March 2014 Acquisitions

Books:
Ed Brubaker et al, Fatale, Vol. 4: Pray for Rain, 2014
John Byrne and Dick Giordano, Superman: Man of Steel, Vol. 1, 1991.
Philip Crawford and Dan Schoening, Wonder Woman: The Fruit of All Evil, 2010.
RH Disney, Frozen (LGB), 2013.
Michael L. Fleisher et al. Showcase Presents: Jonah Hex, Vol. 2, 2014.
Matt Fraction and Howard Chaykin, Satellite Sam, Vol. 1, 2014.
Michael Green et al, Supergirl, Vol. 1: Last Daughter of Krypton, 2012.
Daniel Lipkowitz, Lego Batman: Visual Dictionary, 2012.
Nancy MacLean, The American Women's Movement: A Brief History with Documents, 2009.
Helen Murray, The Lego Movie: Calling All Master Builders!, 2013.
Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 2007.
Dan Parent, Archie: A Rock 'n' Roll Romance, 2014.
Greg Rucka et al, Batman: Officer Down, 2004.


DVDs:
Barbie Presents Thumbelina, 2009.
Frozen, 2013.

"At Its Most Biting When It Explores Other Hot-Button Issues in a Casual Way"

"With its sneaky subversiveness and disgust for its characters, Heathers is more ambitious than most high-school comedies. Clueless and Mean Girls focus on the social hierarchy, yet they’re merely coming-of-age tales that affirm the community: Alicia Silverstone’s Cher joins a cadre of women who look forward to long-term commitment, and Lindsay Lohan’s Cady finally declares that she’s normal. Veronica may save the school, but she’s also a self-loathing masochist–at one point, she burns herself with a cigarette later as a means of contrition. More importantly, she’s complicit in the suicide of her ex-boyfriend, and she rejects the social ladder altogether. The only modern high-school comedy that approaches a similarly bleak outcome is Alexander Payne’s Election, and even then the students emerge relatively unscathed."


Alan Zilberman at The Atlantic looks back at Heathers twenty-five years later.


And Adam Markovitz in Entertainment Weekly presents an oral history.

"A Biography for Readers Who Find Real Human Beings More Compelling than Icons"

"Chavez was constantly praying and fasting, and talking about the importance of sacrificing for the cause. As it often does in American social movements—from abolition to civil rights and beyond—such rhetoric resonated powerfully with people. But basing a movement on sacrifice had its limits. It enabled his cult of personality, since few could beat him in a sacrifice contest. But it also fueled Chavez's obstinacy on points that led to the disintegration of his organization: the impractical insistence that staff should be volunteers rather than be paid. ('Giving up a paycheck, he argued, was a liberating experience.') Even worse, he was outright contemptuous of the 'materialistic' aspirations of the workers he represented, who did not want to be poor like Jesus. Like most people, they wanted to be middle class, with cars and big TV sets."


Liza Featherstone in the Los Angeles Times reviews Miriam Pawel's The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography.

The Spirit of '45

"The Labour party is part of the problem, not the solution. The Greens have many admirable policies, but we look in vain for a thoroughgoing analysis for fundamental change. We need a new voice, a new movement–a new party.
"There are many thousands of campaigns for worthy causes–against hospital closures, to support the homeless, against environmental destruction, to protect the disabled, for human rights and civil liberties, to help those in need–the list is endless. Trade unions still represent millions of working people. There is a unity of interest among all these groups. Imagine what could be achieved if we all acted together."


In The Guardian, Ken Loach calls on support for Left Unity.

"College Senior Already Has Grueling 14-Month Employment Search Lined Up After Graduation"

"'Given the amount of thought and preparation I’ve put into this, I definitely feel ready to head out there into the real world and start receiving hundreds of curt, dismissive responses from companies telling me no positions are available,' he added."


From The Onion.

"Report: 95% Of Grandfathers Got Job By Walking Right Up And Just Asking"

"'I just went right up to the owner, looked him dead in the eye, and told him I was the person he was looking for,' said 78-year-old William Chambers, whose story was nearly identical to accounts given by thousands of other grandfathers interviewed for the report, each of whom emphasized that they placed both their hands firmly on the businessman’s desk, explained that they were 'go-getters,' and concluded by saying that, if hired, they would be the hardest worker the company had ever seen. 'Right away, the fellow told me he liked my gumption, and then we sealed it all with a handshake. I had that job until the day I retired.'"


From The Onion.

"The Place Where Folk Was Transformed into Pop"

"Of course, there is no 'New York ­music'—only musics, plural. Consider the range of songs that could reasonably be deemed the quintessential New York anthem: 'Sidewalks of New York,' 'Give My Regards to Broadway,' 'Manhattan,' 'Take the "A" Train,' 'On Broadway,' 'Spanish Harlem,' 'Positively 4th Street,' 'Across 110th Street,' 'Walk on the Wild Side,' 'Shattered,' 'Theme from New York, New York,' 'No Sleep Till Brooklyn,' 'Empire State of Mind.' Consider also the sheer number of genres and subgenres, musical cultures and sub­cultures, that were born, or at least blossomed most spectacularly, in New York: Tin Pan Alley ragtime, Harlem jazz-blues, Broadway song standards, bebop, doo-wop, Brill Building pop, coffeehouse folk, salsa, disco, punk, New Wave, No Wave, hip-hop, bachata-pop—just for starters."


In New York, Jody Rosen presents "A Look Back at 100 Years of New York Sounds."

Nixon Hates Iran-Contra Stooges

The New York Times runs obits for drummer Scott Asheton, ex-I.R.S. head Randolph Thrower, homophobic preacher Fred Phelps, prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh, and Republican Party strategist Howard H. Callaway.

"Trying to Beat the Odds Is What You Do When You’ve Relinquished All Hope of Turning Them in Your Favor"

"But this is the kind of treacly liberalism best reserved for movies about dedicated white teachers who inspire their angry inner-city students—and it was precisely the myth that I meant to reject on the day of my graduation. A team on the receiving end of biased officiating loses more often, period. And, at some point, it quite reasonably begins to lose faith in the entire enterprise. To believe that my family history represents anything more than the confluence of hard work and an even greater degree of good luck would be to concede that a third-grade Jim Crow education represents a reasonable starting point from which to produce high-achieving children. And to do that would be to lend support, however unintentionally, to the belief that the implications of racism have been overstated."


Jelani Cobb at The New Yorker responds to the debate between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jonathan Chait over poverty and race.

"Three Revolutions All at Once"

"For Israel, resurrecting the Radical Enlightenment is part of a project designed to save the Enlightenment more generally. Both as a moment and as a political project, he thinks it must be rescued from political relativism under the guise of academic postmodernism. He also wants to salvage the French Revolution and its connections to Radical as well as moderate Enlightenment from generations of Marxist historians who see it simply in terms of class conflict, as well as their revisionist liberal critics, who see the logic of terror inscribed into revolutionary catechisms from the outset."


In the Financial Times, Duncan Kelly reviews Jonathan Israel's Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre.

"We're No Longer a Radio Network, We're a Sad Political Glee Club"

"'National Public Radio was kind of a body blow to Pacifica,' Lasar says. 'It was a more professional and less strident alternative.'
"In Los Angeles, ousted KPFK program director Ruth Hirschman (now Ruth Seymour) built KCRW into a powerhouse. Many of Pacifica's volunteer programmers were happy to let 'corporate' NPR surpass them in listenership; Pacifica was 'community radio.'
"'The central underlying problem at Pacifica,' Marc Cooper says, 'is that in the end, what dictates everything is the individual programmer's desire to hold onto his or her airtime. Management has always been weak.'"


Hillel Aron in the LA Weekly depicts the decline of Pacifica Radio.

"It’s The Cashier Who Today Is on Food Stamps"

"Going to the racial dimensions of these hackneyed fictions, when Reagan initially told the T-bone steak story, he identified the food stamp abuser as a young 'buck,' a term then commonly used among Southern whites to refer to a strong black man. This veered dangerously toward open racism, and in any event proved unnecessary. Even after Reagan dropped that term from future renditions, the racial element continued just below the surface, with welfare recipients implicitly colored black.
"But this was not a simple plot to demonize minorities. Rather, Reagan had another scapegoat in mind, and here we come to the heart of dog-whistle politics. Ostensibly, even more than grasping minorities, the greatest enemy of the middle class was liberal government. After all, it was government that was reaching into taxpayer’s pockets and wasting their hard-earned dollars.
"By 'darkening' government itself, Reagan provided the kindling for a taxpayer revolt that ostensibly would cut off funds to the lazy and irresponsible—but that in fact generated enormous windfalls for the very rich."


Ian Haney-López in Salon discusses how "dog-whistle" politics undermines the United States.

"That Exaltation of the Autonomous Self—Whether in the Bedroom or the Shopping Mall—Had Deep Roots in the Nation’s Emersonian and Radical Protestant Traditions"

"Marsden is clear-eyed in describing the forces, especially the economic ones, which did so much to weaken community ties and authority in the 1950s and ’60s. Those pressures have hardly lessened. If anything, community is more ad hoc and transient than ever. The historian Mark Lilla addressed such developments in a 1998 essay in the New York Review of Books, 'A Tale of Two Reactions.' Analyzing much of the same cultural and political history as Marsden, Lilla asked why the social revolutions of the ’60s and the subsequent Reagan revolution of the ’80s have embedded themselves so deeply in American society. Those seemingly incompatible movements, he concluded, were in fact 'complementary, not contradictory,' each finding its spiritual source and justification in the radical democratic individualism of America’s Protestant heritage. Reaganism, Lilla argued, was 'an extension of the same utopian vision' as the antinomianism of the ’60s—one viewing economic freedom as an inalienable right, the other individual personal and sexual expression. How, Lilla lamented, 'have our notions of equality and individualism been transformed to support a morally lax yet economically successful capitalist society'? Marsden wonders, along similar lines, how Americans can continue to find in individual self-determination and self-fulfillment 'a complete standard for a public philosophy that would adjudicate the hard questions that arise when individual interests conflict.'"


Paul Baumann in The Washington Monthly reviews George M. Marsden's The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief.

"Will the Professional Class Doom American Progressivism?"

"If you want to fill an auditorium at a think tank, magazine office or other venue, hold a panel on one or more of the non-economic issues I just mentioned and the seats will fill up quickly with enthusiastic, affluent, mostly white upper-middle-class progressives. If you want to hold a panel on the minimum wage or workplace tyranny, expect to have a lot of empty seats. To avoid embarrassment, you might reserve a smaller room.
"The recent wave of protests by low-wage fast-food workers confirms my point. Their concerns had been neglected for years by upper-middle-class progressives more concerned with inspiring world-saving crusades than trench warfare against McDonald’s. Only when the workers took matters in their own hands did most of the center-left credentialed class start paying attention (perhaps temporarily).
"During the Progressive Era and the New Deal era that succeeded it, idealistic professional-class reformers were only one element of a coalition they were forced to share with the representatives of farmers and blue-collar workers—groups that made up a majority of the workforce in the mid-20th century. Take away the farmer-labor wing of the center-left, and you are left with upper-middle-class do-gooders like Woodrow Wilson and Eleanor Roosevelt."


Michael Lind in Salon argues that "the growing domination of the center-left by college-educated professionals in the U.S. and other Western democracies is bad on the whole for progressive politics."

"Something Has Clearly Changed"

"But the most straightforward, prosaic theory is that, as with virtually every area of popular culture, it's been radically altered by the advent of the internet: that we now live in a world where teenagers are more interested in constructing an identity online than they are in making an outward show of their allegiances and interests.
"'It's not neccesarily happening on street corners any more, but it's certainly happening online,' says Adams. 'It's a lot easier to adopt personas online that cost you absolutely nothing apart from demonstrating certain types of arcane knowledge, what Sarah Thornton called subcultural capital. You don't have to invest in a teddy boy's drape suit or a T-shirt from Seditionaries.'"


Alexis Petridis in The Guardian looks at the decline in Britain of youth subcultures based on music.


Tom Hawking at Flavorwire presents "A Field Guide to the Musical Tribes of the 21st Century."

"Intrepid Middle-Class Parents Embark On Daring Search For Mythical Perfect School District"

"'There are some who believe the perfect school district does not exist—that it is just an old tale handed down in whispered tones at PTA meetings and Kaplan Test Prep centers, and nothing more,' said Ken Linden, resolutely staring off into the distance. 'But we know it is out there somewhere, and we believe its manifold rewards will be visited upon the children of those able to secure an open spot. Many have faltered in this quest, but we will succeed. We must succeed.'
"'When I close my eyes I can almost envision the quiz bowl team prepping for regional finals,' he added."


From The Onion.

"The Problem Is That There Are a Lot of Students Who Enter into These Programs Who Don’t Graduate, but They Leave with Quite a Bit of Debt Anyway"

"APSCU's argument that they serve non-traditional students is certainly true, but for-profit colleges have clearly become an easy way for Wall Street to make money in recent years. In 2009, publicly traded for-profits had an average profit margin of 19.7 percent and generated a total of $3.2 billion in pre-tax profit. Most of that money is coming straight from the federal government. If it were used to set students up to succeed, then it would be money well spent. But it's clear that for-profits are not living up to that standard. They're spending more resources trying to recruit students so they can capture federal dollars and less money offering them a valuable education. This regulation is designed to crack down on the worst offenders. If that means students will lose access to some scholarships and opportunities at those schools, as APSCU warns, that's not a bad thing."


Danny Vinik at The New Republic discusses new regulation of for-profit colleges.

What's the Matter with Irish-Americans?

"In its finer moments, the Irish republicanism of the ’70s and ’80s sparked a global consciousness among a population of privileged white Americans whose cultural distinctness was fading fast. You didn’t have to support Angela Davis, Che Guevara and the PLO to understand that there was a historical relationship between their issues and the Irish Troubles. Ireland was the original colonized nation, and was subjected to a near-genocidal conquest centuries before the Holocaust. It was where the policies of the British Empire were road-tested for use in India and Africa, and where a subject population stripped of property and political rights was then blamed for its own poverty. The island’s native people, despite their white skin, were viewed as savage and barbaric because they did not speak English, practiced an alien religion and hewed to unfamiliar cultural customs. During the Great Famine of the 1840s, which produced a huge wave of Irish emigration to America, the Irish poor were starved to death or driven off their own land by the millions. Yes, the potato—a plant imported from South America by the British—had been ruined by blight, but the famine itself was avoidable. Its true cause was not the black fungus that turned the prátaí to inedible mush, but a pseudo-Darwinian, proto-Milton Friedman free market ideology, insisted upon at a time when Ireland as a whole was a net exporter of food."


Andrew O'Hehir in Salon calls on Irish-Americans "to get back that feeling we briefly had of being an immigrant group that was trying to confront its history, and to see the prison of whiteness for what it really is."

"Paul Ryan Never Learned"

"There is no comparison, of course, between the de facto genocide that resulted from British policy, and conservative criticism of modern American poverty programs.

"But you can’t help noticing the deep historic irony that finds a Tea Party favorite and descendant of famine Irish using the same language that English Tories used to justify indifference to an epic tragedy."

Timothy Egan in The New York Times compares Paul Ryan to Sir Charles Trevelyan.

Ginsburg Must Go

"I do not minimize how hard it will be for Justice Ginsburg to step down from a job that she loves and has done so well since 1993. But the best way for her to advance all the things she has spent her life working for is to ensure that a Democratic president picks her successor. The way to facilitate that is for her to resign this summer."


Erwin Chemerinsky in the Los Angeles Times calls on Ruth Bader Ginsburg to retire from the Supreme Court.


But Garrett Epps at The Atlantic says that Ginsburg should stay as long as she likes.


And Isaac Chotiner at The New Republic takes on Epps and the like.

The Selling of the Bennite of La Mancha

The New York Times reports the deaths of writer Joe McGinniss, announcer Hal Douglas, modeling agent Ophelia DeVore-Mitchell, journalist Joel Brinkley, Florida politician Reubin Askew, British politician Tony Benn, comedian David Brenner, and composer Mitch Leigh.

"Dad From 2150 Can’t Get Enough Iraq War Documentaries"

"Orkney added that although he could happily sit and view a whole weekend of documentaries on the early 21st-century conflict, he does not enjoy any of the popular romantic period dramas set during the quaint, old-fashioned Iraq War era that his wife loves."


From The Onion.

"Because Some People Are Greedy"

"The tobacco industry was a pioneer at this. Its goal was to erode public acceptance of the scientifically proven links between smoking and disease: In the words of an internal 1969 memo legal opponents extracted from Brown & Williamson's files, 'Doubt is our product.' Big Tobacco's method should not be to debunk the evidence, the memo's author wrote, but to establish a 'controversy.'
"When this sort of manipulation of information is done for profit, or to confound the development of beneficial public policy, it becomes a threat to health and to democratic society. Big Tobacco's program has been carefully studied by the sugar industry, which has become a major target of public health advocates.
"It's also echoed by vaccination opponents, who continue to use a single dishonest and thoroughly discredited British paper to sow doubts about the safety of childhood immunizations, and by climate change deniers.
"And all those fabricated Obamacare horror stories wholesaled by Republican and conservative opponents of the Affordable Care Act and their aiders and abetters in the right-wing press? Their purpose is to sow doubt about the entire project of healthcare reform; if the aim were to identify specific shortcomings of the act, they'd have to accompany every story with a proposal about how to fix it."


Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times explores "agnotology, a neologism signifying the study of the cultural production of ignorance."

Back with an 808

"I think that Sandberg and Chávez are basically correct on the way the term is used for girls. The question they don't address, though, is whether boys deserve that praise. When is it good to be assertive, confident and opinionated? Are there some situations in which this behavior is just plain awful? Maybe the problem isn't just that we call women 'bossy' too much; maybe the problem is that we let men get away with behavior which we should call 'bossy,' or something worse."


Noah Berlatsky at The Atlantic takes on the "Ban Bossy" campaign.

"If SCA5 Is Not the Right Answer, What Is?"

"On the power of these arguments, SCA 5 sailed through the State Senate earlier this year. But now that the legislation is in the Assembly, Asian-Americans are organizing against it. Under Prop. 209, Asian-Americans have been overrepresented at the University of California, so many community members worry that they would be hurt by its repeal. Meanwhile, supporters of repeal think they have a decent shot of winning because of the explosive growth of Latino voters. Welcome to the current politics of affirmative action, which are far more complicated than black vs. white."


Richard D. Kahlenberg in Slate discusses an attempt in California to repeal Proposition 209.

"Make No Law"

"And as to the sweeping notion that Sullivan had been injured and was entitled to money damages because of the general criticism of 'the police' in Montgomery, the justices held that: 'no court of last resort in this country has ever held, or even suggested, that prosecutions for libel on government have any place in the American system of jurisprudence.' This is why all of us can blast the Obama Administration, or the Bush Administration, without fear that some bureaucrat within those administrations will consider himself aggrieved enough to sue."


Andrew Cohen at The Atlantic marks the fiftieth anniversary of New York Times v. Sullivan.

"A New Specter Was Haunting France—The Specter of Gender Theory"

"As a result of all this, Butler suddenly found herself massively famous in France. She had established her reputation in the early 1990s with 'Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,' a book that itself drew on French theory. Schooled in the work of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault, Butler argued that what we assume to be essential human characteristics are instead malleable traits fashioned by social habits. Rather than springing fully formed from our biological nature, sexual identity is sculpted by what literary theorists call discursive practices and what the rest of us call language, dress, and cultural conventions. Simone de Beauvoir had famously declared that one is not born a woman, but instead one becomes a woman. In essence, Butler doubled down by emphasizing the subversive as well as repressive possibilities in social constructions of the self."


Robert Zaretsky in The Boston Globe discusses the controversy in France over "la théorie du genre."

"Knows How to Party"

"'We were helping to start West Coast hip-hop and we had no clue,' Hudson says. 'But what really touched me the most was going over there and meeting those people. That's what made it a real and true anthem. Even today, if I go to that area, I'm free to walk around and do whatever, and whoever recognizes me always shows me that same love.'"


Jeff Weiss in the LA Weekly catches up with Ronnie Hudson, who recorded "West Coast Poplock" in 1982.

How Groundhog Dolls Die Mon Amour

The New York Times reports the deaths of music manager Marty Thau, newspaper editor Bill Thomas, comedian Harold Ramis, film director Alain Resnais, author Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland, and anti-poverty activist Richard Boone.

"A Different Kind of Resource Shock Is Unfolding"

"How did California get here? This winter’s infamous 'polar vortex,' which has blocked storm fronts from reaching California, hasn’t helped. But the state was facing dry conditions long before this winter. Whether climate change is at play is a question on which scientists disagree: Some say yes, citing in particular the thinning snowpack, and some say no, citing climate models that predict global warming will make California wetter, not drier. Regardless, the current drought merely tipped into crisis a state whose water woes have been worsening for decades. California would be better prepared to withstand its current lack of rain had various constituencies conceded to tougher water-saving measures over the years. Which constituency is most culpable is subjective. Your answer depends largely on your politics."


Jeffrey Ball in The New Republic discusses what Californians will have to do about the state's drought.

Run, Bernie, Run

"And I think in this particular moment when the problems facing this country are so severe, when we have seen class warfare being waged by the billionaires against the working families of America, when we have seen the billionaire class use its money in an unprecedented way for its political purposes to let more right wing extremists, I think we need people in leadership roles in the House and the Senate and governors’ chairs, in the White House, who are prepared to stand up and say, ‘You know what? This country belongs to all of the people: the waiters and the waitresses who are trying to make it on low incomes, they have a right to see their kids go to college and all people, that the United States is going to join the rest of the industrialized world in guaranteed health care to all people as a right and not any longer be the only country, major country on earth that does not guarantee that right, that all kids regardless of income have the right to a college education, that we need a tax system which in fact makes it very clear that the wealthy and large corporations are going to start paying their fare share of taxes, that we’re going to have real campaign finance reform so that the Koch brothers and other billionaires cannot buy elections, that we’re going to overturn Citizens United.' Do you think that’s Hillary Clinton’s agenda? I don’t think so."

Jay Newton-Small in Time interviews Sen. Bernie Sanders.

"Report: Mom’s Got Her Thing Tonight"

"'Mom really likes going to her thing,' said Christina Walsh, adding that she has to get a ride to volleyball practice from Stephanie on nights Mom’s at her thing. 'Before she heads out to it, Mom’s always in a really good mood.'
"'And it seems like she’s always talking about whatever happened at the thing the next day,' she added."


From The Onion.

"What’ll Become of Me?"

"What became of this girl, Northup’s close acquaintance and one of the major figures in his book, who was terrorized by her master and mistress? Did she succumb to one of the bouts of disease that swept the Louisiana-bayou slave communities? Did Epps’s severe beatings or his wife’s unhinged jealousy take their toll, or did he perhaps sell her some time after 1853? Was she secreted away by members of the Underground Railroad? Did she survive until emancipation rolled through the area via the Red River Campaign in 1864, then travel elsewhere? Or did she remain in Louisiana?"


Katie Calautti at Vanity Fair tries to find out what happened to Patsey from Solomon Northrup's memoir, Twelve Years a Slave.

"His Major Contribution Was Pushing the Envelope in Terms of Racial Discourse"

"In an interview, Mr. Joseph said that if Ture has received less attention than some other civil rights leaders, it was largely because he went to Africa and was not martyred like Dr. King and Malcolm X, both killed at 39. And in the sound-bite landscape, Mr. Joseph said, the complexity of Ture 'makes him a difficult subject,' one that he relished introducing to a new generation."


Felicia R. Lee in The New York Times talks to Peniel E. Joseph, and others, about his new biography of Stokely Carmichael.


And William Jelani Cobb reviews the book.

"Francis Ford Coppola Reveals Every ‘Godfather’ Film Took Place In Same Narrative World"

"Noting that the nods to a common narrative were 'Easter eggs' intended 'only for the real diehards,' Coppola emphasized that the movies still held up individually, though he assured audiences that, after several viewings, many of them would pick up on details such as the fact that almost every character in the three films has ties to the Sicilian Mafia."


From The Onion.

"Over Time, the American Dream Has Become Increasingly Untethered from American Reality"

"More important, in any capitalist society most people are bound to be part of the middle and working classes; public policy should focus on raising their standard of living, instead of raising their chances of getting rich. What made the U.S. economy so remarkable for most of the twentieth century was the fact that, even if working people never moved into a different class, over time they saw their standard of living rise sharply. Between the late nineteen-forties and the early nineteen-seventies, median household income in the U.S. doubled. That’s what has really changed in the past forty years. The economy is growing more slowly than it did in the postwar era, and average workers’ share of the pie has been shrinking. It’s no surprise that people in Washington prefer to talk about mobility rather than about this basic reality. Raising living standards for ordinary workers is hard: you need to either get wages growing or talk about things that scare politicians, like 'redistribution' and 'taxes.' But making it easier for some Americans to move up the economic ladder is no great triumph if most can barely hold on."


James Surowiecki in The New Yorker looks at class in America.

No Love Lost

"Curtis's great lyrical achievement was to capture the underlying reality of a society in turmoil, and to make it both universal and personal. Distilled emotion is the essence of pop music and, just as Joy Division are perfectly poised between white light and dark despair, so Curtis's lyrics oscillate between hopelessness and the possibility, if not need, for human connection. At bottom is the fear of losing the ability to feel."


In a 2008 Guardian article, Jon Savage explores Ian Curtis's literary influences.