May 2015 Acquisitions

Books:
Jason Aaron and Jason Latour, Southern Bastards, Vol. 2: Gridiron, 2015.
Danny Bilson et al, Red Menace, 2007.
Ed Brubaker et al, Catwoman, Vol. 2: Crooked Little Town, 2004.
Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue: A Novel, 2012.
Max Landis et al, Adventures of Superman, Vol. 3, 2015
John Layman et al, Batman--Detective Comics, Vol. 5: Gothtopia, 2015.
Frank Miller et al, Daredevil by Frank Miller & Klaus Janson, Vol. 1, 2008.
Jeff Parker et al, Batman '66, Vol. 2, 2015.
Lincoln Peirce, Big Nate Makes the Grade, 2012.
Gail Simone et al, Sensation Comics Featuring Wonder Woman, Vol. 1, 2015.
Charles Soule et al, Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, Vol. 4, 2015.



DVDs:
E.T. The Extraterrestrial, 1982.
Lego Friends: Friends Are Forever, 2014.
Lego Star Wars: The Yoda Chronicles, 2014.
Selma, 2014.
The Spike Lee Joint Collection, 2006.

"Cheerleading for Spotify Doesn't Quite Get Us There"

"This echoes what we've been hearing from the Silicon Valley crowd about disintermediation and how the collapse of the old system would be great for the artist. We know how well that's worked out. And it ignores the process of re-intermediation, as the Internet companies consolidate into a few corporate behemoths even worse than the old major-label structure, and keep the artists locked out of all the dealmaking.
"There were certainly exploitative label deals and record company execs in the old model. But, the old-school, analog-age middlemen–not just people who work at labels, but record store clerks, editors at book publishers, journalistic critics–are rarely the people who get rich in the culture world."


Scott Timberg in Salon looks at music-streaming companies.

"May Be Unprecedented in Its Scope and Ambition"

"Obama has opened an entirely new frontier of presidential power by turning to state and local governments, said Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha, who studies the effect of presidential persuasion at the University of North Texas.
"'I'm really struck by, one, why hasn't anybody thought of this before? And two, this could be a very effective strategy,' Eshbaugh-Soha said. 'At a time when executive orders are becoming particularly controversial and you're not able to break through the gridlock of Congress, I think it's ingenious.'"


Gregory Korte in USA Today reports on President Obama's "state-and-local strategy."

"The Kids Are Not All Right Anymore"

"The causes for this flattening of society are myriad. Social media encourages gang conformism with its 'like' buttons and 'retweets'. Amazon and other retail websites have honed algorithms that coopt trends, so that when someone reveals they like, say, Sonic Youth, it is assumed they must like Firehose or Dinsoaur Jr–effectively short circuiting choice. There is also the phenomenon of 'retromania' and the way digital media encourage consumers to access everything all at once. Fashion and music are no longer linked to a moment or an event."


Chris Moss in The Telegraph "laments the demise of urban tribes."

"FIFA Frantically Announces 2015 Summer World Cup In United States"

"At press time, the U.S. national team was leading defending champions Germany in the World Cup's opening match after being awarded 12 penalties in the game's first three minutes."


From The Onion.

"Diminished Services for Students"?

"Meeting space aside, adjuncts often report that they simply cannot answer common questions from the students about the requirements for the major, course sequencing, or related classes at the college; to get this information, students instead have to track down tenured faculty on campus. Same with letters of recommendation for admission to graduate programs or post-college jobs: Some adjunct professors may not be willing to write them because they aren't paid for the time, or students may find it difficult to locate former teachers who are no longer employed at that college. Even if they are willing, colleges might not provide adjuncts with institutional letterhead for the recommendations."


Laura McKenna in The Atlantic looks at how adjunct faculty affect college students.

"This Grotesque Level of Inequality Is Immoral"

"As some of you know, I was born in a far-away land called Brooklyn, New York.  My father came to this country from Poland without a penny in his pocket and without much of an education.  My mother graduated high school in New York City.  My father worked for almost his entire life as a paint salesman and we were solidly lower-middle class.  My parents, brother and I lived in a small rent-controlled apartment.  My mother's dream was to move out of that apartment into a home of our own.  She died young and her dream was never fulfilled.  As a kid I learned, in many, many ways, what lack of money means to a family.  That's a lesson I have never forgotten.
"I have seen the promise of America in my own life.  My parents would have never dreamed that their son would be a U.S. Senator, let alone run for president.  But for too many of our fellow Americans, the dream of progress and opportunity is being denied by the grind of an economy that funnels all the wealth to the top."


The Burlington Free Press prints Sen. Bernie Sanders's speech announcing his presidential campaign.

"Universities Meant to Ameliorate Social Inequality Are Instead Exacerbating It"

"Ultimately, Arizona shows two ways that universities can respond to government defunding. They can become country clubs, or they can become 'knowledge enterprises' that rely on the Internet to deliver education to enormous, geographically diffuse student bodies. Either way, the gap between the type of education available to children from affluent families and that offered to everyone else is going to grow. There was a moment in American history, says Newfield, when 'the kind of thing that the Bush family could take for granted at Yale became possible at U. Michigan for somebody whose father was a middle manager.' That moment is over."


Michelle Goldberg in The Nation looks at the future of higher education.

"The Question Isn't Who Is Going to Let Me, It's Who Is Going to Stop Me"

"The beginnings of the 'cyber revolution' that King referenced in his sermon were already moving forward in 1968 as he was speaking. The origins of that technology revolution were clearly located in the counter culture as Fred Turner and John Markoff have shown and the idea (in Nicholas Negroponte's words) was to 'decentralize control and harmonize people'. That the earliest of networks like the Whole Earth Lectronic Link (WELL) organized by Stewart Brand grew directly out of the hippie culture was a natural progression from both the political and cultural growth of 1960's counter culture. But within 20 years, starting with Peter Thiel's cohort at Stanford University, the organizing philosophy of Silicon Valley was far more based on the radical libertarian ideology of Ayn Rand than the commune based notions of Ken Kesey and Stewart Brand. Thiel, the founder of PayPal, early investor in Facebook and Godfather of the PayPal Mafia that currently rules Silicon Valley has been clear about his philosophy."


Jonathan Taplin at Medium argues that we have been "sleeping through a revolution."

"The Philistines Are on the March"

"The culture wars over the humanities that dominated discussion of higher education in the 1980s and 1990s had enduring historical significance. Shouting matches about academia reverberated beyond the ivory tower to lay bare a crisis of national faith. Was America a good nation? Could the nation be good—could its people be free—without foundations? Were such foundations best provided by a classic liberal education in the humanities, which Matthew Arnold described as 'the best that has been thought and said'? Was the 'best' philosophy and literature synonymous with the canon of Western Civilization? Or was the Western canon racist and sexist? Was the 'best' even a valid category for thinking about texts? Debates over these abstract questions rocked the nation's institutions of higher education, demonstrating that the culture wars did not boil down to any one specific issue or even a set of issues. Rather, the culture wars often hinged on a more epistemological question about national identity: How should Americans think?
"But in our current age of austerity, Americans are not asked to think about such questions at all."


Andrew Hartman in In These Times argues that conservatives "have abandoned the humanities entirely."

"The Last Frontier"

"When Backer finally met with his colleague Billy Davis—a songwriter from Motown who had been in the Four Tops—and the rest of his team, he said he wanted 'a song that treated the whole world as if it were a person—a person the singer would like to help and get to know.' He read to them what he had written on the napkin: 'I'd like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company.'"


Slate runs an excerpt from Jeff Chang's Who We Be: The Colorization of America.

"It's a Telenovela Set in the '60s That's Really Beautiful to Look At"

"Mendelsohn dislikes the number of subplots, which, he says, often 'fizzled out because something more interesting came along.' Scoblic takes aim at the larger arc: 'There are shows like Breaking Bad that take a dramatic arc and thread that arc through every episode and you have a destination,' she explains, 'and I don't feel Mad Men was ever going anywhere in particular, except teasing us about Don Draper's background.'"


As Mad Men approaches its series finale, Gazelle Emami in New York talks with non-fans.

"Pioneered the Techniques of Creating Trust in a Pure Religious Product"

"What Crowell did—and what makes him so important to my mind—is that he solved the problem that had plagued individualistic, evangelical religion since it first emerged during the First Great Awakening in the eighteenth century. (When things started to go a little nutty, respectable middle class Protestants swung back to an emphasis on church and tradition.)
"Crowell figured out a way to impose order on evangelicalism, but without having to resort to churchly guardrails. He used the techniques of consumer capitalism that he knew so well, packaging and trademark and massive promotional campaigns."


Daniel Silliman in Salon talks with Timothy Gloege, author of Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism.

"It Is No Wonder That Students Have Become More Mercenary in Their Approach"

"I have suggested that schools stop spending so much money and labor on useless research in the humanities, and instead shift that labor and money to teaching. Pay adjuncts more money and hire them as lecturers on regular contracts. Make no research demands upon them. For research professors, ask them to slow down their publication pace—get off the industrial model—and reward them for contact hours with students. And let's close down graduate programs that don't place 80 percent of their Ph.D.s.
"You can imagine how popular that suggestion was."


Scott Eric Kaufman in Salon talks with Mark Bauerlein about Bauerlein's controversial New York Times op-ed.

"The Biggest Story in American Politics of the Past 40 Years"

"We are under no illusion about how easily or quickly our lopsided politics can be righted. But put yourself in the shoes of an early 1970s conservative and ask how likely the great right migration seemed then, when Richard Nixon was proposing a guaranteed income and national health insurance and backing environmental regulations and the largest expansion of Social Security in its history. Reversals of powerfully rooted trends that threaten our democracy take time, effort, and persistence. Yet above all they require a clear recognition of what has gone wrong."


In The American Prospect, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson argue that the "growing extremism of Republicans is the main cause of increasing gridlock in Washington, the driving force behind the rise in scorched-earth tactics on Capitol Hill, an increasing contributor to partisan conflict and policy dysfunction at the state level, and the major cause of increasing public disgust with Washington—which, not coincidentally, feeds directly into the Republicans' anti-government project."

"They Just Don't Have a Party"

"Seventy-five years ago, this would have been the Dixie branch of the New Deal coalition. Today, this kind of coalition is a mainstay in European politics—where center-right parties support a kind of conservative social democracy—but largely absent from America. Here, it lacks a place in either party. Republicans are too hostile to social spending while Democrats—who represent the so-called 'undeserving' poor—are both too diverse and too permissive on social issues such as immigration, marriage, and abortion rights. In Huckabee, these voters have a candidate."


Jamelle Bouie in Slate considers Mike Huckabee's presidential campaign.

"This Man Reveled in Awkwardness"

"So let's keep it simple: Not one single writer/performer in the last 35 years has had Dave's seismic impact on comedy. Every day, I read that a new comic has 'changed the game,' and admittedly there is an absurd abundance of talent and creativity out there right now. But in today's world of 30 late night programs, it's tempting now to take Dave for granted. Do not. Dave was a true revolution—and I believe his innovations are up there with the light bulb and the Twix bar. Like all revolutions, it was such a seismic shift that it was disorienting and a bit messy at first, and it has taken us time to realize the sheer magnitude of the shift."


In Entertainment Weekly, Conan O'Brien remembers David Letterman in the 1980s.

"Not So Much Willful Amnesia as Willful Misremembering"

"President Reagan's singular political insight was this: he grasped—and fully endorsed—the unwillingness of Americans to acknowledge historical limits, much less anything as definitive as outright failure. That Vietnam was inarguably a defeat signifying unexpectedly confining limits—a great power unable to beat a bunch of peasants—was something that they and he refused to countenance.
"So Reagan told Americans they didn't have to."


Andrew J. Bacevich in The American Conservative reviews Christian G. Appy's American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity.

"Museum Of Repressed American History Conceals New Exhibit On Tuskegee Experiments"

"According to officials, the museum was founded by prominent historical revisionist Henry Fleming, who in 1968 donated his private collection of burned government papers concerning the relocation of Japanese Americans during World War II. Since its unannounced opening, the gallery has featured such exhibits as a retrospective of the construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad consisting solely of a toy electric train that circled around a locked box containing records of laborers' working conditions, as well as a room devoted to the Trail of Tears that contained no doorways by which to enter."


From The Onion.

"This May Be the Last Election of a United Kingdom Ever"

"Under their skin, a lot of old hands felt in their bones that it was remarkable that Labour was level pegging when the Tories had everything in their favour. Never has there been such a mighty blast of nearly all the press denouncing Labour in the crudest ways. Add to that six months of nothing but good economic news, on jobs and on growth, with orchestrated paeans of praise from business. Even if people didn't feel it in their pockets, they were fed a story of sunlit uplands ahead.
"Inside Labour the inquest will be bitter, a battle ahead that risks turning into a grim repeat of old arguments between Blairites and Miliband radicals. Was it the man, or was it his ideas that were defeated?"


Polly Toynbee at The Guardian reacts to the British election results.

Empires of Cotton and Necessity

Columbia University awards the 2015 Bancroft Prize to historians Sven Beckert and Greg Grandin.

Breaking the Back of Love

"With the coming of rock in the '60s, Bob Dylan and the Beatles dramatically widened the range of subjects open to pop-song lyricists, just as Stephen Sondheim (who goes completely unmentioned in Love Songs) taught a generation of theatrical songwriters that it was possible to write about romantic love with unsettling ambivalence. To be sure, the wider significance of these developments was initially overstated by the critics of the day. As Dave Hickey has tartly observed, 'ninety percent of the pop songs ever written were love songs, while ninety percent of rock criticism was written about the other ten percent.' Still, they were at the very least a crack in the façade, and in the '90s that crack widened into a yawning gap."


Terry Teachout in Commentary discusses Ted Gioia's Love Songs: The Hidden History.

"If Physics Can Live With Maddening Truths, Why Can't Literature and History?"

"However, 'Wolf Hall' poses questions not just political but literary. When such a distortion of history produces such a wonderfully successful piece of fiction, we are forced to ask: What license are we to grant to the historical novel?
"For all the learned answers, in reality it comes down to temporal proximity."

Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post ponders fact and fiction.

"As Long as the Melody Is Still There, That's All That Matters"

"'I don't think the 70s and the 80s were great days,' Paul Weller says. 'There were loads of things I hated about them, frankly, and I much prefer my life now. If you gave me a time machine to go back to those decades I wouldn't be bothered. What did I hate about the 70s? Black-and-white television. The way people were overtly racist and Neanderthal. Every gig I went to was violent, with crowds exploding in blood, fists, kicks. I'm pleased to say that we've improved, and I'm really glad we're far more cross-cultural now.'"


Tony Clayton-Lea in The Irish Times talks with Paul Weller on the eve of a new album release.

"The Kind of Explanation That Could Only Be Offered by Someone Oblivious to His Own Advantages"

"For Brooks, the problem with poor people is that they’re immoral. It's not because they're structurally disadvantaged, or because their local economies have collapsed, or because jobs have been shipped overseas, or because they attended chaotic schools, or because their parents worked multiple jobs for unlivable wages, or because the material demands of existence occupy the bulk of their time. Nope, it's because of poor 'social psychology.'"


Sean Illing in Slate criticizes David Brooks's writing about Baltimore.

"The Champion of Causes Not Yet Won"

"The SPA ran thousands of candidates for offices both high and low. It even managed to elect a couple of congressmen as well as dozens of mayors in locales as diverse as Milwaukee; Berkeley, California; and the little railroad town of Antlers, Oklahoma. Many of the reforms the party advocated ended up becoming law.

"Beginning in 1900, Eugene Victor Debs ran five times for president, never gaining more than 6 percent of the popular vote. The charismatic former union leader crisscrossed the nation, stretching out his long arms as if to touch the admiring crowds whom he urged to destroy 'the foul and decaying system' and erect a 'cooperative commonwealth' in its place. But Debs' platform also included such 'immediate' demands as women’s suffrage, a progressive income tax, an eight-hour day, a ban on child labor, and a vote for the residents of the District of Columbia that no longer seem radical at all."

Michael Kazin in Slate connects Bernie Sanders to Socialists in twentieth-century American politics.

Jumping Music, Slick DJs, Fog Machines, and Laser Rays

"I didn't end up talking much about the music because ultimately what I found most interesting about the scene were the DJs and the crews. In any case, it's hard to come up with a representative playlist since we're talking about a scene that spanned the late 70s through early/mid 90s. An essential playlist would have to span any number of different music styles across those years, from funk and disco to electro and freestyle to new wave and of course, hip-hop."


Tamara Palmer at Noisey interviews Oliver Wang about his book Legions of Boom: Filipino American Mobile DJ Crews in the San Francisco Bay Area.

"Parents Of Crying Child Must Not Be Any Good"

"In addition, the baby's incessant screaming only worsened following the couple's repeated attempts to soothe her, further highlighting their profound inadequacies as a mother and father."


From The Onion.