by Mindy Clegg

The Cold War ended somewhere between 1989 and 1991 or if you take the disintegration of Yugoslavia into account, maybe into the 2000s. It is now seen as the end of an era, a closed loop in history. It started with the Communist revolution in 1917 and ended with the end of one-party communist rule in Eastern Europe. The dissolution of the Soviet Union especially signaled the end of the debate about the two supposedly opposing economic systems. The argument goes that communism as practiced in the second world proved unable to keep up with the productive capacity and flexibility of the western capitalist systems, which (many believed) were underpinned by truly democratic norms.

But what if it’s not the struggle between capitalism and communism that was really at the heart of the twentieth century, but was really a more expansive struggle within the world system that developed since the sixteenth century? What if we’re still in the midst of it? I argue that there was a deeper conflict rooted in the debate over who gets to decide how our societies function. This struggle reaches back to the past and shapes our present. We can see this deeper struggle within the communist-capitalist conflict, as that narrative allowed the US and the Soviet Union to double-down on various bad-faith actions with regards to either their own populations or their actions abroad. The fight is between democracy and authoritarianism, the people and the powerful. Democracy clashed with the authoritarian reactionary forces since before the age of revolutions, making the Cold War merely a part of a larger dialectical discourse of the modern world. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Steve Szilagyi

After eight years writing publicity for a cable television network, I was let go. Just in time. I was hankering to get out of Manhattan, go back to my hometown, and marry a girl I knew in high school. Once I’d gotten all that out of the way, I found myself in need of a job. The rust belt city of my birth offered nothing as glamorous as the position I’d left. So I took a job at the local hospital – which happened to be a top-ranked academic medical center. They needed someone to write their employee newspaper. I thought I’d do that humble task for a few years, then retire and lead the literary life. You see, I’d written a novel, and I was pretty sure it was going to be a hit. And it was.

Somehow, the tumblers of fate fell into place and unlocked the doors to an agent, publisher, good reviews, and, finally, interest from Hollywood. In between writing for the hospital, I was doing interviews, book signings, TV, and radio. On my lunch hour, I stuffed coins into a hospital pay phone, calling Los Angeles and London, while producers bid for the right to film my book.

The movie starred an Academy Award-winning Best Actor, and I got a standing ovation at the North American premiere. The money was good, but it didn’t last forever. And I never missed a day at the hospital if I could help it. Week after week, I plugged away at the employee newspaper. My second novel didn’t come so easily, living as I was in a small house with a child.

That was okay. I was being drawn into the world of medicine. An essentially silly man, myself, I was in awe of these serious people. They didn’t know or didn’t care about the book or the movie. I worked hard to prove myself, and eventually became a kind of writer-at-large for the physician leadership. One year I was writing promo copy for Rodney Dangerfield; the next year, I was writing speeches for brain surgeons. Read more »

by Daniel Shotkin

In 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau prophetically declared that “we badly need someone to teach us the art of learning with difficulty.” Two hundred and fifty years later, Rousseau’s words seem clairvoyant in their relevancy to schooling in the United States. Education has come to the forefront of the array of issues emerging in the post-Covid era. The abandonment of the alphabet soup of standardized tests, student reliance on Chat GPT, and rampant grade inflation all point to a wider problem. And though some politicians see the Ten Commandments as the solution to classroom troubles, universal progress toward a real solution seems far away. Not that some don’t try.

Joe Feldman is not an activist; in fact, until recently, he was simply an attentive principal. Working for over twenty years in education, Feldman compiled stacks of hard data trying to answer one question: why was grading so inconsistent among his colleagues?

Two students enrolled in the same course put in a dramatically different amount of work yet shockingly got the same grade. In two classes of the same course, one got 70% A’s, while another received a much smaller 40%. Their grade essentially depended on the leniency (and frighteningly biases) of their teacher, and not on the contents of their course. This discovery correlates with the wider issue of grade inflation; from 2010 to 2022, the percentage of B and C students in all subjects declined, while the number of A students increased. Feldman relates this data to one idea—that student-teacher relationships have to be based on equity.

This idea is laid out in his latest book—Grading for Equity: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How It Can Transform Schools and Classrooms. Feldman believes that for many teachers, equity can be a concept that is far too easily brushed off because “teachers use grading practices that are traditional and end up perpetuating achievement and opportunity gaps.” Read more »

by Barry Goldman

Laws do not interpret themselves. No matter how carefully drafted, the language of a law can never be exhaustive and exclusive. Its boundaries will be imprecise, there will be vagueness and ambiguity, and there will always be a tension between the letter and the spirit. Statutory interpretation inevitably requires reasoned judgment.

Not everyone is happy with this state of affairs. For centuries there has been an effort to squeeze the judgment out of the legal process and reduce it to a rote exercise. In the 17^th century John Selden wrote:

Equity is a roguish thing. For Law we have a measure, know what to trust to; Equity is according to the conscience of him that is Chancellor, and as that is larger or narrower, so is Equity. ‘T is all one as if they should make the standard for the measure we call a “foot” a Chancellor’s foot; what an uncertain measure would this be! One Chancellor has a long foot, another a short foot, a third an indifferent foot. ‘T is the same thing in the Chancellor’s conscience.

Selden has a point. We want the law to be clear, and we want it to be uniformly applied. We don’t want judges (or labor arbitrators) to make rulings simply according to their personal preferences. Legislation is the province of the legislature, not the judiciary. All that is true. But when interpretation is required, what should be the judge’s guide? Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has reminded everyone of how dangerous a world we live in. As rich countries scramble to rebuild militaries dismantled by post-Cold war complacency, one of the other problems of national success has become apparent: young people have better things to do than play soldier.

My solution: conscript the old instead

Armies have a recruitment problem: they can’t get enough healthy young men to join. Young men have traditionally been the best recruits for fighting wars. They can carry lots of equipment over long distances without getting too tired to fight afterwards. They generally lack a visceral awareness of their own mortality, so they can be ordered to do insanely dangerous things. Indeed, many of them rather enjoy the excitement, intense camaraderie, and sense of shared purpose that accompanies war-fighting, and the survivors look back on it fondly when they have grown old and boring. As only partially formed adults, young men conveniently also lack the self-confidence and resources to question orders and hierarchies.

Most crucially, until very recently young men have been cheap, plentiful and easily replaced. The death of an 18 year old man was no great loss to a pre-industrial society, since it didn’t represent any great stock of human capital. (It did represent a stock of muscle power, but subsistence economies were generally constrained by the available land rather than the labour supply to work it.) Fertility rates were high so lost men could easily be replaced as long as plenty of fertile women remained. Altogether then, the cost of using up vast numbers of young men’s lives in warfare was quite affordable and hence commonplace. (Archaeological estimates for male mortality rates by violence in the hunter-gatherer societies that my students like to romanticise range from a terrifying 5% to a scarcely imaginable 35%, and sometimes even higher – see e.g. the research summarised by Azar Gat.)

Young men are still the ideal recruits for war-fighting. But their lives are far more valuable than they used to be, thanks to demographic and economic changes over the last 200 years (the drivers and consequences of the rise of capitalism). Read more »

Sanford Biggers. Transition, 2018.

Antique quilt, assorted textiles, acrylic, oil stick, sequins.

More here, here, and here.

by Derek Neal

Have you ever read a book that you thought you were going to write? A book that captures something you’ve experienced and wanted to put into words, only to realize that someone else has already done it? The Apartment by Greg Baxter is that book for me.

The Apartment was published in 2012 as Baxter’s debut novel and follows an unnamed American as he looks for an apartment over one day in a cold and snowy European city. Interspersed in his search are flashbacks to his home in America, his deployment in Iraq, and various encounters he’s had while living in Europe. He’s accompanied by Saskia, a local woman intent on helping him, as well as a few other characters they meet throughout the day. This is the extent of the plot.

I’ve thought about writing a story or a novel for years about an American in Europe. I wrote a short story based on an experience in Italy, submitted it to a competition, and promptly forgot about it. I’ve started multiple other stories based in Turin and Nice, France—both places I’ve lived—which are scattered throughout notebooks and Microsoft Word files. Sometimes these stories have plots; sometimes they don’t. What I’m more interested in is atmosphere and style. Baxter seems to have a similar approach. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Rebecca Baumgartner

The transformation of bringing a child into one’s family is conceptualized differently by different folks. It is rare, however, to encounter a parent who questions whether parenthood is any kind of transformation at all. This is the provocative stance taken by Anastasia Berg in her piece “What If Motherhood Isn’t Transformative at All?”

Berg is a philosophy professor at UC Irvine. She is also a mother who is very invested in not being changed by the experience of motherhood – or at least, in having us think that she is very invested in not being changed by the experience of motherhood. 

The article purports to be about “the pitfalls of treating motherhood as a transformative identity,” but it’s not actually about those pitfalls at all. What it’s actually about is Berg’s reluctance to be a certain type of mother, and her insecurity about whether this necessarily makes her a bad mother. She doesn’t say this explicitly, mind you; this is a piece that presents the facade of vulnerability, while building an elaborate bastion against vulnerability with every sentence. Despite coming from an ostensibly feminist starting point, Berg puts forth a viewpoint that I find just as disingenuous, confining, and unsatisfying as the blanket dictum that parenthood should consume one’s life. Read more »

Voices Choir concert in Bozen, South Tyrol.

by R. Passov

A few weeks back, I flew to Los Angeles for my 40th business school reunion. I went knowing it was going to be a hopeless affair. I was the odd man out forty years ago and remain so. I had stumbled into business school not out of some ambition to make a fortune on Wall Street, something I knew next to nothing about, but rather because I had stumbled onto a thin set of classes whereby one could get credit for just taking finals. I successfully employed that ruse across six years of undergraduate struggles to land a B.A. A significant number of those finals were taken in courses that constituted the first year of my MBA program. I completed my undergraduate studies on a Friday and started business school the following Monday.

I had no business being in business school. I lacked a rudimentary understanding of the business world. My only two significant sources of work experience were selling drugs and working in liquor stores.

I attacked business like a polished rube. I hit the books, blazing through my classes as though on an academic quest to Mt Olympus. While I went the extra mile solving differential equations to map product penetration rates, many of my classmates were at beer busts or “networking forever down Columbus Avenue.” 

…I’ve seen them in commercials sailin’ boats and plain’ ball, Pourin’ beer for one another cryin’, “Why not have it all?” Now I saw the ghostly progress as the wind around me blew, Till I felt the urge to purchase a BMW

All the salad bars were empty, all the Quiche Lorraine was gone. I heard the yuppies crying as they vanished in the dawn. Calling brand names to each other, as they faded from my view. They’ll be networking forever down Columbus Avenue

—”Yuppies in the Sky”, Peter, Paul and Mary

So, why did I go to that reunion? I went because it’s rare to have the opportunity to follow the routes of so many lives across forty years. I also went because my cohorts and I swum in the currents of the Reagan revolution. We left B-school at the zenith of Regan’s influence. When the ‘Chicago Boys’, those now well-known, hard-charging, un-forgiving right-of-center academics were making much of the western world into a capitalistic democracy, where the ‘free market’ knows best. Read more »

Art

Here is this tree before me
whose skin is as fissured and split
as the landscape of the Rockies as if
a network of rivers had, for centuries,
by force of friction, sculpted canyons
into its surface; bark beaten by
torrents of rain, dried by torch of sun,
torn by whip of wind, but
remaining steadfast as Everest
despite every onslaught, for
well beyond what will be its
natural life, as it is
…. framed in this canvas,
…. or in the length of these lines,
…. or in the music of the spheres,
…. or in the dance of gypsies,
all meant to share with others
the strength and miracle
of its character.

Jim Culleny, 6/14/24

by Rafaël Newman

It was my birthday last month, a “round” one, as anniversaries ending in zero are known in Switzerland; and in gratitude for having made it to a veritably Sumerian age, as well as for the good health and happiness I am currently enjoying, I threw a large party for family and friends. Then, not quite one week later, I flew off to Albania, a land I have come to associate with the sensation and enactment of gratitude.

Albanians in official capacity are fond of giving each other elaborately worded certificates of gratitude, presented in velveteen dossiers at formal ceremonies. I know this because I have attended several of these ceremonies. I have even received such a certificate myself—for, although not a native of Shqipëria, I have now twice been invited to participate in Albanian cultural affairs.

The first occasion, in 2019, was a literary festival in Pejë, in northwest Kosovo, where I joined a host of poets from across the Balkan region and beyond to read poetry in memory of Azem Shkreli (1938-1997), a local man of letters. During the closing ceremony, surrounded on the stage of Pejë’s municipal theater by the many poets in attendance and congratulated by various Kosovar dignitaries, I was handed my certificate by the woman who had invited me to the festival, my friend Entela Kasi, president of the Albanian PEN Centre. Read more »

by Claire Chambers

Introduction

Hari Kunzru has recently completed the third novel in his three colours trilogy about race, class, and the arts. White Tears concerns music and was published in 2017. Red Pill deals with literature and came out in 2020. And Blue Ruin zeroes in on fine art, having just been released last month, in May 2024. All of the novels examine racism and evoke various upheavals in the present moment. The titles of this tripartite sequence of novels figure forth the American or British flag, signifying the fractured state of these nations. Paul Gilroy rightly claimed in the title of his 1987 book that ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’, and Kunzru’s storyworld also highlights the strife amid the stars and stripes.

In this essay, I am interested in how a sensory studies perspective can enrich discussions of Kunzru’s trilogy. I discuss sound (and, to a lesser extent, touch or its absence) and a need to listen to other voices. The key issue here is whether, and to what extent, the tolerant should be tolerant of the intolerant. In White Tears, Red Pill, and Blue Ruin, Kunzru makes a conscious effort to listen to the repugnant politics of white supremacists, alt-right provocateurs, and QAnon or ‘plandemic’ conspiracy theorists. Trying to understand their views without either endorsing or criticizing them (while subtly forming judgements), Kunzru trains his ear on loathsome conversations and does some radical listening. Read more »