Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: Joan Didion

  • New Year Musings

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ 2021 was dominated by Covid. But, competing for our attention has been the deepening and hardening of our political divisions, with Trumpers on one fringe, Social Justice lunatics on the other, and the bewildered, seemingly impotent majority of the country in between, wondering what the hell is going on and…

  • Politics and the Expression of the Adolescent Id

    I appeared on Aryeh-Cohen Wade’s “Culturally Determined” program, on BloggingHeads.TV, where we discussed my essay, “Adolescent Politics.” Along the way, we talked about Donald Trump, Joan Didion, and the impact of social media on politics.

  • Adolescent Politics

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ The sub-heading of the late-Christopher Hitchens’ book, God is Not Great, reads: “how religion poisons everything.”  Now, maybe that’s true and maybe it isn’t.  I really don’t know.  But one thing I do know is this: Politics poisons everything. And the reason it does is that we are not serious…

  • Brave New World, 1984, #MeToo, The New Journalism, and Paprikas Csirke

    by Daniel A. Kaufman A remarkable IQ2 debate between novelist Wil Self and New Yorker essayist, Adam Gopnik, on the relative merits of Brave New World and 1984 in understanding our current world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31CcclqEiZw&index=11&t=0s&list=FLQzxHWvrODrO9oA35PHXsIQ Interesting reflections on the #MeToo movement and the sexual revolution of the 1960’s and 70’s. https://www.city-journal.org/html/sexual-revolutions-angry-children-15827.html Two of the best documentaries…

  • Morality Everywhere?

    by Daniel A. Kaufman Lately, I’ve been having a certain kind of argument, over and over again.  I feel compelled to defend something that I really like – and which I would have thought it quite normal to like – against rather emphatic moral criticisms from various quarters.  Eating food, for instance (well, food that…

  • Generations and Journalism

    by Daniel A. Kaufman My discussion with Robert Wright on Joan Didion, The New Journalism, the Silent Generation, Generation X, and more. Originally aired on meaningoflife.tv, part of the bloggingheads.tv network, October 14. https://youtu.be/Bij2TNhopHk    

  • Nothing Applies

    by Daniel A. Kaufman Wetson’s was a Long Island hamburger chain that was established in 1959 to be a McDonald’s clone, in a market that McDonald’s and Burger King had yet to enter.  Once they did, in the early 1970’s, it wouldn’t be long before Wetson’s would go out of business, but at its peak,…