A Gilded Planet

Charles Murray is a white supremacist who built his academic career on pseudoscience claiming to prove that black people are intellectually inferior. His kind - the reactionary pedant - was best described last year by Rick Perlstein. For some reason, PBS found it worthwhile to publish a truly idiotic BuzzFeed-style quiz developed by Murray : Do you live in a bubble?  There exists a new upper class that’s completely disconnected from the average white American and American culture at large , argues Charles Murray, a libertarian political scientist and author. Take this 25-question quiz, based on a similar one published in Murray’s 2012 book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010,” to find out just how thick your bubble is. Well, how about it? Are you disconnected from the average white American and American culture at large? Slippery professional bigots like Murray get away with this kind of chicanery all the time. Murray has hoodwinked PBS into merging t...

What makes blood shine in the sunlight? I write of the poisons first in my life, then in my poetry, last in my computer. I wrote about ingrown hairs and diamonds before. I got paid for that. Everything that pays is false. Poison is the only truth. I developed magpie behaviors at some point in my life, maybe back when I used to pace around the pool for hours on end. I always liked walking. It’s a healthful activity. It’s medicine. Too much of it is poison, and that’s how I cooked my brain. I’ll steal a metaphor from here, a stylish phrasing from there. Add it all up and it’s some stroke of genius. It takes a genius to go to war and a fool to make peace. A rambling weird piece of nonsense is just what the doctor ordered. She ordered it from room service and took a nap, only waking when the knocking outside her door grew desperate. A doctor knows something about poisons. Place the pellet under the tongue and let it dissolve. I try to assemble thoughts and everything falls apart. They rac...