June 2015 Acquisitions

Books:
Ed Brubaker et al, Catwoman, Vol. 1: The Dark End of the Street, 2004.
Ed Brubaker et al, Catwoman, Vol. 3: Relentless, 2005.
Ed Brubaker et al, Catwoman, Vol. 3: Under Pressure, 2014.
Ed Brubaker et al, Catwoman, Vol. 4: Wild Ride, 2005.
Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, Criminal, Vol. 5: The Sinners, 2015.
Matt Hawkins et al, Postal, Vol. 1, 2015.
Kate Hopkins, Sweet Tooth: The Bittersweet History of Candy, 2012.
Auma Obama, And Then Life Happens: A Memoir, 2012.
Will Pfeifer, Catwoman, Vol. 5: The Replacements, 2007.
Rachel Renee Russell, Dork Diaries 9: Tales from a Not-So-Dorky Drama Queen, 2015.
Jerry Siegel, Showcase Presents Superman, Vol. 1, 2005.
Jerry Siegel, Showcase Presents Superman, Vol. 2, 2006.
Gail Simone et al, Batgirl, Vol. 5: Deadline, 2015.
Robb Young, Power Dressing: First Ladies, Women Politicians & Fashion, 2011.


DVDs:
American Hustle, 2013.
4 Film Favorites: Batman Collection, 2009.
Ted, 2012.

"Identity Is One Thing; Identification Is Another"

"Belief in witchcraft didn't disappear because science disproved it, but because it ultimately became something people couldn't take seriously in the world of everyday life. Right now people take race seriously, they think its something that nature has bestowed. Even the people who think they don't, who say 'race is a social construction,' also take it seriously as something that nature has bestowed."


Jason Farbman at Jacobin interviews Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields.

"They've Now Passed It onto Us"

"That—that history can't be a sword to justify injustice or a shield against progress. It must be a manual for how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, how to break the cycle, a roadway toward a better world. He knew that the path of grace involves an open mind. But more importantly, an open heart."That's what I felt this week—an open heart. That more than any particular policy or analysis is what's called upon right now, I think. It's what a friend of mine, the writer Marilyn Robinson, calls 'that reservoir of goodness beyond and of another kind, that we are able to do each other in the ordinary cause of things.'
"That reservoir of goodness. If we can find that grace, anything is possible."


The Washington Post provides a transcript of President Obama's eulogy for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney.


James Fallows at The Atlantic reacts to the speech.


And David Remnick at The New Yorker discusses Obama's previous ten days.

"A Portrait of Policy Triumph"

"Now, you might wonder why a law that works so well and does so much good is the object of so much political venom—venom that is, by the way, on full display in Justice Antonin Scalia's dissenting opinion, with its rants against 'interpretive jiggery-pokery.' But what conservatives have always feared about health reform is the possibility that it might succeed, and in so doing remind voters that sometimes government action can improve ordinary Americans' lives.

"That's why the right went all out to destroy the Clinton health plan in 1993, and tried to do the same to the Affordable Care Act. But Obamacare has survived, it's here, and it's working. The great conservative nightmare has come true. And it's a beautiful thing."

Paul Krugman in The New York Times checks the state of Obamacare.

"Dynamists and Catastrophists"

"This is a document aligned with the scientific consensus on climate that excoriates the modern scientific mind-set as, in effect, a 500-year mistake. It's a document calling for global action, even a 'new world political authority,' that's drenched in frank contempt for the existing global leadership class. It's a document that urges a rapid move away from fossil fuels while explicitly criticizing the leading avenue for doing so—a cap and trade regime—as too 'quick and easy,' too compromised by greed and self-interest, to 'allow for the radical change which present circumstances require.'
 

And while it includes hopeful passages, the encyclical's most pungent lines are apocalyptic: 'Doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain. We may well be leaving to coming generations debris, desolation and filth.'"

Ross Douthat in The New York Times reads Pope Francis's "Laudato Si'."

"A Great Deal Has Happened in a Very Short Time"

"And the 1960s offer the best available parallel to the changes sweeping through American culture and politics. That period saw an intense expansion of activist government in the economic sphere, just as the current one has (Obamacare; stronger regulation of Wall Street and greenhouse-gas emissions). Then, as now, judges created new rights, legislatures created others, and new attitudes spread organically through the culture."


Jonathan Chait in New York places today's Supreme Court ruling in context.

"His Field, Economics, Has a Weirdly Distorted View of Human Behavior"

"After the '87 crash, when the market fell 20 percent in a day, and the Internet bubble, when the Nasdaq went from 5000 to 1400, and then the real estate bubble, which led to a financial crisis from which we're still trying to extricate ourselves, the idea that markets work perfectly is no longer tenable."


Paul Solman on PBS Newshour talks with Richard Thaler about behavioral economics.

"South Carolina Has a Very Unique and Deplorable History When It Comes to Slavery and Race"

"It goes way back to the American Revolution. South Carolina had delegates who insisted that Thomas Jefferson take out a clause that condemned slavery from the Declaration of Independence. It was South Carolina delegates who got the Three-Fifths Compromise and the Fugitive Slave Clause into the Constitution. It was South Carolina who was the leader in nullification, the leader in secession. The first shot of the Civil War was shot there. South Carolina was the only Southern state in which the majority of white families owned slaves."


Elias Isquith in Salon interviews Eric Foner.

"I Would Have Turned Him Over to the FBI for Destroying the Left!"

"But movies are made mostly to entertain. Burrough does more, offering lessons to absorb. One involves the inner logic that leads sensitive souls of various ideological predilections to embrace violence for political ends. The number of American leftists studying bomb-making over the last couple of decades may be vanishingly small, but the number of Americans is not: Timothy McVeigh and his drums of fertilizer; the Tsarnaev brothers and their pressure cookers; abortion-clinic bombers; young Minnesotans scouring the Internet for ways to travel to Syria to join ISIS--all of them are seekers of a certain kind of Dostoyevskian fantasy of communion. They are radical narcissists detached from reality, certain that their spark would ignite the great silent masses who share the same sense of futility and frustration. They see society as a powder keg almost ready to blow."


Rick Perlstein in The Nation reviews Bryan Burrough's Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence.

"Death Squads Suppressed the Black Vote and Killed Some 150 People"

"In a way, the memorialization of Wade Hampton might be even more insulting than the flying of the Confederate flag. The flag's defenders have convinced many people that they're not commemorating slavery, just Southern history as a whole. (I don't believe that argument has merit; I'm just saying others do.) But what else are Wade Hampton's statue and the Wade Hampton Building besides tributes to his anti-democratic seizure of power? What else could the celebration of a political figure know only for his connection to white supremacist violence possibly be, except an endorsement of white supremacist violence?"


Ben Mathis-Lilley in Slate discusses how South Carolina "honors white supremacists."

The Way We're Droppin' Hamiltons

"What to make of all this? Well, people are complicated, and don't always line up along the conventional left-right axis. Hamilton has an especially unstable background, especially compared to Virginia planters who dominated the founding generation: Born in the British West Indies and orphaned, Hamilton had an early history so sketchy, we're not even sure of his birth year.
"But part of it is that we've gotten Hamilton wrong over the decades, perhaps thanks to high school history classes that framed Hamilton as the father of American conservatism and Jefferson as the founder of U.S. liberalism, with Andrew Jackson as his inheritor."


Scott Timberg in Salon looks at reactions to the announced elimination of Alexander Hamilton from the $10 bill.


Ron Chernow at Politico pleads to keep Hamilton on the bill.


Binyamin Appelbaum and Josh Barro at The New York Times discuss the issue.


And David Greenberg at Politico defends Andrew Jackson.

"He Identified Their Situation with That of the Israelites"

"In 1817, following a dispute over burial ground with white members of Charleston's Methodist Episcopal church (reportedly, white congregants built a 'hearse house' on black burial ground), some 1,400 black Christians formed a separate congregation, according to the National Park Service website on Charleston. A year earlier, the African Methodist Episcopal church denomination had been formally established in Philadelphia, and the church community in Charleston set up their church in that denomination in 1818. Free black man and church leader Morris Brown is widely credited as the founder of Charleston's African Methodist Episcopal church, but many cite Denmark Vesey as a co-founder, including the church’s website. Even before Vesey and his associates began discussing plans for an uprising, the church was seen as a threat to the white domination of Charleston. Within months of the church’s establishment, the Charleston city guard arrested 140 free men and slaves for worshipping in violation of city ordinances. Egerton theorized that Vesey might have been among them. In early 1821, Charleston's city council warned against church leaders allowing African Church classes to become 'schools for slaves.' By December of 1821, Vesey was plotting the slave uprising that would make him famous."


On the day after the Charleston shootings, Naomi Shavin in The New Republic remembers Denmark Vesey.

"Lysergically Enhanced Parlour Music"

"Its heyday ran from the tail end of psychedelia to the birth of punk and it made great use of string quartets, woodwinds, and summer-into-autumn melancholy. While it never grabbed the pop world as a chart-conquering genre, its velvety touch was never that far away. This was a sound informed by Paul McCartney's contributions to The White Album, the Zombies' Odessey and Oracle, Scott Walker's weighty chamber pop, and a dash of Crosby, Stills & Nash harmony. Just add a harpsichord, a pot of tea, a ginger cat on the windowsill, and you've got the picture."


In a 2007 Guardian article, Bob Stanley praises 1960s baroque pop.

"Quickly Becoming a Centerpiece of the 2016 Presidential Campaign"

"Senator Schumer and the other lawmakers who spoke at the event framed student debt as a barrier to economic mobility and a drag on economic growth. They argued that student loans prevent college graduates from buying homes or starting businesses, and discourage some low-income students from attending college altogether.
"'If we're serious about wanting people to pursue higher ed, we can't put them on the brink of bankruptcy every time they graduate,' said Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, sponsor of the Senate resolution."


Kelly Field in The Chronicle of Higher Education looks at the call for "debt-free college."

"Report: San Francisco To Shut Doors Over Rising Rent"

"The city's in such a great area, but ultimately we just couldn't find a way to make ends meet each month,' said San Francisco resident Jaime Gonzalez, speaking on behalf of the city's 850,000 citizens, all of whom recently gave notice that they would be vacating the premises by July 1. 'We've been here for so long, it's hard to imagine this city anywhere else. But the reality is that we just aren't making enough to justify what we pay to be here.'
"'Unfortunately, we just can't afford to keep San Francisco in San Francisco Bay,' Gonzalez added."


From The Onion.

To Finish the Work We Are In

The New York Times ends its Disunion blog and Paul Finkelman discusses how the Civil War changed the Constitution.

The Number One Song in Heaven

"For a spell it seemed like '80s new wave, marked by witty lyrics about teenage lust and bold, synth-driven arrangements (two Sparks hallmarks), routinely producing major hits, would be the perfect place for Sparks. They stood out on the soundtrack to the 1983 hit film 'Valley Girl' with 'Eaten By the Monster of Love' and the title track to their 11th album, 'Angst in My Pants.' MTV played the hell out of Sparks' duet with the Go-Go's Jane Wiedlin, 'Cool Places,' but mainstream success in America continued to elude them. Ultimately, however, the Maels had to be content with a devoted and disciplined base (the young Kapranos among them). There was something a little too smart about Sparks to be genuine pop stars; they could only ever be 'pop stars' in quotes—they saw the falseness of the game a little too reflexively to really play it."


Marc Spitz in Salon talks with the Brothers Mael.

"Where, For More Than a Century, Conflicts Over Race and Class Have Often Surfaced"

"Today, that complicated legacy persists across the United States. The public pools of mid-century—with their sandy beaches, manicured lawns, and well-tended facilities—are vanishingly rare. Those sorts of amenities are now generally found behind closed gates, funded by club fees or homeowners' dues, and not by tax dollars. And they are open to those who can afford to live in such subdivisions, but not to their neighbors just down the road."


Yoni Appelbaum in The Atlantic discusses McKinney, Texas, and the history of segregated pools.

"A Social Arrangement That Is Legal, but Not Moral"

"If people groaning under the weight of student loans simply said, 'Enough,' then all the pieties about debt that have become absorbed into all the pieties about higher education might be brought into alignment with reality. Instead of guaranteeing loans, the government would have to guarantee a college education. There are a lot of people who could learn to live with that, too."


Lee Siegel in The New York Times argues that college graduates should stop paying off their student loans.

Mike Love Not War

"Californians get tired of hearing their state described in dichotomous terms of sunshine and noir. But if there was ever a band with a stark contrast between clean-cut innocence and nasty stuff beneath the surface, it's these guys. Compared to them, the Stones are art-school poseurs dabbling in Satanic imagery.
"And if you look closely, you can see the weirdness from almost the very beginning."


Scott Timberg in Salon considers the Beach Boys.

"Subtle, Permanent and Devastating"

"Mielke, along with colleague Sammy Zahran, compared leaded gasoline emissions with aggravated assault rates in Chicago and five other cities and found a good fit in each one.
"Both trends look like an upside-down 'U.' Emissions from leaded gasoline started increasing in the 1950s, peaked in the early '70s and then steadily declined. Aggravated assault rates rose, peaked and fell on a similar curve, only about 20 years later."


In the Chicago Tribune, Michael Hawthorne reports on the social effects of lead poisoning.

"The Natural Expression of a Worldview"

"But what does the episode tell us? It does not show that the Constitutional right to freedom of speech faces a serious threat. The proceedings against Kipnis were dropped, and it's impossible to imagine that a court could have sustained any formal sanctions against her on the basis of writing an op-ed column, because of, you know, the First Amendment.
"What's important, rather, is that Kipnis’s antagonists believe that she deserves to be punished by the university administration for writing a column they didn't like."


Jonathan Chait at New York reacts to the controversy regarding Laura Kipnis at Northwestern University.

"But Family Income Matters More Than Math Talent"

"Dynarski's study, above, shows that poor children who manage to graduate from college have beaten the odds. They require, on average, more academic ability in order to obtain a college degree than a more affluent child. Through some combination of talent and hard work, in addition to luck, they have overperformed. A child from an affluent background who fails to graduate college has also beaten the odds, in a negative way. Through some lack of hard work or talent or, of course, luck, they underperformed.
"And yet a child from a poor background who beats the odds to graduate from college is still less likely to wind up in the top fifth of income earners than a child from an affluent background who failed to graduate from college."


Jonathan Chait at New York looks at studies of class and education.