It's to the best of our knowledge.

Today, political correctness.

I'm Anne Strain Champs, and here's a scene that might be familiar.

You're at a party, talking to somebody you just met.

Everything's going really well, and then you ask what seems like an innocuous question,

maybe about favorite restaurants, or music music or where they're from.

And then it starts, that terrible inner monologue.

Did that question sound racist? Was it racist? Or sexist? Or homophobic?

Should you apologize? Or would that just make it even worse?

By the time the evening's done, you're so exhausted, you just want to go home and curl up in bed.

So we've all been there before, right?

Afraid something we said offended someone or could be misinterpreted.

Some people would call this sensitivity.

Others call it political correctness.

It's exhausting. I mean, I quote a lot of other

writers who talk about how exhausting the rules of PCR, how draining it is, how it drives people

out of the movement and causes them to stop being political. So in that sense, it's quite

self-defeating. Jonathan Chait is a staff writer for New York Magazine,

and he recently published a takedown of political correctness

that caused a real stir on the Internet

because he sees PC being used as a tool to silence debate.

I saw a movement in certain parts of left-wing culture

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