by Brooks Riley

by Joseph Shieber

Yeats composed his poem, “Among School Children”, after visiting St. Otteran’s School in Waterford in February, 1926, when Yeats was in his early 60s. It is probably best known for the couplet that concludes it: “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,/ How can we know the dancer from the dance?” (Here is Helen Vendler leading a class on the poem at the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, Harvard University, in 2007.)

Read in its entirety, one of the major themes of its eight stanzas is the divergence between image and reality, and how humans suffer from attempting to privilege ideas over reality. In a note he wrote for himself in March, 1926,  while composing the poem, Yeats describes the theme of the poem this way: “School children, and the thought that life will waste them, perhaps that no possible life can fulfill their own dreams or even their teacher’s hope.” 

Despite the suggestion of Yeats’s own note, the poem doesn’t really deal with the dashed hopes of the students themselves. Instead, Yeats’s focus in the poem is on the illusions of the childrens’ mothers — and of the nuns who are their teachers. Read more »

A solitary field scabious wildflower in an alpine meadow. Photo taken in early June in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

by Alexander C. Kafka

A shy high-school student asks a girl out. Desperate for some wheels, he buys a sorry ’65 Chrysler sedan and, with it, a heap of trouble. 

That’s not a bad premise for a noir action comedy, but the new release First Date squanders the concept from script through edit in a preposterous, humorless, bloody, and nihilistic mess of a movie.

For their feature debut, the writer-director duo Manual Crosby and Darren Knapp were clearly trying to concoct a spicy blend of Quentin Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, and Guy Ritchie. But First Date has no originality, wit, or directorial flair, only derivative burnt scrapings of violence and meanness. Despite one half-hearted, swiftly corroded moment of civility, the screenplay is three-quarters F-bombs, one-quarter cynical shootings and beatings. 

The production has an undeniable energy and the unfertilized seeds of its crowded characterizations might have been more ambitiously nurtured. The dynamic between the passive hero Mike (Tyson Brown) and Kelsey (Shelby Duclos), the kickboxing dynamo he desires, is an intriguing gender inversion of the traditional. A misfit crew of baddies also discuss Steinbeck as a book group. And there’s a droll coffee-table meme. 

But such promising touches wither under the screenwriters’ sadistic hand, as does the unlikely introduction of an older couple with distinct memories of the junker car. Mike’s passivity, rather than a challenge to overcome, becomes worrisomely defining and dramatically flat. The criminal gang’s constant foul-mouthed blathering, within minutes, becomes merely grating. Michael’s parents are oblivious, Kelsey’s are crass and unfeeling, and a couple sports-car-obsessed neighborhood jocks are insipid teen-farce throwbacks with nothing to say. Only Nicole Berry, as a poker-faced sheriff’s deputy, has any real hint of quirky depth.

Direction is halting toward the beginning but finds its momentum by a tense standoff scene, and sedate Hawaiian-guitar riffs give the score an unexpected, somewhat demented vibe. But ultimately, First Date is just bleak. As social commentary, it’s numb, and as entertainment, it’s numbing. 

by Michael Liss

Take mankind as they are, and what are they governed by? Their passions. There may be in every government a few choice spirits, who may act from more worthy motives. One great error is that we suppose mankind more honest than they are. Our prevailing passions are ambition and interest…

–Alexander Hamilton, 1787.

March 4, 1800. John Adams, Second President of the United States (and first President to be defeated for reelection) was leaving Washington on the 4:00 a.m. stagecoach to Baltimore, the first stop on his way back home to his beloved home and his wife Abigail. He would not be in attendance when, later that day, his successor (and former Vice President), Thomas Jefferson, would take the Oath of Office and deliver his Inaugural Address.

It was considered by his contemporaries (and most of us would agree) a sour note to end a Presidency. As Washington had voluntarily given up the office when he could have been President-for-Life, a peaceful transition of power was a demonstration of continuity and the stability of a young nation’s experiment in democracy. Adams had lost, fairly so under the rules of the day, and many felt he needed to express public acceptance, particularly at a time when the verdict was not merely a change of person, but also of political philosophy.

There are many explanations for Adams’ behavior, one of which is that Jefferson might have made it known that Adams would not be welcome, but the one that fits best is that, in the absence of a real tradition, Adams was following his heart. He’d had enough of Philadelphia and the new swamp that was Washington, of politics and political infighting, of being judged too harshly for his failures and praised too little for his accomplishments. Like every President since who has lost, the sense of rejection was unavoidable. In Adams’ case, more so because Jefferson and he had once been close, and because some in Adams’ old party, the Federalists, had pointedly withheld support—Alexander Hamilton foremost amongst them, but even some of his old friends. It was time for him to leave. Read more »

by Usha Alexander

[This is the tenth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. All the articles in this series can be read here.]

On February 18, 2021, NASA landed Perseverance rover on the surface of Mars. Perseverance is the latest of some twenty probes that NASA has sent to bring back detailed information about our neighboring planet, beginning with the Mariner spacecraft fly-by in 1965, which took the first closeup photograph. Though blurry by today’s standards, those grainy images helped ignite widespread wonder and fantasy about space exploration, not long before Star Trek also debuted on television. By the 1970s, science-fiction storytelling was moving from the margins of pop-culture into the mainstream in film and television—and so followed generations of kids, like myself, who grew up expecting off-world adventurism and alien encounters almost as much as we anticipated the invention of video-phones and pocket computers and household robots, as our conceptual bounds for the human story were pushed ever farther outward.

And so much of our expectation has come true. Smartphones and Zoom calls and Roombas are just the most mundane examples of how our techno-fantasized future has manifested in daily life. There’s promise of even more to come, as cultural forces continuously work to realize not only our imagined technotopia of flying cars and jetpacks, but even to seek out those elusive alien encounters. Perseverance rover is, in fact, a robotic astrobiologist: its purpose on Mars is to seek out direct signs of alien life—microbial fossils, if not living microbes themselves. But even should the Martians disappoint us by their absence, information gathered by Perseverance is still intended to help us make that next “giant leap for mankind”: human colonization of Mars. What was until quite recently still generally regarded an outlandish notion seems now widely accepted as the obvious next chapter in our human Manifest Destiny. Indeed, the more we know about the unsuitability of that cold, airless, radiation-beleaguered rock, the more we seem inspired to conquer it. Read more »

Delita Martin. Rain Falls From The Lemon Tree. 2020

Acrylic, Charcoal, Decorative Papers, Hand Stitching

More here and here.

by Rafaël Newman

It’s been 40 years this past month since the election of François Mitterrand as President of France. Today, June 21, is the day chosen by his first Minister of Culture for the Fête de la Musique: what has come to be known as “World Music Day” in the English-speaking countries that have since, along with scores of others, enthusiastically adopted the annual festival.

Mitterrand was the first Socialist in the history of the Fifth Republic to attain the office of president, and his term, historic as well for its unprecedented (and still unrivalled) duration, was characterized among other things by grand gestures of support for culture, both classical and popular, focused not only on Paris but increasingly on the cities and towns of the traditionally underserved French provinces. Following a nation-wide study of amateur musicianship commissioned by Culture Minister Jack Lang, which found that one out of two young people in France play a musical instrument, Mitterrand’s government in 1982 initiated the annual Fête de la Musique, to be held on the day of the summer solstice, and to feature multiple, simultaneous public performances by musicians, both amateur and professional, playing for crowds of varying dimensions, from busker’s circle to stadium-sized audience.

Although Mitterrand’s cultural policy was in some respects a continuation of his predecessor’s efforts at modernization and opening, Giscard’s patrician air had lent his presidency the cast of a bygone era, and it was left to Mitterrand, the former Vichy functionary and perennial also-ran, to reap the benefits of a sea change in French public affairs, symbolized in part by the Fête, an annual celebration of a vital, and vitally homespun, national creativity. The Fête was thus effectively part of an image campaign: a rebranding, or, less cynically and more in keeping with the cultural theory of the era, a re-imagining of the French community, and a libidinous recommitment to its revolutionary pillars of liberté, égalité, and fraternité. Read more »

by Eric J. Weiner

White people go around, it seems to me, with a very carefully suppressed terror of Black people—a tremendous uneasiness. They don’t know what the Black face hides. They’re sure it’s hiding something. What it’s hiding is American history. What it’s hiding is what white people know they have done, and what they like doing. White people know very well one thing; it’s the only thing they have to know. They know this; everything else, they’ll say, is a lie. They know they would not like to be Black here. They know that, and they’re telling me lies. They’re telling me and my children nothing but lies. —James Baldwin, 1979

What and how the Nation teaches its children says a lot about the political principles for which it stands. Through a complex mechanics of curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, discourse, and discipline, public school systems have always operated as cultural and ideological state apparatuses. This means that they help to reproduce the dominant ideological and cultural logic of the nation-state of which they are an integral part. The mechanics of public education change as the ideological and cultural morphology of the state changes. Yet, schools are also sites of struggle over the Nation’s dominant ideological and cultural interests. As Henry Giroux has shown, there is always resistance at the curricular, pedagogical, and discursive levels to the reproductive energies of the state. Teachers, students, parents, and other stake-holders are always, from one side of the ideological spectrum to the other, pushing back against the reproductive mechanics of the school. One articulation of resistance that has become a source of outrage and concern in our current times for many liberals and conservatives is the move by some states, districts and schools to use Critical Race Theory (CRT) to reframe what and how American history is taught.

CRT, explains Stephen Sawchuk, Associate Editor of Education Week, “is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that racism is a social construct, and that it is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.” Within the context of schooling, CRT researchers and scholars “look at how policies and practices in K-12 education contribute to persistent racial inequalities in education, and advocate for ways to change them.” Researchers working within the framework of CRT over the past 40 years have shown, qualitatively and quantitatively, how systemic racism in the areas of housing, finance, law, healthcare, and education has disenfranchised, marginalized, oppressed, and dehumanized people of color from the Nation’s inception and continue today. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Sarah Firisen

When we were young, most of us indulged in the speculation, “What do I want to be when I grow up?” Many of us said things like a firefighter, a doctor, a nurse, or a teacher. As children, we instinctively looked at the world around us and recognized the careers that seemed to have purpose and meaning, and that seemed to make the world a better place. I can’t imagine that many 5-years olds dreamed of being paper pushers or spending their days doing data entry. But we grow up. People around us have expectations for us; we have expectations for ourselves. We might have academic challenges, financial needs, family obligations. We see the world and the careers open to us as more diverse and as more challenging than the Fisher-Price Little People figures that characterize the world for a child.  And so, many of us lose that childhood idealism and just get a job, get on the career ladder, put our noses to the grindstone.

At the beginning of lockdown, my friend and former colleague Catherine and I started talking about the future of work. This conversation turned into a book that we’re currently writing, and a companion podcast called The Impromptu Game Plan. Our overall premise was, “for the last decade, the digitization of jobs, primarily through automation, has been an exponentially disruptive force.  And then COVID-19 hit.  COVID-19 has devastated entire industries that may never come back, or at least come back in their previous form. It further disrupted the world, the economy, the workforce in ways that we will be living with long beyond the end of the spread of the virus. The economic disruption caused by lockdown has accelerated the workforce displacement already underway due to automation and other technology disruptions.  We’re now living through a perfect storm of human-made and natural disruption that will cause as much reordering in society as the industrial revolution did, perhaps more so.” We thought there was an interesting germ of an idea there, but we had no idea how prescient we would turn out to be. Read more »

by Callum Watts

The desire to turn failure into a learning opportunity is often generous, and an important way of dealing with the trials and tribulations of life. I first became aware of it as a frequent trope in start-up culture, where, influenced by practices in software development where trying things out and failing is the quickest way to get to something of value, we are constantly subject to exhortations to “fail fast and fail forward”. Many workplaces now lionise (whether sincerely or not is another matter) the importance of learning through failure, and of creating environments that encourage this.

I’ve noticed the idea that failure should be re-conceptualised primarily as a source of learning appearing in many other contexts. Self-help encourages us to think of misfortunes as opportunities for personal development. The peculiar fact that people like Jordan Belfort have become popular figures in the self-help/motivational speaker circuit is striking, but even outside the realm of obvious moral failings, we are encouraged to think of our own tragedies as opportunities for redemption and growth. In the face of covid-19, people talk about what they have learnt from a year in lockdown, how it might have improved them as, and I expect there will be plenty more of this sort of thinking to come in the next couple of years. This though, can become a manic compulsion, which has a distorting effect on our ability to understand the reality of our existential condition. The desire to find in every grief an opportunity, forgets the inescapably tragic dimension of life, and in doing so misses something profound. Read more »

Self-portrait in a reflection in a passing train window at Ostbahnhof in Munich last evening.

by Bill Murray

If you’d like to start at the beginning, read Part One here.

On a piercing-bright, dripping-humid Irrawaddy delta morning in the 1990s, wild, screeching fowl wheeled over trucks full of boys in Chinese dragonheads banging on the side panels, driving in circles, celebrating the new year. The year of the pig had just begun.

The Yangon – Thalyin bridge was three two-and-a-half kilometer, Chinese-built lanes, one in each direction with a rail track separating them in the middle. Having just one lane on a bridge doesn’t keep anybody from passing, of course.

From China all the way around southeast Asia to here, the technique for driving is the same: If you get out around the car in front of you fast enough, you present the oncoming drivers with a fait accompli: I am tying up the entire highway in front of you, so you have no choice but to brake and let me merge in front of the guy beside me.

Naturally the oncoming traffic plots to do the same, and tranquility seldom reigns. Yet in the middle of it all, whole Burmese families plodded by on ox carts or old blue Ford or Dodge “buscars” with men and boys stuffed everywhere inside, standing hanging on the back and a dozen more piled on top. Invariably they all broke into wide smiles and waved madly as they wheezed past. Read more »

by Bill Benzon

Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon, Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age, The University of Chicago Press, 2021.

Permanent Crisis hits close to home. In the first place, I have been trained as a humanist, my degree is in English Literature. But I have long suspected that the sense humanists have of being under attack (by agencies in the culture at large) is at least as much a feature of humanities culture as it is a perception of the world in which they live. Thus I am biased in favor of the thesis Reitter and Wellmon are arguing.

Second, most of the book is an examination of debates that took place within the German academy in the nineteenth century. Why is that important to me? Because my alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, was explicitly founded on the German model in 1876, the first American university to be so founded. The words Bildung and Wissenschaft that march through this text like Sherman’s troops through Georgia also surrounded me at Hopkins.

But first I urge you to settle into a comfortable chair, pour yourself a drink, coffee, tea, scotch, a white wine spritzer, whatever. This is going to take awhile. As you know, it is customary in some quarters for a reviewer to use the occasion to expatiate on their own views while treating the book under review as but a pendant on that disquisition. I hope, Paul and Chad, that my abuse of this privilege is not so flagrant as is so often the case in, for example, The New York Review of Books but I found your argument so compelling that I had to toss in my 2 cents.

In the first section I lay out their argument as I understand it. Then, after a generous quotation from the book, I illustrate the argument with some observations by the late J. Hillis Miller, a contemporary humanist of the first rank. Miller’s observations set up the third section, where I stray from the text entirely, and discuss the ways in which schools could use the internet to revamp humanities instruction and public outreach in ways suitable to the contemporary world. I loose it entirely in the fourth section, where I explain how one ancient text, Plato’s The Crito, has been central to my own life, and then move closer to the Reiter’s and Wellmon’s text with a discussion of Goethe’s Faust, which also has personal significance. I conclude on a note of measured open-ended pessimism. Read more »