I recently re-read Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, and now every time a reactionary Silicon Valley billionaire opens his mouth, I think about it. So I wrote about it for The Nation. Here's the column: On Instagram, there’s an activist named Brian Patrick (@pano.

The NYT asked me if I had any thoughts about the discourse around Lindy West's new memoir, and her throuple and whether you can be a feminist and maybe be married to a shitty guy. Because I reliably have opinions on everything, I said yes, and they are

Every now and then I get asked to explain how I ended up with the career I have, and it’s been happening a lot lately, so I thought I’d write it up. (The more general and frequent inquiries come from students, and the more specific ones from other

Alternative titles: PERLs Gone Wild, Bots Behaving Badly, Rage Incensed the Machine I wrote a column for The New York Times about agentic AI and a bot that wrote a hit piece about an engineer who rejected his code. The text is below, with some annotations I'm adding

One of my ongoing frustrations of our culture's veneration of capitalistic success is that it causes people to ascribe positive qualities to rich people that they may or may not have--intelligence and competence, in particular. I wrote about evidence of this in the Epstein files for The Nation,

I've added some new dates for opinion writing, personal essay, and creative/writing practice workshops. The schedule is below, and I hope to see you in one of them! WINTER/SPRING 2026 WORKSHOP SCHEDULE AND REGISTRATION OPINION WRITING Opinion Writing | Tuesday, February 10, 2026 | 3:00 pm -

Doing it for JournalismTM Some brave journalists go to war zones and get shot at. I went to the Melania "documentary" for The Nation. Here's the column: Melania at the Multiplex Packaging a $75 million bribe from Jeff Bezos as a vapid, content-challenged biopic. by Elizabeth

This is not about "Spheres of Influence" Pundits and talking heads who insinuate that what Trump just did in Venezuela (or what he wants to do in Greenland or Nicaragua or Cuba) is part of some larger coherent foreign policy strategy as if he and his toadies are

Why Must She Stoop So Low? [Ed. note: Almost went with "why does your network blow?" but no one under the age of 40 uses "blow" in that sense anymore.] Happy New Year! We have somehow made it to 2026 without being annihilated in a nuclear