"Trail of Fears"

"Like Jackson, he is a wealthy Washington outsider posing as a champion of the people. He does not recognize the legitimacy of the political system, as Nixon did, because he is not a creature of it. He will not go quietly, if it comes to that. We may be fast approaching another 'question of public faith,' in the words of Archibald Cox's great-great-great grandfather. But as in Jackson's time, there is no political center to curb the power of the president. There is only extremism and chaos."

Kevin Baker at The New Republic argues that "Donald Trump operates in a political landscape that is far more similar to Andrew Jackson's than to Richard Nixon's."

"Relationships Between Government and Those Who Are Governed"

"Virginia's dual passage of racial integrity and sterilization acts in 1924 highlighted another concern held by lawmakers beyond that of interracial love: the perception that the white race was in danger of being weakened by inferior traits and that laws were needed to promote good racial hygiene and public health."

On the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court's Loving decision, Osagie K. Obasogie at The Atlantic describes how the decision was connected to issues of eugenics.

"That's Classic Trump"

"Yes, clearly he understands that there are individual battles he's lost or things aren’t going as he had hoped they would, and he doubles down. This is the old Roy Cohn lesson that he learned and has lived by for half a century: When things get rough, double down and keep going. If you say something that's wrong or stupid or misunderstood, you don't apologize, you don't retract, you just double down and hit that harder and harder. That's part of his DNA, and so all of these stories about his anger and his lashing out fit in with that. That's him saying, 'I'm going to stick with this. Everyone tells me it's not a travel ban. It's still a travel ban to me.'"

Isaac Chotiner at Slate talks with a Donald Trump biographer Marc Fisher.

And Jeet Heer at The New Republic calls Trump "a Mobster President."

The Bright Knight

"The show was a campy, pop art-inspired playground and West's performance—an utterly straight-faced approach to a ridiculous character—was perfect. 'All we wanted from him was eternal squareness, rigidity, and purposefulness,' producer William Dozier said in 1966 as Batman's premiere loomed, and West—helped by Burt Ward’s Robin and a lineup of celebrity guest stars—delivered. Whether he was dancing the Batusi or hanging from a helicopter with a shark chomping on his leg (in the series' spin-off Batman: The Movie), West's ultra-serious approach to ultra-ridiculous material worked perfectly."

Matthew Dessem at Slate reports the death of Batman Adam West.

Trump May

David Frum at The Atlantic reacts to former FBI chief James Comey's testimony against Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Theresa May's snap election.

Steven W. Thrasher and Owen Jones at The Guardian react to the British election (as does John B. Judis at The New Republic). And Joseph Stiglitz blames austerity for Britain's problems.

"A Tabernacle Too, but One That Welcomes the Viewer Inside"

"It's easy to think of movie-watching as a passive experience, one in which you sit back and the movie happens to you through the medium of light and sound. Early nitrate film did not live for long, but its fragmentary remains remind us that movies have lived a material life just as vital and animated as painting. I saw a cabinet containing nitrate reels once in the basement of the New York Historical Society, what was left of a collection that had partially burned. It was like looking at an opaque tabernacle."

Josephine Livingstone at The New Republic reviews the documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time.

"It's an Opportunity for the State of California to Take Up the Slack"

"'Since the two countries established diplomatic ties, China-U.S. relations have weathered various tests and always moved forward, bringing huge benefits to both peoples,' Xi said. 'Bilateral relations also contributed a lot to peace, stability and prosperity of the Asia-Pacific region and the world.' Bilateral, in this case, with a non-national government."

James West at The New Republic calls Gov. Jerry Brown America's "New Climate Commander-in-Chief."

"Like a Drama of Sophocles"

"The L.A. houses are also austere enough to be off-putting. Yet what historians and critics have generally failed to see is that they were inscrutable and even crypt-like not by accident but by design. They were places for Wright to bury the grief he’d been shouldering for nearly a decade, since Mamah Borthwick, the woman he’d abandoned his family and career for, was brutally murdered in 1914."

On the 150th birthday of Frank Lloyd Wright, Christopher Hawthorne in the Los Angeles Times argues that "the five Los Angeles houses Wright produced in the early 1920s remain underappreciated and largely misunderstood."

And Josh Kramer at The Atlantic especially advocates for the Ennis House.

"The Distant People Who Rule Them Simply Do Not Give a Damn"

"That Brexit will do little to restrain those winners, and will instead injure the people of Barnsley, Grimsby and Sheffield, is almost certainly true. That it will result in yet another triumph of the hated Tories seems highly likely. That it will conclude in outright disaster like the miners’ strike of 30 years ago is also very possible.
"But it is not hard to understand. Just as in America, a certain chunk of the British ruling clique now traces its legitimacy to its globalist enlightenment and an intimate familiarity with the thinking of the new-economy god. They meet every year at Davos; they conjecture about the nature of creativity and how innovation will save the world; and in happier times they swooned for the idea that Britain's great national virtue was its coolness. And it is bullshit, all of it."

In The Guardian, Thomas Frank "visited the industrial heartlands of northern England" in the run-up to Britain's parliamentary election.

"The Precise Action That Forced Richard Nixon to Resign"

"Trump is faithfully supporting the conservative agenda, so most conservatives faithfully support him. Their concerns are pragmatic ones about his effectiveness on behalf of their common agenda, rather than moral objections to the legitimacy and propriety of his actions. Trump may have committed impeachable offenses, but the impeachment clock has not even begun to move."

Jonathan Chait at New York argues that whatever crimes Donald Trump commits, "Republicans Aren't Going to Impeach Him."

"Artwashing"

"But not everyone believes that battle is lost. There are some who believe that a global city is a city without soul, because a luxury condominium in Lisbon is a luxury condominium in Seattle, which is a luxury condominium in Lagos. For a city to have character and soul, it must have all the complex constituents of such a project, and that includes locals who work hard in unglamorous jobs, who at the end of the day pop open a can of domestic beer and drink it on the stoop, arguing about béisbol and listening to the yapping of little dogs."

At Newsweek, Alexander Nazaryan discusses battles over gentrification in Los Angeles.

"Like Them"

"That policies can differ so much among different states—and that such differences correspond so tightly with racial breakdowns—is the unfortunate lesson of welfare reform. Giving states leeway on how they treat their poor has always been a risky proposition, with states with high shares of minorities historically choosing to leave people out. It's only when the federal government intervenes that a more egalitarian response is possible. That, however, may not be what Congress wants."

Alana Semuels at The Atlantic writes that "States With Large Black Populations Are Stingier With Government Benefits."

"Election May Prove to Be a Self-Inflicted Blow, and Perhaps a Fatal One, for Prime Minister Theresa May"

"She called for the election in April, hoping to consolidate her power, increase the Conservative majority, and exploit the perceived weakness of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. The Tories' 17-point polling lead in April suggested they would widen their 12-seat majority in Parliament by as many as 70 seats. May could be excused for not fearing Corbyn, since his loudest critics have been the Blairites in his own party and the center-left press.

"But the last six weeks have been cruel to May and the Tories. The Labour Party's manifesto was received warmly, and the sense that Corbyn was an aloof and eccentric relic of the stagnant 1970s gave way to the notion that the actual Corbyn was the only politician poised to reverse the austerity regime in place since 2010 and restore and reinforce what was best about the British welfare state."

At New York, Christian Lorentzen asks, "Is Jeremy Corbyn Actually Going to Win This Thing?"

The Proto-Alt Right

"In the years before the outbreak of World War II, people of German ancestry living abroad were encouraged to form citizens groups to both extol 'German virtues,' around the world, and to lobby for causes helpful to Nazi Party goals."

Alan Taylor at The Atlantic provides photos of the German American Bund of the 1930s.

The Porpoise Is Laughing Goodbye Goodbye

"At the end of a four-hour final edition of a show he has curated for nearly 40 years--which included archival interviews with Van Halen and Elvis Costello and on-air well wishes from Joan Jett, Debbie Harry and others--the DJ born Rodney Bingenheimer played one last piece of music: 'Porpoise Song.'"

Randall Roberts at the Los Angeles Times marks Rodney Bingenheimer's final "Rodney on the Roq" radio show.

"The True of Such Miseducation Will Be Paid By Us All"

"While the American working class clamors for more dramatic policies to alleviate their plight, Democrats are busy getting advice from guys who close over 50 schools–in mostly black and Latino areas–and attempt to cover up the killing of an unarmed black teenager by his city's police. It seems that they will not learn the lessons of 2016 until they see the Republicans retain their perch in 2018 and, even more ghastly, 2020."

Douglas Williams at The Guardian warns Democrats that "not being Trump" will not be enough.

"You'll Never Have to Deal With an Insurance Company Again"

"Whether you're insured through an employer, through Covered California or on public programs such as Medi-Cal, as long as you've established California residency—regardless of legal immigration status—you would be enrolled in a single plan, which the bill's backers call the 'Healthy California' plan. That would eliminate the need for employer-provided plans and other commercial options."

Melanie Mason in the Los Angeles Times looks at efforts in California to create single-payer healthcare.

"I Think There's a Lot of Rhyming Going on Here"

"'For me, it's both sad and fascinating,' he said. 'It's sad because I spent five years at a library about a failed presidency. I've seen that movie, and I'm hoping I'm not watching it again. I'm fascinated because, like anyone who's studied Nixon deeply, I have some sense of what might happen.'"

Graham Vyse at The New Republic asks historians, "Is Trump a New Nixon?"

"The Very Thing That Is Driving Our Economy Forward Is Creating These Divides"

"A bigger, denser city in general increases the rate of innovation, increases the rate of start-up, increases the rate of productivity. At the same time, the bigger, the denser, the more knowledge-intensive increases the rate of inequality, increases the rate of economic segregation, makes housing less affordable. So it's a two-sided monster."

Paul Solman on the PBS Newshour talks with Richard Florida about "winner-take-all urbanism."

"We Are Living in an Age of Political Racism and Mainstreamed Hate"

"Key to all of this is the interplay between racism in culture, in politics, and in public life. Each reinforced the other, creating an atmosphere of hostility and violence that wasn't otherwise inevitable, even as it had its antecedents. Put differently, racist violence isn't spontaneous; it creeps up from fertile ground, feeding on hate and intolerance in the public sphere. The lynching epidemic exploded with the end of Reconstruction and the reconciliation of Northern and Southern whites under the banner of white supremacy, pogroms in towns like Tulsa occurred in an atmosphere of unimaginably virulent racism, and the killings and assassinations of the civil rights era were inseparable from the segregationist fire-eaters that governed states like Mississippi and Alabama. Today, the rising pace of hate crimes is tied to a political style that has harnessed and weaponized white resentment by way of an ethno-nationalist movement that sees America in narrow, racially exclusionary terms."

Jamelle Bouie in Slate discusses the fruits of Donald Trump.

May 2017 Acquisitions

Books:
Fred Armisen et al, The Portlandia Cookbook, 2014.
Ed Brubaker et al, Kill or Be Killed, Vol. 1, 2017.
Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People?, 2016, 2017.
Miriam Schneir, Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, 1972.                
Michael Zezima, 50 American Revolutions You're Not Supposed to Know: Reclaiming American Patriotism, 2005.

DVDs:
Trainwreck, 2015.

"Supra-Manhattan Rents and Gentrification at a Pace That Would Make Bushwick Blush"

"Brand-new Teslas with vanity plates like DISRUPTD drift down the streets of the Mission District, where pawnshops and porn stores used to be. Paper millionaires spend their nights at the Battery, a members-­only club with a tech-heavy roster and a $10,000-per-night penthouse suite. Upscale restaurants pop up at regular intervals, each with a more elite clientele and a more Portlandia-esque menu—everything from the $4 artisanal toast that sparked a citywide craze to the underground supper clubs serving kombucha pairings with sustainable-seafood dinners. Finding an affordable apartment in the city has become, as one tech worker lamented to me recently, 'a Hunger Games scenario.'"

In a 2014 New York article, Kevin Roose asks, "Is San Francisco New York?"

And Scott Lucas at San Francisco imagines "If 'American Psycho' Was About a San Francisco Techie."

"There Are Plenty of Non-Deplorables Out There"

"It's how we isolate ourselves. It's one of the reasons a lot of middle Americans didn't vote for Hillary. And bridging the gulf is on us, not them. It requires that we accept certain realities. A person can still be 'on the team' even if they think the minimum wage should be raised only to $10, or don't consider the placement of the crèche on the courthouse square for two weeks in December a constitutional crisis, or haven't yet figured out how they feel about transgender bathrooms. If we don't find a way to welcome them, they'll go to the other side. That isn't how majorities are built. Unfortunately, it's how elections are lost."

Michael Tomasky at The New Republic argues that "this chasm between elite liberals and middle America is liberalism's biggest problem."

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones agrees.

"Slow, Difficult, and Ugly"

"An angry president, resentful of the political establishment; a devoted minority, supporting their leader as a symbol of the country they feared they were losing; a trial which blurred the lines between legal and political charges—it was all enough, 150 years ago, to threaten renewed war. Americans live in far more peaceful times today, but it’s not difficult to imagine how impeachment could rile an already agitated nation."

At The Atlantic, Jon Grinspan looks back to the impeachment of Andrew Johnson.

"Any Business Deal Appears Like a Small Battle in a Never-Ending War for Financial Supremacy"

"His rejection of Friedman's vision of trade is clearly not a considered view but a gut reaction. The story he tells himself about capitalism is one that involves a high-stakes game of winners and losers—those who beat, and those who get beaten. As such, it seems axiomatic to him: In any deal, whether it involves individuals or independent nations, only one side can win. As a matter of economic science, Donald Trump may be wrong, but with respect to the sensibility that guides his approach to business and colors his understanding of capitalism, it may be the case that the GOP nominee is simply a man of his time—and ours."

John Paul Rollert at The Atlantic describes Donald Trump as an avatar of "Sociopathic Capitalism."

"Too Much, Too Fast"?

"The master-planned city has become synonymous with a certain kind of lifestyle, a magnet for high-achieving families of all races and backgrounds looking for the best public schools for their children and safe, immaculate neighborhoods for themselves.
"But even in this haven that residents call 'a mini-United Nations,' diversity sometimes brings strain."

Anh Do in the Los Angeles Times writes about growing pains in Irvine, California.

"To Grow Some Historical and Moral Backbone as They Think About Memorialization"

"Wittingly or not, the mayor gave the whole country a serious lesson in how Americans should contemplate their war dead, indeed their broader past, in this divided and quarrelsome nation. He suggested they learn some good history first, face its most troubling parts however painful, and separate 'remembrance of history and reverence for it.' It is an extraordinary act for a Southern white politician to ask his fellow citizens to seriously separate heritage from history, to look down the dark tunnel of slavery and New Orleans's infamous 'slave markets,' and the 'misery, rape, and torture' that followed for so many unnamed individual Africans, Creoles, and African Americans sold as property into the Mississippi River valley. Landrieu argued that ignorance or denial of this past for so long had been collective 'historical malfeasance, a lie by omission.' He called New Orleanians, and thereby all Americans, to an alternative kind of remembrance for this Memorial Day. He asked his auditors to learn a more complex past and to grow some historical and moral backbone as they think about memorialization."

David Blight at The Atlantic considers Memorial Day in the wake of the end of Confederate monuments in New Orleans.

And Adam Serwer at The Atlantic criticizes the cult of Robert E. Lee.

"Donald Trump Is Doing Damage to the Deepest and Most Broadly Agreed Foreign-Policy Interests of the United States"

"He is doing so while people associated with his campaign are under suspicion of colluding with Vladimir Putin’s spy agencies to bring him to office. The situation is both ugly and dangerous. If it’s to be corrected, all Americans—eminent Republicans like Bob Corker above all—must at least correctly name it for what it is."

David Frum at The Atlantic reacts to Donald Trump's European trip.

I Will Fight No More Forever

"Joseph never stopped pressing for land in the Wallowa Valley, and up to his death in 1904, the government kept reopening and reconsidering his claims. Joseph became an inspiration to generations of civil rights and human rights activists due his forceful message of universal liberty and equality. 'We only ask an even chance to live as other men live,' he famously said. 'Let me be a free man—free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself—and I will obey every law, or submit to the penalty.' It's a strikingly modern expression of the rights that all Americans should expect, marking a bridge from the old values of abolition, the Union, and Reconstruction to the causes of a new century. But Joseph was not simply making a plea for citizenship. He was claiming the right to participate in the contentious, if not unending, struggles built into the American way of governing—the right to speak to the state and be heard."

Slate runs an excerpt of Daniel J. Sharfstein's Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War.

"Then There's That Other American Dream, the Numbed-Out, Dumbed-Down, Make-Believe World"

"Franklin Roosevelt: '[F]reedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.' The proposition goes deeper than sentiment, deeper than policy, deeper even than adherence to equality and 'the pursuit of happiness' as set forth in the Declaration. It cuts all the way to the nature of democracy, and to the prospects for its continued existence in America. 'We may have democracy in this country,' wrote supreme court justice Louis Brandeis, 'or we may have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.' Those few, in Brandeis's judgment, would inevitably use their power to subvert the free will of the majority; the super-rich as a class simply couldn't be trusted to do otherwise, a thesis that's being starkly acted out in the current era of Citizens United, Super Pacs, and truckloads of dark money."

Ben Fountain at The Guardian connects the American Dream to the "Fantasy Industrial Complex" in a 2016 article.

"The Casual Ethic Is Embodied in This Solitary Figure of Freedom"

"It had been so easy once upon a time, we mused. If you were a good accountant or lawyer, or worked in sales or almost any other non-blue-collar office job, you put on your dark business suit, white shirt, discreet tie, black oxfords and went to work. It was all rather simple and time-saving and free of nagging choices. You might have incorporated a few personal touches like a pocket square or fancy wristwatch. But you didn't have to worry about whether to wear the tangerine-colored cashmere turtleneck with the fawn suede blouson or the cappuccino-colored, waxed cotton shooting jacket with the puce narrow-wale cords (choices for which there seemed to be no authoritative guidance). As long as things fitted decently and weren’t garish, you were safe. More than a few men have told me they no longer understand what's appropriate for any occasion anymore, except maybe weight-training."

G. Bruce Boyer at First Things discusses men's clothing.

"Has Expanded Well Beyond That Narrow Legal Description"

"For Crenshaw, the ascendancy of the term is a mixed blessing. She believes that intersectionality has led to genuine social progress, like the 'Say Her Name' movement, which draws attention to black women who are killed by police officers, and whose deaths tend to be downplayed if not ignored. And yet she also finds herself dodging criticism from both drive-by firebrands and quarrelsome scholars. 'Do I feel gratified having to defend it? Not really,' she says. 'But it's a lot better than had the term died in 1990.'"

Tom Bartlett at The Chronicle of Higher Education talks with Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw about her term "intersectionality."

And Helen Pluckrose at Areo writes "Why I No Longer Identify as a Feminist."

Plucked Her Eyebrows on the Way

"Not only is this stupid, it’s dangerous. As music fans are attacked in spaces where they should be free to celebrate and feel safe, to be whoever they want–terrorists are trying to scare us into acting a certain way, talking a certain way, thinking a certain way. Focus your anger on them.
"Don't try to censor the art of yesterday because you don't agree with it. Don't tell new artists that they should only paint the world as you see it."

Roisin O'Connor in The Independent reacts to Canadian students offended by Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side."

"And Perennially Raised Eyebrow"

"The common criticism of Moore's approach to Bond is that he made the series sillier and less serious—which is thought to be what audiences were looking for in the dismal 1970s. The first part of this isn't really fair. The series was changing, it's true: the gadgets got bigger, the jokes got broader, and the action frequently moved to the United States, because of the size of the American market. (This last aspect proved temporary, thank God.) But all of these things are true of Diamonds Are Forever, in which Connery himself adopted a lighter take on Bond. If the series was going in that direction, it wasn't Moore's fault."

Isaac Chotiner in Slate writes an appreciation of Roger Moore, who died at age 89.

"'I T'ink I'd Like to Talk to Someone About Gettin' a Grant'"

"Charm wafted up the line, fragrant as peat smoke, as I heard him utter the magic spell: 'I'd like to start a museum of American literature.'

"He said something else too, but I didn't catch it, because I was already racing downstairs three marble steps at a time."

David Kipen in the Los Angeles Times discusses the origins of the American Writers Musuem.

"Set That Favorite American Adjective, 'Free,' on a Fresh Altar"

"The Human Be-In drew about 20,000 people to Golden Gate Park. Costumes, music, incense, and marijuana abounded. ('There was so much dope rising in the air,' Rock Scully recalls, 'Jerry and I thought we'd walked into a geodesic dome.') Allen Ginsberg was on hand, leading a massive om chant. Timothy Leary, then 46, premiered his mantra, 'Turn on, tune in, drop out.' A consequential witness was the *Chronicle'*s revered jazz critic, Ralph J. Gleason. 'No drunks,' a stunned Gleason wrote in his column. The event was 'an affirmation, not a protest … a promise of good, not evil This is truly something new.' He described it as 'an asking for a new dimension to peace … for the reality of love and a great Nest for all humans.'

"As news of the Be-In trickled out, media coverage increased. In early spring, a group of Haight insiders held a homespun version of a press conference, welcoming the youth of America to San Francisco to experience the magic for themselves, as soon as school let out. The Diggers braced to house and feed the hordes. And hordes there would be, given the seductive name coined for the beckoning season."

Sheila Weller, in a 2012 Vanity Fair article, writes about the origin of San Francisco's Summer of Love.

"What Does the President Owe, and to Whom Does He Owe It?"

"The counsel's mandate, however, only empowers him to investigate connections between Russia and the Trump campaign. It's by no means clear that he has authority to broaden the inquiry into the mighty question of why Russia chose to intervene, or to explore entanglements between the Russian government and Trump's businesses.
"People in Trump's orbit now face legal fees and legal jeopardy. For a long time however, the president himself will enjoy the shield of Robert Mueller's professional discretion.
"It doesn't have to be this way. Congress could still investigate itself or empower an independent investigation. This Congress won't. The next Congress should."

David Frum at The Atlantic wants more than a special council to investigate Donald Trump.

"No One Should Think That Gives Us the Protection We Need"

"Dodd-Frank sought other ways to safeguard the system. It toughened capital requirements for banks and required the biggest financial firms to develop liquidation plans so they could be more easily shut down if they teetered near collapse. And the so-called Volcker Rule prohibited banks from trading for their own profit and limited their ownership of risky investments.
"But there's no question that the repeal of Glass-Steagall led to consolidation in the U.S. financial system."

Jim Puzzanghera in the Los Angeles Times looks at the question of reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act.

I Went into a Dream

"After John's reprise, the orchestra returns for an even greater swelling of sound. It was like something blowing up, a tremendous wreck, the explosion of a gun inside a car. And then, after all the chaos and destruction, what next? George Harrison had suggested a fade to humming. But it didn't work. Paul thought that the song needed firmer resolution. Three Steinway pianos and a harmonium were rolled into action, and at every keyboard the players were instructed to hit the single chord of E major simultaneously and hard, with the sustain foot pedal down, letting it carry as long as possible. There were nine takes. The tone is so big, so capacious and resonant because Martin and Emerick thought to put the recorder on half speed. It's the sound of peace. Instead of love being all you need, here it's music that gets you through all the days and nights."

Nicholas Dawidoff at The Atlantic listens to the Beatles' "A Day in the Life" fifty years later.

Ned Rorem discusses the Beatles in a January 1968 article from The New York Review of Books.

But Kyle Smith at National Review argues that Sgt. Pepper is "not even the finest Beatles album released in 1967."

And Geoff Edgers at The Washington Post visits Richard Goldstein, "the critic who panned 'Sgt. Pepper.'"

"He Made Our Country Nastier, Stupider, Cruder, and More Bigoted"

"When Rupert Murdoch hired Ailes to create Fox News as an 'alternative' to the mainstream media, Murdoch's intention was clear. He wanted to degrade American society in precisely the way he had degraded British society. And when degradation is your goal, there is no better hire than Roger Ailes. Ailes was a political aide turned television genius who emanated anger; his crucial insight was that there was a great amount of money to be made off the resentments of others. And the more you could stoke those resentments, the more money you would earn. At the same time, you could increase the net amount of resentment, and create a coarser society, all the better for your own pocketbook."

Isaac Chotiner at Slate remembers Roger Ailes.

"We Are Failing"

"It's not shocking that Donald Trump—a reality television star and poster boy for crude excess—is manifestly unsuited for an office that even at its least challenging, requires unusual patience and ability. That much was apparent throughout the presidential contest, from the moment he announced his campaign to his eventual triumph in the general election. What is shocking is how little the Republican Party seems interested in reining this in. Despite the weight of Trump’s transgression—a dangerous contempt for discretion, on the heels of an authoritarian push against the independence of federal law enforcement—GOP lawmakers are largely silent, frustrated with the 'drama' but unwilling to challenge the president's grossly abusive behavior."

Jamelle Bouie at Slate says that Donald Trump is "a Stress Test for Democracy."

Peter Beinert at The Atlantic, however, is more hopeful.

"Epitomizes the Dorky Arrogance and Smugness of the Professional Elite"

"One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich. Class migrants (white-collar professionals born to blue-collar families) report that 'professional people were generally suspect' and that managers are college kids 'who don't know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job,' said Alfred Lubrano in Limbo. Barbara Ehrenreich recalled in 1990 that her blue-collar dad 'could not say the word doctor without the virtual prefix quack. Lawyers were shysters…and professors were without exception phonies.' Annette Lareau found tremendous resentment against teachers, who were perceived as condescending and unhelpful.
"Michèle Lamont, in The Dignity of Working Men, also found resentment of professionals—but not of the rich. '[I] can't knock anyone for succeeding,' a laborer told her. 'There's a lot of people out there who are wealthy and I’m sure they worked darned hard for every cent they have,' chimed in a receiving clerk. Why the difference? For one thing, most blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But professionals order them around every day. The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable—just with more money. 'The main thing is to be independent and give your own orders and not have to take them from anybody else,' a machine operator told Lamont. Owning one's own business—that's the goal. That's another part of Trump’s appeal."

Joan C. Williams in the Harvard Business Review writes about the "Class Culture Gap."

"We Could Have Been Canada"

"Had the British won, we might now be taught about a fight between brave British emancipators and indigenous slaveholders, with the black slaves who defected to the British-loyalist side seen as self-emancipators, as the blacks who defected to the Union Army are now, and with Washington's and Jefferson's rhetoric of liberty shown the same disdain we have for the not-very-different libertarian and individualist rhetoric of their heirs in the Confederacy. We would perhaps wonder, far more than we are now allowed to, how radical Whigs like Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Paine ever allowed themselves to betray their own Enlightenment principles by making the tragic error of entering into a compact with slaveholders."

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker looks at recent books on the American Revolution.

"Defined Less by Its Conservatism Than Its Radicalism and Its Will to Power"

"At every turn, when faced with the choice between norms and power, between the integrity of our institutions and partisan victory, Republicans from Gingrich and Tom DeLay to Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan have chosen the latter. It's how brinkmanship became the order of the day under President Obama and why few, if any, Republicans have spoken out against the push for voter suppression in the states. It's what drove the party establishment to consolidate behind Donald Trump, an unstable demagogue whose chief qualification is his physical ability to sign conservative legislation, and it's behind the present choice—in the face of unprecedented behavior and a possible cover-up of unethical (even criminal) activity—to move against accountability.

Jamelle Bouie at Slate defines "The modern Republican Party—the party shaped by Newt Gingrich and his 'revolution.'"

"Might Be the Clearest Voice on What This Moment Means"

"Similarly, in a 2015 open letter to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Foner urged the presidential candidate to stop referring to Denmark as the inspiration for his democratic socialism and instead give credit to the United States’ own 'radical forebears'—abolitionists, suffragettes, populists, Eugene V. Debs, the makers of the New Deal and the Great Society—and their fight for economic equality and social justice. These were uniquely American battles, grounded in uniquely American values.
"Today, when we find ourselves in the hands of the most dangerously authoritarian and corrupt president in memory, it is this radical history that we are once again called upon to retrieve."

Katrina vanden Heuvel in The Washington Post promotes historian Eric Foner in the era of Trump.

And Jesse A. Myerson at The Nation cautions against class condescension among Trump opponents.

Black Lemonade

The Village Voice publishes its 2016 Pazz+Jop poll results.

"Trump Has Demonstrated His Inability to Tolerate Any Authority That Lies Beyond His Control"

"The defense offered by Republicans—see Trump himself, Senator John Cornyn, National Review editor Rich Lowry, and innumerable others—is that Democrats are also hypocritical. After all, they expressed outrage at Comey's behavior during the election, and now Trump is firing him for that very same putative reason. How can they object?

"This is obviously absurd. The entire objection to Comey's intervention in the election is that he violated FBI protocol because—as an exhaustively reported New York Times account found—he implicitly assumed Clinton would win, and feared postelection attacks on his agency by enraged Republicans. The refusal by Republicans to accept the legitimacy of law enforcement, even a Republican official like Comey, is the source of both Comey's unusual foray into the election and Trump's decision to fire him. It is perfectly consistent to object to both—not to mention for Democrats to fear that, however unforgivable Comey's actions, a Trump-selected replacement would be more dangerous."

 

Jonathan Chait at New York reacts to Donald Trump's firing of FBI director James Comey.

And Chait adds that Trump is "like a child monarch."

"Of No Party or Clique"

"On May 5, 1857, a group of Boston Brahmins gathered for dinner at the Parker House Hotel and decided to create a new magazine, one that would make politics, literature, and the arts its chief concerns. These men, united in their opposition to slavery, their love of American writing, and their tripartite names, included such eminences as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and James Russell Lowell. They did not set out to exclude women from the gathering; Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, was invited, but she boycotted the dinner when she learned that alcohol would be served."

Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic marks the 160th anniversary of The Atlantic.

"There Appears to Be a Growing Consensus that Obama-Trump Voters Were a Much Bigger Problem for Clinton than Superior Republican Turnout"

"So: It was the Obama-Trump voters, in the Rust Belt, with the economic anxiety. Disaffected workers in deindustrialized America, who believed that Trump was a genuine populist—and sympathized with Bernie Sanders's critique of the Democratic Party—cost Clinton the election.

"But then, so did insufficient Democratic turnout."

 

Eric Levitz at New York looks at 2016 post-mortems.

"The fact that she was in a position to lose because of the Comey letter, ah, is something that deserves some introspection."

And David Axelrod adds his on CNN.

"We Are Living in an Era of Populism and Demagoguery"

"Reactionism is not the same thing as conservatism. It's far more potent a brew. Reactionary thought begins, usually, with acute despair at the present moment and a memory of a previous golden age. It then posits a moment in the past when everything went to hell and proposes to turn things back to what they once were. It is not simply a conservative preference for things as they are, with a few nudges back, but a passionate loathing of the status quo and a desire to return to the past in one emotionally cathartic revolt. If conservatives are pessimistic, reactionaries are apocalyptic. If conservatives value elites, reactionaries seethe with contempt for them. If conservatives believe in institutions, reactionaries want to blow them up. If conservatives tend to resist too radical a change, reactionaries want a revolution. Though it took some time to reveal itself, today’s Republican Party—from Newt Gingrich's Republican Revolution to today's Age of Trump—is not a conservative party. It is a reactionary party that is now at the peak of its political power."

Andrew Sullivan in New York writes about "the manifest return of a distinctive political and intellectual tendency with deep roots."

And Park MacDougald and Jason Willick profile reactionary Steve Sailer.

(These articles form a part of a larger package on "the new far right.")

Michael Hann at The Guardian discusses the soundtrack.

"No Protest, However 'Inclusive,' Should Wall Itself Off From What It's Arguing Against"

"There is an element of performance in all protest, necessarily. However, the 'safe space' rhetoric has permeated so deeply that, unintentionally, the left is using a display of weakness as strength. That is, in order to create change, one is to indicate grievous injury on the basis of things which, in the not too distant past, even politically concerned people considered something to walk on by, or make fun of.
"But as sociologist Todd Gitlin has noted, this kind of performed delicacy was alien to leftist protesters of the '60s and beyond."

John McWhorter at CNN criticizes efforts to ban controversial speakers from college campuses.

"The Dominant Population Center in California"

Shelby Grad in the Los Angeles Times reports that the population of Los Angeles has passed 4,000,000.

"Dramatically Altered the Story of Crime and Punishment in the United States"

"According to U.S. immigration officials, Mexicans made nearly 1 million official border crossings into the United States during the 1920s. They arrived at a port of entry, paid an entry fee and submitted to any required tests, such as literacy and health.
"However, as U.S. immigration authorities reported, many other Mexican immigrants did not register for legal entry. Entry fees were prohibitively high for many Mexican workers. Moreover, U.S. authorities subjected Mexican immigrants, in particular, to kerosene baths and humiliating delousing procedures because they believed Mexican immigrants carried disease and filth on their bodies. Instead of traveling to a port of entry, many Mexicans informally crossed the border at will, as both U.S. and Mexican citizens had done for decades.
"When the debate stalled over how many Mexicans to allow in each year, Blease shifted attention to stopping the large number of border crossings that took place outside ports of entry. He suggested criminalizing unmonitored entry.
"According to Blease’s bill 'unlawfully entering the country' would be a misdemeanor, while unlawfully returning to the United States after deportation would be a felony. The idea was to force Mexican immigrants into an authorized and monitored stream that could be turned on and turned off at will at ports of entry. Any immigrant who entered the United States outside the bounds of this stream would be a criminal subject to fines, imprisonment and ultimately deportation. But it was a crime designed to impact Mexican immigrants, in particular.
"Neither the western agricultural businessmen nor the restrictionists registered any objections."

Kelly Lytle Hernandez at The Conversation discusses "the Immigration Act of March 4, 1929."

"Who Needs New Music?"

Jody Rosen in a 2013 New York article presents "60 Great Albums You Probably Haven't Heard."

"God Help Us"

"All I can say to you is that from day one I have believed that Donald Trump's greatest threat to our society and to our democracy is not necessarily his authoritarianism, but his essential ignorance—of history, of policy, of political process, of the Constitution. Saying that if Jackson had been around we might not have had the Civil War is like saying that one strong, aggressive leader can shape, prevent, move history however he wishes. This is simply 5th grade understanding of history or worse."

Tim Murphy at Mother Jones asks historian David Blight about Donald Trump's comments regarding Andrew Jackson and the Civil War.

"In other words, what sets Trump apart is not that he has historical heroes, but that he admires heroes who are 'tough' and push people around, whether it be Jackson in the nullification crisis or various generals in running the military. Patton and MacArthur were the most authoritarian of American military leaders, known for bullying their troops and disobeying the rules."

Jeet Heer at The New Republic expands on the theme.

"No, it's more as though American history were Groundhog Day, and we'll keep repeating the cycles of Reconstruction and Redemption until we can figure out how to live together. But for all of Foner's willingness to see the era's contemporary echoes, he blanches at the idea that we should view regression as inevitable. 'People who lived through Reconstruction did not know Redemption was coming,' he says. 'They were operating on the basis that this was happening, that this was gonna be permanent, that these rights were going to be there, and thinking about what to do with them. You can't make Reconstruction purely a question of failure, and you can't make it purely a question of why did it fail.'"

Tim Murphy at Mother Jones talks as well with historian Eric Foner about how to view Reconstruction in the age of Trump.

"For Blight, the trouble is that Trump rose to power despite these truths—despite the established danger of demagogues, the historic viciousness of prejudice, and the broad consensus that expanding rights for women and people of color has strengthened societies. 'You spend all your years and all your life trying to teach history, and then to see this man elected—I felt historians had failed,' he said. 'We're working in every medium we can—from film, to museums, to writing books. But we're up against the Fox News view of the country, which we don't reach. We don't even know how.'"

And Graham Vyse at The New Republic writes that "Trump’s Ignorance Is Radicalizing U.S. Historians."

"Inskeep was making that argument to demonstrate a key difference between Jackson and Trump, who largely failed to widen the electorate in 2016. Jackson, Inskeep noted, brought new voters into the American democratic experiment and gave a political voice to those who had previously been voiceless. But if Trump failed to do the same, he seems to have understood lessons about Jackson's success that progressives, to their detriment, have largely forgotten."

Andew Exum, though, at The Atlantic offers an alternate view.

March and April 2017 Acquisitions

DVDs:
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, 2016.

"If We Have Movements That Are Entirely Based Around English Majors and Web Designers, We're Not Reaching the Majority of the American Population No Matter What Their Skin Color Is"

"I've written a little about the history of the term. It comes out of some groups that split off from the Communist Party in the '50s, and really came to prominence in the '60s. Its primary architects were Theodore Allen and Noel Ignatiev, and they called it 'white skin privilege.' The idea of white skin privilege was that white workers had been bribed. The American ruling class, especially the Southern planter class dating all the way back to the 17th century, had bribed white workers with greater social status and privileges so they would not unite with black workers—from enslaved workers in the 17th century to super-exploited black wage workers in the '50s, '60s, and '70s—and pose a challenge to the ruling class.
"The idea was that white skin privilege was actually harmful to white people, because despite the fact that they were granted some advantages over black people, they ended up even more entrenched in their condition of exploitation precisely by accepting these advantages. As a result, they did not build a movement across racial boundaries to fight their common oppression. The fact that the idea of white privilege is used today to show why we can't possibly unify—that's a reversal of the core idea."

Kelton Sears in Seattle Weekly interviews Asad Haider.

"If People Don't Get Justice in the Courtroom, They'll Get Justice in the Streets"

Mara Shalhoup in the LA Weekly presents "25 Years After the L.A. Riots: An Oral History."

Josephine Livingstone at The New Republic explains the significance of videotape to the events.

"Once a Nice Place to Live and a Destination. Now It's Just a Destination"

"But the gentrifiers--colonizers, really--are spoiling our quality of life. New neighbors are often unfriendly. Sometimes they're not really neighbors at all but transient groups from Craigslist, AirBnB or other online services. From 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., five or even six days a week, bulldozers rumble around serving the construction sites. Where I used to see blue sky and trees I now see walls hovering over my house and yard."

Jack Schwartz in the Los Angeles Times discusses life in Venice, California.

Jennifer Swann in the LA Weekly reports on the fall of the Venice Freak Show to gentrification.

"The Utterly Predictable Fruit of the Democratic Party's Neoliberal Turn"

"The way I see it, the critical test for our system will come late next year. The billionaire great-maker in the Oval Office has already turned out to be an incompetent buffoon, and his greatest failures are no doubt yet to come. By November 2018, the winds of change will be in full hurricane shriek, and unless the Democratic Party's incompetence is even more profound than it appears to be, the D's will sweep to some sort of mid-term triumph.
But when 'the resistance' comes into power in Washington, it will face this question: this time around, will Democrats serve the 80% of us that this modern economy has left behind? Will they stand up to the money power? Or will we be invited once again to feast on inspiring speeches while the tasteful gentlemen from JP Morgan foreclose on the world?"

Thomas Frank at The Guardian writes that "Democrats can have no excuse for not seeing the wave of heartland rage that swamped them last November."

"The Bile Poured on Him from Every Quarter Makes Today's Internet Vitriol Seem Dainty"

"This process of distillation obscures how Lincoln was perceived in his own time, and, by comparison, it diminishes our own age. Where is the political giant of our era? Where is the timeless oratory? Where is the bold resolve, the moral courage, the vision?
"Imagine all those critical voices from the 19th century as talking heads on cable television. Imagine the snap judgments, the slurs and put-downs that beset Lincoln magnified a million times over on social media. How many of us, in that din, would hear him clearly? His story illustrates that even greatness—let alone humbler qualities like skill, decency, good judgment, and courage—rarely goes unpunished."

Mark Bowden in a 2013 Atlantic article explores Northern criticism of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.

"It Requires Us to Supplement How We've Come to View the Origins"

"I see a lot of power and persuasive force in the traditional model that focuses first and foremost on how kind of race-baiting politicians used race to cynically win votes, and how our relative indifference to black suffering at the national level is part of what's blinded people to the pain and the misery that is mass incarceration. I lay what I’m doing alongside those. I think we have failed to focus on all of these little tiny decisions. When you stack them up and you add them up across time and across the country, and when you add them up throughout the criminal-justice system from police on the one end, through prosecutors and judges and legislatures and probation and parole officers at the other end of the process—when you look at all of these actors over time and over space and across the country, if everyone only becomes somewhat more punitive, but everyone does it together and everyone does it for decades, you get mass incarceration.
"I do think that’s a crucial part of the story, and I don't think it’s one that has gotten enough attention. Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and the War on Drugs are the kind of natural hinge points for the story, and they're important. But they’re not the only things that are important. It's harder to see some of these smaller decisions."

Matt Ford at The Atlantic interviews James Forman, Jr., author of Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America .

"Delights in Skewering the Left and the Right Simultaneously"

"It asks why there aren’t more places like St. Francisville—places where faith, family, and community form an integrated whole.

"Dreher's answer is that nearly everything about the modern world conspires to eliminate them. He cites the Marxist sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who coined the term 'liquid modernity' to describe a way of life in which 'change is so rapid that no social institutions have time to solidify.' The most successful people nowadays are flexible and rootless; they can live anywhere and believe anything. Dreher thinks that liquid modernity is a more or less unstoppable force—in part because capitalism and technology are unstoppable. He urges Christians, therefore, to remove themselves from the currents of modernity. They should turn inward, toward a kind of modern monasticism."

 

Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker profiles writer Rod Dreher.

"Shut It Down"?

"Nearly all American politicians in both major parties support some limits on legal immigration, and some measures to enforce those laws. Virtually all of them define 'some human beings as "unworthy of legal standing"'—a position Baer insists does not deserve to be defended in public at all. Perfectly cogent arguments can and have been made that, say, Hillary Clinton advocates systemically racist policies or that Bernie Sanders encourages sexism. The ability to associate disagreeable ideas with the oppressor, and to quash free speech or other political rights in the name of justice for the oppressed, is a power without any clear limiting principle. Historically, states that rule on that basis tend to push that power to its farthest possible limit."

Jonathan Chait at New York revisits the state of the "illiberal left."

"Professor of Mambo"

"Thompson wants his students to recognize how aspects of African cultures infuse not only the music, art, and dance of the Americas, but also philosophy, religious practice, textile design, everyday gestures, and even vocabulary as quotidian as Uh-huh (yes) and Unh-unh (no). According to David Doris '02PhD, a professor of African art history at the University of Michigan, 'He coined the term that became prevalent in academia: "Black Atlantic."' Says Thompson, 'We can't know how American we are unless we know how black we are.'"

In a 2010 Yale Alumni Magazine article, Cathy Shufro profiles art historian Robert Farris Thompson.

"Gave the Music Its Sound and Its Attitude"

"It could be said that Berry wore the mask, though he did it in trickier ways. When that mask really dropped, at the end of the 1950s, he lost just about everything. Yet such was Berry's importance that if not for him, the Beatles, Dylan, the Rolling Stones and countless others wouldn't have had a model or map. Rolling Stone wouldn't be here without him. If ever there was an American who deserved the Nobel Prize in Literature, it was Chuck Berry. If ever there was an American who did not, it was Chuck Berry. If ever there was an American, it was Chuck Berry."

Mikal Gilmore at Rolling Stone writes an appreciation of Chuck Berry, who died at age ninety in March.

"Why CDs May Actually Sound Better Than Vinyl"

"'Every way you can measure it, digital is going to be superior,' Metcalfe says. 'It really does come down to the preference of the end user.'
"Or, as Kees Immink says: 'Some people like marmalade and some people like mustard. If people like to listen to vinyl, do so, enjoy life. But don't say that the sound is better.'"

In a 2015 LA Weekly article, Chris Kornelis explains.

"Early Front-Runners in the Race to Make Sense of It All"

"There is no Big Reveal, no shocking secret answer. Instead we get a slow-building case against the concept and execution of the Clinton campaign, with plenty of fault falling squarely on the candidate herself.
"Far from a juggernaut, the campaign we see in these pages is plagued with division, unease and anxiety practically from the outset. When things go right, it only means they are soon to go terribly wrong. Win a primary, lose a caucus. Quash a rumor, see three more go viral. Close one wound and find another torn open again."

Ron Elving at NPR reviews Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes's Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign.

As does Michiko Kakutani at The New York Times.

"His Ascent Is a Death Knell for an Entire Era"

"However deranged Bannon's assumptions, this willingness to call the system into question goes a long way toward explaining Trump's political success.
"Liberals see no such system. Instead, they see more or less qualified individuals who either have the right ideas or not, in government or business: cultural diversity, a fervent belief in incremental rather than structural change, and a firm commitment to meritocratic success. Rather than thinking historically—and preferring to avoid the whole idea of neoliberalism—they profess an ethos. And since they cannot recognize neoliberalism as a system, they cannot acknowledge its political and economic dissolution, its steady descent into incoherence. They cannot acknowledge the loss of the historical soil of their selfhood."

J.M. Bernays at The Baffler considers liberals in the Trump era.

"An Inducement to Wonder"

"A true stimulant to the imagination, as the modernists saw it, color just might work social and spiritual transformations in a world cowering before the oppressive gray of industry, the foul brown of the trenches. It was 'a power which directly influences the soul,' in the words of Wassily Kandinsky, and at the Bauhaus, where he arrived in 1922 after leaving Communist Russia for Germany, he proposed the theory that primary colors are intrinsically linked with basic forms. In a kind of utopian holy trinity, triangles were yellow, squares red, and circles blue. These pairings became the foundation of a new design grammar to be applied not just to canvas and sculpture but to daily existence—refashioning everything from buildings and chairs to cradles and nursery toys. 'Fortunately,' Frank Lloyd Wright wrote, summing up the wishful credo of innocence reclaimed, 'human beings are really childlike in the best sense when directly appealed to by simple, strong forms and pure, bright color.'"

Sebastian Smee in a 2014 Atlantic article looks at books about color.

"I Kept Finding Parallels"

"The Buddha doubted the existence of an omnipotent, benevolent God. In his doctrine of 'emptiness,' he suggested that we have no real evidence for the existence of the outside world. He said that our sense of self is an illusion, too. The Buddhist sage Nagasena elaborated on this idea. The self, he said, is like a chariot. A chariot has no transcendent essence; it's just a collection of wheels and frame and handle. Similarly, the self has no transcendent essence; it's just a collection of perceptions and emotions.
"'I never can catch myself at any time without a perception.'
"That sure sounded like Buddhist philosophy to me—except, of course, that Hume couldn't have known anything about Buddhist philosophy.
"Or could he have?"

In a 2015 Atlantic article, Alison Gopnik describes her efforts in investigating a link between Buddhism and David Hume.

"That Humility Has Been Lost"

"It's hard to recapture the horror that earlier generations of Americans felt about preventive war when it was still something that other countries did to the United States and not merely something Americans contemplate doing to others. They viewed it the way some Americans still view torture: as liberation from the moral restraints that human beings require. One of the things that frightened them most about the Nazis was that Hitler had dispensed with the concept of original sin. He had aimed to create a new class of infallible, god-like, humans who need not be encumbered by the fetters that bound lesser races. Totalitarianism, argued Arthur Schlesinger in The Vital Center, aimed 'to liquidate the tragic insights which gave man a sense of its limitations.' For Schlesinger, Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Lippmann and other intellectuals who shaped America’s foreign policy debate in the early Cold War, acknowledging these limitations was part of what made America different. Because Americans recognized that they were fallible, fallen creatures, they did not grant themselves the illegitimate, corrupting power of preventive war."

Peter Beinart at The Atlantic looks at the American embrace of preventive war.

Preoccupied with 1995

"Most of the URLs the Times printed in 1995 are now dead, including those that led to a guide for backpackers and wilderness trekkers; a livestream of a coffee pot; a Grateful Dead fan page; a map of estuaries; a federal spending website; a hub for online gaming; a gardening site; a site devoted to legislation affecting Massachusetts; Wired's coverage of legal issues in cyberspace; Berkeley's Museum of Paleontology; a graphic novel about living with cancer; an illustrated explanation of an infamous flaw in Intel's Pentium chip; a cybermall; a site for making hotel reservations in San Francisco; a site dedicated to subway routes; a virtual frog dissection; a wine-tasting club; a digital map viewer that let you zoom in to any spot on Earth; Yahoo's internet directory from when it was still hosted by Stanford; and an informational site about zebrafish."

Adrienne LaFrance at The Atlantic revisits a list of websites from an article in The New York Times back in 1995.

"Cities vs. Trump"

"In the 2016 election, virtually every large urban center and many small ones—white Boise and majority-black Baltimore, wealthy San Francisco and beaten-down Detroit, sprawling sunwashed megalopoli and shrinking union strongholds—rejected the man who became president, often by yawning margins. The density that is one of the defining characteristics of cities forces encounters that, more and more, seem to strengthen Democratic principles—and separates urban dwellers from their rural cousins."

Justin Davidson in New York asserts that the "urban-rural divide is more significant" to contemporary politics.

"If You Thought George W. Bush Was Generally Swell, but too Racially Inclusive, You Are Going to Like Trump's Presidency"

"Donald Trump ran an ethnonationalist cult-of-personality presidential campaign, in which his status as a (real) nonpolitician and (imaginary) business genius would allow him to transcend and solve every policy problem. He has retained the ethnonationalist themes, while abandoning, one by one, almost every other populist element differentiating him from the generic Republican brand."

Jonathan Chait in New York argues that "Trump has become a conventional party man."

"The Truly Paranoid Style in American Politics"

"Conspiracists are by nature anti-heroic—they believe that faceless networks must be far more powerful than ordinary individuals. A marginal figure like Ross could never have built his cocaine empire alone; Oswald could not have killed a president; a few dozen men in Afghan caves could not have brought down the Twin Towers. The romance of the conspiracy hunt lies in the way it transfers vitality from the assassin to the buff, at home alone, searching for the plot’s true source. In this, it matches perfectly the romance of the Internet, which perhaps explains why conspiracy has found such a resolute home there. If Ross, Oswald, and Hani Hanjour are merely pawns, then the story needs a hero, and the ­puzzle-solver himself raises his hand."

In a 2013 New York article, Benjamin Wallace-Wells looks at "50 years of conspiracy theory."

"That Shadow Has Mostly Subsided"

"These days, the black-and-white artifices of midcentury studio films often seem overly mannered to viewer who didn't grow up watching them on TV as Harry and Sally did. And while young men will always struggle to define masculinity in a way that feels authentic, the world in which they're struggling has changed dramatically. The bitter stoicism that made Bogey cool in the eyes of Allen Felix might look like emotionally stunted self-pity to Felix's son."

Laura Miller at Slate explores if Casablanca is losing its reputation as a beloved movie. 

February 2017 Acquistions

n/a

"I Keep Telling People I'm a Fashion Icon"

"He knows that you probably didn't know that he's an actual living person, or that if you had at one point heard that he was a tennis player, you most likely thought he was already dead. 'I'd love to sit here and say the success of the shoe has been totally because I'm such a great guy or I'm such a great player or whatever. But, you know …' So what is it like when a shoe named after a man is way more famous than the man born with the name himself? To have your name mean so much beyond who you actually are? When you Google Stan Smith, only one of the first 100 images are of the man."

Lauren Schwartzberg at New York talks with Stan Smith, of the eponymous tennis shoe.

"They're Telling the Truth about Words"

"Words belong to everyone. That was Noah Webster's premise, and now, in a world Webster couldn't have imagined, his successors are delivering that message in newly definitive ways. As the rest of us debate the existence of 'alternative facts,' they're keeping it simple:"

James Sullivan at The Boston Globe describes how the Merriam-Webster dictionary continues on in the twenty-first century.

"Conflict and Consensus"

"Perhaps they're right to be cautious. In framing a narrative about a nation, there's always the danger of letting description shade into prescription—as Hartz saw when he wrote about the 'compulsive power' of consensus. Stories about the past are bound to leave things out, and any narrative will eventually come to grief as neglected groups disrupt settled assumptions to make themselves known. Yet we can acknowledge those dangers and still recognize that Woodward was also right. The task for the next generation of American historians will be to draw a new roadmap of our country’s history—simple but not simplistic, rigorous but not rigid, inclusive but not incoherent. As our most recent history has shown, we refuse this task at our peril: if Americans are not offered realistic stories about their country's past, they may well choose mythological ones."

Scott Spillman at The Point asserts that "historians no longer know how to tell a narrative history of the United States because they no longer know what to think about the United States."

"The Chain of Responsibility Is Too Long and Obscure to Have Any Bearing on the Average Voter"

"Here is the story. The House of Representatives has refused to investigate either one of the two massive ongoing legal and ethical violations involving the Trump administration: President Trump's opaque ties (financial and otherwise) to Russia, and his ongoing self-enrichment in office and violations of the Constitution's Emoluments Clause.

"If the House won't investigate, what happens next? Well, the next-best course of action would be some form of public debate on the matter. This is not nearly as good as a real investigation, since the absence of subpoena power means Republicans can simply deny Trump has done anything wrong while blocking any efforts to acquire the evidence that would prove the case. But at least it's something. That's why House Democrats introduced a 'resolution of inquiry' that would force House action on these issues.

"Today, Politico reports the House's response: It will divert the resolution to the House Judiciary Committee, which will (almost certainly) vote on Tuesday along party lines to kill the inquiry. It will be a minor story that probably receives scant or nonexistent coverage from television news, and then it will be quickly over. To be sure, coverage of Trump's scandals will surely continue. But coverage of the House role in permitting Trump's behavior will be extremely minimal."

 

Jonathan Chait at New York explains how Donald Trump gets away with it.

"Obama's Lost Army"

"As we now know, that grand vision for a postcampaign movement never came to fruition. Instead of mobilizing his unprecedented grassroots machine to pressure obstructionist lawmakers, support state and local candidates who shared his vision, and counter the Tea Party, Obama mothballed his campaign operation, bottling it up inside the Democratic National Committee. It was the seminal mistake of his presidency—one that set the tone for the next eight years of dashed hopes, and helped pave the way for Donald Trump to harness the pent-up demand for change Obama had unleashed."

Micah L. Sifry at The New Republic calls "the failure to keep the grassroots movement going" Barack Obama's "original, and most costly, political mistake."

"It Illuminates the History of Not Only the School, but of New York, Too"

"After the revolution, King's College changed its name to Columbia. Then slavery was abolished gradually in New York. Little by little Columbia's direct connection fades away. But New York City in the 1830s and '40s is still very tied into the cotton trade. We don't like to think about this as New Yorkers, we like to think of it as a bastion of liberalism. But New York was a pro-slavery city. The economy was very connected to the South and to slavery."

Gillian B. White at The Atlantic interviews Eric Foner about Columbia University and Slavery, a historical research project.

January 2017 Acquisitions

Books:
Nick Hornby, Funny Girl, 2016.

DVDs:
Four Christmases, 2008.

"An Angry Screed of a Campaign Speech"

"I've been watching and listening to inaugural addresses since John F. Kennedy's, in 1960. I've never heard anything like this one in terms of its divisive content and complete lack of uplift. Even its call for the blessings of the Almighty was to a nationalist God Trump seemed to be charging with protecting the country—if and only if our military and police forces failed. And absent any admission of his own fallibility, his appeal to unity sounded more like a threat of repression than a call for mutual understanding and bipartisanship."

Ed Kilgore at New York reacts to Donald Trump's inaugural address.

"'I Promise To Work Tirelessly To Achieve My Campaign’s Goals,' Threatens Trump In Terrifying Address"

From The Onion.

Mark Joseph Stern at Slate credits Mitch McConnell for the rise of Trump.

And Jonathan Chait at New York reacts to the anti-Trump marches the day after the inauguration.

"Looking at Historical Experience, There Is No Obvious Relationship between the Minimum Wage and Unemployment"

"This conviction that the minimum wage hurts the poor is an example of economism in action. Economists have many different opinions on the subject, based on different theories and research studies, but when it comes to public debate, one particular result of one particular model is presented as an unassailable economic theorem. (Politicians advocating for a higher minimum wage, by contrast, tend to avoid economic models altogether, instead arguing in terms of fairness or helping the poor.) This happens partly because the competitive market model taught in introductory economics classes is simple, clear, and memorable. But it also happens because there is a large interest group that wants to keep the minimum wage low: businesses that rely heavily on cheap labor."

James Kwak at The Atlantic argues that "introductory economics can be more misleading than it is helpful."

"The Source of the Triple-A Attack Line"

"The smear is being mentioned in some of McGovern's obituaries, but most of these leave out the phrase's weird provenance, which remained a secret until 2007. In that year, Robert Novak revealed its source (in his memoir, The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington) to be none other than Sen. Tom Eagleton."

In a 2012 New Republic article, Timothy Noah explains how George McGovern "became the candidate of Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion."

California Dreamer

"Starr captured the state's rise in influence, and its singular hold on the public imagination, in 'Americans and the California Dream,' a sweeping book series that moves from the Gold Rush into the Progressive Era, the 1920s, the Great Depression and other distinct chapters of California’s past.
"Throughout his work, Starr celebrated the state's creativity and its openness to new ideas. And he demonstrated a familiarity with a vast range of topics central to the state's development and its image of itself: architecture, agriculture, literature, water infrastructure and the entertainment industry, among others."

David Zahniser and Matt Hamilton in the Los Angeles Times writes an obituary for historian Kevin Starr.

And Carolyn Kellogg, Peter H. King, Shelby Grad, and William Deverell provide appreciations.

"They Spring from Four Strategies of Approaching the Problem of Authenticity"

"First, autofiction: narratives that appear to do away with much of fiction's familiar scaffolding — plots, scene-setting, the development of characters other than the hero; that eschew familiar modes of storytelling in favor of the diary entry, the transcript, or the essayistic digression; and that collapse the distance between the hero-narrator and the authorial persona by investigating that dual figure's claims to authenticity. Second, fables of meritocracy, often satiric: social novels and comedies of manners in which higher education and its professional aftermath are both crucibles that allow characters to reveal their authentic selves and alienating systems that strip them of their native identities. Third, many historical novels have been set in the near past, locating in recent decades the romantic grit and violence their nostalgic authors find lacking in the sterile present. And, fourth, a set of narratives have placed the experience of trauma—rape, pedophilia, homophobic abuse, incarceration, the horrors of war—at their center, where it assumes an animating role: Suffering bestows meaning on an otherwise comfortable world."

Christian Lorentzen in New York explores "the Novel in the Age of Obama."

"Now We Know Nixon Lied"

"But Nixon had a pipeline to Saigon, where the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, feared that Johnson would sell him out. If Thieu would stall the talks, Nixon could portray Johnson's actions as a cheap political trick. The conduit was Anna Chennault, a Republican doyenne and Nixon fund-raiser, and a member of the pro-nationalist China lobby, with connections across Asia.
"'! Keep Anna Chennault working on' South Vietnam, Haldeman scrawled, recording Nixon's orders. 'Any other way to monkey wrench it? Anything RN can do.'"

John A. Farrell in The New York Times discusses notes written by H. R. Haldeman about Vietnam in 1968 that establish that Richard "Nixon directed his campaign's efforts to scuttle the peace talks."

And Jason Daley in a 2017 Smithsonian article and Colin Schultz in a 2013 Smithsonian article cite other evidence.

"Making the Great Man Theory of History Great Again"

"As a professional historian, this sort of analysis is entirely contrary to the way I was trained, which was to see social change developing across broad swaths of society, not emanating from particular individuals. Moreover, I was partly trained in France, under the aegis of the so-called Annales school, whose vision of history could not be more different from the heroic one. Fernand Braudel, one of the leaders of the school, taught his followers to pay attention to the deep, slow, geological, and climactic forces that, in determining the shape of the continents and patterns of global warming and cooling, ultimately shape human societies as well. After that, Braudel directed us to study centuries-long patterns of economic and social change. He compared all these subjects to the deep currents moving through oceans. Mere 'event history,' by contrast, including decisions taken by powerful individuals, he likened to the insignificant foam tossed up on the ocean's surface. Much of the history influenced by Braudel barely even mentioned particular individuals, let alone attributed a decisive influence to them. In short, my instinct was long to treat the 'heroic mode' as simplistic and misleading."

David A. Bell in Foreign Policy says that Donald Trump's "unpredictable rise is forcing historians and social scientists to rethink their most basic assumptions about how the world works."

"Tonight It's My Turn to Say Thanks"

"My fellow Americans, it has been the honor of my life to serve you.  I won't stop; in fact, I will be right there with you, as a citizen, for all my days that remain.  For now, whether you're young or young at heart, I do have one final ask of you as your president–the same thing I asked when you took a chance on me eight years ago.
"I am asking you to believe.  Not in my ability to bring about change–but in yours."

The Los Angeles Times runs a transcript of President Obama's farewell address.

Danielle Kurtzleben at NPR provides statistics from 2009 to 2017.

And The Onion "looks back at the historic legacy of Barack Obama, a post-racial president for a pre-post-racial America."

"The Great Irony of the Moment"

"Obama rejected Wright's vision with a speech that saved his campaign and made him president. Given our present circumstances, it's clear he could have used a little of Wright's insight. Obama saw his candidacy and ultimately his presidency as part of the story of American progress. But governments change, the pastor said. Things can and will get worse, our ever-perfecting union be damned."

Jamelle Bouie in Slate argues that "The optimism that helped Obama reach this office—the same faith in our ever-perfecting union—is wholly inadequate in the face of the revanchist rage that gave us President Trump."

But Jonathan Chait at New York contends that "the specific changes Obama wrought may prove far more durable than either his gloating enemies or his despairing supporters believe."

"An Artistic Activist"

"Though he was a critic, and a great one, Gleason didn't review art or life from the sidelines; he wrote from inside the moral, political, and artistic crises of the times, and he perceived them clearly and understood them passionately. His standard of critical practice and his model of critical responsibility are awe-inspiring."

Richard Brody in The New Yorker reviews Ralph J. Gleason's Music in the Air.

"But Also About the Things and Attitudes That the Music Embraces"

"One of the first assignments he gave Lydon–which wound up becoming the main story on page one–concerned money missing from the Monterey Pop Festival. 'Jann didn't want a fanzine," says Lydon. "He wanted investigative reportage.' Many articles–including pieces on David Crosby getting fired from the Byrds and the Dead's big drug bust–didn't have bylines. 'We didn't put our names on everything,' says Lydon, 'because that would have showed how few people were working for the paper.'"

For the fiftieth anniversary of Rolling Stone, Andy Greene writes about the magazine's birth in San Francisco.

K, Owed

"What went wrong? The 401(k) began as a technical adjustment to the tax code, one meant to mostly impact high-earning executives using profit-sharing plans. People like Benna, a benefits consultant, convinced the Reagan administration that the language of the statute allowed for all employees to put aside a portion of their salaries on a tax-deferred basis. It was supposed to supplement corporate pensions. Instead, in something almost no one foresaw, the 401(k) replaced them.
"In 2017, we know that this historic accident isn’t working out for many people."

Helaine Olen at Slate writes that "Life has become too expensive for many of us to save adequately."

"Having a Remarkable Resurgence"

"The film is set in the deteriorating cities and countryside of southeastern England—vividly rendered with alarming realism and minimal use of sci-fi futurism—amid geopolitical chaos that has led to a massive refugee crisis, which has in turn led an immigrant-fearing and authoritarian U.K. to close its borders to outsiders who seek its shores. Terrorist attacks in European capitals are just routine items in the news crawl. The world stands on the brink, and no one has any clear idea of what can be done. The film, in hindsight, seems like a documentary about a future that, in 2016, finally arrived."

Abraham Riesman in New York revisits Children of Men.

"We Do Not Need to Take Sides in These Battles to Do Justice to Their Histories"

"In books like 'Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s' (1984) and 'Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination' (1992), Dr. Appleby challenged this view.

"She argued that the revolutionaries were more individualistic and optimistic than they had been given credit for. John Locke and Adam Smith had as much influence—or even more—than the radical Whigs on founders like Thomas Jefferson. In her view, the revolutionaries believed that the public good would arise out of the harmonious pursuit of private interests in a market economy."

 

Sewell Chan in The New York Times writes an obituary for historian Joyce Appleby.

And Randy Kennedy reports the death of critic John Berger.

And Robert D. McFadden reports the death of author and journalist Nat Hentoff.