Pun Salad

The author, Nellie Bowles, is a journalist currently working at the Free Press, an online samizdat site run by her wife, Bari Weiss. Both Ms. Bowles and Ms. Weiss previously worked for the New York Times.

This book is a collection of essays ("dispatches") that recall good old Tom Wolfe writing about "Radical Chic" in the 1970s. It's all very journalistic, but—really—the attitude is clear: she's trying to keep a straight face while reporting on the antics and delusions of … well, for lack of a better word, let's say: the woke. Sometimes her straight face is covering up amusement. Sometimes disgust. Sometimes even despair. Outrage, perhaps? Just guessing, of course. But what's the appropriate emotion when an editor you work with says of your lover: "She's a Nazi. She's a fucking Nazi, Nellie."

Ms. Bowles also reports on how Johns Hopkins University just last year defined "lesbian" as a "non-man attracted to non-men." It's a real stride for feminism, isn't it, that "a woman" must now be defined in terms of what she's not: a man.

I think she's mainly amused here.

Her essays range over Antifa; Black Lives Matter; antiracist and transgender ideology; the "autonomous zones" that were set up in Minneapolis and Seattle for a time; the (literal) enshittification of San Francisco; and more. As an example of her straight-face reporting:

A couple of years ago, one of my friends saw a man staggering down the street, bleeding. She recognized him as someone who regularly slept outside in the neighborhood, and called 911. Paramedics and police arrived and began treating him, but members of a homeless advocacy group noticed and intervened. They told the man that he didn't have to get into the ambulance, that he had the right to refuse treatment. So that's what he did. The paramedics left, the activists left. The man sat on the sidewalk alone, still bleeding. A few months later, he died about a block away.

I'm pretty libertarian on drug use, but Ms. Bowles knocked me a couple notches back toward conservatism here.