Category: Uncategorized

The initial frenzy about critical race theory in schools seems to be giving way to a much more legible fight about what is taught in high school American history classes (Douthat, Snyder). This evolution makes sense as critical race theory — an area of legal and philosophical scholarship that excavates and then debates the relevance… Continue reading Why Care About History Class?

Conservative hucksters have recently seized upon something called “critical race theory” (CRT) and started acting like it is permeating itself through the cultural reproduction sectors — education, media, and entertainment. They then make calls to protect these sectors from CRT, which provides another wedge issue for especially state and local elected officials to run on.… Continue reading Critical Race Theory

Over at Slow Boring, Matt Yglesias has a piece arguing that Amazon is not a monopoly and that a lot of what passes for anti-monopoly discourse is actually anti-bigness discourse. I agree with Yglesias on this point. Not all anti-monopoly advocates are motivated by anti-bigness per se, but many of them are, and this can… Continue reading The Anti-Bigness Ideology

Last month, David Dayen set off a discussion about music in the age of streaming. Most of Dayen’s piece was about the economics of it all, but he also found space to lament the cultural effect of the shift towards these buffet-style music services. Perhaps most distressing of all, Spotify has changed how we listen to music,… Continue reading What Is Lost in Post-Scarcity?

Netflix is currently streaming The Last Blockbuster, a movie about the rise and fall of the monopoly video rental giant. There are a lot of interesting tidbits in the movie, including a former executive explaining that the company did not really get caught flat-footed by services like Netflix but was instead just financially mismanaged to the… Continue reading The Communal Feeling of Monopoly