November 2016 Acquisitions

Books:
John Bingham and Jenny Hadfield, Running for Mortals: A Commonsense Plan for Changing Your Life with Running, 2007.
Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty!: An American History, Vol. 1, 2016.
Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty!: An American History, Vol. 2, 2016.
Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People, 2011.
Dav Pilkey, Dog Man, 2016.
Ellen W. Schrecker and Phillip Deery, The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents, 2016.
Bob Stanley, Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé, 2015.
David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love, 2013.
Alan Watts, The Way of Zen, 1999.

DVDs:
The Big Short, 2015.
American Experience: Clinton, 2012.
30 Rock, Season 2, 2011.

"Such Selective Protectionism Means Globalization Will Continue to Redistribute Income Upward"

"Globalization did not have to put a target on the backs of factory workers.  It could've just as easily applied its competitive pressures to a different group: highly compensated professionals such as doctors and lawyers."

Dean Baker in the Los Angeles Times argues that "there is nothing natural or inevitable about the process of globalization as we've experienced it for 40 years."

"Story of a Smoldering Grudge"

"The public has embraced the notion that the greatest crime of the 20th century must have been the product of an equally grandiose conspiracy.
"But none of these conspiracy theories hold up when the events of the six months before Nov. 22, 1963, are carefully studied.  Oswald was no coldhearted professional assassin under orders.  The real answer to the reasons he took aim are to be found in his frustrations and obsessions."

James Reston, Jr., speculates in the Los Angeles Times that Texas Governor John Connally was Lee Harvey Oswald's target in Dallas.

Join Our Club

"It's interesting you say that. I used to read interviews with Julian Cope [of the Teardrop Explodes] or Nick Heyward of [Haircut 100] and they would talk about their influences really openly, and it was like opening a door: if you like what I do, here's where it all comes from. We probably overdid that, and it looked like we were showing off."

Michael Hann at The Guardian interviews Bob Stanley about the twenty-fifth anniversary of Saint Etienne's Foxbase Alpha.

Consummatum est

"In 1900, many reformers looked for answers to questions about social reform, social responsibility, and consumer representation. Climate change is its own monumental challenge, but there may be lessons that can be learned from that earlier history of the consumer. Consumers were identified as important players in tackling social blight and economic injustice. As buyers, they had some influence over what was produced, its quality as well as quantity. Organizing their interests added an important voice to the arena of public politics. These remain valuable insights: Consumers may not hold the answers for everything, but that does not mean they should be treated as merely individual shoppers in the market."

Frank Trentmann at The Atlantic discusses "How Humans Became 'Consumers.'"

"Not Only a Disease, but as a Historical Aberration"

"So, if it's not vaccines, it's Wi-Fi or it's pesticides or it's antidepressants in the water supply. It's some factor in the toxic modern world. But once we realize that autism and autistic people have always been part of the human community, that there were always autistic people there, but they were hidden away, either behind the walls of institutions or behind other diagnostic labels, not getting the help that they need, we understand that autism is a very, very common disability, as Hans Asperger believed.
"It's not some rare form of childhood psychosis caused by parenting, as Leo Kanner believed. Because we have thought of it as the toxic byproduct of our modern world, we haven't thought about making accommodations for, for instance, the many autistic adults that are out there."

William Brangham on the PBS Newshour interviews Steve Silberman, author of NeuroTribes.

"Visible Nearly Everywhere You Look"

"These are the kinds of challenges faced by the Tongva and Acjachemen people (and others, including the Tatavium, Chumash, Serrano, Kitanemuk and Luiseño) who are the original peoples of Los Angeles and Orange County. Although they are officially recognized by the state of California, neither the Acjachemen nor the Tongva enjoy federal recognition. Without federal recognition or a trust-protected land base, there is almost no protective buffer from the plague of relentless development. This means that sacred sites are routinely destroyed. Anthropological studies, for instance, estimate that about 90 percent of Native sacred sites in coastal Southern California are gone.
"Relatively new state laws such as Senate Bill 18 and Assembly Bill 52 do, however, aim to afford greater protection for tribal cultural resources. SB 18 requires local governments to consult with Native nations prior to development projects, while AB 52 adds tribal cultural resources to the categories of cultural resources in the California Environmental Quality Act. But even then, in public debates to protect lands from development, the significance of the laws to protect Native sacred sites often is overlooked in favor of environmentalist rhetoric about protecting endangered species."

Dina Gilio-Whitaker in the LA Weekly discusses Native Americans in Southern California.

Absolved?

"'No sober person in Latin America wants to adopt the Cuban system. But wherever he went in Latin America he received a raving ovation,' said Wayne Smith, a veteran U.S. diplomat who served in Havana. 'Why? Because he stood up to the United States, told us where to go, and got away with it."

Carol J. Williams in the Los Angeles Times writes an obituary for Fidel Castro.

Back to the Future?

Writers in The New Republic, including Graham Vyse, Brian Beutler, Nicole Narea and Alex Shephard, wrestle with the path forward for the Democratic Party.

"A Difficult Subject"

"For good or ill, violence has been a common agent of historical change almost everywhere; it occurs at decisive moments even in the history of those nations that have otherwise enjoyed long periods of gradual and relatively peaceful change. While we may find violence undesirable, we can hardly find it unnatural. The United States, even with its considerable record of violence, appears not as some mutant monster among the peoples of the world but rather as a full-fledged and somewhat boisterous member of the fellowship of human frailty. What is most exceptional about the Americans is not the voluminous record of their violence, but their extraordinary ability, in the face of that record, to persuade themselves that they are among the best-behaved and best-regulated of peoples."

The Baffler publishes Richard Hofstadter's 1970 essay "Reflections on Violence in the United States."

"Overconfident, Not Complacent"

"Ten days before Pearl Harbor, the chiefs ordered an 'appropriate defensive deployment' in a terse cable that dramatically began, 'This dispatch is to be considered a war warning.'  The alarm couldn't have been more clear—or less specific.
"The warning didn't mention Hawaii. And Kimmel could not conceive of a Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor.
"His fleet couldn’t sail all the way to Japan in secret, launch a major attack and get away. If he couldn't do it, he reasoned, neither could the Japanese.
"Thus he took no precautions to guard the fleet at anchor."

Bob Drogin in the Los Angeles Times reviews Steve Twomey's Countdown to Pearl Harbor: The Twelve Days to the Attack.

"An Essential Companion Piece to Definitely Maybe and Morning Glory"

"All of this is related with a mix of archival footage and some animation—Whitecross doesn't bother with talking-head segments anywhere in the film, instead laying interviews over footage as narration. It's an engaging tactic: Pairing audio of Noel acting out a story from the band’s early days with video of what appears to be the exact anecdote he's describing creates the sensation of actually being inside of a memory. And the director isn't wanting for memories."

Kyle McGovern at Spin reviews Oasis: Supersonic.

"Expressive, Not Persuasive"

"Some years ago I was invited to a union convention in Florida to speak on a panel about Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous Four Freedoms speech of 1941. The hall was full of representatives from local chapters—men, women, blacks, whites, Latinos. We began by singing the national anthem, and then sat down to listen to a recording of Roosevelt's speech. As I looked out into the crowd, and saw the array of different faces, I was struck by how focused they were on what they shared. And listening to Roosevelt’s stirring voice as he invoked the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want and the freedom from fear—freedoms that Roosevelt demanded for 'everyone in the world'—I was reminded of what the real foundations of modern American liberalism are."

Mark Lilla in The New York Times argues that "the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end." (Ross Douthat reacts, as does Lovia Gyarkye at The New Republic.)

Emmett Rensin at Vox, back in April, criticizes the "smug style" of liberalism.

And Kyle Scott Clauss at Boston reports on remarks by Bernie Sanders in which Sanders argues that to stop Donald Trump, Democrats "have to do it in a way that we have never done it before, and it's essentially reaching out to people who do not or may not agree with us on every single issue." (Graham Vyse at The New Republic reacts, and Max B. Sawicky at The Baffler defends Sanders.)

Michelle Goldberg in Slate joins the debate as well. (And she refers to Ellen Willis's essay "Identity Crisis" from 1992, republished by n+1 magazine.). Jamelle Bouie calls for a "renewed Rainbow Coalition."

Eric Levtiz at New York tries to bring everything together.

"A Simulacrum of Trump's Presidential Campaign"

"Both relied on direct appeals to the downtrodden, especially people without much education. In both settings, Trump claimed he was acting in the public interest. (Because, after all, he's a billionaire! What could he have wanted with their money, or with political office?). And both trafficked in suggestions that Trump was their personal ally against the economic forces that had beaten them down."

 

Nick Tabor at New York describes the rise and fall of Trump University.

"A Campaign of Fear against Immigrants"

"What the newsreels didn't show were those same detainees, now with shaved heads, crammed onto trains or trucks bound for the middle of the desert, where they were left 15 miles across the Texas border on the highway. A leader with the largest Mexican labor organization (Confederación de Trabajadores de México) described the transportation of these deportees as being like 'truckloads of cows.' In one instance, near Mexicali, across the California border, 88 deportees died of exposure in the 112-degree heat. Others—about a quarter of those deported—were shipped to Mexico by boats from Port Isabel, Texas. Congressional investigators, historian Mae Ngai has written, likened the boats 'to an "eighteenth century slave ship."' The press coverage also failed to capture the many instances in which immigrants were roughed up, detained, and summarily deported without due process, often with no chance to notify their families that they had been swept up in raids on factories, fields, boarding houses, and even the same movie theaters that showed the newsreels. Mexican Americans had to prove that they belonged. INS agents dismissed the legitimacy of draft cards or Social Security cards, insisting on birth certificates, which few people carried around on their person. Mexican Americans who couldn't produce birth certificates quickly enough were deported."

Louis Hyman and Natasha Iskander in Slate revisit the mass deportations carried out by the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s.

Add Slate republishes Dahlia Lithwick and Laurel Reiman Henneman's 2015 article on Japanese-American internment during World War II.

"Aggression" or "Aggressiveness"?

"At the University of Amsterdam, researchers have found that semi-obnoxious behavior not only can make a person seem more powerful, but can make them more powerful, period. The same goes for overconfidence. Act like you're the smartest person in the room, a series of striking studies demonstrates, and you'll up your chances of running the show. People will even pay to be treated shabbily: snobbish, condescending salespeople at luxury retailers extract more money from shoppers than their more agreeable counterparts do. And 'agreeableness,' other research shows, is a trait that tends to make you poorer. 'We believe we want people who are modest, authentic, and all the things we rate positively' to be our leaders, says Jeffrey Pfeffer, a business professor at Stanford. 'But we find it's all the things we rate negatively'—like immodesty—'that are the best predictors of higher salaries or getting chosen for a leadership position.'"

In a 2015 Atlantic article, Jerry Useem explores if "It Pays to Be a Jerk."

"DNC Aiming To Reconnect With Working-Class Americans With New 'Hamilton'-Inspired Lena Dunham Web Series"

"'We are confident that with the help of Josh Gad, Debra Messing, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and the creative team behind The Mindy Project, we can bring Americans who feel like they have been left behind by globalization back to the Democratic Party. Viewers will also have the chance to win a trip to be in the audience at a live TED Talk taping if they share the series on Instagram, which we believe will draw considerable interest across the nation's heartland.'"

From The Onion.

"Study the Strengths of the Modern Republican Party"

"But the Democrats fumbled their advantage almost immediately. Rather than use their resources to cultivate local candidates and ideologically aligned intermediating organizations, the party chose to blast Obama supporters with emails and phone calls about the president's escalating war with Congress. Obama’s supporters checked out. The failure became crystal-clear in off-year elections, when Democrats struggled to generate support for down-ballot candidates. The party's inability in 2010 to elect Martha Coakley in Massachusetts, of all places, to replace the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, of all liberals, was a powerful lesson in the necessity of building an ecosystem of voters and organizations independent of rising star candidates."

Brent Cebul at The New Republic writes that "progressives must build up a range of intermediating organizations that can remake the Democratic Party from top to bottom and between presidential elections."

And Molly Ball at The Atlantic looks at various lessons for Democrats.

"The Most Deplorable of Them All"?

"The failure to engage the white working class has been described as a grave tactical error, and that may well be true, given the slim margin of victory in swing states. But the media's obsessive focus on this voting bloc would leave you to believe that Trump’s voters largely live in areas hit by the decline in manufacturing, are suffering from economic anxiety, and turned out last Tuesday to voice their disdain for smug urban elitists. But this narrative paints a misleading picture of the typical Trump voter, and by doing so, lets off the hook an entire class of voters who are at least as responsible for Trump's victory:"

Eric Sasson at The New Republic argues that college-educated whites, not working-class whites, were the key group of Trump voters.

And Nell Irvin Painter in The New York Times explores the problem of contemporary white identity.

"Progressive Outlier in a Trumpified United States"

"Californians voted for Hillary Clinton at a rate (61.5%) higher than any other state's, save Hawaii. They voted to extend progressive tax rates, restrict ammunition sales, legalize weed and ban plastic bags. They appear to have given the Democrats a two-thirds supermajority in the state Assembly and perhaps, pending the final vote count in one district, a supermajority in the state Senate. Even Orange County, once the seedbed of Goldwaterism, voted Democratic in the presidential race--for the first time since Franklin Roosevelt’s landslide victory in 1936."

Harold Meyerson in the Los Angeles Times looks at California in the age of Trump.

And Priya Krishnakumar, Jon Schleuss, and Joe Fox report the growing support for Democrats behind the Orange Curtain.