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Navneet Alang

@navneetalang.com

6.9K followers 2.4K following 2.6K posts

Editor @ Toronto Star Opinion. Pitch me op-eds, essays at [email protected]. Writer and former columnist with bylines all over. PhD. https://navneetalang.com/categories/blogposts/

navneetalang.com

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Navneet Alang @navneetalang.com · Jan 9

Alas, I think that might be 2025's goal too

Karen Attiah @karenattiah.bsky.social · Jan 9

My goal for 2025 is just to become hotter and more lethal

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Navneet Alang @navneetalang.com · 4h

Listening to the Yankees game on the radio like I'm living in a tenement in 1930s Brooklyn. (I could be wrong about like 7 things in this one short post)

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Reposted by Navneet Alang

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 7h

repost this if an editor has ever saved you from yourself

violent alien @blipstress.bsky.social · 8h

An actual hot take: Too many authors are afraid of editors watering down their voice or whatever and not afraid enough of editors letting you put any old slop on the page.

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Navneet Alang @navneetalang.com · 11h

Working in media or being media-adjacent means that when with friends, I still frequently answer the question "how do you two know each other" with "oh... must have been Twitter?"

Conrad Hackett @conradhackett.bsky.social · 11h

A surprising number of people say a great outcome from social media was meeting their spouse through Twitter. Until today, I was clueless about Twitter being used as a dating platform.

Sophie Michell @sophiemhistory.bsky.social · 11h

I asked my husband out on twitter, as was the custom in 2010

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ae @aelkus.bsky.social · 11h

Social media is very effective at creating sin-eaters. A sin-eater is different from an ephemeral main-character. It's a recurring "well would you look at that guy" person you see screenshotted on your feed constantly, who is meant to stand in for the evils of some larger group you dislike

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Navneet Alang @navneetalang.com · 17h

Anyway, I live a comfortable life in one of the most diverse cities in the world and I've never felt more uneasy and worried.

Navneet Alang @navneetalang.com · 17h

That at least is part of what now certainly feels like a surge of nativist, xenophobic, white nationalist thinking. Yes, some of that stems from the obvious economic failures of neoliberalism. But it does feel like a moment in history where there is an impasse b/w pov's. And such impasses = violence

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Navneet Alang @navneetalang.com · 17h

A lot of leftist and progressive rhetoric was rooted in power disparities, and intellectually and ideologically underpinned by those disparities. But the right perceives that, say, anti-racist or anti-colonial narratives have become hegemonic, despite the basic power relations remaining unchanged.

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Navneet Alang @navneetalang.com · 17h

Don't mean this as some kind of grand pronouncement but rather just a feeling: I sometimes feel as if progressivism in the 2010s was a little like the dog that did in fact catch the car -- except that rather than not knowing what to do, the ppl in the car got out and were very angry about it.

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Navneet Alang @navneetalang.com · 1d

Baseball, eh?

Reposted by Navneet Alang

Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 1d

I'm back writing! Here's me at TASTE writing about all the "party" cookbooks coming out this season, and why we apparently need to be reminded how to host tastecooking.com/party-in-the...

Party in the USA: The Cookbook

A new wave of cookbooks—plus an iconic Martha reissue—are showing how to cook and host a crowd.

tastecooking.com

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Navneet Alang @navneetalang.com · 2d

Please don’t make me go back to Threads.

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Navneet Alang @navneetalang.com · 3d

Idly Googled which is faster, a Lime or Bird or Neutron scooter. Admittedly a dumb Q! But Google AI helpfully told me that while a Lime scooter goes 17mph, a neutron star travels 70,000 miles a second. Useful stuff!

Navneet Alang @navneetalang.com · 4d

The trouble is when you confuse one thing for another, labelling something as a moral failing or a personal deficiency when the thing rightly critiqued is the intersection of at least two kinds of systems

Navneet Alang @navneetalang.com · 4d

There are two different problems here: one is that as an exemplar of a broader trend, outsourcing decision making to AI sounds awful; but on the individual level, you can easily understand why an exhausted person who lives in an era in which they’re overwhelmed by choice might want to.

Almond @breakfastallday.bsky.social · 4d

There's this ad where the guy asks AI what he should make for his sunday BBQ, and tbh it really depressed me. Make what sounds good to you? What you're craving? It feels like fully abandoning your personhood to have a computer assign you something like that. You're alive, live in your body and mind.

hayden johnson @haydenjohnsonn.bsky.social · 13d

every AI ad is like

“hey gemini, what would i have for lunch?”

and then the phone is like

“sandwich”

and the guy is like

“wow”

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Reposted by Navneet Alang

John Semley @johnsemley3000.bsky.social · 4d

America has all-dressed potato chips now. for the @thestar.com I dared to ask: can the Yankee mind comprehend the "tout-garnie" lifestyle? www.thestar.com/opinion/cont...

John Semley: Can Canadian potato chips lead to American acceptance of ‘tout garnie’?

There is no Canadian culinary confection quite like the all-dressed chip. As schoolchildren we’re taught to believe that Canada is a land of cultural and ethnic diversity. It’s the kind

www.thestar.com

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Navneet Alang @navneetalang.com · 4d

[reading the news this morning]

Oh wow, Japan is going to have its first woman prime minister!

[reads a bit further]

Ah. I see.

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Navneet Alang @navneetalang.com · 4d

Just feeling pretty pessimistic about things. Who knows what will be further unleashed by what's going on to our south. Still want to live through it, if I get the chance. But hard to imagine much of anything getting better for the next decade or so.

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Navneet Alang @navneetalang.com · 4d

I'm gonna miss the internet when it's gone. I think there were a lot of us who had good reasons to gravitate toward text-based, loose-tie networks.

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ae @aelkus.bsky.social · 5d

every time one of those "look how evil ages you" posts goes viral you get a reminder that much of us have heuristics for navigating the world that aren't much different from that of a middle ages peasant

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Navneet Alang @navneetalang.com · 5d

Gobsmacked. But that’s helpful, thank you!

Navneet Alang @navneetalang.com · 5d

I’m out of the loop: possible for anyone give me the tl;dr re what’s going on re Bluesky?

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Navneet Alang @navneetalang.com · 6d

One of the many bad things about Reddit is the way people talk about fiction, which seems just barely different from when I was 9 and would wonder which fictional character was most powerful etc.

Reposted by Navneet Alang

The New York Times @nytimes.com · 6d

Zohran Mamdani, the front-runner for New York mayor, is keenly aware of how attentive New Yorkers are to how their politicians interact with food, and how judgmental they can be. But no candidate’s relationship to food has been more scrutinized or showcased than Mamdani’s, often by his own choice.

How Zohran Mamdani Built a Campaign Around Food

The front-runner for New York mayor is leveraging his lifelong love of eating to inform his policy plans and spread his message.

nyti.ms

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Navneet Alang @navneetalang.com · 7d

Reposted by Navneet Alang

staring blankly into the abyss @ianmosby.bsky.social · 8d

This is an excellent OpEd that Canadians need to read and to understand.

Robert Jago @rjjago.bsky.social · 8d

In this OpEd, I talk about the residential schools still being built in China and Russia - and explain how that should change Canadians’ thinking about this country’s residential schools: www.thestar.com/opinion/cont...

Residential schools still exist in our world today. This is the lesson Canadians can draw from that disturbing truth

Canadians think about residential schools as if they were a creature of the past, an ancient moral failing from which we have since evolved. But around the world new residential

www.thestar.com

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