Yearly Archives: 2014

For Politico, I wrote about how the portrayal of female political leaders in media, noting that the coverage of mainstream outlets is little different from the preening profiles of fashion magazines. An excerpt: In 1963, Look magazine published a series of photos of President John F. … Continue reading →

My latest for Al Jazeera English is on the fall of the American mall: The mall has long been derided by those with the luxury of an alternative. When the US industrial economy faltered in the 1970s, downtowns in many … Continue reading →

I have a new article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on parenthood and PhDs: It is no surprise that an academic culture that infantilizes does not welcome infants. In academia, pregnancy is often presented as a series of cautionary tales (dropout … Continue reading →

Update: This is an update to a post I wrote on June 7, 2014. That post is the only public statement I have ever made on “Jacobinghazi”, which is a flippant term men coined to refer to the months I was bombarded with rape … Continue reading →

My latest for Al Jazeera English is on gentrification: Gentrifiers focus on aesthetics, not people. Because people, to them, are aesthetics. Proponents of gentrification will vouch for its benevolence by noting it “cleaned up the neighbourhood”. This is often code … Continue reading →

For Al Jazeera English, I bravely reread David Brooks’ 2000 scifi masterpiece, Bobos in Paradise, and extracted a few lessons for the modern era: According to Brooks, baby boomers had surmounted class and ethnic barriers through the accumulation of credentials. … Continue reading →

Some of you have been wondering why I’ve been writing for Al Jazeera and other outlets with less frequency. The answer is my in-depth article on the fast food workers of St. Louis, “The Minimum Wage Worker Strikes Back”. An excerpt: … Continue reading →

I have a new article for Al Jazeera English on the dearth of women in U.S. foreign policy. I was originally asked to write about this for Foreign Policy, who instead last week published a piece asking where the women … Continue reading →

My first article for Politico is on “disaster porn”, with Ukraine coverage as a key example: The Kyiv protests were also starting to look like clickbait. By the end of the day on Wednesday, Business Insider, Talking Points Memo, Buzzfeed and Mashable had all published their … Continue reading →

From my latest for Chronicle of Higher Education Vitae: In his recent State of the Union address, President Obama announced his intent to make college affordable. “We’re shaking up our system of higher education to give parents more information and … Continue reading →