I think that there’s a very interesting and dangerous game being played with student loans. No, not the fancily-worded indenture agreements that some schools are talking about. This is a game of brinkmanship being played at the highest level.
Read MoreCall it the participation trophy problem, after those little totems of insecurity that older people like to bring up – forgetting that they’re the ones who spent money on those trophies and no one my age cares about any of the participation trophies they received: because if everyone got one, that means that they don’t matter. We don’t feel that we earned them, we feel that none of them actually signify anything, and so praise is fake.
Read MoreSo that happened. By “that” I mean an attempted coup happened – it occurred as I was putting together a slate of book reviews, and honestly I didn’t have the bandwidth to really do anything about it.
Read MoreOne thing that I feel explains not only a great deal of why so many well-meaning young people fail to grasp the nature of the world around them, but also why so much American political discourse is utterly useless: Americans simply cannot do anything like a materialist analysis of current events.
Read MoreThe Republicans are playing a different game. Their game, charitably, is whatever game Lucy was playing in Peanuts where she yanks the football out of the way at the last moment. Or at least it was. I think Susan Collins still thinks that’s the game they’re playing. Their game has transitioned over to the cruel “game” of pulling the wings off flies.
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