaroid taken at a Halloween party at one of my early State Department assignments in the 1980s. One of my diplomatic colleagues is in blackface. He’s done up to look like the minstrel player who was on the "Darkie" toothpaste boxes then for sale in every drugstore in Asia. You can see a photo of the packaging: the white teeth against the minstrel player's face were supposed to show how good the toothpaste was. My other colleague is dressed as the Frito Bandito, a caricature of Mexicans used to sell corn chips. The costume theme for the night was advertising icons. In the 1980s, these were acceptable ways to advertise and acceptable costumes for Halloween. Looking at the photo now, I realize it is a weapon.

Two years ago, I went to a megachurch service at Liberty University. Its guest speaker was Ben Shapiro. I asked some conservative students in the crowd what they thought of him. ‘He’s stupid smart,’ one said, ‘way smarter than me.’ The words have stuck with me ever since. ‘Stupid-smart’, a progression from ‘super-smart’, is the kind of compound modifier we’ve needed for years. How better to describe the small army of commentators, authors, critics and activists who now comprise the majority of the pundit class? Thanks to the internet, intellectual debate has been made dim, and we’re living in in the age of stupid smartness. Across the media landscape, professional megabrains pop up like big mushrooms.