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[sebastian_dangerfield]

Coates, undeniably, is a star, whatever you think of his writing. He won the National Book Award and a MacArthur genius grant, and his books sell and get critical acclaim.

Is there an emoji for "mimicking handjob in the air"? If credentials from the politicized academe count for anything, whatever that is and a few bucks should pay for a nice subway ride. Bob Dylan has my proxy on how to respond to an accolade. If that reference misses, look up his response to the Nobel Prize.

He also writes for Marvel Comics, and seems to be working on TV and film projects.

He writes a Black Panther series. That is pretty cool. But again, getting Hollywood to pay you in a moment where you're a darling of the left ain't terribly hard. The people who buy and develop scripts are not geniuses, and they are not well read, but the majority of them are incredibly herd-like. Coates is a home run for Marvel. The film execs converting the material to movies get to wax about how they've got the Atlantic's critical race scholar in-house. (None of them know wtf that means, but they can say it between bites of salad at lunch meetings and sound like they're enlightened.)

I was joking about Hollywood wokeness with a friend in the business at a film festival in the spring. One comment made to me was, "a handicapped lesbian writer is probably more important than the quality of the script."

I've negotiated sales of scripts. Kill me. The people in that industry are as deep as bird baths.

He has the sort of crossover appeal that reflects that publishers want him writing for them because he's a draw. I personally have not read any of his books, so I can't speak to them, but it's clear that he has been very successful lately.

Agreed. And he probably has a great agent. It's all about the network. Ibram Kendi's agent is probably trying to compete in the space right now. Do you have any doubt - even a single one - that agents are saying things like, "get some woke writers to put on this project" and "we're going to make a bundle on this series/movie/show riding the 'woke capitalism' wave"?

Whatever you think of him or Sullivan, it's pretty obvious that their relative status has flip-flopped dramatically in the last fifteen years.

Sullivan has no place to go because there can only be one David Brooks. He's got no place to hang his hat except dying magazines.

I decline your invitation to compare and contrast the work of Taibbi, Sullivan and Coates, not least because it has nothing to do with what I was talking about.

Fair enough.

OK. Either way, your "bury the hatchet" point was totally obtuse.

It was ironic. You're tone deaf.

eta: Obviously, I posted the quotes from Sullivan and Coates because of the exchange we had about Sullivan a few days ago. I guess you're bored by things that don't match your priors.

Yeah, I know the point was Sullivan is controversial. But where that fails is your proof of that being Coates, who is an unreliable source. You don't ask the man who has a hammer-and-nail view of the world, where the problem with everything is racism which must be assailed, if someone is a racist. Of course Sullivan is a racist. So is every living thing with which Coates comes into contact.

But here's some really fun stuff: https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...le-cornel-west

That's Colonel West blasting Coates, calling him a neoliberal anti-racist who ignores the intersectional interplay of class and race and instead assesses race in a vacuum, alone, because he doesn't want to get into the concurrent class issues. Why? Because to assess those issues along with race might put Coates at odds with the well-heeled members of academe and the woke capitalists who pay for his home in Paris.