Chris Braak's Blog, page 3
August 20, 2015
Ladies, Beware! George Carlin Can See Your Banana!
I’ve been watching Louis CK’s show on Netflix, because I don’t want to get sucked into something and my limit on Louie is about two episodes. I can’t binge on it for exactly the same reason can’t binge on Tequila: I usually know it’s too much before I actually start to get sick. If you’re […]
August 18, 2015
War Games
“Your grandparents were so lucky,” the bigger boy said to me at play time. “They didn’t have to live through the Depression like mine did.” He fiddled with the toy train. I thought of my grandparents’ stories of civil war, of street vendoring for pennies a day. But my foreign-born shame followed my family’s bloodline […]
Prima Facie
Yo, I was at a party and like this woman came up and said ‘now don’t be offended’, and I guess that should’ve been as loud a herald as those trumpeters announcing guests, except her herald was announcing, TOOT TOOT Something Offensive This Way Comes (But Don’t Complain About It When It Does), and then […]
August 14, 2015
My Missed Education
It is 1999, and Debra Ann Byrd wants to talk to me. We’re on a break from rehearsal of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, which I am directing. We go into an empty classroom and sit down in two ancient institutional metal desk-chairs. She looks […]
August 12, 2015
Bernie, Interrupted – About Black Lives Matter and Senator Sanders
Protest is a movement, and it has to be judged as a movement. Like it or not, perfectly executed or not, the Black Lives Matter protesters have directly influenced a shift in platform and in personnel within the campaigns of both Seantor Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders. Yes, protesters who may or may not […]
August 10, 2015
David Brooks: Threat or Menace? The Next Culture War
(I guess I am going to keep doing these.) Friends, this week’s David Brooks column is…a little bizarre. I don’t completely know what to make of it. It’s definitely about Christian homophobes, and how they need to conduct themselves in the new, slightly-less-homophobic America that the Supreme Court has gay-married us all into, and I […]
August 7, 2015
Polls and the Polling Pollsters Who Poll Them
Polls and the Polling Pollsters Who Poll Them Hey, you! Stop believing polls. Stop it! Stop using them to argue for your candidate or against another. Stop using them to create underdog narratives about a candidate getting 20% of the vote, or stories about an insurmountable lead by a candidate getting 20% of the vote. […]
August 5, 2015
There, There, White Guy: Advice for the World to Come
White guy, what has happened to common courtesy? If there’s one thing Americans have always respected, it’s authority. But suddenly, it’s OK to mouth off to the cops? And I seem to remember a time when you could engage in an honest debate in this country without the thought police banging down your door and […]
August 3, 2015
Threat Quality Retrospective
SO! Inspired by that one nerd who keeps turning up in the comments to call me a taste fascist and imply that I’m insufficiently respectful of the opinions of Jonathon Chait and Joss Whedon, I have been looking back at and doing some thinking about Threat Quality and about the writing that I’ve done here […]
July 27, 2015
David Brooks: Threat or Menace? On the Minimum Wage
(I’ve decided to continue with this series, “David Brooks: Threat or Menace?” which was previously called “David Brooks: Hero or Menace?” because I had misremembered a joke about Spider-Man.) This week isn’t quite as exciting as last week’s; we’re probably never going to get quite the staggering constellation of “white-guy cluelessness” and “fantasy worlds in […]
