Wesley Yang

Last updated

Wesley Yang is an American essayist and political commentator. He is currently a columnist for Tablet magazine and a contributor editor for Esquire . He hosts a blog and podcast on Substack called Year Zero.

Contents

Biography

Yang was born to Korean-American parents who were refugees from the Korean War and was raised in New Jersey. [1] He studied history at Rutgers University.

Yang attracted mainstream attention in 2008 after publishing an article in n+1 about Seung-Hui Cho, the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech shooting. He has since then written extensively about the experiences of Asian-Americans in American society. [1]

Yang published his first book, The Souls of Yellow Folk, in 2018. A collection of his previously published essays, the book was selected as a notable book of the year by The New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post , and one of the best books of the year by The Spectator and Publishers Weekly . Yang coined the term "successor ideology" in 2019 to describe an emerging ideology among left-wing movements in the United States centered around identity politics. Yang opposes this ideology and believes it may replace traditional liberal values. [2] [3]

Yang costarred as Wes in the 2008 Alex Karpovsky docufiction film Woodpecker .

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew Sullivan</span> British-American author, editor, and blogger

Andrew Michael Sullivan is a British-American political commentator. Sullivan is a former editor of The New Republic, and the author or editor of six books. He started a political blog, The Daily Dish, in 2000, and eventually moved his blog to platforms, including Time, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and finally an independent subscription-based format. He retired from blogging in 2015. From 2016 to 2020, Sullivan was a writer-at-large at New York. He launched his newsletter The Weekly Dish in July 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bryan Caplan</span> American behavioral economist and author (born 1971)

Bryan Douglas Caplan is an American economist and author. He is a professor of economics at George Mason University, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a former contributor to the Freakonomics blog and EconLog. He currently publishes his own blog, Bet on It. Caplan is a self-described "economic libertarian". The bulk of Caplan's academic work is in behavioral economics and public economics, especially public choice theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Fallows</span> American writer and journalist (born 1949)

James Mackenzie Fallows is an American writer and journalist. He is a former national correspondent for The Atlantic. His work has also appeared in Slate, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and The American Prospect, among others. He is a former editor of U.S. News & World Report, and as President Jimmy Carter's chief speechwriter for two years was the youngest person ever to hold that job.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eric Alterman</span> American historian (born 1960)

Eric Alterman is an American historian and journalist. He is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College and the author of twelve books.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Christgau</span> American music journalist (born 1942)

Robert Thomas Christgau is an American music journalist and essayist. Among the most well-known and influential music critics, he began his career in the late 1960s as one of the earliest professional rock critics and later became an early proponent of musical movements such as hip hop, riot grrrl, and the import of African popular music in the West. He was the chief music critic and senior editor for The Village Voice for 37 years, during which time he created and oversaw the annual Pazz & Jop critics poll. He has also covered popular music for Esquire, Creem, Newsday, Playboy, Rolling Stone, Billboard, NPR, Blender, and MSN Music; he was a visiting arts teacher at New York University. CNN senior writer Jamie Allen has called Christgau "the E. F. Hutton of the music world—when he talks, people listen."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Frank</span> American political analyst, historian, and writer

Thomas Carr Frank is an American political analyst, historian, and journalist. He co-founded and edited The Baffler magazine. Frank is the author of the books What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004) and Listen, Liberal (2016), among others. From 2008 to 2010 he wrote "The Tilting Yard", a column in The Wall Street Journal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Radley Balko</span> American writer (born 1975)

Radley Prescott Balko is an American journalist, author, blogger, and speaker who writes about criminal justice, the drug war, and civil liberties. In 2022, he began publishing his work on Substack after being let go from The Washington Post, where he had worked as an opinion columnist for nine years. Balko has written several books, including The Rise of the Warrior Cop and The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Matt Taibbi</span> American author and journalist (born 1970)

Matthew Colin Taibbi is an American author, journalist and podcaster. A former contributing editor for Rolling Stone, he is the author of several books and publisher of Racket News on Substack. He has reported on finance, media, politics and sports.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Matthew Yglesias</span> American blogger and journalist (born 1981)

Matthew Yglesias is an American blogger and journalist who writes about economics and politics. Yglesias has written columns and articles for publications such as The American Prospect, The Atlantic, and Slate. In 2014, he co-founded the news website Vox.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ian Bremmer</span> American political scientist (born 1969)

Ian Arthur Bremmer is an American political scientist, author, and entrepreneur focused on global political risk. He is the founder and president of Eurasia Group, a political risk research and consulting firm. He is also founder of GZERO Media, a digital media firm.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chris Cillizza</span> American political journalist (born 1976)

Christopher Michael Cillizza is an American political commentator, who worked for the television news channel CNN from 2017 to 2022. Prior to joining CNN, he wrote for The Fix, the daily political blog of The Washington Post, and was a regular contributor to the Post on political issues, a frequent panelist on Meet the Press, and an MSNBC political analyst.

Travis Jeppesen is an American novelist, playwright, poet, artist, and art critic. He is known, among other works, for his novels Settlers Landing and The Suiciders; a non-fiction novel about North Korea, See You Again in Pyongyang; and for his object-oriented writing work, 16 Sculptures. He also wrote the 2014 feature film The Coat, directed by Christophe Chemin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Seth Abramson</span> American professor, attorney, author, and political columnist

Seth Abramson is an American professor, attorney, author, political columnist, and poet. He is the editor of the Best American Experimental Writing series and wrote a trilogy of nonfiction works detailing the foreign policy agenda and political scandals of former president Donald Trump.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gideon Rachman</span> British journalist

Gideon Rachman is a British journalist. He became the chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times in July 2006. In 2016, he won the Orwell Prize for political journalism. In the same year, he was awarded with the Commentator Award at the European Press Prize awards.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eddie Huang</span> American restaurateur, chef, writer (born 1982)

Edwyn Charles Huang is an American author, chef, restaurateur, food personality, producer, and former attorney. He was a co-owner of BaoHaus, a gua bao restaurant in the East Village of Lower Manhattan. Huang previously hosted Huang's World for Viceland. His autobiography, Fresh Off the Boat: A Memoir, was adapted into the ABC sitcom Fresh Off the Boat, of which he narrated the first season.

Jay Caspian Kang is an American writer, editor, television journalist and podcast host. He is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine and the opinion section of The New York Times. Previously he was an editor of Grantland, then of the science and technology blog Elements at The New Yorker. He was also an Emmy-nominated correspondent on Vice News Tonight and cohosts the podcast Time to Say Goodbye. His debut novel The Dead Do Not Improve was released by the Hogarth/Random House in the summer of 2012. In 2021, he published The Loneliest Americans, a memoir and reported work examining Asian American identity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Heather Cox Richardson</span> American historian (born 1962)

Heather Cox Richardson is an American historian. She is a professor of history at Boston College, where she teaches courses on the American Civil War, the Reconstruction Era, the American West, and the Plains Indians. She previously taught history at MIT and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew Yang</span> American businessman and politician (born 1975)

Andrew Yang is an American businessman, attorney, lobbyist, political commentator, and author. He founded the political party and action committee Forward Party in 2021, for which he serves as co-chair alongside former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman.

Substack is an American online platform that provides publishing, payment, analytics, and design infrastructure to support subscription newsletters. It allows writers to send digital newsletters directly to subscribers. Founded in 2017, Substack is headquartered in San Francisco.

"Successor ideology" is a term coined by essayist Wesley Yang to describe what he sees as an emergent ideology within liberal or left-wing political movements in the United States, Canada, and to a lesser extent other Western countries, centered around intersectionality, social justice, identity politics, and anti-racism, the rise of which, Yang argues, is degrading conventional liberal values of pluralism, freedom of speech, color blindness, and free inquiry. Proponents of the concept link it to an alleged growth in the intolerance of differing opinions, to cancel culture, wokeness, social justice warriors, and to the far left; Yang himself describes it as "authoritarian Utopianism that masquerades as liberal humanism while usurping it from within."

References

  1. 1 2 MacDougald, Park (November 13, 2018). "Wesley Yang on Asian-Americans, Political Correctness, and the Struggle for Recognition". New York Magazine.
  2. Jeong, Sarah (July 10, 2020). "Social media and the end of discourse". The Verge. Archived from the original on July 28, 2020. Retrieved August 8, 2020.
  3. Berkowitz, Roger (18 June 2020). "The New Orthodoxy". Bard College. Retrieved September 3, 2020.