All posts tagged: think tank

Dad Culture Has Nothing To Do With Parenting

Dad Culture Has Nothing To Do With Parenting

Published by skeptic

Americans spend a fair amount of time describing things as “dad.” “Dad rock” is guitar-driven music, typically from the time of the Nixon or Ford administration, with bonus points for extended drum solos or albums that feature double-gatefold illustrations of imaginary planets. “Dadcore” is the art of clothing yourself without wasting any energy thinking about fashion. “Dad friends” are kindly and endearing, but not necessarily the most fun at parties. A “dad bod” is desirable but poised on the brink of middle-age sprawl. “Dad energy” involves being goofy and acting like a 40-something guy, whether or not you actually are a 40-something guy. “Dad jokes” are mostly terrible puns. These phrases all paint a picture of someone who is uncool, modestly embarrassing, and blissfully unconcerned with others’ judgments. But they have something else in common: They bear little relationship to the actual work of raising children. The mom descriptor typically gestures at being harried (classic “mom brain”) or nurturing (like a “mom friend”). Meanwhile, dad as an adjective hints at someone shorn of all responsibilities. …

America Is Missing Out on the Best Electric Cars

America Is Missing Out on the Best Electric Cars

Published by skeptic

To shop for an electric car right now is to encounter an embarrassment of riches. In the United States, almost every major automaker has its own EV model, if not several. You can get a Chevy Bolt or Nissan Leaf for less than $30,000, or a Porsche Taycan Turbo S for nearly $200,000. You can get an electric pickup truck from Ford, Tesla, or Rivian, a midsize five-seater from Hyundai or Kia or Volkswagen, or even unusual things like the new Cybertruck. There’s a lot, and it’s all pretty exciting. But you know what EV you can’t easily buy in the U.S.? A Changli Freeman, which at $1,200 is one of the cheapest cars in the world. As a professional car reviewer, I couldn’t travel to test-drive interesting cars during the early pandemic, so I did the next best thing: went to the website Alibaba, and bought a Changli. After I paid $2,000 for shipping and customs, the car arrived at my doorstep months later in a massive cardboard box. It barely looks like a …

The Power Network Behind Florida’s Power Couple

The Power Network Behind Florida’s Power Couple

Published by skeptic

The ugly news broke during the last week of November: A Florida woman alleged that the chair of the state Republican Party had raped her at her home. The assault had occurred after he and his wife had planned, according to police, to meet her for a three-way sexual rendezvous, as they had previously. These were stunning claims given the power couple involved: The GOP chair, Christian Ziegler, who has denied the assault and said the encounter was consensual, is a prominent state political consultant. His Republican-activist wife, Bridget Ziegler, is a founder of Moms for Liberty, the conservative political organization whose members have made school-board meetings partisan battlegrounds across America for the past two years. The allegations have sparked a fusillade of condemnations, complaints of hypocrisy, and “Moms for Libertines” jokes. But the situation has also provided a window into the machinations of the movement that helped make the Zieglers so significant in Republican politics—thanks especially to the rapid rise of Moms for Liberty as a national organization. Bridget Ziegler started Moms for Liberty …

Tell Me How This Ends

Tell Me How This Ends

Published by skeptic

In the year leading up to the invasion of Iraq, technocrats in Washington deployed their laptops and prepared for war. Their plans for the governing structures that would replace Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship filled bulging white papers, organizational flowcharts that spilled across thick binders, and dense memoranda for managing esoteric ministries. Israel is on the brink of testing a far different approach to regime change. Its leaders have announced a desire to dismantle the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip. Rather than entering battle with a carefully constructed blueprint for what might follow victory, though, they are winging it, improvising in the dazed aftermath of a devastating massacre that left its military and political leadership in a state of shame and confusion. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government announced its war aims before it had fully sketched out how it might effectively realize them. But the Israeli operation faces the same question that ultimately vexed the American project in Iraq: What comes next? Removing murderous Islamists from power solves one problem, but it creates another. Who will …

Richard Hanania and the Allure of Racist Pseudoscience

Richard Hanania and the Allure of Racist Pseudoscience

Published by skeptic

The pseudoscience of eugenics is making a comeback on the American right. In August, the HuffPost reporter Christopher Mathias unmasked the Substack writer and academic Richard Hanania as “Richard Hoste,” a pseudonym under which Hanania blogged for white-supremacist websites about the evils of “race mixing,” advocated for the sterilization of people with a “low IQ” and for the deportation of all “post-1965 non-White migrants from Latin America,” and declared that “women’s liberation = the end of human civilization.” He also wrote a tribute to Sarah Palin in 2009, gushing that her candidacy had made the “ugly, secular and barren White self-hating and Jewish elite absolutely mad.” (There’s a lot going on there.) “White nationalism,” Hanania wrote as “Hoste,” is “the only hope that part of what made the American nation great will survive somewhere.” Two days after Mathias’s story, Hanania responded, stating, “Over a decade ago I held many beliefs that, as my current writing makes clear, I now find repulsive.” He rejected Mathias’s characterization of his “creepy obsession with so-called race science” as “dishonest,” …