Tarpley Hitt
A Nicely Situated Ideal | On the Public Sphere
Edward Ongweso Jr, Ege Yumuşak, Erik Baker, Ismail Ibrahim, Megan Marz, Noelle Bodick, Sam Adler-Bell, Sarah Brouillette, Tarpley Hitt
When the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas died in mid-March, the contentious debates about his ideas and influence that had stalked his career reappeared in posthumous assessments. Some recognized Habermas’s role in keeping Frankfurt School critical theory alive and defending the values of “democratically organized social life,” as Matt McManus wrote in Jacobin, against reactionaries. Others condemned Habermas’s own rightward drift, especially his “long history of being deliberately unquestioning of Israel,”...
A Surrender to Market Forces
Tarpley Hitt
Toward the end of the eighth season of Murphy Brown, the 1990s CBS sitcom about a broadcast journalist at a 60 Minutes-like TV magazine, the titular news anchor runs into real-life Newt Gingrich. Brown, played by Candice Bergen, has been hosting the “Press-capades,” a dinner where members of the media lightly roast their audience of politicians. She is dressed as Hillary Clinton, having just wrapped up a skit in which...
RIP Good Times | On the Future of Big Tech
Annie Rauwerda, Ben Tarnoff, David Adler, David Ethan Jones-Krause, Jane Chung, Jeannette Estruth, Jordan Coley, JS Tan, Lora Kelley, Sophie Haigney, Tarpley Hitt
The trouble in Silicon Valley goes far beyond the tumult at Twitter and the implosion of FTX; in the sixteen months since Facebook rebranded as Meta, the company has shed thousands of employees, including 11,000 in a single round of layoffs, and has extended its hiring freeze. Across DoorDash, Stripe, Lyft, Salesforce, and other companies, more than 150,000 tech workers lost their jobs in 2022 alone, and stocks have taken...
Back in the Doomsday Spirit
Tarpley Hitt
There are a couple of anecdotes that routinely come up in media coverage of Sequoia Capital, the V.C. firm now notorious for investing and then losing $150 million in the crypto exchange FTX. A recent one is Sequoia’s assurance that its partners had run a “rigorous diligence process” on the failed platform. Another is the fact that Sequoia deleted a fawning, 14,000-word profile of FTX’s founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, from its...
America’s Son | Who’s Afraid of Hunter Biden?
Tarpley Hitt
It is easy to discount most new entries in the canon of conservative cinema, on account of the fact that they tend to be bad. By conservative cinema I mean overtly partisan agitprop, not the Clint Eastwood kind, and by bad I mean their dialogue is sermonic, their symbolism is obvious, their edits waffle between awkward and uncanny, and their casts represent a collection of Hollywood afterthoughts who ascribe their...
