Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Even though Bad Subjects is usually full of grad-student wankery, I…
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2002 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
Even though Bad Subjects is usually full of grad-student wankery, I still read it. Case in point: it's fun to skim such a perfect embodiment of the genre, especially when it's queer theory being applied to "why the life of a teaching assistant stinks".
On the other hand, sometimes Bad Subjects gives you a useful introduction to some fun contrarian.
As long as I'm pointing you to cute culture analysis, I'll quote from an instance of Michael Kinsley's brand of astonished common sense:
America is not, as it sometimes seems, a society lurching from one acute social crisis to the next. It is a basically healthy society with lots of chronic problems that exist simultaneously, can and should be ameliorated, but will never go away.
And Leonard is right. Read the NYT article on the revolutionary entrepreneur Farsi satellite TV station. The last page is hilarious -- P.G. Wodehouse for the twenty-first century.
