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7 Most Truthy NYT Columnists
Avidly’s North Carolina correspondent, Jedediah Purdy, discovered the magic of Facebook headline editing. Truthiness ensued. Jedediah Purdy: A way with rebar.
The Wide, Wide World Category
Perspectives on the political scene, public discourse, and matters of policy that are making the world around us.
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Saudade Soccer
Soccer isn’t my game. I never played as a child. In fact, I avoided soccer the way I avoided all sports that involved projectile objects: at all costs. In part because I know how much it belongs to other people, it makes me uncomfortable to claim any involvement in “the beautiful game.” And yet, in…
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How Football Counts
This weekend, the last weekend of the World Cup, it’s worth pausing to watch the world celebrate its favorite sport. In the midst of it, you may notice a particular kind of fan: the kind of sports fan that seems, really, to be a fan of numbers. For all their interest in the drama of the…
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Brazil’s Untergang
For commentators on TV networks around the world, human speech was truly a cracked tin kettle Tuesday; if they weren’t expressing their utter disbelief, they were just being silent, gaping at the nothingness of the unprecedented. They didn’t know what to say because they didn’t believe what they were seeing. Not that there was anything…
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Pop Politics
If I hum a few bars, you might begin to recall the tune. It goes like this. In August 1970, a warrant was issued for Angela Davis’s arrest. Two guns she’d legally owned and registered turned up in a courtroom shoot out a week before, and this disgraced philosophy professor, doubtful of getting a fair…
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“Like a Wedding”
A confession: I had never been to a gay wedding before my own. Another: a gay wedding turns out to be pretty much the same as a straight one. That realisation didn’t come as a total surprise, but it did come with another, one more visceral and unexpected. Namely, that the struggle for same-sex marriage…
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Isla Vista: Two Essays
In the wake of the recent shootings, Avidly offers two essays about the challenge of reading Isla Vista: “The Mein Kampf of Isla Vista” by Kirsten Silva Gruesz “Guns ‘n’ Rakes” by Jonathan Beecher Field ¤ The Mein Kampf of Isla Vista By Kirsten Silva Gruesz I couldn’t watch the Santa Barbara shooter’s videos, but…
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Moral Mondays, Paper Planes, and the Pursuit of Happiness
I watched streaming video of the Moral Monday protests in Raleigh, North Carolina, for several weeks in 2013 before I attended one. You see, my skin is brown, my last name contains a Spanish diacritical mark, and I’d been unemployed for seven months. I felt too vulnerable for protesting, especially the sort that might land…