Peter Coviello used to be the chair of the Africana studies department at Bowdoin College. That’s why, when Bowdoin alum and Africana studies major Zohran Mamdani was running for mayor of New York City, Coviello started getting messages from journalists:

Beneath its humdrum requests, every email said more or less the same thing: Can you explain how reading certain things can turn a person into a socialist—and, possibly, a terrorist-sympathizing antisemite? It’s a storied gambit of the right at its most grimly predictable. “People read Foucault,” the redoubtable David Brooks once wrote, in an actual column that I’ve all but committed to memory, “and develop an alienated view of the world.” God, did I love this. An “alienated view of the world”! Not by, like, trying to pay rent or having an insurance claim denied—no, no, it was probably the Foucault you read in 2003. Anyway, it was clearly time to get the elaborate machinery of manufactured bewilderment and sour indignation up and running again.

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“After Stanford physician Bryant Lin was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, he invited students to follow along.”

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“Learning that one’s job might soon be eliminated by the emergence of an overhyped new technology puts one in good company.”