the virtually lost art of ethnographic participant-observation

The model of opinion writing is no longer the essay form as perfected by, say, Perry Anderson, but the data-visualization chart as perfected by Nate Silver. There are still grammatically complete sentences grafted on to the data, but there is no reason to expect that these will hang on for long, as the process of transition from thinking to data-mo... See more

If you think of language primarily as the vehicle by which to sharpen your consciousness of the debt you bear to your language-shaping ancestors, then being told what you can and cannot say is, if I may speak just this once in the manner of my contemporaries, “literal violence”.