There’s the internet, and it’s certainly all too real. But there’s also three-dimensional life. No matter who you think is “good” or “bad” on here, go outside with your kids or your parents and enjoy your only fleeting time here 🫶🏽
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Thomas Chatterton Williams
@thomaschattwill
Writer: . Faculty: . Trustee: . Fellow: , . Representation: , Wylie. Next book 
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Even got some candid footage at the bar at the Hilton of me hopefully not trying to mansplain something to the truly great 😩
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I love this— turned a conference at Cambridge with , , and among others into a beautiful music video for his new single:
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Have already seen capitalism used extremely stupidly on here four times today. The rate is only accelerating.
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What extraordinary dignity, bravery, resilience
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The photo in @NewYorker is dramatic and powerful but this, more prosaically, is what I actually look like. 
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Also, what about those nights a man or a woman just wants to stay out after a long day of work?
There is more to life than mere domesticity, even domestic bliss, as lovely as that is.
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Many men are thrilled to have someone thriving in her own work and social world who might not have time to make dinner but who will book (or ask you to book) a babysitter and meet her at a restaurant––also, plenty of men love to cook for their family or order takeout.
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All a man wants is to come home from a long day at work to a grateful wife and children who are glad to see him, and dinner cooking on the stove. This is literally all it takes to make a man happy. We are simple. Give us this and you will have given us nearly everything we need.
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I fail to live up to this ideal all the time, but that was my motivation in writing this piece, and I’m grateful to the people who read it before commenting
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So much of the debate today is hampered by people being married to their solutions, defining themselves in relation to them. But any durable solution has to revolve around integrating even your opponents’ real and hard-earned insights into the equation if they are true or useful
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A friend reminded me of a directive at Apple that prevailed for a long time: fall in love with the problem, not the solution. This meant not being precious about one’s ideas and discarding them when they no longer suited the goal.
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Such skepticism is difficult for people invested in both “woke” and “anti-woke” ideologies to embrace
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The key to healthy and sustainable social progress is understanding to what extent a potentially useful idea can be pursued before tipping over into self-defeating extremism.
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I enjoyed speaking to for this useful piece in on identity politics - à la française 🇫🇷.
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In France, @thomaschattwill has seen how a vehement rejection of identity politics can become a dogmatism as rigid as what it opposes:
on.theatln.tc/hb0MrLF
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One does not need to agree upon everything but this nuanced , interesting piece helps you think the French debate better. Read it.
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There is a special place in hell for people who don't read the linked article, but storm into the replies anyway.
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Read on failed approaches to identity/difference "America and France are simultaneously becoming weaker, less capable, each undermined by growing internal divisions—the one by overemphasizing them, the other by denying them altogether"
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Let’s put some respek on Camus’s name!
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Now. Philosophers. Tell me please (and this is so important etc) - who was the most attractive philosopher? (let’s keep it to the deceased so as not to make living philosophers feel bad because no one made the list apart from Martha Nussbaum). I’m going with this guy.
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Read the thread, and the article
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I remain convinced that an authentically color-blind society—one that recognizes histories of difference but refuses to fetishize or reproduce them—is the destination we must aim for. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi
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Excellent on "le wokisme." I have a feeling that a lot of the critics I saw today didn't actually read his nuanced piece that connects France's understandable concerns about violent Islamic extremists with the American import of wokeness.
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In France, has seen how a vehement rejection of identity politics can become a dogmatism as rigid as what it opposes:
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I don't see what the issue is here. Everyone in this scenario is simply deciding for themselves what they're comfortable with.
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If you have family or friends who refused to see you because you were unvaccinated, will you ever forgive them?
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OK, it's actually really funny how many of the NYM etiquette rules have to do with famous people: having famous friends, meeting famous people, talking and posting about famous people. I counted: 11 of the rules concern this, in whole or in part. About 7 percent of the list.
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“America and France are each being undermined by internal divisions—one by overemphasizing them, the other by denying them.”
Long(ish) read, but had me hanging on every word.
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I remain convinced that an authentically color-blind society—one that recognizes histories of difference but refuses to fetishize or reproduce them—is the destination we must aim for. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi
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In France, has seen how a vehement rejection of identity politics can become a dogmatism as rigid as what it opposes:
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A riff on the apocryphal Winston Churchill quip about liberal ideology describes the challenge aptly: You have no head if you wholly embrace “wokeness” (e.g. Robin D’Angelo), but if you categorically reject it, you have no heart (e.g. Chris Rufo).
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Either we achieve genuine universalism or we destroy ourselves as a consequence of our mutual resentment and suspicion.
The question, then, is not how to stamp out these impulses, but how to channel them responsibly, while refusing to succumb to the myopia of group identity.
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I remain convinced that an authentically color-blind society—one that recognizes histories of difference but refuses to fetishize or reproduce them—is the destination we must aim for.
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"wokeness is philosophically incoherent—trying to end racism by elevating race—......Worst of all, it smacks of determinism, trapping the present in a never-ending past that steals the innocence from any collective future."
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I've got a new essay on the phenomenon of "wokeness" in this month's @TheAtlantic. It has been revelatory for me to see the ways U.S. culture and institutions changed after the summer of 2020, and how that transformation has reverberated internationally.
theatlantic.com/magazine/archi
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Blaise Pascal was a heterodox centrist: “a man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once.”
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It would be a mistake for either culture to remake itself entirely in the image of the other. The future belongs to the multiethnic society that finds a way to synthesize them.
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Yet in practice, the exhausting and sometimes disingenuous American reflex to interpret social life through imperfect notions of identity nonetheless manages to perceive real experiences that otherwise get dismissed and, when suppressed long enough, put us all in peril.
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In principle, it is hard to deny the superiority of the French model of universal citizenship—liberté, égalité, fraternité.
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Many of the debates there take place as if in a parallel universe, eerily familiar but with several illuminating differences. They are a useful prism for contemplating the excesses and limitations, as well as the merits, of the social-justice fervor that has gripped the U.S.
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But living in France these past few years caused me to appreciate more keenly just how easily anti-wokeness can succumb to a dogmatism as rigid as the one it seeks to oppose.
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I worked on this for a year. I know it will frustrate people in France with whom I largely agree, as well as people in the U.S. on both sides of the debate.
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I've got a new essay on the phenomenon of "wokeness" in this month's . It has been revelatory for me to see the ways U.S. culture and institutions changed after the summer of 2020, and how that transformation has reverberated internationally.
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This is not even accurate with wind chill
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It’s so cold out right now on the east coast, I almost can’t believe it.
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This remix is actually amazing
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No—The Atlantic is a magazine with a genuinely viewpoint-diverse roster of writers.
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