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G.D. pointed out the latest Gladwell article to me, and now that I’ve read it, I’m at a loss for words: rarely in the history of long-form journalism has the pitch been more obvious or the product more strained. Gladwell decided to write an article on violence in the National Football Leauge, went to his editor with his Vick-topical article and was told to run with it. The problem, of course, is that the entire article boils down to this question:
Is [football] dogfighting or is it stock-car racing?
And that question, I think we can agree, makes little sense for the simple reason that its analogy isn’t analogous. I know that blunt counterintuitive statements are a hallmark of literary journalism, but they need to be founded on something more substantial than this:
[I]s the kind of [tau deposit-induced dementia] being uncovered by McKee and Omalu [in former NFL players] incidental to the game of football or inherent in it? Part of what makes dogfighting so repulsive is the understanding that violence and injury cannot be removed from the sport. It’s a feature of the sport that dogs almost always get hurt. Something like stock-car racing, by contrast, is dangerous, but not unavoidably so.
The relevant analogy is right there—preventable injuries in Nascar versus the NFL—but had Gladwell went with that, he would have to ditch the dogfighting angle.* The problem, then, is that the once venerable New Yorker would rather be clever and topical than deeply informative. Consider, for example, the career of the go-to literary journalist for me and Ari [thanks ben and Rick, my shame will only endure until Homer stops nodding], John McPhee. His first book was about A Sense of Where You Are, was about the professional basketball player, long-tenured Senator and former Presidential candidate Bill Bradley, but was written before Bradley graduated from Princeton. McPhee did a superlative job outlining what would make Bradley successful, but he didn’t write about him because the New Yorker wanted an article about the Senatorial or Presidential candidate.
Similarly, after Katrina the magazine saw fit to print McPhee’s brilliant (and to my students, hilariously unpronounceable) essay “Atchafalaya,” which was first published in in 1987, long before most people outside of Louisiana cared about the state of the levees. My point, as you probably guessed, is that the odds of the New Yorker dipping into their archives and pulling out a Gladwell essay on the strength of its reporting or the depth of its intelligence decrease with every superficially clever, patently topical article they allow him to write and consent to publish. This isn’t to say that Gladwell is incapable of strong reportage or intellectual depth—only that that people can’t seem to convince him to slow down and write something with heft enough to be as relevant twenty years down the line as it is this week.
*I have nothing against clever analogies when they actually, you know, work. My friend Barry Siegel combined a thrilling narrative of a crashing B29 and a legal case that led to . . . something else both topical and relevant which I won’t spoil. (If you want spoilers, consult Ira Glass.)
On this day in 1986, President Ronald Reagan considered the abolition of nuclear weapons from the world, but then changed his mind.
The occasion was a summit between Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland. During the summit, Reagan briefly embraced Gorbachev’s proposal to abolish nuclear weapons. Gorbachev’s price? A promise by the U.S. to confine the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) to the laboratory.
The president’s neocon aides were horrified. Richard Perle, who regarded the notion of nuclear abolition as “ludicrous” and “delusional,” almost single-handedly torpedoed the Reykjavik deal. Perle didn’t think SDI would work, but he decided to use it as a poison pill to destroy Gorbachev’s initiative. In Arsenals of Folly, Richard Rhodes describes the remarkable conference that Reagan and his aides held in a bathroom, which was the only room available, with the president perched on the toilet and ten advisers crowded around, as Perle and others convinced Reagan that he could not give up SDI. Reagan proved even more attached to the myth of a mission missile shield than to his vision of a nuclear-free world, and he walked away from the deal, to the relief of his aides.
My favorite two-sentence analysis of Reykjavik is in Reagan’s America, by Garry Wills:
Sophisticated workers for the president had to search their souls. They resembled a crew of absentminded mini-Frankensteins who had fiddled at separate parts of a monster for benevolent but widely varying purposes, only to see him break the clasps and rear himself up off the table in a weird compulsion to do some monstrous Good Thing that none of them had ever believed possible.
The mini-Frankensteins brought the monster back under control that day. Soon, though, after the Iran-contra scandal discredited the hawks, more moderate officials began to reclaim control and to urge Reagan to agree to steep cuts in the nuclear arsenal. The result was the INF treaty, a safer world, and that famous stroll in Red Square, with Reagan arm-in-arm with the evil emperor.
I’ve hesitated to post on this for a couple of days now, largely because I am in agreement with the conclusion: men, don’t hit on strange women in public, it’s obnoxious as hell. But I find the reasoning to be pernicious, and since I’ve been thinking about it for three days…
The piece follows on the heels of this boneheaded xkcd comic, in which hero Stick Man decides not to talk to a strange woman on the train because he doesn’t want to come off as creepy, and it turns out she was trying to attract him by pulling out her netbook! True love lost! The takeaway, I imagine, is that nice guys lose, because they no longer read the universal symbol of desire that is the eeePC.
So, the piece. It’s called Schrödinger’s Rapist. Nice men should not approach women on trains because women think like this:
So when you, a stranger, approach me, I have to ask myself: Will this man rape me?
Do you think I’m overreacting? One in every six American women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime. I bet you don’t think you know any rapists, but consider the sheer number of rapes that must occur. These rapes are not all committed by Phillip Garrido, Brian David Mitchell, or other members of the Brotherhood of Scary Hair and Homemade Religion. While you may assume that none of the men you know are rapists, I can assure you that at least one is. Consider: if every rapist commits an average of ten rapes (a horrifying number, isn’t it?) then the concentration of rapists in the population is still a little over one in sixty. That means four in my graduating class in high school. One among my coworkers. One in the subway car at rush hour. Eleven who work out at my gym. How do I know that you, the nice guy who wants nothing more than companionship and True Love, are not this rapist?
I don’t.
This is presented as a rational calculation, so I think I can say that it’s going to be completely irrelevant to point out that I don’t actually worry about rapists on public transit or when I walk home late at night. (Statistically, living near a campus, I probably reduce my risk of rape by walking away at night, and the thing I fear is getting mugged. More on this in a bit.) If the number’s one out of sixty guys who are rapists, I should be worried. I’d be irrational not to. Right?
Let’s take the number as given, and play with it.
On this day in 1933, about 350 farm workers gathered in the small central California town of Pixley to listen to Pat Chambers, a 33-year-old Irish-American Communist union organizer. Chambers’s union, the Cannery and Agricultural Workers International Union, was coordinating the largest farmworker strike in U.S. history up to that point: a walkout by 20,000 mostly Mexican cotton pickers up and down the Central Valley to protest wages as low as ten cents an hour.
The young organizer, who was still recovering from a broken jaw he suffered from a vigilante attack in a recent strike, stood on a truck bed, urging the workers to remain non-violent, but to protect themselves if they were attacked. As Chambers spoke, a caravan of cars and trucks filled with forty growers roared into town and pulled up behind them. The men spilled out of the cars, brandishing pistols, rifles, and shotguns. Chambers told the men, women, and children to move into the union headquarters across the street.
As the workers and their families rushed to the safety of the building, the growers pursued them. When one grower fired his weapon into the air, a striker angrily approached him and shoved his rifle barrel to the ground. Another grower began beating the striker, and then shot him dead. The vigilantes emptied their weapons into the fleeing crowd, killing two workers and wounding eight. Mobs killed another striker in the town of Arvin that same day.
The violence that day was not unusual for the California fields. Infuriated by the increasing militancy of workers during the Great Depression, California growers and their allies responded with mob violence and official repression. Up and down the state, vigilantes beat pickets with axe handles and clubs, raked them with fire hoses, and smothered them with tear gas. Police arrested strikers for vagrancy or loitering, federal officials cut off their relief payments, and landlords evicted their families. Carey McWilliams used the term “farm fascism” to describe the response of corporate growers to the unionization of their workers. In this dangerous atmosphere, only the Communists were willing to organize California’s field workers. As one AFL organizer said, “only fanatics are willing to live in shacks or tents and get their heads broken in the interests of migratory laborers.”
Although federal mediators forced the cotton growers to raise wages, there was still no justice on California’s factory farms. After a local jury quickly acquitted the men charged with the Pixley killings, California officials then proceeded to decapitate the union, charging Chambers and 16 other union leaders with violating the state’s criminal syndicalism law. Chambers went to San Quentin for his sins, but an appeals court set him free in 1937. California farm workers were not so lucky: they would have to labor under miserable conditions until the 1960s, when Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers helped them win some protections and the right to unionize.
There’s something strange about the popular area of specialization this year:
the hell?
Really, I’m enjoying this for all the wrong reasons:
In a stunning surprise, the Nobel Committee announced in Oslo that it has awarded the annual prize to the president “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” The award cited in particular Mr. Obama’s effort to reduce the world’s nuclear arsenal.
Heh, heh, heh.
The photographer has passed, aged 92. I’m suspicious of photography that strays even perceptibly toward the fashion end of the spectrum, but Penn (unlike, say, Avedon) somehow slips in past my Puritanical defenses. Elegant, inventive, technically proficient, various, and whimsical or eccentric enough not to be glib. Read the rest of this entry »
Via Leiter, an article on why philosophy lags behind the other humanities’ disciplines in gender parity. Overall, the discipline is about 75% male, and so it’s quite possible to be the only woman in one’s cohort (or one’s program) or department. This gives philosophy a reputation as a bit of a boys’ club, and it’s not one that’s entirely undeserved. Let me riff.
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If future civilizations needed to reverse-engineer my Pollocky whiteboard splatter to learn something about the state of historical knowledge in 2009, I honestly can’t imagine what sense they’d make of it all.
That wheel-like thing there in the second picture? That’s the US banking system in 1929. The thing is, it really looked like that! But someone, someday, will probably see that as a really terrible visual metaphor for . . . something or other. On the other hand, I’m particularly proud of the stick figure buying $100 worth of stock on margin. I think I did a nice job of capturing the “I’m Really Getting Screwed Here, But I don’t Yet Know It” look.
I like Mary Beard’s TLS blog. But this time I fear she has Gone Too Far. Or, perhaps more likely, she’s pulling our collective leg — though I don’t remember her pulling it in quite this manner before. Even out here at the veriest Edge, the cityscape is clotted with victors’ memories of the War of Eastern Aggression. Just yesterday I was out picknicking with fellow parents of future yuppies at the Black Point Battery; and of course the map is full of streets named for Vicksburg, Grant, Lincoln and the Union. (Not to speak of the Confederate general from Big Sur.)
Need we quote Faulkner again?
Image by Flickr user maduarte used under a Creative Commons license.
It’s the time of the semester where nervous students are writing their first philosophy paper, and among my advice to them is the maxim to avoid the temptation to start an essay with any variation on the phrase “Since the dawn of time…” unless they’re actually talking about the dawn of time, which they won’t be, and I know, since I wrote the paper topics. Why? It’s a lazy habit, a turn of phrase meant to do nothing more than get the writerly wheels turning.
But it also makes your argument weaker, as this essay shows:
Yet if reason were to be readmitted to the debate, we might find something in the history of military honor to justify the principle now enshrined in the law decreeing that “homosexuality is incompatible with military service.” We know that soldiering–I mean not training or support or peacekeeping or any of the myriad other things soldiers do, but facing enemy bullets–is inextricably bound up with ideas of masculinity. We also know that most heterosexual males’ ideas of masculinity are inextricably bound up with what we now call sexual orientation. In other words, “being a man” typically does mean for soldiers both being brave, stoic, etc.–and being heterosexual. Another way to put this is to say that honor, which is by the testimony of soldiers throughout the ages of the essence of military service, includes the honor of being known for heterosexuality, and that, for most heterosexual males, shame attends a reputation as much for homosexuality as for weakness or cowardice.
Come on, Plato, don’t let me down. Take it away, Phaedrus!
The beloved too, when he is found in any disgraceful situation, has the same feeling about his lover. And if there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their loves, they would be the very best governors of their own city, abstaining from all dishonour, and emulating one another in honour; and when fighting at each other’s side, although a mere handful, they would overcome the world. For what lover would not choose rather to be seen by all mankind than by his beloved, either when abandoning his post or throwing away his arms? He would be ready to die a thousand deaths rather than endure this. Or who would desert his beloved or fail him in the hour of danger? The veriest coward would become an inspired hero, equal to the bravest, at such a time; Love would inspire him. That courage which, as Homer says, the god breathes into the souls of some heroes, Love of his own nature infuses into the lover.
Now, Phaedrus is not the brightest crayon in the box, as he is young and rather silly, but according to Plutarch, the idea that homosexual soldiers would be a braver, tightly bound fighting unit was taken seriously by people who read Plato. The Sacred Band of Thebes was composed of 150 erastes-eramenos couples, and they were fierce enough to beat a Spartan force three times its size at Tegyra, and again at Leuctra, securing Theban independence from Sparta. (It bears pointing out that the Spartans were probably not heterosexual enough for the contemporary American conservative either, but it’s cruel to spoil their enjoyment of 300.)
The Sacred Band was annihilated by the phalanxes of Philip II of Macedon, but then again, so was everyone else, eventually. The young Alexander broke through their lines; until that point, the Band had been thought to be invincible.
Let’s be clear that the worst thing about an essay that argues that gays could be good American soldiers except for the problem of them being gay is not that it gets the history wrong. (Via Sullivan, who makes the more appropriate response.) But the assumption that early 21st century American conservative mores have been on the triumphant, manly, very very straight, winning side throughout all of human history since the dawn of man? Not true.
Saving the cheerleader is neither necessary nor sufficient for saving the world.
(Yes, I know I’m three years behind on television, but it needs to be said.)
Duke Magazine does a solid article on the search of one fresh Ph.D for a tenure-track job:
But on this warm winter day in Durham, Kennington is firmly back in the present. Fewer than four months away from earning her Ph.D., she is thinking about the challenge every doctoral candidate is pondering right now: how to land a tenure-track teaching post during one of the worst academic job markets in memory.
It would have been interesting to see the article also look at someone who (spoiler alert!) did not find a tenure-track job, and a lovely post-doc.
Hat-tip to Ralph Luker
I’ve finally read the talk I have to give in a few hours, and it holds up pretty well. It’s on some of the applied ethics stuff I was on about last summer: physician obligations and disagreement, breast cancer treatments, and so on. It will go well, or it will not. The beach will welcome me regardless.
Conference liveblogging: at a talk by a guy who struggled to get a TT job. The talk is so good. What a reminder of the arbitrariness of the market…also, follow-up questions? Of diminishing interest. Make ur point the first time!…man, GPS is a cruel mistress. I thought I’d go for a local place for lunch, but the device got me stuck in a desolate RV park. Now I’m headed to a mediocre sandwich across from a Hooter’s, missing a talk I wanted to see…ah, back at the hotel. What a nice day! I could duck out early but that’s my session. I expect a small audience….woohoo, virtue epistemology! Fun. Could I get another sports meaphor? Yes I can! ….holy crap. 10% of my audience is people I haven’t gotten loaded with. I’m wondering if we should give the talk in the ocean….my half of the talk went ok; now on to the boobs….q+a time!
The last light of summer fades into fall. The air has become crisp and stern, as if it’s giving you a final warning lecture before it really takes you to task in December. The leaves will soon burst into yellows and oranges, and plaid-trousered alumni wander the campus and point out where things aren’t.
(At least on campuses with proper climates. Mutatis mutandis for pleasant weather.)
But it’s also the time of year where the first assignments of the semester come due, and the students, busy with papers and tests, come dead-eyed into class. If your class is the one giving the exam or requiring the paper, all their attention is focused on that, not on lecture or discussion. If your class isn’t the one currently assessing them, your class just dropped off the priority list.
What tricks do you have to keep the classroom engaging?
In the late 1940s Americans began afresh to confront—slowly, partially, and often reluctantly—the discrepancy between their ideals of equality and justice, and the reality of how they treated certain traditionally despised classes of people. There was, it seems not too grand to say, a broad, mild but insistent cultural pressure toward these confrontations, deriving its force from anti-racist propaganda of the war effort and from civil rights organizations as well as, perhaps, from the general experience of war, in which so many different kinds of Americans had been thrown into service with so many others. Sometimes these confrontations were ugly, but sometimes they were formidably thoughtful, as in the case of An American Dilemma or Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Out of this same culture, somewhere between Myrdal and Kinsey, appeared a small Partisan Review essay by Leslie Fiedler, “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey,” swiftly touring American literature in an effort to confront these same themes.
Or rather, this one theme, Fiedler said.
[T]he fact of homosexual passion contradicts a national myth of masculine love, just as our real relationship with the Negro contradicts a myth of that relationship; and those two myths with their betrayals are, as we shall see, one.
One? Yes, one. Just look at what were then regarded as the great works of American literature, all of them—Huckleberry Finn, the Leatherstocking tales, Moby Dick, Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway—overwhelmingly boys’ books, as Papa’s short-story collection frankly admitted.
“As boys’ books,” Fiedler wrote, “we should expect them shyly, guiltlessly as it were, to proffer a chaste male love as the ultimate emotional experience—and this is spectacularly the case.”
At the focus of emotion, where we are accustomed to find in the world’s great novels some heterosexual passion, be it “platonic” love or adultery, seduction, rape, or long-drawn-out flirtation, we come instead on the fugitive slave and the no-account boy lying side by side on a raft borne by the endless river toward an impossible escape, or the pariah sailor waking in the tattooed arms of the brown harpooner on the verge of their impossible quest.
Fiedler believed “we are, though vaguely, aware” of the homoeroticism in these stories.1 But, he said, it appeared to have escaped Americans’ notice that not only were the great books of the canon about the chaste manly mutual love of men for men, which they could find by escaping to the great outdoors where women didn’t go, but about the chaste manly mutual love of a white man for—as Fiedler put it, in 1948-speak—“a colored.”
In the myth, one notes finally, it is typically in the role of outcast, ragged woodsman, or despised sailor (“Call me Ishmael!”), or unregenerate boy (Huck before the prospect of being “sivilized” cries out, “I been there before!”) that we turn to the love of a colored man….
Our dark-skinned beloved will take us in, we assure ourselves, when we have been cut off, or have cut ourselves off, from all others, without rancor or the insult of forgiveness. He will fold us in his arms saying, “Honey” or “Aikane”; he will comfort us, as if our offense against him were long ago remitted, were never truly real. And yet we cannot ever really forget our guilt; the stories that embody the myth dramatize as if compulsively the role of the colored man as the victim….
In each generation we play out the impossible mythos, and we live to see our children play it: the white boy and the black we can discover wrestling affectionately on any American sidewalk, along which they will walk in adulthood, eyes averted from each other, unwilling to touch even by accident. The dream recedes; the immaculate passion and the astonishing reconciliation become a memory, and less, a regret, at last the unrecognized motifs of a child’s book. “It’s too good to be true, Honey,” Jim says to Huck. “It’s too good to be true.”
Fiedler expanded on this essay in Love and Death in the American Novel, ascribing, I think it’s fair to say, Americans’ literary obsessions to a kind of cultural immaturity. But his insights might have more to do with that moment in the late 1940s when those books became the unarguably great American books, when they surpassed the palefaces Irving and Howells and James and Eliot and Wharton, enshrining as supremely normal a thinly disguised marginal America, ridden with guilt and driven by id, whose great book’s secret motto was “I do not baptize you in the name of the father, but in the name of the devil!”
1Vaguely? From Moby Dick: “Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say, –Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness. Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever!”
Since Ahistoricality asked, some comparisons on late c19 / early c20 levels and growth of per capita GDP.
That’s Germany (DE), United States (US), Britain (UK), Japan (JP), Brazil (BR). Data from Angus Maddison.
I’m on a train to the airport to go to a conference that’s more or less a grad school reunion. It’s also on a beach, and the weather forecast is positive. I’m giving a talk that I haven’t looked at since August– I hope it’s good! Wooohoo academic perks.
No raping or rapeblogging from me this weekend, but I might check in with some weekend hilarity if things get out of hand.
The Edge of the American West 
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