I was thrilled to read this review of The Cancel Culture Panic in The New Republic — as a wonderful bonus it’s by Samuel Catlin, whose absolutely brilliant essay from last spring ( “The Campus Does Not Exist” ) I’ve been praising to everyone and anyone who’ll listen!
I got to join the indomitable and brilliant Abby Kluchin and Pat Blanchfield on their wonderful podcast Ordinary Unhappiness . As a longtime fan of their podcast, I was thrilled to get to talk about my book, about academic life and about generational narcissism — one of the favorite interviews I’ve done for The Cancel Culture Panic .
Angie Coiro hosts “Book It” on KALW radio, and was kind enough to invite me to talk to me about The Cancel Culture Panic . KALW aired a shortened version of the interview during their morning news, and this long version later. Check out either or both of them, if you’d like!
The Pennsylvania Gazette is UPenn’s alumni magazine. In their latest issue, they published an excerpt from The Cancel Culture Panic — so even if you’re neither a Penn alumn nor a frequent reader of The Pennsylvania Gazette , this is your chance to read a part of the book and decide whether you might want to buy , read and review the whole thing!
… and there’s video of it , courtesy of Peter Maravelis and the lovely folks over at the Bookstore! The reason we’re both shouting like crazy is that there was a punk band playing in Jack Kerouac Alley directly behind us. You can’t hear it on the tape, fortunately — but you can hear us trying to make ourselves understood over it.
My next (solo) book will be about cars. About the violence they enact and the violence they teach us to shruggingly accept. It is about the history of our vast carelessness about vehicular death. Sarah Marshall (of You’re Wrong About fame) and Alex Steed invited me onto their podcast You Are Good to talk about the original killer car from hell: Steven King’s (and John Carpenter’s) Christine ! If…
I’ve long admired Amanda Marcotte’s reporting and essays, so imagine my excitement when she reached out to do an interview about The Cancel Culture Panic ! The interview was great, and went up on Salon.com just today — check it out !
I’m beyond excited to finally get to share this book with anglophone readers! The Cancel Culture Panic is now out from Stanford University Press — buy it wherever you get your books!
“Made by History” is a brilliant series over at TIME, which delves into the pre-history of our current debates. I wrote about how Americans came to be fixated on what happens on college campuses — and how maybe it’s not actually a very good thing that they are. You can check out the piece here .
I have been a huge fan of “You’re Wrong About” from the beginning, so it was an absolute treat to get to be a guest on the podcast! And I have been a huge fan of Dungeons&Dragons since the late 80s, so it was a particular blast to get to talk about that game, and the bizarre moral panic it precipitated in the late 70s and 80s! Check out the episode here !
Writers don’t write their titles, and this one is thanks to the amazing editors over at n+1 . It caused some consternation online when the piece went up, but I think their framing is right. Mainstream Germany’s solidarity with Jewish Germans, and with Israel post 10/7 isn’t very much about Israel — it is about their own projection, complexes and identities. Hence: Psychozionism .
Prof. Bodie Ashton put together this lovely volume on The Pet Shop Boys and the Political — I got to write about a few of my obsessions for it. Queerness, choruses, disco and community. If you’re a PSB fan, check it out!
The Cultural History of Western Music is a massive undertaking and not exactly a cheap set of books. Each of the series’ six volumes returns to the same keywords and investigates them for a different period. I got to write about Popular Culture for Vol. 5 (“The Industrial Age”), edited by Alexander Rehding and Naomi Waltham-Smith. It’s a piece I’m immensely proud of and one that allowed me to…
For weeks now, large-scale protests against the far right, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and the rightward drift in politics more generally have roiled German cities big and small. I wrote about these protests, why they give me hope and where they give me pause for the New Statesman . You have to register to read the piece , but I believe signing up is free.
The incredible Prof. Anita Hill came to the Clayman Institute in late January for three days of talks, workshops and one big lecture and Q&A — and I got to do the Q&A. The video of the event will be available on YouTube for a few months, but will eventually be taken down. Check it out while you can!
I have made no secret about my feelings about Chris Rufo — but in this essay for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung I got to explain his methods and why they succeed in spite of him being perfectly explicit about the fact that his aim is media manipulation…
I’ve been to Harvard about a half-dozen times in my life and it seems … perfectly nice. The New York Times seems to love going to the same campus — in December 2023 and January 2024 they seem to have sent several of their reporters there full-time just to spin whatever students, faculty, donors or the president said into front page news. I got to dissect and analyze that campaign (in German) for…
“It depends” — two little words, uttered by three university presidents, that seem to have given rise to about a whole month of discourse. Much of it tired, rote and uninformed. For Die Presse I got to delve a little bit into the 4 hours of testimony, why “it depends” is both an unsatisfactory and the only possible answer the presidents could have given — and why it’s conservative politicians like…
The British literary magazine Grant has put together an absolutely exceptional issue on German culture and politics — featuring Jürgen Habermas, Leif Randt, Lauren Oyler, Yoko Tawada, and many, many more. My essay “Auto Mind” — about the peculiar German relationship to the automobile and the industry that makes it — is free to access on the web now (it’ll be behind a paywall intermittently) here .
Vienna’s Angewandte Universität convened a large conference on “The Radical University”, and I was invited to speak about US universities: what creates the widespread perception that they are “hotbeds of radicalism”, and what in fact keeps them from being truly radical. One of the fun things about the volume is that it doesn’t just print the keynote texts, but also the Q&A — which means you get to…