"For the Purpose of Strewing with Flowers or Otherwise Decorating the Graves of Comrades"

"As America recognizes the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclaimation, we would do well to revisit the origins of Memorial Day among freedpeople in Charleston. While they honored those who fought for their emancipation, it was not simply a moment of great triumph and celebration for freedpeople, but a complicated process that led to the unexpected death of hundreds of thousands of former slaves."

Jim Downs at The Huffington Post discusses Memorial Day and the end of slavery.

"Nazis Were All but Invisible in American Movies at the Time When Depicting Their Savagery Might Have Done the Most Good"

"In the end it was Jack Warner who brought the rest of Hollywood on board. By using the techniques of 'March of Time,' he was able to blend melodrama, agitprop and a remedial history lesson into the Warners production 'Confessions of a Nazi Spy.' The film made it through the censor boards and onto American screens in the spring of 1939, only a few months before the outbreak of war in Europe. By then, as Doherty pointedly notes, even the most optimistic of Hollywood’s businessmen had concluded that Nazi Germany was no longer a viable outlet for American movies, and was unlikely to be so again for the foreseeable future."

Dave Kehr in The New York Times reviews Thomas Doherty's Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939.

"The Other Half Is Equality"

"We usually think of greater inclusiveness as a blow struck for equality. But in our time, the stories of greater social equality and economic inequality are unrelated. The fortunes of middle-class Americans have declined while prospects for many women and minorities have risen. There’s no reason why they couldn’t have improved together—this is what appeared to be happening in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies. Since then, many women and minorities have done better than in any previous generations, but many others in both groups have seen their lives and communities squeezed by the economic contractions of the past generation. Like almost everything else, the new inclusiveness divides the country into winners and losers. It’s been good for those with the education, talent, and luck to benefit from it; for others—in urban cores like Youngstown, Ohio; rural backwaters like Rockingham County, North Carolina; and the exurban slums outside Tampa—inclusiveness remains mostly theoretical. It gives an idea of equality, which makes the reality of inequality even more painful."

George Packer at The New Yorker looks at "What America Has Gained, What America Has Lost."

At The American Conservative, Samuel Goldman responds.

Joe Klein at Time reads Packer's new book.

"Every War Has Come to an End"

"Our victory against terrorism won’t be measured in a surrender ceremony at a battleship, or a statue being pulled to the ground.  Victory will be measured in parents taking their kids to school; immigrants coming to our shores; fans taking in a ballgame; a veteran starting a business; a bustling city street; a citizen shouting her concerns at a President."

The New York Times prints President Obama's speech about counterterrorism.

"The Troubling Question Is Why She Has Become What the Education-Reform Movement Is Looking for in a Standard Bearer"

"Surely one reason that the education-reform movement comports itself in this strident and limited manner is that it depends so heavily on the largesse of people who are used to getting their way and to whom the movement’s core arguments have a powerful face validity. Only a tiny percentage of American children attend the kind of expensive, non-sectarian private schools where many of the elite send their children. It is worth noting that these schools generally avoid giving their students the standardized achievement tests that state education departments require, making the results public, and paying teachers on the basis of the scores, and that they almost never claim to be creating hyper-competitive, commercial-skills-purveying environments for their students. Sidwell Friends, of presidential-daughter fame, says it offers 'a rich and rigorous interdisciplinary curriculum designed to stimulate creative inquiry, intellectual achievement and independent thinking in a world increasingly without borders.' That doesn’t sound like it would cut much ice with Michelle Rhee."

Nicholas Lemann in The New Republic discusses Michelle Rhee.

"Zelig in the Corner of Someone Else’s Portrait"

"When he crosses a present-day mind, it is almost never as the plump, white-mustachioed burgher painted by Sargent. We see instead the slender young man, one hand playfully on his hip, the other on the back of Lincoln’s chair, being photographed with Nicolay and the president in Alexander Gardner’s Civil War studio. Hay may have written, in 1900, that 'the most important part of my life came late,' but his heart and subconscious are unlikely to have believed it. While sailing home from Europe shortly before his death—he’d gone for a rest cure but succumbed, as always, to social distractions—he had a dream about going 'to the White House to report to the president who turned out to be Mr. Lincoln' instead of the incumbent Roosevelt. It was his service to the first that brought him into the realms of myth and even religious mystery; his work for the second put him in the mere thick of history."

Thomas Mallon in The New York Times reviews John Taliaferro's All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay, From Lincoln to Roosevelt.

This Can't Be Today

"I was just grateful I got on for the ride. For some reason, which I cannot explain, we have become to other people what Television was for me. That is for me the greatest satisfaction because those guys, for me, were it. For all the bullshit that's out there, one of the most rewarding things for me has been, 25 years later, to go out and play again. It's almost more rewarding now – I've never been in a room where so many people are so happy to see me. There are people for whom this music means a great deal, and it's very humbling."

Michael Hann in The Guardian presents an oral history of the Paisley Underground.

"A Commitment to Democracy as Process"

"O’Brien is right that Obama represents an American political tradition, though there’s no need to go back to seventeenth-century Rotterdam to find it. The focus on democratic process, reform, and an ideal of deliberative democracy has been shared by many of the less successful Democratic candidates (and a few Republicans, like Representative John Anderson in 1980) since the 1950s. It’s the tradition of what historian Sean Wilentz called the 'beautiful losers,' beginning with Adlai Stevenson, and journalist Ron Brownstein called 'wine track' candidates (people who talk about 'new politics') as opposed to the more electable 'beer track' candidates like Bill Clinton (who focus more on basic economics than on the nature of politics). Obama’s passion has always seemed to be more for a richer and more collaborative form of politics than for any particular vision of economic justice.
"Obama’s presidency has been the first real test of a politics focused on reform and democratic participation rather than traditional bipartisan bargaining—and it has failed. Over the last four years, American politics split sharply into the two primary traditions: the first a sort of hyper-Lockeanism represented not just by the Tea Party but even by Mitt Romney’s division of the country into 'makers and takers,' the second a demand—driven by circumstances and crisis—for a much more active, expansive government role in the economy. Economic issues, once a natural zone of compromise, began to seem more like social issues, matters of irreconcilable absolutes. There wasn’t much room in the middle, and for a period, Obama’s discursive strategy seemed wholly irrelevant."

Mark Schmitt in the Washington Monthly reviews Ruth O’Brien's Out of Many, One: Obama and the Third American Political Tradition.

"Devastating to Open Access"

"Harris understands the temptation to resort to two-tier pricing. During the economic downturn and subsequent squeeze on state budgets, funding for community colleges was cut $809 million over three years. Faculty and staff were cut. Class sizes increased to 20-year highs; teacher-to-student ratios rose to 11-year highs. The number of course sections decreased. Students faced waiting lists.
"The solution, however, is not to create a pricing system that favors 'haves' over 'have-nots.'"

The Sacramento Bee's Editorial Board criticizes proposals to create "pay to play fees for community colleges."

"Mere Representation"

John Harris and Meghan Sutherland in The Guardian discuss Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle.

"A Particular Kind of Socialism"

Whatever its political vagaries, people bought the NS just as much for the 'back half,' outstanding books and arts pages that gave one of the best reflections of serious English culture for most of the last century. Evelyn Waugh was not the only one amused by what he called the notorious contrast 'between the Jekyll of culture, wit and ingenious competition and the Hyde of querulous atheism and economics which prefaces it.'"

In The New Republic, Geoffrey Wheatcroft marks the centennial of the New Statesman.

The $64,000 Stingray Mobile

The Los Angeles Times runs obits for animator Ray Harryhausen, car customizer Dean Jeffries, bicycle designer Al Fritz, actor Taylor Mead, and television psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers.

"Enumerating Heresies and Defining Orthodoxies"

"'There is much that citizens from all points on the ideological spectrum can learn from the story of the Federalist Society,' Avery and McLaughlin conclude. And indeed there is. Although they don’t spell out the lessons for liberals, at least two emerge from the data they present. First, the various strands of legal liberalism—civil libertarians, Great Society liberals, neoprogressive technocrats, economic populists and advocates of equal rights on the basis of race, gender and sexual orientation—would do well to set aside their ideological differences and converge around a common approach to constitutional interpretation that citizens can understand. And second, if liberals want to take the courts back from conservatives, they have to recognize that ideas—and judicial appointments—matter."

Jeffrey Rosen in The New York Times reviews Michael Avery and Danielle McLaughlin's The Federalist Society: How Conservatives Took the Law Back From Liberals.

Fiat Nox

"When Clark Kerr was installed as UC's president, he cited the 'immeasurable benefits' the university had derived from the 'long vision and the understanding of the legislators and officers of our state.' As that 'enlightened and friendly environment' has eroded in the decades since, so has the education of successive generations—and the prospects for California's future."

Seth Rosenfeld in the Los Angeles Times identifies Ronald Reagan's governorship as the beginning of the University of California's decline.

Brave New School

"Those that have signed up are a mix of for-profit and nonprofit institutions, many of them business schools, both in the United States and overseas. Professors and administrators say they have been won over by on-the-job performance. 'This is what they do for a living,' says Ms. Whisenant. 'We're working with professionals.'"

Audrey Williams June in The Chronicle of Higher Education writes about companies in India that allow American college professors to outsource grading.

"I Went to Those Shows . . . "

"My parents are awesome, but they're pretty left-wing. They live in Canada now. They moved when Bush was re-elected. You know how a lot of people said they were going to do that? My parents actually did it. So I was raised with what I would say was a healthy alternative political view. Certainly, most of my memories of my childhood are at City Lights, because that's where I was babysat. Lawrence Ferlinghetti would watch me, and I would play in his office."

Stephen Mooallem in Interview interviews Winona Ryder.

"It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way"

"Jim Knoepp of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit group that has campaigned against the guest worker program, said farm work, like other difficult labor, can be made attractive to Americans at reasonable cost, and farmers should not be excused from doing so.

"'There used to be lots of American pickers who moved around the country,' he said. 'But wages have stagnated and conditions have deteriorated and agriculture is unwilling to make these jobs attractive. Think of trash collection. That’s not very appealing either. But if you offer a decent wage and conditions, people do it.'"

 

Ethan Bronner in The New York Times reports on a lawsuit in Georgia alleging hiring discrimination in farm work. 

The Devil Made Him Do It

"Wilson came out of a difficult Jersey City, N.J., childhood, spent largely in foster homes from which he repeatedly ran away; eventually, he escaped into the Air Force where he began performing. Cook offers an intriguing glimpse into black nightlife in mid-'50s California, where Wilson got his professional start, in San Francisco and the working-class rooms of the San Joaquin Valley. He was older than both Bill Cosby, whose success preceded his (and of which, according to 'Flip,' he was jealous), and Richard Pryor, whom he hired as a writer-performer for 'The Flip Wilson Show. ' Pryor paid him back by calling him 'NBC's house Negro.'"

In the Los Angeles Times, Robert Lloyd reviews Kevin Cook's Flip: The Inside Story of TV's First Black Superstar.

"The Further West One Comes, the More There Is to Like"

"San Francisco readily embraced the outré young Irishman. Wilde returned the favor. 'There is where I belong,' he told his hosts at one reception. 'This is my atmosphere. I didn't know such a place existed in the whole United States.' When the time came for him to leave San Francisco on April 8, even the railroad locomotives were said to have echoed one of his catchphrases, whistling 'too too!' as they left the station."

Roy Morris, Jr., in the Los Angeles Times discusses Oscar Wilde's 1882 visit to California.

"Bang Up the Middle of the State"

"Dropping into the Central Valley from the mountains surrounding the Tejon Pass is like breaking open a petit four, getting past the glossy, pretty exterior: inside is the cake. The urban surfaces of California are what we see in movies and on TV: slick, manufactured, shouting, cajoling, bamboozling, seducing, ready to sell you something. And then the confected beauty of the city gives way; now the land reaches far out to the sky. Your ears pop from the pressure change, and a sign advises you that the next gas station is 19 miles off."

Maria Bustillos in Aeon magazine drives the Five.

Smoke Out Hickory

"But after an election in which Democrats rode a wave of minority support to keep the White House and Senate, party activists should wonder about one of the founders for whom that event is named. If branding matters, then the tradition of honoring perhaps the most systematic violator of human rights for America’s nonwhites should finally run its course."

Steve Yoder in Salon argues in favor of dumping Andrew Jackson from the name of Democratic Party fundraising events.

April 2013 Acquisitions

Books:
Scott Beatty, Catwoman: The Visual Guide to the Feline Fatale, 2004.
Howard Chaykin, Batman: Dark Allegiances, 1998.
Darwyn Cooke with Dave Stewart, DC: The New Frontier, Vol. 2, 2005.
Tony S. Daniel, Batman: Detective Comics, Vol. 1--Faces of Death, 2013.
J. M. DeMatteis and G. L. Barr, Realworlds: Justice League of America, 2000.
Albert B. Feldstein (ed.), The Dirty Old MAD, 1971.
Albert B. Feldstein (ed.), Polyunsaturated MAD, 1972.
Albert B. Feldstein (ed.), The Organization MAD, 1960.
Matt Groening, Radioactive Man: Radioactive Repository, Volume One, 2012.
Dan Jurgens et al, The Return of Superman, 1993.
Roger Stern and Eduardo Barreto, Superman: A Nation Divided, 2000.

DVDs:
Batman: Year One, 2011.
The Dark Knight Rises, 2012.
Django Unchained, 2012.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall, 2008.
A History of Violence, 2005.
Steve Martin: The Wild and Crazy Comedy Collection, 2007.
Wreck-It Ralph, 2012.

"I Demand You Get a Grip"

"Yeah, that's her, staring you down, eyes blazing, cursing under her breath. She's a piece of work with zigzag black bangs, a blood-red shirt and hands firmly planted on hips. When the guy who's in love with her inches forward, telling her, 'I can't live without you,' she shoots him down: 'Then why aren't you dead yet?'
"She's not big on holding back."

Anh Do in the Los Angeles Times talks with Lela Lee, creator of Angry Little Asian Girl.

Der No-Show Freedom Pain

The Los Angeles Times runs obits for singer George Jones, lawyer Leo Branton, Jr., singer Chrissy Amphlett, singer Richie Havens, newspaper publisher Al Neuharth, designer Storm Thorgerson, architect Pedro Ramirez Vazquez, sports broadcaster Pat Summerall, and restaurateur John Galardi.

"USDA Rolls Out New School Brunch Program For Wealthier School Districts"

"'Quite simply, we believe all children of privilege deserve a proper, well-composed brunch plate with complimentary jalapeno cornbread mini muffins and honey butter on the side. With this new program, we can finally begin to offer the superior culinary experience that until now has been sorely missing in school cafeterias from Greenwich, CT to Palo Alto, CA.'"

From The Onion.

"What the Occupiers Find Most Transformative about Their Protests Counts for Their Detractors as the Principal Reason to Dismiss Them"

"Occupy could have put its 'people power' behind a few clear, concrete, policy proposals such as student or mortgage debt restructuring, higher bank capital ratios or specific tax reforms – more progressive direct tax rates, for example, or the elimination of such outrageous loopholes as the tax discount on carried interest. The success of Tobin tax campaigners in Europe shows that politicians are responsive to anti-finance sentiment.
"Granted, campaigns such as Strike Debt have grown out of OWS but they no longer have the numbers in the street to make themselves heard. A greater willingness to engage could have secured the movement a more permanent voice – a voice that would carry weight when decisions are made, rather than a voice merely talking to itself. Those of us who think that the system is ours to reform will see this as a missed opportunity to fix the problems that brought people to Zuccotti Park in the first place."

Martin Sandbu in The Financial Times uses the publication of three new books to ponder Occupy Wall Street.

I Want to Believe

"There are number of factors, but probably one of the most important ones in this instance is that, paradoxically, it gives people a sense of control. People hate randomness, they dread the sort of random occurrences that can destroy their lives, so as a mechanism against that dread, it turns out that it’s much easier to believe in a conspiracy. Then you have someone to blame, it’s not just randomness."

Alex Seitz-Wald in Salon talks with Stephan Lewandowsky about the popularity of conspriacy theories.

"Isn’t That 'Dependence,' Too?"

"Communitarian conservatives (frequently, though not always, traditionalist Catholics; Ross Douthat is a pretty good contemporary example) often criticize libertarian types for complicity in the 'atomized individual' part of the destructive dynamic Nisbet was talking about, or, more practically, for promoting a political message that repels voters who don’t view 'altruism' as immoral or who may anticipate needing external help at some point in life. Indeed, you sometimes get the sense that Randians and 'traditionalists' hate each other more than their common liberal enemy. But if you boil off the philosophy and look at actual public policy issues, you have to wonder if this is often a distinction without a difference."

Ed Kilgore at The Washington Monthly contrasts individulist and communitarian conservatives.

Screaming Fields of Sonic Love

"And yet, as scrutinized as she has been, Gordon has always been considered a mystery. A typical Sonic Youth interview featured Moore waxing philosophical while Gordon, in sunglasses, sat by his side, nearly silent. Aloof, remote, and intimidating are often used to describe her. After decades in the public eye, it seemed like this was the way things would always be. Then, in the fall of 2011, Gordon and Moore announced they were separating. The news called into question the future of Sonic Youth and devastated legions of music fans. Jon Dolan, one of the flintiest rock critics around, began a piece for Grantland about their breakup with this plaintive cry: 'Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!'"

Lizzy Goodman in Elle magazine talks with Kim Gordon.

"Self-Radicalizing in a Western Environment"

"No, they want to make headlines. That’s the point. They want to become a hero. It’s why I compare them with many of the guys who did the Columbine sort of terrorist attacks against a school. They were very young guys, probably loners and slightly suicidal. They want to end in beauty, they want to do something extraordinary."

John J. Judis in The New Republic interviews Oliver Roy about the Boston bombers.

"What’s the Difference between Ketchup and Catsup?"

"'Well, catsup has more tomatoes, comes in a bigger bottle. It’s cheaper, but tastes just like ketchup. Now,' she continues, 'we know that’s not true. But that’s what your competitors are saying, over and over. And they’re selling their watered down, flavorless sauce by pretending that they’re you. It makes you mad, doesn’t it,' she adds.
"It does. But wait a second. Is there a difference between ketchup and catsup?"

Aisha Harris answers the question in Slate.

"Diverted Them from the Life of the Mind"

"Only in recent years did colleges start to resemble country clubs, with a few classrooms thrown in. Competing for students, universities also competed to see who could build the nicest dorms, gyms and stadiums. The expenses were passed on to students, of course, who met rising tuition costs by taking out more loans. Student debt has doubled in the last decade, topping $1 trillion, which is more than the total amount that Americans owe on their credit cards."

Jonathan Zimmerman in the Los Angeles Times criticizes lavish university amenities.

"Study: Majority Of Americans Not Informed Enough To Stereotype Chechens"

"'Clinical trials show that most individuals will make brief, fumbling attempts to stereotype Chechens based on what little they know about Russians, but eventually drop the subject entirely after running out of anything to say within seconds.'"

From The Onion.

"Those Who Recently Dreamed of World Power Now Despair of Governing the City of New York"

"The 1970s—in New York and around the country—saw the dawning of a new era of austerity, as the earlier assumptions of economic growth faded. The contraction of the state also meant the shrinking of the social imagination. The stern dictums about the necessary limits of political dreams contrasted sharply with the new populist utopianism of the free market, where anything might be possible. We still live today in a society defined by these two poles: the harsh limits of the political sphere and the delusional boundlessness of the market. Although it wasn’t solely responsible for bringing the city into this new age, New York’s fiscal crisis marks the boundary between the past and the present we still live in today."

Kim Phillips-Fein in The Nation connects New York City's fiscal crisis of the 1970s to the city of today.

For Truth, Justice, and the American Way (or for Stalin, Socialism, and the International Expansion of the Warsaw Pact, depending)

"If familiarity breeds contempt, this character’s seven decades of cultural ubiquity have bred something more insidious. In writing my cultural history of the iconic superhero, I repeatedly encountered a view of the character as a stolid, unremarkable chunk of conceptual furniture. It was one place where the received wisdom of comic book obsessives (who tend to focus on edgier stuff) overlapped with that of the general public (who tend to ignore comics of any provenance). The Big Blue Boy Scout was a safe, unchanging, anodyne fixture of our popular culture. A bore.
"They’re all wrong."

Glen Weldon in The New Republic looks back at seventy-five years of Superman.

As does Larry Tye in the Los Angeles Times.

"We Just Want to Be the Band We Were in 1985"

"A sign of the times, reviewers frequently described Quercio's voice and stage persona in terms that, from a 21st-century lens, seem an awful lot like coded homophobia. He was routinely dismissed as being too 'fey,' and one 1987 review in the San Diego Union-Tribune labeled him a 'twerp.'
"'We were in Arizona, and I remember a local Phoenix reviewer described Michael as the "king of twee,"' said Benair. 'That really bothered him.'
"Quercio, for his part, is magnanimous about any homophobia he may have faced: 'It was really never much of an issue. Probably because we came up in Los Angeles, where no one really cared.'"

Matthew Fleischer in the Los Angeles Times meets up with a reunited Three O'Clock.

"The Full Weight of Justice"

"Today is a holiday in Massachusetts—Patriots' Day. It's a day that celebrates the free and fiercely independent spirit that this great American city of Boston has reflected from the earliest days of our nation. And it's a day that draws the world to Boston's streets in a spirit of friendly competition. Boston is a tough and resilient town. So are its people. I'm supremely confident that Bostonians will pull together, take care of each other, and move forward as one proud city. And as they do, the American people will be with them every single step of the way."

NPR publishes a transcript of President Obama's remarks about the Boston Marathon bombings.

"My Dear Fellow Clergymen"

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights. That’s a beautiful creed,” King told his crowd. It is easy to read such sentences in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and other works by King and leave it at that. But it is vital to read what he said next: “America has never lived up to it.”

Jonathan Rieder in The New York Times marks the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail."

Devil Embers in the Black Count Grove

Columbia University announces the winners of the 2013 Pulitzer Prizes, including Tom Reiss for biography, Fredrik Logevall for history, and Gilbert King for general nonfiction.

Camping Out

"Unfortunately, what Camp does not have is an effective tourism office. Ever since Sontag’s slapdash observations attained the esteem of a Fodor’s guide, potential visitors have been fantastically confused about just what our town has to offer. Is camp a full-fledged aesthetic sensibility or a simple mode of humor? Is it a lens through which to view objects or an inherent property within them? Is it a subversive (gay) language or just another denuded subcultural trifle? We have had such poor public relations on these and other issues that some writers have recently gone as far as to declare us dead! (A bit dramatic for my taste, but given the aura of mystery surrounding camp, I don’t really blame them.)

"The good news is that camp is definitely not dead nor necessarily confusing."

J. Bryan Lowder in Slate presents "a set of travelogues—postcards from camp."

"Our Tax System Has Actually Fostered Inequality"

"The fiscal problem we face is not, then, a lack of revenue sources. We can finance any amount of transfer payments and 'entitlements' by taxing corporations’ profits in the same way we tax personal income, using a progressive formula. If necessary, give them a mortgage deduction—they already get something like it in the form of accelerated depreciation allowances on their purchases of capital equipment—but make them pay higher taxes on their income. Do that, and the federal deficit goes away."

On tax day, James Livingston in The New York Times makes a proposal.

Only an Asshole Gets Killed for a Car

"It wasn't the first feature to mash up science fiction, underground culture and cutting-edge music; 'Liquid Sky' was a huge indie hit in 1982, but its more cerebral, synth-driven saga contrasts sharply with the rough-and-ready of Cox's politically astute debut. And 'Liquid Sky' was set in New York, a city then secure in its status as the center of the cultural universe. Cox's film, in comparison, explores the edges of a metropolis that was in search of a center, a place where 'the life of a repo man is always intense.'"

Sheri Linden in the Los Angeles Times revisits Alex Cox's Repo Man.

I Choose My Choice

"Still, as a wave of educated, middle-class Americans becomes focused on sewing non-sweatshop curtains and pureeing non-GMO baby food for their own families, they are increasingly uninterested in pursuing large-scale collective solutions to the very problems that drove them to become modern homesteaders in the first place. These droves of radical post-consumerist home-ec enthusiasts may believe that change begins in the home, but for them it also ends there. Matchar cites economist Juliet Schor’s prediction that the new economy will be a 'synthesis of the pre- and post-modern,' affording every worker the ability to choose whether and when to work either in or outside the system. If educated middle-class workers aren’t rallying for better health care and paid sick days within the system, what hope do minimum-wage workers have? If wealthier moms are judging each other for shopping at Trader Joe’s, who’s holding down the fresh produce prices for lower-income families? It’s easy to see how the new domesticity, born of inequality and economic hardship and professional dissatisfaction, will only exacerbate those trends for workers further down the food chain, leaving them struggling to opt in to the economy at all."

Ann Friedman in The New Republic reviews Emily Matchar's Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity.

Goldbuggery

"But the runaway inflation that was supposed to follow reckless money-printing—inflation that the usual suspects have been declaring imminent for four years and more—keeps not happening. For a while, rising gold prices helped create some credibility for the goldbugs even as their predictions about everything else proved wrong, but now gold as an investment has turned sour, too. So will we be seeing prominent goldbugs change their views, or at least lose a lot of their followers?       

"I wouldn’t bet on it."

 

Paul Krugman in The New York Times discusses the belief "that gold offers unique security in troubled times."

Iron Gap-Toothed Mouseketeer

The Los Angeles Times runs obits for modiste Lilly Pulitzer, documentarian Les Blank, actress Annette Funicello, and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian discusses Thatcher's effect on British pop music.

"To Push Their Legislative Programs through Congress, the New Dealers Sold Their Souls to the Segregated South"

"The calculation was simple enough. Thanks to the disfranchisement of blacks and the reign of terror that accompanied it, the South had become solidly Democratic by the beginning of the 20th century, the Deep South exclusively so. One-party rule translated into outsize power on Capitol Hill: when Roosevelt took office, Southerners held almost half the Democrats’ Congressional seats and many of the key committee chairmanships. So whatever Roosevelt wanted to put into law had to have Southern approval. And he wouldn’t get it if he dared to challenge the region’s racial order."

Kevin Boyle in The New York Times reviews Ira Katznelson's Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time.

"Now You Know Why the Knights in Your Chess Sets Always Look Like They’re Screaming in Agony"

"Inspired by the Neoclassical architecture of Victorian London and a very modern need for standardization and mass production, the Staunton chessmen helped popularize the game and quickly became the world standard. The new Staunton pieces by Daniel Weil reinforces this architectural history of the original pieces while respecting their timeless design."

Jimmy Stamp at Smithsonian discusses the history of modern chess pieces.

Crawdaddy Muppet Previews

The Los Angeles Times publishes obits for music critic Paul Williams, puppeteer Jane Nebel Henson, cymbal manufacturer Robert Zildjian, and film critic Roger Ebert.

"The One They’ve Been Waiting For"

"The plantation metaphor refers to a popular theory on the right. It holds that the 95 percent of African-Americans who voted for a Democratic president are not normal Americans voting their beliefs, but slaves. A corollary to the plantation theory is the legend of the Conservative Black Hope, a lonesome outsider, willing to stare down the party of Obamacare and stand up for the party of voter ID. Does it matter that this abolitionist truth-teller serves at the leisure of an audience that is overwhelmingly white? Not really. Blacks are brainwashed slaves; you can’t expect them to know what’s in their interest.

"Benjamin Carson is that Conservative Black Hope of the moment."

 

Ta-Nehisi Coates in The New York Times reflects on the rise and fall of various Anti-Obamas.

The Final Comedown

"The stickers they distributed included read ones reading 'REGISTER COMMUNISTS, NOT FIREARMS,' and tiny one members would slap on restroom walls or inside phone books featuring an image of rifle cross hairs, and this text: 'See that old man at the corner where you buy your papers?… He may have a silencer equipped pistol under his coat. That fountain pen in the pocket of the insurance salesman that calls on you might be a cyanide gas gun. What about your milkman? Arsenic works slow but sure.… Traitors, beware! Even now the crosshairs are on the back of your necks.'"

Rick Perlstein in The Nation recalls the Minutemen of the 1960s.

"History Licking Its Chops To Judge George W. Bush"

"'Oh man, I’ve been holding out a while for this one—just let me at that fucker once and for all,' said the ongoing timeline of human events, which acknowledged it’s been champing at the bit to properly evaluate the 43rd president since he left office in January 2009. 'I’m raring to get that son of a bitch in my crosshairs, carefully analyze each of his foreign and domestic policies, and develop a consensus view of his administration that will endure in the annals of American politics. Let’s do this!'"

From The Onion.

March 2013 Acquisitions

Books:
Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love, Sappho Was a Right-on Woman: A Liberated View of Lesbianism, 1972.
Edward T. Chang and Russell C. Leong (eds.), Los Angeles--Struggles toward Multiethnic Community, 1994.
Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, 2012.
Darwyn Cooke, DC: The New Frontier, Vol. 1, 2004.
Chuck Dixon et al, Batman: Contagion, 1996.
Marcia A. Eymann and Charles M. Wollenberg (eds.), What's Going On?: California and the Vietnam Era, 2004.
Alan Grant, Batman: The Abduction, 1998.
Theodore Hamm, Rebel and a Cause: Caryl Chessman and the Politics of the Death Penalty in Postwar California, 1948-1974, 2001.
Dan Jurgens et al, Superman: The Death of Superman, 2003.
Dan Jurgens et al, Superman: World without a Superman, 1998.
Gerald O'Collins, Catholicism: A Very Short Introduction, 2008.
John Ostrander et al, Superman: The Kents, 2000.
Scott Snyder et al, Batman: The Black Mirror, 2013.
W. A. Swanberg, Citizen Hearst: A Biography of William Randolph Hearst, 1981.
Judd Winick et al, Catwoman, Vol. 2: Dollhouse, 2013.

DVDs:
Ratatouille, 2007.

Muscle Trumpet

The Los Angeles Times runs obits for bodybuilding promoter Joe Weider, journalist Anthony Lewis, record producer and songwriter Deke Richards, actor Richard Griffiths, and record producer Phil Ramone.

A Sunkissed Miss Said, "Don't Be Late"

"But there is something irrational, indeed unpatriotic, in rooting for California to fail, as so many conservatives are now doing. Sure, they are upset that the Republican Party is dead in this state—R.I.P. G.O.P. And, among the fringes, there are those who cannot accept that California is a minority-majority state, with whites making up about 39 percent of the population. They’ve seen the future and don’t like it one bit.
"When Cal-haters say people are leaving the state because of high taxes—its top rate is 13.2 percent on earnings over $1 million—they mean people like them. Or people like the golfer Phil Mickelson, who complained that the tax burden on the millions he makes hitting a little white ball may force him to look beyond his Southern California moorings.
"Because, by any measure, the state is still growing."

Timothy Egan in The New York Times looks at California's comback.

As does Paul Krugman.

"Man Cautiously Avoids Barnes & Noble Section Where Teens Check Out Graphic Novels"

"'I really don’t want to go over there,' said Gannon, adding that he would prefer to avoid asking the lip-pierced, teenage girl with a ski cap covering her dyed-red hair if she would please move her backpack so he could browse the shelves. 'I’ll just pretend to browse the Business and Money section until they leave.'"

From The Onion.

"If Dixie Can Make Peace with the Hellish Parts of Its Legacy while Fostering Its Inherent Strengths, It Just Might Achieve a Real Breakthrough"

"Thompson finds the greatest reason for hope in an unlikely place—the past, specifically that part of it staked out by the Agrarians, the group of Vanderbilt University teachers and students (among them Robert Penn Warren) who in 1930 published 'I'll Take My Stand,' a manifesto in praise of the Southern way of life.
"Although wrong about race, the book was right about much else. The Agrarians championed sustainable family farms, ecology, human scale and, most of all, community. They were green many decades before the rest of America, and they were down home."

Steve Oney in the Los Angeles Times reviews Tracy Thompson's The New Mind of the South.

"The Blueprint for All Motion Picture Parodies to Come"

"For many of us, the first exposure to classic films wasn’t on film at all, it was in print. It was in black and white even if the films were in color, it was printed on cheap paper, and it was full of some of the worst puns known to man. We thrilled to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Oddfather, Arthur Penn’s revisionist Western Little Dull Man, the sophisticated sex comedy Shampooped, and Stanley Kubrick’s ground-breaking 201 Minutes of a Space Idiocy. For us, Casablanca was cast with professional wrestlers, My Fair Lady featured women’s libbers trying to reform a male chauvinist Burt Reynolds, and The Exorcist ended with Satan demanding a six-film deal."

Grady Hendrix in Film Comment traces the history of Mad magazine's treatment of the movies.

"I Would Exterminate"

"Although we think of the Civil War as fought by armies, the historian Daniel E. Sutherland has recently reminded us that it was also marked by extensive guerrilla warfare that spread throughout the Confederacy and into Northern border areas. Such fighting occurred first and most virulently in Missouri. Another historian, Matthew C. Hulbert, calls the guerrilla war in Missouri 'hyper-violent,' making it a 'uniquely different wartime experience' from that of ordinary soldiers. Even the name given to the guerrillas, 'bushwhackers,' carried connotations of a different kind of fighting—attacks from ambush. Indeed, Hulbert argues that Quantrill’s biographer 'concocted' the exchange between his subject and Seddon in part 'to legitimize the brutality' of the Missouri guerrillas."

Nicole Etcheson in The New York Times discusses Confederate William Clarke Quantrill.

Things Fall Deep

The Los Angeles Times runs obituaries for Venezuela President Hugo Chavez, car designer Roy Brown, actor Harry Reems, and author Chinua Achebe.

"YouTube Reaches 1 Trillion Racist Comments"

"'It’s hard to even comprehend how many completely ignorant comments 1 trillion is. We’re truly humbled by our dedicated and extremely uneducated users who make such vile and imperceptive statements each and every day. Thank you, everyone.'"

From The Onion.

The Mortal Code

Columbia University awards the 2013 Bancroft Prize to historians W. Jeffrey Bolster and John Fabian Witt.

"Drifting In and Out of Focus Like a Dream"

Robin Pogrebin in The New York Times reports that Toyo Ito has won the 2013 Pritzker Prize for architecture.

All the News that Fits

"Many former alt-weekly editors would like to persuade you that their cutting take on city politics and the arts combined with their dedication to the feature form won readers. Actually, it was the whole gestalt that made the publications work. Comprehensive listings paired with club and concert ads to both entertain and help readers plan their week. Classified ads, especially the personals, often provided better reading than the journalistic fare in the front of the book. No better venue for apartment rentals existed; even people who had long-term leases used the housing ads to fantasize. Even the display ads, purchased mostly by local retailers and service providers, were useful to readers.
"In most cities—and eventually in all—the alt-weekly was priced at zero for readers, prefiguring the free-media feast of the Web, and these publications became cultural signifiers. Bob Roth, one of my bosses when I edited Washington City Paper (1985-1995), told me to watch people as they picked it up from a street box and walk away with it: Almost to a one, they would hold it in their hands or fold it under their arms as if to display the paper’s flag so onlookers would know they were City Paper people, whatever that meant."

Jack Shafer at Reuters discusses the decline of alternative newspapers.

Hail, Columbia

"Thanks to these and other women who marched, women's rights in America were secured (even if they remain always and ever contested). A century later, Columbia looks like a lady who knows how to lean in. Enough time has passed, it seems, that we might consider reviving her spirit, and returning her to the pantheon of America characters for the years to come."

Garance Franke-Ruta at The Atlantic looks back at a neglected symbol of America.

"Approaches 1"

"I was entering into the online world pretty deeply in the eighties, and I was offended by how glibly these comparisons came up—almost invariably inappropriately. My feeling was that the more people got into this habit, the less likely that people remembered the historical context of all this. And as you know, one of the injunctions of Holocaust historians is that we must never forget, we have to remember. And I just thought, Well, I’m going to do a little experiment and see if I could make people remember."

Dan Amira at New York talks with Mike Godwin about the eponymous internet law.

But Somewhere the Party Never Ends

"The coming of stagflation, and the seeming incapacity of economic orthodoxy to deal with it, discredited the Keynesians and lifted the monetarists. Economic policy didn’t seem to be working, and as the 1970s progressed, the pressure to make a change became irresistible. Monetarists ascended to key policy positions, but this ascent did not mark the capitulation of center-left governing practices to the neoliberal faith in free markets, as right-wingers like to claim. The idea that accepting monetarism meant accepting free markets is the result of a retrospective 'conflation of monetarism with a theoretically separate set of arguments about the supposed superiority of markets over government intervention in the economy.'"

In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Michael W. Clune reviews Daniel Stedman Jones's Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics.

"Living Like a Cross between a Chameleon and a Magpie"

"But there’s more to Mr. Bowie’s compulsive changeability than a career strategy. What he was really developing during the ’70s was a new postmodern psychology based around flux and mutability. His great precursor and influence here was Warhol, the inspiration for his 1971 song 'Andy Warhol' and a role Mr. Bowie would actually play in the 1996 biopic 'Basquiat.'  Analyzing Warhol, the art critic Donald Kuspit wrote of 'the protean artist-self with no core'—a description that could also fit Mr. Bowie."

Simon Reynolds in The New York Times welcomes the return of David Bowie.

The Unknown World

"Most of us will find the news that some black people bought and sold other black people for profit quite distressing, as well we should. But given the long history of class divisions in the black community, which Martin R. Delany as early as the 1850s described as 'a nation within a nation,' and given the role of African elites in the long history of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, perhaps we should not be surprised that we can find examples throughout black history of just about every sort of human behavior, from the most noble to the most heinous, that we find in any other people's history."

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., at The Root explores the history of black slaveowners.

"Make Concern for the Future"

"Lasch considered himself a man of the left, and saw his attack on liberalism as coming from that perspective. But he also admitted that he was not entirely sure of his own viewpoint, and so he dived into social theory, reading Marx, Weber and the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse), among others. As we learn, this would become a typical pattern: when confronted with doubt and intellectual obstacles, he upped his reading and expanded into new areas. Indeed, he was far from the typical academic historian: he reached far afield into sociology, psychology and other areas, wherever his explorations would lead him."

Sean Collins at Spiked reviews Eric Miller's 2010 book, Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch.

One Day Leader of the Tears

The Los Angeles Times runs obits for pop producer Shadow Morton, singer Cleotha Staples, former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, pianist Van Cliburn, actress Bonnie Franklin, and singer Bobby Rogers.

"You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here, but It Helps"

"And yet without the Plath life-story sitting alongside it, marking it out with an especial integrity, The Bell Jar starts to show its family likeness. I’m thinking here of JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951), of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962).

"That is, The Bell Jar’s Esther belongs to the empyrean of the beatified and the beaten just as much as Holden Caulfield or Sal Paradise. Its narrator speaks in a distinctly countercultural tongue. Like those literary works to which it bears such a striking affinity, it presents a portrait of the stifling conformism of postwar American society. And in the rebellion-cum-suffering of Esther it counters it."

 

Tim Black at Spiked considers Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar fifty years after publication.

Truth or Consequences

"In the epilogue Morin and Rouch pace the halls of the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, recapping and analyzing their experiment and its aftermath. Their subjects were variously blamed for being 'too true' or 'not true enough,' for being exhibitionists or phonies. But the filmmakers' hypothesis is that the moments they have captured on film are no less true, or at least no less revealing, for being acted. How we act, in other words, reveals something about who we are."

Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times discusses the DVD release of Chronicle of Summer.

February 2013 Acquisitions

Books:
Mike W. Barr, Batman: Reign of Terror, 1999.
Jose Cadona, Mulan, 2013.
Suzan Colón, Catwoman: The Life and Times of a Feline Fatale, 2003.
J. M. DeMatteis et al, Batman: Going Sane, 2008.
Albert B. Feldstein (ed.), Three Ring MAD, 1964.
David Finch et al, Batman: Dark Knight--Golden Dawn, 2013.
Gregg Hurwitz et al, Penguin: Pain and Prejudice, 2012.
Bruce Jones and Sam Kieth, Batman: Through the Looking Glass, 2013.
J. H. Lee, Boo: The Life of the World’s Cutest Dog, 2011.
Stan Lee and Joe Kubert, Just Imagine Stan Lee's Batman, 2001.
Gavin Menzies, 1434, 2009
Dr. Seuss, Hop on Pop, 1963.
Michael Uslan et al, Batman: Detective No. 27, 2004.

DVDs:
The Master, 2012.
Max Fleischer's Superman, 1941-1942, 2009.

"Her Life Story Is a Eulogy for an America Long Since Past"

"Like internships, adjunct positions are often necessary to advance professionally - but only the well-off can afford to work them without living in poverty or debt. The result is a professoriate of an increasingly uniform class background, much like the policy, finance and journalism circles McArdle describes. Mobility is but a memory. 'The life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in almost any other advanced country for which there is data,' writes economist Joseph E Stiglitz in an editorial aptly titled 'Equal Opportunity, Our National Myth'."

Sarah Kendzior at Al Jazeera looks to Drew Gilpin Faust's experiences to see changes in class mobility during the past forty years.

"Not the Kind of Change Friedan Hoped Her Book Would Inspire"

"Sandberg also seems primarily concerned with the economics of gender. But there's a key difference: Friedan didn’t share a view from the corporate boardroom. Her first political home was the labor movement, and she found her way back to it in the mid-1990s. Then in her 70s, Friedan participated with gusto in campus teach-ins to promote the new, reform-minded leadership of the AFL-CIO. 'I have a pretty good historic Geiger counter,' she told a packed audience at Columbia University. 'It clicked thirty years ago' when The Feminine Mystique helped create the modern women’s movement. 'And that counter is clicking again, because I think we are on the verge of something new: a movement for social justice' which might 'transcend the separate interests, the special interests, even the very good interests of identity politics that have been at the cutting edge of democratic progress.' Friedan wasn't able to realize her vision of justice—such is the fate of American leftists. But it was always a far cry from the individualized notion of justice proferred by Sandberg."

Michael Kazin in The New Republic considers Betty Friedan's legacy upon the fiftieth anniversary of The Feminine Mystique.


"Competent female executives run better companies than incompetent male executives, but they’re no more likely to make universal day care the law of the land. If Davos Woman had dominated feminist discourse when the Triangle Shirtwaist fire killed nearly 130 female sweatshop laborers in 1911, would she have pushed for the legislation that came out of that tragedy—the fire codes and occupancy limits that made workplaces safer for women, and men, for generations to come?"

And Judith Shulevitz reviews Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In.

"On Some Level You, not Metallica, Are the Asshole"

"The same point is at the heart of Freeloading, which--like the TMT piece--provides the backstory that Ruen himself was an unapologetic music pirate until he began working at a Brooklyn cafe, saw that some of the indie-rock musicians who came in--members of the Hold Steady, Yeasayer, Vampire Weekend, musicians he considered 'success stories'--were virtually broke due to, he believed, digital piracy killing album sales ('Even I had an apartment as nice or nicer than those of some of these "rock stars,"' Ruen writes), understood that at some point the lack of financial support could compel many of them to stop pursuing a career in music, and had the epiphany that 'behind free content's superficial illusion of more lies a long-term reality of less. Sooner or later, it is something we all have to pay for.'"

Michael Alan Goldberg at The Village Voice talks with Chris Ruen about Ruen's book Freeloading: How Our Insatiable Hunger for Free Content Starves Creativity.

"When Everyone Is DIY-ing, the Act of Putting Out Your Own Music or Magazine Loses Much of Its Ethical and Political Charge"

"Digiculture is the Anti-Spectacle: now we're all doing it for ourselves, incessantly.  The passing of the Analogue System makes it possible to see the benefits of the Mono-Mainstream (TV networks, major labels, government-run public broadcasting).  This apparatus created mass experiences, mobilizations of energy and desire.  But it also brought into being undergrounds, subcultures that grew in the darkness, outside mediation.  In time, these would break through into the mainstream, via certain libidinally charged thresholds (in UK terms, the weekly music press, Top of the Pops, Radio One).  They would change pop and be changed by it.  It was hard to break through, but if those barricades could be surmounted, things would then get propelled into mainstream consciousness and couldn't be ignored.  This antagonistic symbiosis of underground and overground resulted in a dialectical process of renewal and recuperation that kept music moving."

In a 2011 The Wire article, Simon Reynolds assesses the impact of the internet on pop music.

"100 Percent of Them Would Be Wrong"

"The book took her 10 years to write, which is about how long it takes to read, albeit for the best possible reason: it is rigorously, at times obsessively, well researched. More appealingly, Banner’s academic orientation did not preclude her from going native. In the course of her work, she joined a Marilyn fan club, became a major collector of the star’s artifacts, contributed to a fund that paid for a new bench outside the Westwood crypt, and published a coffee-table book devoted to items from Marilyn’s personal archive. For those of us who love Marilyn, The Passion and the Paradox constitutes an invaluable resource, a compendium of the latest discoveries, a settling of long-festering questions, and a thoughtful and thorough revisiting of the subjects we love most. For the general reader, however, the book will be overwhelming and impossible. How can a civilian be expected to care about the details of a real-estate deal that led to the 1910s development of the Whitley Heights tract in the Hollywood Hills? An introductory note is addressed, casually, to those 'familiar with the biographical tradition on Monroe'; indeed, it is this tradition itself, more than any freshly excavated facts about the life, that demands a reckoning. Serious books about Marilyn number in the high hundreds, possibly the thousands; together they describe not just the transformation of a poor California girl into an international sex symbol but also the posthumous transformation of that sex symbol into something shockingly urgent, completely contemporary, and forever bankable."

Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic reviews Lois Banner's Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox.

Black Bonnie Showtime

The Los Angeles Times reports the deaths of musician Donald Byrd, screenwriter Richard Collins, jurist Ronald Dworkin, singer Mindy McCready, basketball-team owner Jerry Buss, and singer Tony Sheridan.

"Contrary to What Is Often Said, the 'Original Sin' of the South Is Not Slavery, or Even Racism. It Is Cheap, Powerless Labor"

"Northernomics is the high-road strategy of building a flourishing national economy by means of government-business cooperation and government investment in R&D, infrastructure and education. Although this program of Hamiltonianism (named after Washington’s first Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton) has been championed by maverick Southerners as prominent as George Washington, Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln (born in Kentucky to a Southern family), the building of a modern, high-tech, high-wage economy has been supported chiefly by political parties based in New England and the Midwest, from the Federalists and the Whigs through the Lincoln Republicans and today’s Northern Democrats.
"Southernomics is radically different. The purpose of the age-old economic development strategy of the Southern states has never been to allow them to compete with other states or countries on the basis of superior innovation or living standards. Instead, for generations Southern economic policymakers have sought to secure a lucrative second-tier role for the South in the national and world economies, as a supplier of commodities like cotton and oil and gas and a source of cheap labor for footloose corporations. This strategy of specializing in commodities and cheap labor is intended to enrich the Southern oligarchy. It doesn’t enrich the majority of Southerners, white, black or brown, but it is not intended to."

Michael Lind in Salon contrasts regional economics.

The Age of Eisenhower and Nixon?

"Frank does a splendid job of showing why Eisenhower and Nixon are still compelling characters, but neglects the political dimension that framed their relationship. My guess is that even general readers will want to know the significance of the political stories they’re told, no matter how beautifully those tales unfold."

Geoffrey Kabaservice in The New Republic reviews Jeffrey Frank's Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage.

Replaceable

"Nobody but nobody (and/or Keyshia Cole) competes with Blige as queen of 'organic,' in-the-trenches R&B. But what that quote reveals, mostly, is the gap between the Gen-Xers running nineties music and pop’s modern age, driven by millennials like Beyoncé. The nineties grew skeptical of the formal craft of show business, delighted in dressed-down rawness, quirk, and grit. Pop today seems to share much in common with the generation listening to it: It’s driven, hypercompetent, sensitive to public scrutiny. (Maybe it was overscheduled and helicopter-parented as a child.)"

Nitsuh Abebe in New York discusses the "Winter of Beyoncé."

Coming of Age in Anthropology

Alice Dreger at The Atlantic and Emily Eakin in The New York Times Magazine discuss the controversial reputations of anthropologists Margaret Mead and Napoleon Chagnon.

Posh-ification

"It turns out that the old complaint against gentrification, that it drives out minorities, is far too simplistic. Instead, we should be worrying about a different concern: It hasn’t built the diversity that Jacobsian urbanists envisioned, and that cities need. Diversity, in all its forms, is the urban advantage; it’s what lured a suburb-raised generation to 19^th century rowhouses in the first place. After all these years of trying to revive their old neighborhoods, what a shame if it turns out that American cities have birthed a new kind of monotony."





Inga Saffron in The New Republic ponders urban neighborhood changes.

"We Have Been Scared, Misled or Bamboozled"

"While we know intellectually that we need to save and invest for our future, our ability to do so varies enormously, Ms. Olen points out.
"'Between 1979 and 2007, the average after-tax income for the top 1 percent of earners in the economy soared by 281 percent,' she writes. 'The top 20 percent would see their incomes increase by 95 percent. The middle fifth? A mere 25 percent.'       

"THE solutions offered by the personal finance world have been unrealistic, she says, contending that 'the increasing problem Americans were having keeping up financially was not viewed as a social justice problem, but as a knowledge and smarts problem that could be solved on an individual basis, one investor at a time.'"

 

Caitlin Kelly in The New York Times reviews Helaine Olen's Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry.

Null Hypothesis

"But the key thing is that the Republican Party has now rejected its Southern Strategy and is embracing Calhounism instead. The high period of the Republican Party’s most explicit racial appeals was also the time when it had the least use for Calhounian methods of minority rule. The Southern Strategy, as a political method, was not based on Calhounism. It was closer to the opposite of Calhounism.

"Why? Because Republicans were winning."

Jonathan Chait at New York reacts to Sam Tenenhaus's article in The New Republic about the influence of John C. Calhoun on today's Republican Party.

Jobs and Freedom

"Freed approached the march as a day in its entirety, from early morning preparations on the periphery, to stacks of picket signs, to wide angles of the National Mall evolving into swelling masses framing the reflecting pool anchored by the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. He embedded himself in the crowd, zooming in on children clapping and marchers straining to hear the speeches. He then shot the aftermath with stragglers lingering among discarded fliers strewn about the grounds."

Liesl Bradner in the Los Angeles Times discusses This Is the Day: The March on Washington, a new book of photographs by Leonard Freed.

"Can’t Ignore It for Long"

"A whopping 73 percent of Asians supported Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election, up 11 percent from four years ago. When you disaggregate by nationality, the difference between Asian support for Obama and Romney is even more stark and begins to approach African American-levels of support for the president."

Jamelle Bouie at The American Prospect argues that "the Republican Party has an 'Asian problem' that rivals their 'Latino problem' in size and scope."

This Is My Body

"While quite intriguing to contemplate, Wills’s suggestion will never be seriously considered, either by Catholic priests or many parishioners. It is likely to be dismissed, therefore, as unrealistic, impractical and possibly unkind. This is a shame. Whatever one thinks of his proposal, Wills’s demolition of the many myths surrounding the origins of priestly status and function is in itself crucially informative and enlightening, especially for practitioners of Catholicism."

Kevin Madigan in The New Republic reviews Garry Wills's Why Priests? The Real Meaning of the Eucharist.

"That’s Just the Way We’re Made"

"But we gather here knowing that there are millions of Americans whose hard work and dedication have not yet been rewarded. Our economy is adding jobs–but too many people still can’t find full-time employment. Corporate profits have rocketed to all-time highs–but for more than a decade, wages and incomes have barely budged.

"It is our generation’s task, then, to reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth–a rising, thriving middle class."

 

The New York Times prints President Obama's 2013 State of the Union Address.

"Resigning Pope No Longer Has Strength To Lead Church Backward"

"'It is with sadness, but steadfast conviction, that I announce I am no longer capable of impeding social progress with the energy and endurance that is required of the highest ministry in the Roman Catholic Church,' Benedict reportedly said in Latin to the Vatican’s highest cardinals. 'While I’m proud of the strides the Church has made over the past eight years, from thwarting AIDS-prevention efforts in Africa to failing to punish or even admit to decades of sexual abuse of children at the hands of clergy, it has become evident to me that, in this rapidly evolving world, I now lack the capacity to continue guiding this faith back centuries.'"

From The Onion.

1993's Company

Carl Swanson, Jerry Saltz, David Edelstein, and Nitsuh Abebe in New York argue that our current era began twenty years ago.

"Less Ayn Rand, More Flannery O’Connor"

"Conversely, conservatives are wary of concentrated power in whatever form. The evil effects of Original Sin are nowhere more evident than in Washington, on Wall Street, or in the executive suites of major institutions, sadly including churches and universities. So conservatives reject the argument that correlates centralization with efficiency and effectiveness. In whatever realm, they favor the local over the distant. Furthermore, although conservatives are not levelers, they believe that a reasonably equitable distribution of wealth—property held in private hands—offers the surest safeguard against Leviathan. A conservative’s America is a nation consisting of freeholders, not of plutocrats and proletarians."

Andrew J. Bacevich in The American Conservative offers suggestions for conservative renewal.

Not O(k)

"The 401(k) experiment has been a disaster, a disaster which threatens to doom millions to economic misery during the later years of their lives. Proposals to improve our system of private retirement savings--even good ones--will offer little to no help for the baby boomers who are currently nearing retirement, and are also unlikely to be of sufficient help for current younger workers. We need to increase Social Security benefits, now and in the future. It's the only realistic way to provide people with guaranteed economic security and comfort post-retirement."

Duncan Black at USA Today warns of impending poverty for the soon-to-be retired.

The Winter of His Disinterment

"The injury appears to confirm contemporary accounts that he died in close combat in the thick of the battle and unhorsed – as in the great despairing cry Shakespeare gives him: 'A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!'"

Maev Kennedy in The Guardian reports the confirmation of the discovery of Richard III's remains in Leicester, England.

"Something That Is Fast"

"Sometimes B-movies featured talent on their way down, but more often they were a testing ground for up-and-comers such as Wise, Richard Fleischer, Edward Dmytryk, Fred Zinnemann, Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher. But some directors were content to stay in B-pictures because there was little interference from the front office."

Susan King in the Los Angeles Times gives a brief history of B-movies.

Unlearned

"Although the book by Stone and Kuznick is heavily footnoted, the sourcing, as the example of Wallace’s 1952 article suggests, recalls nothing so much as Dick Cheney’s cherry-picking of intelligence, particularly about the origins and early years of the cold war. The authors also devote many thousands of words to criticism of such destructive American policies as Ronald Reagan’s in Central America and George W. Bush’s in Iraq, but much of this will be familiar to readers of these pages, as will their objections to Barack Obama’s use of predator drones. This book is less a work of history than a skewed political document, restating and updating a view of the world that the independent radical Dwight Macdonald once likened to a fog, 'caused by the warm winds of the liberal Gulf Stream coming in contact with the Soviet glacier'—but now more than twenty years after the dissolution of the Soviet empire."

Sean Wilentz in The New York Review of Books reviews Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick's The Untold History of the United States.

Hush that Fuss

"She spent nearly two decades before the bus incident struggling, organizing and agitating for civil rights, mostly as the secretary of the Montgomery, Ala., branch of the N.A.A.C.P. But it wasn’t until Parks was in her 40s and attended an integrated workshop that she found 'for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society.' This didn’t mean that she was eager for integration, though. She was later quoted as saying that what people sought 'was not a matter of close physical contact with whites, but equal opportunity.'"

Charles M. Blow in The New York Times discusses a new biography of Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theoharis.

"The Black and White Ball of the Critical Elite"

"The tale has often been told of how the publisher Jason Epstein, his wife, the editor Barbara Epstein, the critic Elizabeth Hardwick and her husband, Robert Lowell, convened in an apartment on West 67thStreet in the midst of an extended newspaper strike in New York, then in its second vexing week. The absence of the New York Times and its book review constituted a grievous problem for publishers, who felt they had nowhere to advertise their books or get them effectively reviewed; the very existence of the book review constituted a grievous problem for those four people, who viewed it with disdain. In his memoir 'Book Business,' Epstein says, 'Its reviews were ill-informed, bland, occasionally spiteful, usually slapdash.' Hardwick had recently written a brutal takedown in Harper’s, decrying 'the lack of literary tone itself' and dismissing it as 'a provincial journal.' So they seized the day: Lowell borrowed $4,000 to float the enterprise, and the brilliant young Harper’s editor Robert Silvers was hired on for what very well could have been a one-off job, if the new review could not have been made financially self-sustaining. The whole thing had the air of an Andy Hardy let’s-put-on-a-show exercise, except the cast of this movie all went to Columbia, Kenyon and the University of Chicago and came equipped with killer rolodexes and deadly serious intent."

In Salon, Gerald Howard marks the fiftieth anniversar of The New York Review of Books.

Alabama Death Wish Boogie Woogie

The Los Angeles Times publishes obituaries for civil-rights activist James A. Hood, baseball manager Earl Weaver, baseball player Stan "The Man" Musial, director Michael Winner, journalist Hans Massaquoi, journalist Stanley Karnow, singer Leroy "Sugarfoot" Bonner, singer Patty Andrews, and former NYC mayor Ed Koch.