Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 →

Why does the US media portray foreign Twitter activism as empowering but black Twitter activism as “toxic”? My latest for Al Jazeera English takes on — among other things — the Nation article on the alleged hazards of Twitter: Social … Continue reading →

My thanks to Matthew Clayfield for this profile of me and my work in the Australian news website Crikey. An excerpt: Since the op-ed columnist and self-described “recovering academic” began publishing opinion pieces on the news channel’s English-language website nearly two years … Continue reading →

For the Chronicle of Higher Education, I debunked the myth that publishing in academic journals will get you a job, and encouraged scholars to take a broader perspective to research and writing: Most scholars hesitate to take this approach even … Continue reading →

I took a couple of weeks off to recover from surgery, but I’m back with a new article at Al Jazeera English on how the mainstream media is really the fringe: The terms of public debate are rarely set by … Continue reading →

From my latest, Expensive cities are killing creativity: New York – and San Francisco, London, Paris and other cities where cost of living has skyrocketed – are no longer places where you go to be someone. They are places you … Continue reading →