Tommy Craggs
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tcraggs22.bsky.social
Tommy Craggs
@tcraggs22.bsky.social
8.8K followers 980 following 35 posts
Writer and editor. Late of "Game Theory With Bomani Jones" on HBO, Mother Jones (no relation), HuffPost, Slate, Gawker Media, Deadspin, etc. Subscribe to @flaminghydra.com. Email: [email protected].
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tcraggs22.bsky.social
The mom in question:
A very 1980s tableau in which a little kid in a Superman shirt is standing on the lawn of a small house he could never dream of affording as an adult, next to a woman in a cream-colored knee-length dress, belted with cap sleeves, who will never tire of asking him when he's finally going to write a book. They appear happy.
October 22, 2025 at 6:01 PM
tcraggs22.bsky.social
A screenshot from the article that reads: "The idea of full employment has been too long in the hands of the technocrats for any of the old cultural feeling to endure. White paper by white paper, the country’s Poindexters have defined full employment down to the point that it is now understood as a statistical benchmark of acceptable immiseration, some unemployment being necessary, so they say, to the long, twilight struggle against inflation. But true full employment always meant just that: no involuntary unemployment. Everyone has a job, and there is a job for everyone. And the Squad Assembles movies, even the bad ones, are some of the last remaining cultural expressions of that ideal. They are a dream of ~everyone fits somewhere~, costarring Ludacris."
June 12, 2025 at 2:27 PM
tcraggs22.bsky.social
The call on the field is that the totality was incompletely grasped before hitting the ground
"It’d be a mistake to dismiss the conspiracy business altogether. Since we’re all so freely handing out theories these days, here’s one for you: Far from the misfiring of irrational minds, the conspiracy thinking of sports fans is serious stuff, even rational. It’s a kind of layperson’s structural analysis—an earnest effort by regular folks to grasp the ever more recondite workings of the leagues they love to watch. They may not always be right in the particulars, but neither are they wrong, exactly."
February 7, 2025 at 10:52 PM
tcraggs22.bsky.social
In re the social death of trans people being reckoned a "distraction" from meat-and-potatoes economic issues:
A screenshot of something I wrote in 2020. It reads: "In such a world, the material cannot be so easily cleaved from the cultural. Is it material or cultural for gay Americans to demand civil equality? Is it material or cultural for women not to want to be subordinated to the reproductive function of their bodies? Is it material or cultural for transgender people to wish for bodily autonomy? What about the fact that they are, by one recent accounting, much more likely to be unemployed than the general population, much more likely to have salaries below $10,000, much more likely to make less than $30,000 even when they have college degrees? Is that material? Is that cultural? How much less meat, how many fewer potatoes could Aimee Stephens afford after she was fired from a funeral home for being transgender?"
January 29, 2025 at 1:15 AM
tcraggs22.bsky.social
Here's something I wrote in 2020 about punditry's idpol contras that I don't recommend reading so much as printing out on absorbent paper, ripping into pieces, wadding up, moistening with saliva, inserting into a straw, and shooting at Jeremy Peters's computer www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
Two paragraphs from a story I wrote in re American punditry's quadrennial anti-idpolapalooza: "McCaskill seems to have her cultural history backward. In the realm of discourse, at least, where these voter-alienating offenses are allegedly being committed, the left is on a big winning streak. The fact she felt compelled to apologize is a sign of this. On some level all the culture-contra pundits know it, which is why their political analysis seems so forked. They complain about the hegemony of identity politics and in the next breath urge, as a matter of cold-blooded realpolitik, that the Democratic Party defy the hegemon. There’s so much potent, culture-shifting wokeness afoot, they complain. Democrats have no choice but to…reject it? "This isn’t a contradiction so much as a statement that it doesn’t count as winning if the winners don’t really count. Take a look at how McCaskill balances her equation. There are the vulnerable, people who exist as political creatures at the sufferance of the Democratic Party, and there are the 'voters.' Her invocation of the 'voters' here, with their families and their kitchen-table issues, is doing some slyly invidious rhetorical work, akin to the sneaky whitening and gendering that happens with 'taxpayers' and 'workers.' These are special categories, reserved for those Americans who get to move through the discourse without ever having to show their papers—Americans who count."
November 2, 2024 at 7:21 PM