The Real Problem With Dave Chappelle’s Transphobic Jokes

Anirudh Koul / CC BY-NC 2.0

The comedian’s new Netflix show has been the source of quite a lot of criticism for many reasons; the new president had a crash course in the workings of government thanks to his health care failure; meanwhile, two economists are delving into the reasons behind the rising mortality rates among middle-aged white Americans. These discoveries and more below.

What Is Dave Chappelle’s Problem With Gay People? It’s not just that the comedian’s Netflix specials are rife with homophobic and transphobic jokes. It’s that the jokes are bad.

Donald Trump and the Triumph of White Identity Politics The renowned historiographer E.H. Carr famously compared the historian with his facts to the fishmonger with fish on the slab; the historian collects the facts, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him.

Who Owns Your Face? It takes a feast of facial imagery to teach a machine how to recognize an individual person.

The Great Forgetting: Childhood Amnesia Our first three years are usually a blur and we don’t remember much before age seven. What are we hiding from ourselves?

Trump Gets Tamed by Washington The businessman president finds after the defeat of health care reform that legislating isn’t as easy as making real estate deals.

How a Republican Congressman Accidentally Disclosed a Secret Intelligence Debate On Monday, when the House Intelligence Committee held its first public hearing about Russian involvement in the U.S. Presidential election, Republican members were almost completely focussed on leaks.

One Question That Turns Courageous Journalists Into Cowards When I was verbally sexually harassed by a Trump supporter after an interview, that didn’t make my coverage. It wasn’t germane to the story I was writing. But it did make me think.

Magazines Find There’s Little Time to Fact-Check There’s a rumbling at the ground zero of journalistic fact-checking: Magazines are struggling to maintain in their online content the rigor historically applied to that practice in print.

The Problem With P-Values Academic psychology and medical testing are both dogged by unreliability. The reason is clear: we got probability wrong.

The Idea of Monogamy as a Relationship Ideal Is Based on Flawed Science Is monogamy actually better than non-monogamy?

In Fake Letter, ‘Dana Schutz’ Demands Removal of Controversial Painting from Whitney Biennial Several outlets recently published an open letter purportedly written by artist Dana Schutz and demanding that her painting “Open Casket” be removed from the Whitney Biennial.

President Trump Called My Cellphone to Say That the Health-Care Bill Was Dead President Trump called me on my cellphone last Friday afternoon at 3:31 p.m.

The Most Expensive Weapon Ever Built Israel is very proud of its machines.

The Inside Story on The Nation’s UN Report Calling Israel an Apartheid State A people cannot be permanently repressed in all these ways without viewing the structure that has emerged as an apartheid regime.

Suburban Sprawl Stole Your Kids’ Sleep Why does school start so early? Blame 1970s planning.

Is Economic Despair What’s Killing Middle-Aged White Americans? Two Princeton economists elaborate on their work exploring rising mortality rates among certain demographics.