My 2023 Airing of Grievances

Grump. Grump grump grump. Hmmph!

Photo by yerling villalobos on Unsplash

Ah, December 24th. You know what that means: it’s time for Festivus for the rest of us!

Honestly, the only part of this holiday I care about is the Airing of Grievances. I am finding that as I get older my inner Raging Old Man voice is getting louder. I’m starting to get up before 7 AM nowadays. Do young people have any idea how frustrating it is not to be able to sleep in?!

My friend and colleague Jacob T. Levy asked us to air all the grievances yesterday. Festivus seems like an appropriate time every year to vent about the myriad quotidian frustrations that have been percolating since, in some instances, last January.

To paraphrase Frank Costanza, even if things are looking up I’ve got a lot of problems with society and now, you’re gonna hear about all of them!¹

Let’s start with my response to Jacob: Restaurants, stop using QR codes to have patrons access the menu on their phones. You know how dispiriting it is to go to a nice restaurant and see people sitting across from each other with everyone buried in their phones?! We are already too addicted to screens as it is! Furthermore, menus are one form of literature where looking at a normal piece of paper easier on the eyes than scrolling down a phone.²

Back in 2021 I understood the QR thing as a useful means of restarting sit-down service in the wake of the pandemic. It’s been two years since then — just print up some goddamn menus! If you have a waitstaff taking orders, then you should have hard copies of the food and drink options.³

Hey, Microsoft Outlook! Your job is to provide me with my work email. Earlier this year you posted at the top of the Outlook page, “REPLY WITH EMOJIS: Send hearts, thumbs, and smileys and soon you may get them in return!”? What makes you think I want to use emojis in a goddamn work email?!

Trust me when I say that if I start sending heart emojis in my work emails, the likely result would be an email from my Office of Equal Opportunity with a thumbs down and red-faced emoji in response.⁴

Hey, business and government: make up your goddamn minds about the post-pandemic dress code! This fall I attended multiple events involving government officials and financial professionals. I suited up on these occasions because that’s what I did in the pre-pandemic days. The result: I was way overdressed and felt like a schmuck for showing up in a suit. The dress code at events like these has clearly become more variable — the finance event had folks in fleece vests.

Don’t get me wrong — I am not a fan of neckties. If we get to dress down to business casual at these functions, fine with me! But tell your guests what the dress code is in advance.

Speaking of email, I have been using it for well over thirty years now and I still cannot get used to the “Hi Dan” opening. Just because mail is electronic doesn’t mean we can’t start our missives the same way we start traditional correspondence — with “Dear ____.” Sometimes I reciprocate a “Hi Dan” with a “Hi Person Who Wrote to Dan” — and I feel dirty every time I do it.⁵

Is it necessary, as a commentator, for me to pay attention to TikTok as the voice of a younger generation? I get that TikTok is a super-popular social media site among the younglings, and that the site is allegedly a vital information source about the economy. I’m just growing more skeptical about the very idea of virality as an indicator of the national vibe. Often these kinds of things turn out to have an even shorter half-life than old Twitter controversies.⁶ Or the claims of virality turn out to be wildly overhyped or completely bogus.⁷

And finally, if someone levies a accusation of plagiarism, make sure they understand what plagiarism, you know, actually means. I took a cursory look at Christopher Rufo’s plagiarism allegations against Harvard president Claudine Gay. As a political scientist, I’m pretty familiar with the citation standards for scholarship in my field. The very first example Rufo provides is… a textbook example of paraphrasing someone with the appropriate citation! It’s not plagiarism, and it sure as hell makes me skeptical that Rufo knows what that word means. As Michael Hobbes noted, almost all of Rufo’s allegations fall under this horseshit category.

A New York Times writeup of the alleged plagiarism cites “one example that has drawn particular attention and online ridicule” in which Gay echoes two sentences written by another scholar… in the acknowledgments section of her dissertation. That’s… not plagiarism either! It’s the acknowledgments!⁸

To paraphrase Montesquieu — see what I did there? — weak-ass claims of plagiarism weaken necessary claims of plagiarism. Cut it out.

Whew. Boy, I feel much better now.

Happy Festivus to those who celebrate! Merry Christmas to those who celebrate! And a very Merry Jewish Christmas for those of us who celebrate!!!

1. [Hi, it’s the hard-working staff. We’re going to use the footnotes to provide some necessary caveats to these grievances that ain’t gonna appear in the main text. He is in a mood today!—eds.]

2. [A double pox on those places where the QR link takes us to a .pdf of the menu! The hard-working staff is behind Drezner all the way on this one!—eds.]

3. [The staff allows that exceptions can be made for more casual places where ordering and paying by phone is the norm!—eds.]

4. [The hard-working staff acknowledges that not all workers using Outlook are cranky professors—eds.]

5. [Yeah, we know, he’s had 30+ years to adjust to a new mode of communication. What can we say, Old Man Drezner is the Raymond Holt of email!—eds.]

6. [Remember this song? Yeah, neither do we!—eds.]

7. [We’ll try to persuade him to give TikTok a chance in the new year!—eds.]

8. [There was one example provided in which Dan did raise one eyebrow a bit and note that a citation would have been appropriate. But one misstep buried deep under a steaming pile of horseshit does not equate to a scandal!—eds.]