nobody sasses a girl in glasses

"The most comely of miniature mammals"

2012-01-29T20:34:00.003-05:00

Mice, per contra, except to a few hysterical women,
rank among the most comely of all the miniature mammals
who impinge on our lives

Once, when I was living in a very old dorm in college with two oblivious, unhygienic roommates and one ultra-hygienic one, a family of mice installed themselves in our room. Their arrival was the unhygienic roommates' fault, but the hygienic roommate's burden, and she was intent on destroying them. But I put in a plea on their behalf--they are fragile and needy mammals like us (true, in a way...), they are unobtrusive and primarily go about their business quietly at night (not strictly true; my roommate woke up one night from their scuttlings and threw stuffed animals at me until I was awake enough to be informed that WE HAVE MICE), and, as long as they keep to their side of the contract I had outlined (cute, nocturnal, nondestructive) for them, we could harmoniously cohabit with them. My hygienic roommate reluctantly agreed, and we struck up a temporary truce with the mice, agreeing to provide them with a warm domicile in our walls for the winter if they agreed to stay out of our hair.

You never have managed, as all successful parasites must, to
break the code of your host, wise up on what habits can travel.
Ah!, if only You had, with what patience we would have trained You
how to obtemper your greeds, recalling the way that our Nannies
molded our nursery moeurs...

Good Little Mice never gnaw through
woodwork or nibble at packages. Good Little Mice never scatter
droppings that have to be swept up. Good Little Mice get a tidbit,
Bad Little Mice die young. Then, adapting an adage of lovers,
Two Little Mice are a company, Three Little Mice are a rabble.

One day soon after, I discovered strange holes in my laundry hamper, and more holes in the laundry within. The mice, it seemed, had dined on my t-shirts and underwear. Well, let's just say the mice lost their lawyer by this act of war, and, with the cohabitation treaty voided, they soon saw their doom.

What occurred now confirmed that ancient political axiom:
When Words fail to persuade, then Physical Force gives the orders.
Knowing You trusted in us and would never believe an unusual
object belonging to Men could be there for a sinister purpose,
traps were baited and one by one you were fatally humbugged:
all fourteen of You perished...

We had felt no talent to murder:
it was against our pluck. Why, why then? For raisons d’état. As
householders we had behaved exactly as every State does,
when there is something It wants, and a minor one gets in the way.

I was, needless to say, very pleased to come across this poem today, which though clearly not intended to recall my nearly identical encounter with representatives of the mouse race, did. Raison d'etat, cute rodents, raison d'etat. The sovereign resignedly does what it must to protect its underwear.

Occupy Harvard is liberated

2012-01-20T21:34:00.002-05:00

The "weather-proof geodesic dome" blew away in the wind and, while the occupiers recessed to conduct an emergency meeting about whether they should try to affix the dome more firmly to the ground (no affixing without consensus!), the administration "seized" it. Weather-proofing fail, democracy fail. Satire win.

New semester, old foraging strategy

2012-01-19T15:23:00.003-05:00

This year (which is to say, this academic year, since my life revolves around the academic rather than Gregorian calendar), I have a cubicle in the grad student office in the department building. My cube, it is a great cube. True, other cubes have many books in them to demonstrate their inhabitants' substantial erudition or concern for the appearance thereof (Exhibit A), while my cube (Exhibit B) lacks most decorative embellishments, but at least allows one to LEARN TO READ LATIN, or so the title claims. But it's a comfortable cube, furnished with all the infrastructural necessities of grad school: reading lights, an outlet, and a chair.

Comparative cubicle study

Exhibit A: This are a serious cube.

Exhibit B: This are my cube.

During the semester, I live in this cube. (Not pictured: the office futon, for the sleeping part of living.) But where one lives, one must also eat, and it's best when lodging includes meals. Fortunately, in the subfields of political science that aren't my own, people evidently have very large budgets and are always putting on extremely fascinating scholarly events that I alas cannot attend (schedule constraints!) but whose catering I always seem to have time for.

So last semester, I developed a foraging strategy whereby every weekday I could obtain free lunch. This involved a spreadsheet with the days, times, and locations of all weekly poli sci events, culled from various advertisements and forwarded emails from fascinating groups like the Center for the Quantitative Analysis of Minor Latin American Electoral Trends, along with a two-hour delay figured in for the time that must elapse between primary eater (event attendees) food access and secondary eater (me) access. However, a logistical dilemma often arises as a result of primary eater enthusiasm--namely, all the plates and forks are gone by the time that secondary eaters arrive. So, I also stockpiled disposable flatwear and dishes in my cube for enhanced foraging productivity. (Those who overlooked this step are reduced to putting their pad thai in paper cups.) A friend also introduced me to the American Politics coffee room, where fresh coffee with fresh milk live for even non-Americanists to take, at least while their purveyors' office doors are closed.

So I thought I was pretty well-covered last semester for food. Dinner was of course a problem, but one that could often be solved by eating twice as much pad thai for lunch. Then, today, two days shy of the new semester, I discovered a place called the second floor refrigerator. Apparently, this is where catering leftovers are stored! (Typically, I compete with other department scavengers to ensure that there is nothing to store.) Maybe these foods are from secret events not yet registered in my spreadsheet? Or non-recurring events? In any case, they seem not to be left out for secondary eaters. But they cannot be kept from enterprising and committed scavengers! So, this morning, I had a delicious piece of fruit tart for breakfast, compliments of my new friend, second floor refrigerator.

I mentioned this strategy to one of my professors last semester, and he looked at me as if to suggest, "If you were more prudent, you would keep your gauche habits to yourself." One day, I hope, I too will look back on these times and think them unclassy. On the other hand, I can't imagine ever wanting to actually pay for lunch, so maybe I will just be the person slinking by the pad thai troughs more guiltily in the future.

Sign-waving, demonstrated

2012-01-10T23:56:00.004-05:00

From an overcrowded Romney rally in Manchester during which we got shunted into the "overflow room." And despite our suitably evident team spirit! Well, fortunately, the above is not the official endorsement of this blog (maybe).

Remember when this was a blog?

2012-01-08T17:10:00.001-05:00

Well, those were good times. Maybe they'll return someday? Who knows? In other news, the magazine I started in college has a really nice new website. One of my college teachers has a nice article. And I'll be in NH tomorrow waving signs in order to "learn about primaries" so I can TA with marginally greater competence for an American politics class next term.

9th Congressional District news: new boundaries, same crazies.

2011-12-28T14:01:00.001-05:00

Those of you familiar with my lingering hypothetical political ambitions will see why the new boundaries of the 9th District are so promising: all the areas added this year voted Republican in the 2010 House races. And what is the GOP doing with this promise? Running these people.

Remember the primary candidate from a few years ago whose entire platform consisted in opposing toll booths? He's evidently been reincarnated in this Atanus woman, who, in addition to claiming that market downturns are lies fabricated by "the Elite," is also unable to write in complete sentences. The other guy, after we put aside some minor grammatical errors, is a kind of acceptable fluffball, more interested in laying out his inarticulate political philosophy than any specific policies. "I believe in American Exceptionalism. This country was created with the idea of a specific destiny – that is to be an exceptional country based upon our unique American political system." Our destiny is to be exceptional based on our uniqueness. And, he would like to simplify the tax code somehow. Well, ok.

Why again am I not living in Skokie right now? The Joel Pollak strategy deserves a reprise effort under new conditions. Or at least, it deserves one more than the anti-tollbooth strategy does.

"You will remain there, incommunicado, until you are able to resume the exam."

2011-12-12T14:58:00.001-05:00

TAs are required to read a script containing exam rules to all students before administering a final exam. It's quite long, but the best part is,

If you become ill during the exam, immediately contact an instructor. Note that a student who is present for any part of an exam is never entitled to a make-up exam. If you are too ill to continue the exam in the exam room you will be sent to University Health Services and will be seen by a doctor. If you are admitted to the Infirmary, you will remain there, incommunicado, until you are able to resume the exam. If you are seen by a doctor but the doctor does not feel that you are ill enough to be admitted to the Infirmary, you must go immediately and directly to the Science Center, room 112, and you will compete your exam there.

It goes on with detailed instructions about how to respond to a fire alarm ("stay together but do not discuss the exam"), but I've personally never managed to get past the part about being held incommunicado--either as reader or hearer of this text--without dissolving into giggles. I wonder if anyone's ever made it to this "room 112" during finals week.

Finals week, redux to infinity

2011-12-10T16:41:00.001-05:00

What is about to be sent over my carrel wall to my neighbor in the facing carrel. Sorry peep, but it's gotta be said. Keep humming, et id [the airplane--no Latin for that, huh?] veniet tibi.

Occupy Aristotle

2011-11-27T12:42:00.000-05:00

Occupy Harvard set up camp in the Yard (with tents that "look like they belong to the 1 percent," as one of my students observed) earlier this month, provoking the Administration to lock all but four of the gates into the university's main quad, which is now only open to Harvard ID holders. Miss Self-Important has mixed feelings about this. Every morning, she must decide between getting coffee or getting to Latin on time b/c the walk to class has been extended by half a mile (Latin timeliness has suffered dramatically). In the initial confusion of the occupation, there was only one tiny gate open for both entrance and exit, and it would take 20 minutes of standing in line to be permitted to leave, making me and my students all late for my discussion section on causes of revolution in Aristotle's Politics. Eventually though, we were able to occupy the classroom in order to occupy Aristotle. On the other hand, the patent absurdity of the "occupation" by approximately seven people (at least judging by the repetition of the names quoted in the articles) has provided a steady stream of entertainment from the Crimson.
In response to complaints from the freshmen living in the Yard whose mobility is hampered by the protest, we learn that

“Student inconvenience is not on the level of global oppression,” said Sandra Y. L. Korn ’14, who is also a Crimson editorial editor. “I have little concern for students who have to walk 30 seconds more to get to CVS.”

So local oppression is ok as long as it's in the name of fighting global oppression. When inclement weather broke the iron wills of some protesters, the movementarians responded

that the Occupy Harvard movement does not require a large number of people for the tent city in the Yard to remain active. “We don’t need all of our tents to be 100 percent full all the time,” Whitham said. “We just need to make sure there are enough people to hold down the fort in the encampment, and I think we’ll be ok.”

Or maybe they don't even need to be 1 percent full 99 percent of the time? Why not just pitch 'em and leave? The university will treat a cluster of empty tempts just as diplomatically as it's treating a cluster of half-empty tents, and Drew Faust will issue press releases extolling free speech for tents if she has to. Harvard is very protest-savvy. This is no small issue--if you've ever done any college "activism," the scripts for this event will sound familiar to you.

College politics of the activisty, national headlining kind (as distinct from student government elections and all that small potatoes actual college politics) is an elaborate repeat performance of the mid-60s that has grown out of the synergy of kids' cultivated interest in "changing things"--whatever things happen to be at hand--and adults' interests in finding emotionally compelling stages on which to act out their own political agendas (children are very emotionally compelling, in case you've been living under a rock and haven't noticed). The kind of kids who want to' be political' and 'express their ideals' and all such things for which they've been lovingly patted on the head by adults show up to college (literally just show up, if you take the preponderance of freshmen in this to mean anything) and look around for some way to assert themselves against the gentle inertia of large but highly accommodating institutions--"the system."

It's a sign of how little youth culture has really moved from its creation (by, ahem, adults) in the mid-60s that the model for this kind of activity continues to be Berkeley and Kent State. Only now, alumni of the originals are standing by with professional public relations and media training (no worries, it gets more niche than this, and the Right has its avenues for it too--bipartisan gimmickry) for would-be activists who want only controlled bursts of police hostility and camera-ready shows of force that will stoke public anger without permitting the show to spiral out of control. No National Guard troops, plz. Everyone is instructed to stay professional, emphasize your openness to hearing "the other side," never let your anger or indignation show, stick to the script. The idea is to provoke the other side into letting their guard down and, say, pepper-spraying a bunch of immobile students. When that fails, you're instead stuck hosting a lot of windbaggy "forums" in which such empty platitudes are exchanged: “One of the great virtues of the campaign is that it scandalized the campus,” Novendstern said. “If anything, that was the resounding success of the movement.” Whoever drops the PR-talk and evinces emotion first loses. (Perhaps you wonder what the fight is over at this point. Perhaps the answer is nothing but a contest of wills and a bid for popular attention.)

The slickness of these things ("Visit our website for more information!" says Occupy Harvard) is met with the equal slickness of Harvard's response--we love free speech and our students, and only want to ensure their safety to sleep in tents in the Yard as long as they'd like, so we're going to lock the gates, pay the security guards OT, and wait it out. Sometimes, Drew Faust goes and visits with the camping kids, and I can only imagine that they pleasant nice small talk over hot chocolate with marshmallows. And why not? In the end, they both love Harvard for the same reason. It is a soft, accommodating conduit for their ambitions. Everything they do receives positive press coverage--the noble protesters (occasionally) sleeping in the yard and the humane university administration that defends their free speech rights--and their "experience" either coordinating or responding to this spectacle is something to highlight in future iterations of their resumes under leadership skills and teamwork. Organizing activisty campus performances is a nice if not requisite resume notch for future political jobs. (And don't I know it? Ah, college days.) It's such a tired, hollow show by now that there can't even be much indignation about it left to restrain.

So let's note the nice things--the clearing out of the tourist masses has permitted those who can get through the checkpoints the rare opportunity to enjoy the Yard's slide into autumn in peace and calm. One afternoon, a strong wind blew and I was the only person around to watch the rain of leaves--a nice moment. I am also no longer an inadvertent intruder in the photos of 14 Japanese tourists at a time when I walk up the steps of Widener (waiting until everyone is done photographing to make your entrance will take longer than renewing a driver's license at the DMV). In the spirit of this movement's aimless banality, I have now replaced almost all verbs of activity with the verb "occupy" in my speech and thought, so that I abandon the occupation of my bed in the mornings in order to occupy my bathroom, then the streets of Cambridge, then my Latin textbook, then my Latin class, and so on. I call sitting in my office "occupy cube!" and eating lunch "occupy sandwich!" (although it would perhaps be more semantically accurate for the sandwich to shout, "Occupy Miss Self-Important!" but perhaps it hasn't caught the spirit of the season yet).

Catching up

2011-11-13T01:12:00.001-05:00

I guess a lot of things happened in the past two months? Or maybe it just seemed that way to me from the vantage of my tiny cubicle in the windowless grad student office. If we hope to catch up, let us begin. In October, as I was teaching the books he first taught me, my favorite professor, known on this blog as "hum professor," died. The magazine I edited in college asked me to write something about him since he was the magazine's faculty advisor. Here is, more or less, what I sent them and what I now send you.

----

There aren't many people like Herman Sinaiko around at universities--people who spend their entire lives, more than half a century at the same institution. Sinaiko taught in the Humanities Core and in eccentric programs like Fundamentals and Big Problems and ISHUM, but he wasn't the Humanities Core or ISHUM or any of those things--he was the whole university. He had been so involved in its workings for so long that, as far as I could see when I studied with him, he contained the whole thing. I once took a reading course with him on the history of American education, for which I read people like Robert Hutchins and Wayne Booth, while he simply narrated the history of the College--the original curricular debates and the late '60s unrest and the later Core reform debates of the '90s. There also aren't many people who do what Sinaiko did—dedicate themselves to teaching undergraduates. He was also a great supporter of student organizations, among them, this magazine, for which he served as faculty advisor since its inception in 2006.

Sinaiko started his classes with Plato, and sometimes also with Homer. Greek Thought and Lit opened with the Iliad rather than the Apology, but Sinaiko's argument was no less Platonic. Consider the rage of Achilles, the class began. (And began, and began again. Sinaiko once explained his tendency to get so caught up in the openings of books that he rarely made it through the whole work in one quarter: “You’ll have to forgive me. I have a passion for beginnings.”) Achilles is angry that Agamemnon stole his concubine. What's the import of such a little slight? Just look at Zeus and Hera—he insults her and they go to bed together that very night. The immortal gods don't understand insults. They get irritated, and they cut down a few dozen men, and then they make love. But they don't understand rage, and what it means to have your own—your family, your honor, your life—threatened. Sinaiko told a story about someone breaking into his house one night while his children were sleeping, and how, thinking of his children, he understood what it really meant to "see red"—the closest thing to Achilles' rage he had experienced. The gods don't understand that you can't get these things back once they're gone. They have all this power, but no understanding—their lives are wanton and meaningless, and in this respect, hardly better than those of beasts. We understand, and we long for things--material things and other people, but also justice and beauty and truth--precisely because we know we will die.

The wrath of Achilles costs the Greek army the lives of hundreds of men. It nearly costs them the war. The Iliad is full of dozens of deaths, each described individually. Each death matters. Our deaths matter to us; they spur us to live consciously and make living well a matter of literally mortal importance. These were—loosely, of course—the lectures on the Iliad. Then he found a place for the Apology—he pounded on the table and yelled, "You will all die! And what kind of life will you live in light of that?" A week or two later, reading the scene in Book XXIII in which Sinaiko particularly loved in for its dramatic recognition of this demand—the one in which Achilles comes to Priam's tent to hand over Hector's body—I found myself unaccountably crying over it, to the consternation of the other patrons on the second floor of the library.

But to be reduced to tears by Priam's appalling tragedy in the university library is not, after all, a final recognition of one's mortality. It's a hint, a moment of poetic clarity that may move one to probe further, read more, work later, sacrifice small pleasures for more substantial goods.But to be reduced to tears by Priam's appalling tragedy in the university library is not, after all, a final recognition of one's mortality. It's a hint, a moment of poetic clarity that may move one to probe further, read more, work later, sacrifice small pleasures for more substantial goods. In Aristotle’s Ethics,which Sinaiko taught in the third quarter of Greek Thought and Lit, Priam’s fate clarifies why external goods can neither create nor destroy happiness. It demonstrates why the good life is worth striving after, why it’s still wretched to “choose the life of fatted cattle” who seek consolation in transient pleasures, even in the face of the enormous uncertainty and fragility of human life.

Valuing liberal education at Chicago meant valuing the Core, and the possibility of being told by other people who know something you don’t what is important—necessary, even—to learn. This kind of authority is rare and rarely accepted, perhaps for good reason, but perhaps not; some people might deserve such deference. Sinaiko was the first teacher I'd ever encountered who seemed to know more than the contents of a textbook. He took literature and philosophy seriously, he took his students seriously, and he remained unfazed by the demands for practical application and the accusations of irrelevance leveled at the humanities from outside the university. It may be objected that this is an education founded on prejudice, since none of us can actually know the value of a liberal education before we receive one, but all education—even one that claims to offer infinite choice but really relies on whatever ill-founded ideas have chanced into the mind of an 18-year-old—begins from prejudice. Starting with Plato is not, I think, the worst way of dealing with the difficulties of foundational prejudices.

Sinaiko’s death is a tremendous loss for the University, and particularly for the College, which has benefitted immeasurably from his erudition and dedication. The highest life in Aristotle’s Ethics, which Sinaiko taught in the third quarter of Greek Thought and Lit, is the contemplative life, and Sinaiko served as an exemplar of such a life—the first that I’d ever met--for thousands of college, graduate, and even high school students. Aristotle says of such meetings that, "It would seem that payment ought to be made to those who have shared in philosophy; for the value of their service is not measurable in money, and no honor paid them could be an equivalent, but no doubt all that can be expected is that…we should make such return to them as is in our power." Because teachers like Sinaiko are rare, their students are correspondingly numerous—Sinaiko’s reputation ensured that his Hum courses always required a pink-slip—and so, one hopes, will be the returns they make for his teaching.

"Like any language, Latin seeks to be understood"

2011-09-12T17:21:00.001-04:00

This is a line in my ($75!!!) Latin textbook. It's not clear why this is a thought worth writing, no less publishing, but nonetheless, there it is. One imagines the scene in which this line might be spoken, with a teenaged Latin embroiled in a heated dispute with his hypothetical parents, Indo and European.

Indo: Why are you always out causing trouble? Why do I keep hearing from other language families that you're stealing their usages? I was on the phone with Etruscan for hours yesterday, getting an earful about your disgraceful behavior!
Latin: I just want to try new things! Experience the world's possibilities! Dispense with definite articles!
European: Why can't you be more like your older brother, Greek, who stays close to home and minds his parents' rules? One day, you'll realize how important definite articles are and you'll be sorry you didn't listen to us!
Latin: Ugh, you're too old! You just don't understand!

And, for those of you keeping track at home, it seems that there is a certain logic to the usual course of studies whereby one learns Latin before Greek and not vice versa. The good news is that, if you happen to reverse this order, your serial Greek failures might someday be vindicated by the euphoria of coasting through introductory Latin. So far, at least.

Tomorrow: TAing for the first time. Pretty excited. Going to try to avoid making dramatic exhortations about "the virtue of a human being and citizen."

Serendipity

2011-08-31T11:12:00.000-04:00

The manager of the grad student coffee shop on campus lived in the dorm room across from me six years ago, where he annoyed me by bongo-drumming pop songs to impress girls.

But of course this means the grad student coffee shop is open, and therefore classes have begun.

The Department of Bad Ideas is now offering a course on its greatest hits

2011-08-28T01:22:00.000-04:00

The Crimson reports that there will be a new freshman seminar option this fall variously called "Big Ideas" and "Great Big Ideas" (a confusion which is actually not the paper's fault since the course site also uses both names). The course will consist of videos of professors lecturing about their field paired with the sparsest of readings (often of the professor's own work). The purpose of this course is largely unknown, since all the descriptions of it available consist entirely of educational buzzwords. According to the Crimson,

"One of the goals of Great Big Ideas," Hopkins said, is to expose new students to as many different areas of knowledge as possible, helping them connect relevant ideas from multiple disciplines and guiding them in their own decisions about future academic paths...This is a course for everybody...To do one thing well, you need to be able to connect the dots between disciplines, see the big picture, and understand how seemingly different concepts relate to each other. You need to have a diverse toolkit to confront challenges that are out there.”

"Expose" "Areas of knowledge" "Relevant ideas" "Multiple disciplines" "Academic paths" "Connect the dots" "Big picture" "Diverse toolkit" "Confront challenges"-- Are you wondering what the actual content of this course might be? If so, perhaps you will be enlightened by the description included on the syllabus [requires university login]:

This course serves up a mezze-plate introduction to the world’s most important ideas and disciplines. It is the conceit of this course that there are precious few important ideas that have relevance beyond their specific disciplines, but it is these very ideas that comprise the sine qua non of a modern education. A wide range of subjects will be covered including Psychology, Economics, Biomedical Research, Linguistics, History, Physics, Politics, Statistics and more. Within each topic, we will discuss the most current, innovative ideas in the field, dissect them, and look at how they impact not only the world-at-large, but our own lives as well. How does Demography predict our planet’s future? How is Linguistics a window to understanding the brain? Each of these lectures will be presented by top experts from top institutions around the country, and will be delivered via the Internet. The course is designed to give students an introduction to a variety of concentrations in a way that allows them to explore unfamiliar territory and ask leading questions, and look at different subjects in a new light, before choosing any predetermined field of concentration.

Oh, did that not clarify anything? Maybe what you're failing to grasp is that this course is about Everything, or the subset of Everything known as Every New and Hip Thing, and so has no specific content? Let's look at the weekly assignments and see:

The first week will be an overview of the syllabus itself. This is understandable because the syllabus is 12 pages, four of which contain the biographies and color photos of the professors in the videos.

The second week is called "The Classics," and the topic of the video lecture is, "Contemporizing the Classics: Why Homer, Plato and Dante Still matter in the Modern World." You might imagine that this session will include readings from--at least--Homer, Plato, and Dante. But, no. Instead, some chapters of How to Read a Book and Education's End--a recent pop lament of the decline of the liberal arts--are assigned, as well as evidently the entirety of that ageless classic, All Things Shining, which came out about two weeks ago and is reviewed here. So I guess after this session, students will be "exposed" to all the "relevant areas of knowledge" in literature and will have "connected the dots" to see the "bigger picture" of the entire history of Western literature, and will be sufficiently equipped with the requisite "diverse toolkit" to determine whether an English major ought to be their "academic path," right?

The rest of the syllabus proceeds in much this way, the only difference being that most of the other sessions assign readings from the latest works of the professor featured in that week's video lecture, some newspaper or magazine articles, or a single chapter of a random textbook in the field being "exposed"--economics, statistics, etc. The reading is on the nonexistent side of light, which I suppose is reasonable since these ideas are either "big" or "great big," and in either case, obviously expansive enough to warrant a week's dedication to their contemplation unencumbered by such distractions as "books." The week dedicated to philosophy has the most extensive requirements, listing the readings to be discussed as:

Thomas Hobbes, Selections from Leviathan
• Book I, chapter XIII, paragraphs 1-14
• Book I, chapter XIV, paragraphs 1-5
• Book II, chapter XVII, paragraphs 1-15
Robert Nozick, Anarchy State and Utopia
• (Optional) Preface, entire (pp. ix-xiv)
• Chapter 7, Introduction (pp. 149-150)
• Chapter 7, Section I, up to “Sen’s Argument” (pp. 150-164)
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
• Chapter I, opening paragraph (pp. 3)
• Chapter I, section 1, paragraphs 1-2 (pp. 3-4)
• Chapter I, section 2, paragraph 1 (p. 7)
• Chapter I, section 3, paragraphs 1-8 (pp. 11-16)
• Chapter I, section 4, entire (pp. 17-22)
• Chapter II, section 11, entire (pp. 60-65)

Given that this is a course on Great Big Ideas, this may seem like a Great Big Lot of reading, but look closer, and you'll realize that it's fewer than 50 pages in total. So no worries, freshmen, nothing is easier than learning Everything!

UPDATE: This absurdity has a website, which sports their logo, which doubles as their message to students--F U.

Overheard during freshman move-in day

2011-08-26T01:01:00.001-04:00

Said by a freshman to her new roommate: "This is the greatest place in the world to be a brilliant and motivated young person...That's our room [pointing to a dorm window]. It's amazing. We're going to be sitting there in January, drinking coffee and watching snow fall in the Yard. Then we're going to change the world."

Twitter on the side of the good

2011-08-24T13:32:00.000-04:00

Attention fellow Gov peeps! The elevators in CGIS are tweeting! Both of them!

The high cost of keeping classicists employed

2011-08-23T23:35:00.001-04:00

Because you've all informed me that I should use grad school as a time to explore my passions, whatever those are, and that nothing I do during this time will ever be regrettable later, I've decided to take Latin this fall even though it will probably never help me in any way. Why not, right? I've done some Greek, a little Russian, even less French--may as well add a smattering of Latin. But today, I looked at the syllabus for the first time and discovered that the required text for the class costs $75. $75! Who charges that for a Latin book? What is this, some kind of science class? And there are no decent used copies! People, when you told me to enjoy myself in grad school, you neglected to mention how pricey this would be. Now I have to seriously weigh the hedonic value of half-learning another inapplicable language against how much more I would enjoy two new pairs of shoes. Decisions!

Watch out for next semester's dilettantish undertaking in personal enrichment and whim-fulfillment: Sanskrit! Biblical Hebrew! Korean! The possibilities for self-improvement are endless. With every passing semester, I become a better version of myself.

Earthquakes

2011-08-23T14:51:00.002-04:00

Been there, done that.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

2011-08-22T02:12:00.001-04:00

If it were possible to be a fan of reviews of things in general, I would say that I am a fan of Emily Hale's reviews of things--books, lectures, battle re-enactments (as the case may be). I usually lack the requisite interest in the particular genre of mid-century women writers who convert to Catholicism to seek out the books she reviews, but in a universe of infinite time, I might read them based on these reviews. But recently, she reviewed The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and it was clear from her description--Calvinism! teacher-student relations!--that this was a book I needed to read, pretty much as soon as possible. So I did. And it was, as I expected, completely mesmerizing. You can read Emily Hale's summary of the book so I don't have to repeat it here. "Teacher-student relations" is a politic way of getting at what the book is about, which is something more like the erotic nature of teaching, and its limits in forming people. Everything about this book is, as teh catz would say, relevant to my interests, which are soon to become my dissertation. (After the completion of which, I might have no further interests.)

Emily Hale thinks Miss Brodie's failing "is that she attempts to make her students into her own image." This is true in that she seems to have a narrow sense of what is acceptable for the best women to become--not "team spirited" believers in popular platitudes, not unthinking young wives, not technical experts like the upper school teachers, and so on. Basically, not anyone else they encounter in school except herself. But it's not clear that her criticism of the narrowing tendencies of conventional schooling is entirely misplaced. She tells her girls, "Miss Mackay [the headmistress] retains [a poster of a former Prime Minister] on the wall because she believes in the slogan 'Safety First.' But Safety does not come first. Goodness, Truth and Beauty come first." Is that not an accurate summation of the imperatives of schooling vs. the imperatives of living? And Miss Brodie is additionally right to resist various efforts to send her to "the more progressive schools," sensing that the education she offers can only be effective against the backdrop of tradition, not in the absence of it. But I think the main problem is not that she wants to make her girls into herself as that she wants to make to make them all Anna Pavlovas (her ideal of passionate dedication) of whatever vocation she discovers in them. But she is first more fallible than she assumes in her ability to identify the girls' vocations. And the Calvinist idea of secular vocation can't bear the weight of her demands (even before she extricates it from its original relation to an omnipotent God). It turns out that "vocation" can't be secularized at all, that in the world it can only lead to disappointment because it's incommensurate with the smallness of human lives, which can rarely be as single-minded and committed as vocation demands.

Miss Brodie wants to instill passion in her girls in order to "lead them out" (her translation of education--"ex duco") so that they may discover themselves in the world, which is to say, so that they may take up their vocations. But vocation demands that individuals become exceptional in some way simply by taking their rightful places in the world, and this doesn't account for our relative smallness and the world's galling bigness. All of Miss Brodie's girls go on to respectable but unremarkable things--one becomes a typist, another a nurse, a third a scientist. Sparks tells us all this right away, just as she introduces the girls, so that there is no suspense about what will become of them or what effect the tutelage of Miss Brodie will have. She even emphasizes the smallness of each girl's youthful talents--"what she was famous for," as she describes it. One girl is famous for doing somersaults, another for being desired by boys, a third for having remarkably small eyes, and a fourth for being hapless. These are not auspicious beginnings for identifying vocation, for leading what is already inside the girls out.

And the great gulf between the "potentiality" (a word Sparks seems to like) of their childhoods and their adult fates is so blunt as to be shocking--the first outcome we learn about is that of the hapless and stupid girl, Mary, whose hapless and stupid death in a fire is described in maudlin detail. Why does Miss Brodie so to speak "elect" such a pathetic girl to her set? What is the meaning of election if one must live and die like Mary? Did Miss Brodie see some spark or potentiality in her, or think it a challenge suitable to her prime to improve someone as dull as her? But for the reader, the girls are always destined, or predestined for their smallness in the world. Jenny, the prettiest of the Brodie set and thought by Miss Brodie to have much potential until she unaccountably "becomes insipid" sometime in her mid-teens when she discovers acting, and ends up only "an actress of moderate reputation," contentedly married for 16 years when she comes across an Italian stranger with whom she falls in love, but "there was nothing whatever to be done about it." This--both the mediocrity in a life of imitation and the unthinking unwillingness to pursue an illicit love--was not imagined in Miss Brodie's plans for the girls. Only the main girl, Sandy, whom Miss Brodie is always saying will go too far one day, achieves a kind of strange acclaim, a place in the world for a psychology book she writes, but that only after she converts to Catholicism and rejects the world to enter a convent. "What a waste. That's not the sort of dedication I meant," says Miss Brodie when she hears about Sandy's vocation. Ironically, of course, Sandy--the one who is famous for nothing more than her small eyes--turns out to be the only one of the Brodie set to have any capacity for a vocation at all.

One might also ask how well Miss Brodie herself lives up to her vocation, which she declares several times is her students. It is clear that she loves her students and they love her, but she doesn't realize that if it's to be a vocation, this love must be exclusive. When she starts an affair with another teacher, the girls, and Sandy most of all, feel betrayed. The other girls turn their attentions more to the world outside Miss Brodie, while Sandy starts up an imaginary affair with a policewoman, whom she helps to gather evidence of Miss Brodie's crime. This is a great moment in the psychology of modern eros, by the way. In Emile, Rousseau argues that, in order to educate children in a world without any legitimate authority (the fear of punishment being a perversion of authority to which we resort for lack of other means), a teacher must dedicate his whole existence to a single child. Authority can only be established contingently on a child's sense of the adult's perfect benevolence to him, which requires unstinting attention to the child. The impossibility of living up to this demand is in part what makes Emile a Lockean comedy rather than a serious guide to childrearing. But we get an image of Emile gone wrong in Miss Brodie, who sets out to do exactly what Emile's tutor does, but never realizes that the temptations of "her prime" must be seen as mere distractions from her vocation rather than the arbiters of her own happiness. This is of course an impossible demand, but Calvinism makes it.

Also this book is wonderfully written, mimicking the rhythm of children's thoughts with their endless repetitions while the girls are young, and picking up as they grow older. Emily Hale is also right that, despite the sort of whimsical narration and plot, it's ultimately dark. I finished it in a state of low-grade gloom, quite convinced that I ought to lay off the Calvinism for a while.

Academic moralizing, part II: The grad students speak

2011-08-04T22:11:00.000-04:00

Alex sends along this series of responses to the Pannapacker article, brimming with examples of the dreamy self-actualization nonsense I describe below. Those who accuse me of setting up straw men, I offer for your consideration:
"Yet I can say without blushing that my experience of life is infinitely richer for having spent the last seven years thinking as hard as I can among some of the smartest "suckers" I have ever met. For me, graduate study was like getting fitted with a second nervous system—I feel that much more acutely alive and responsive to the world. I will try to pass that vividness along to my students as long as this broken education system allows me to. In the end, I may well have to walk away from academia, but, if so, I suspect I'll feel more regret for those students than I will for myself."
Not only have you not even lived until you've received a PhD, students denied exposure to your amazing new grad school-induced vividness are lesser beings for the lack.

"Books make me happy and being able to talk about books for a living (even if that living is currently classifiable as below the poverty line) makes me happy, too...What's wrong with the pleasure of reading, of thinking, of learning new things about the world and how it works?...For now, I'll stick with my choice and accomplish the task of a doctoral degree which, if not always a pleasure, still affords satisfaction and pride in my own determination. I will continue my work because, as Stanley Fish puts it, "[t]he humanities are their own good," and to insist otherwise is to buy into the notion that the only education worthwhile is that which is instrumental."
I love ideas and books--except not always--but even if I don't always actually love them, I'm satisfied and proud of loving the idea of loving ideas and books, and of standing by that love.

"As Pannapacker says, we need to organize, raise awareness, and work against exploitation...And the struggle is not only for wages and conditions, but for thinking, teaching, and writing about our shared humanity. As the striking mill women of Lawrence, Mass., showed us in 1912, "hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses." Bread yes, but roses too."
!!!

The moralism of self-improvement: grad school edition

2011-08-02T22:00:00.001-04:00

Just as crappy YA lit is defended on the grounds that reading anything is by definition better than not-reading, there emerges in discussions about the wisdom of going to grad school a similarly lopsided proposition: Grad school (specifically, the funded PhD program) is a choice, an investment of time and labor, with a highly uncertain outcome. Nonetheless, no matter what its outcome, there can be no justifiable grounds for regretting it. If you don't get an academic job afterwards, or a job that makes use of your PhD in any way, that's no reason to be upset. After all, you had the rare opportunity to spend several years in the uninhibited contemplation of ideas that interest you, and you ought to be grateful for that alone, regardless of where it gets you in worldly terms. The one exception to this seems to be cases of subsequent unpayable debt, which is legitimate ground for regret apparently only because it's a quantifiable loss. The sacrifice of time or opportunities to do other things is either insignificant (what's seven years if you live to 90?) or merely hypothetical (who knows if you would've had opportunities anyway?), and so negligible in the accounting of regret.

Sure, there is an ostensible purpose, a purported end to grad school, which is qualification for the professoriate or for some other employment requiring a PhD, but grad school apparently also offers the soul-expanding intrinsic benefits of study, learning, the pursuit of the beautiful and the true, living "the life of the mind"--and any negative impacts of the process had better be quite substantial if they can hope to outweigh the value we accord to these ineffable goods. And with this turn in the argument, the responsibility of grad programs for pumping out far more PhDs than they can employ effectively evaporates. Employment is no longer required or expected, since the process itself becomes the end.

And just as the process of grad school is soul-expanding, the jobs otherwise available to would-be grad students are in proportion soul-crushing. Down there in the "real world," people are driven by economic necessity to perform tasks that no thinking person would choose for himself, like answering phones and filling out spreadsheets. But up here, we are free to set our own tasks for ourselves, to pursue our interests, which are inspirations that bubble up from within us and drive us forward (or in circles, as the case may be), rather than have tasks imposed by others in the service of their interests. Considered in this light, we may the only people in the whole world aside from retired billionaires who are so free. And even billionaires are worse off in a way, because they're only free from the necessity to labor, but they're not necessarily self-motivated to pursue the highest good--self-improvement through education--like we are. To be rich but without elevated "passions"--such a pity.

I suspect that it's precisely because many academics largely can't defend the significance of the discrete things they study that they moralize about the virtues of the process of studying. Grad school is educational. Education is good for you, like eating carrots. Even if you get nothing tangible out of it, you are a better person for it. Or, more specifically, I am a better person. You are a cog in the real world machine, laboring at your dull job and paying taxes to fund my graduate stipend. I am self-fulfilled because I pursue the interests I myself have generated. I chase my own tail! You, on the other hand, are stuck chasing someone else's tail even though you have no desire to catch it. So why wouldn't you want to be me? The only thing you have to lose is money, but if you can qualify for some kind of funding, then you have absolutely nothing to lose.

The problem with this argument is that it's the argument for going to college and getting a liberal education, not for getting a PhD. College education is supposed to prepare you to improve yourself in all these edifying ways afterwards, not to become dependent on institutionalized education as the only setting where "the life of the mind" can be lived. Graduate education purports to be extremely narrow and technical, which we accept in light of its purpose to prepare professors, but when that fails, we rush to justify it in the broadest possible terms--it was self-improving. Once we do this though, we can no longer simultaneously justify the narrow, disciplinary training it actually offers since the point ought to be to study and learn whatever one wants, and not to be hemmed in by requirements like papers, dissertations, and teaching assignments. Or, if we want to claim that these requirements are actually useful for general intellectual growth, we ought to require them of college students as well. Moreover, how, if grad school is so self-improving, can we justify limiting access to graduate education so radically when the reason for it is the same as the reason for college education, which we encourage everyone over some threshold of cognitive capacity to pursue?

This logic makes going to grad school the best choice that anyone with a brain could ever make. It's a wonder these programs aren't even more competitive than they are, since only philistines and the cognitively-impaired should ever pass up the zero-liability self-enhancement opportunities they offer. Your cognitive impairments are at least not your own fault. But if you would simply prefer to make money by working than become a better person by learning for a few more years, something is clearly wrong with your moral compass. Who cares if you don't want to be a college teacher or do research for the rest of your life? Surely you have some kind of interest that could be satisfied by further study. If you value the right things, then surely you value learning for learning's sake, and that--even if nothing else--is what grad school offers. There will always be time later (when you don't get a tenure-track job) to re-join the real world and take up the burden of office drudgery by getting a job you were equally qualified for when you had only a BA.

Now, ok, this is an exaggeration of the sentiments expressed at Phoebe's blog. But I'm not sure that it's a misinterpretation of their assumptions. In particular, it's the selective deployment of both economic and romantic justifications that results in this kind of moralism. This mindset assumes both that the initial impetus for going to grad school is the lack of "intellectually fulfilling" jobs paying enough to feed you (the job market sucks!), but that, once you're actually in grad school, the economic motivation simply melts away and you value only learning for learning's sake. But love of learning for learning's sake in principle never ends, and yet, inexplicably, grad school does end. If no academic job materializes afterwards, however, you ought not to take this as a catastrophic foreclosure of your ability to continue pursuing your "passions," but rather, resign yourself to the intellectually inferior workaday grind you went to grad school to escape. But how can that be a reasonable expectation of someone who has just spent years learning to care only for intellectual fulfillment rather than economic reward? If PhD programs have no purpose aside from self-betterment, there is little logic behind their ending in five or seven years. They ought to be infinite.

I’m not denying that education's benefit is largely intangible, that to demand proportional financial returns on it is in some sense perverse. Education can be soul-expanding and mind-liberating and whatnot. Some educations, at least. But which ones? Does this include graduate education? We claim yes, but can't say why. The problem here is that that when this argument is used in self-defense, it's not really about what kind of education really is self-improving, but about how what I personally am doing is not a waste of time, contrary to all appearances. This is where we start to argue like YA lit authors who claim that, because some books are good, all reading must be good. When we don't know any longer in what way even the best books are good, we turn to claiming that they’re good for you.

To avoid this proposed monopoly of academia on all serious thought, I'm for holding grad programs to their original limited purpose: to train professors. If they can't deliver on this, they fail. If you don’t want to be a professor, don’t go. College can teach you to think and all that, but once that's done, you need no further institutional training. Assuming your undergrad education was successful, you should now know how to read and think on your own, without the imprimatur of a university. This, however, is not a profession, or a specialized thing you do at settled times for "self-improvement." Liberal education makes liberally educated people, not people who specialize in liberal education work, rather than business or consulting or law. Once we start positing all kind of indeterminate ends like intellectual fulfillment for grad school and conflating these ends with the purpose of all education in order to cut our losses, we are in even bigger trouble. There is no final satisfaction for something like intellectual fulfillment. If intellectual fulfillment is made into a full-time job, and the highest intellectual fulfillment is conflated with institutions of higher education, then every right-thinking person ought to aim for a life in academia, and any other job is a mark of moral and intellectual failure--you loved learning, but weren't smart enough for the best positions and need more learning (consider a JD/PhD, an MD/PhD, or a second PhD), or worse, you didn't love learning enough.

The life of the mind and all these other airy ideals are great. I am for them. I am just not for tying them to any institution or giving universities a monopoly on them. There is enough pressure on universities to host the entire world's life of the mind as it is, and universities are themselves imperialistically turning everything into an academic discipline (as anyone who has seen subway ads for implausible MA degrees knows)--young people (the pool of would-be grad students) should resist these incursions into cultural life, and figure out how to be thoughtful and serious on their own, without having to submit term papers about it. Sometimes you can live the life of the mind in universities, but very often, professors and grad students are less inspired than the editorial staff of a magazine that actually has something to say, or even just a group of friends who have really good conversations with one another after work. If we tip the balance so that universities become the only refuge for serious thought, we are probably doomed. So I’d suggest we start worrying when we find ourselves claiming that highly specialized acquisition of non-transferrable skills for seven years that issues in an abysmal rate of subsequent employment is an undertaking that can’t possibly have any drawbacks.

Why do I still maintain the pretense that this is a blog?

2011-07-27T23:26:00.003-04:00

"There is no denying that Francis Drake was a pirate...But it was on the scale that transforms crime into politics."
--Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

I had this idea for a blog post about pirates in political thought, because there are a lot of pirates in political thought, and someone should write a dissertation on them, and it seemed like something FLG would like. But when I began to compose it, I thought: "Why would I give away my idea about pirates for free to teh internets? What if someone actually uses it? What if my dissertation project on a completely different topic falls through and I have to resort to using it myself, but someone else who happened to read my blog has already claimed it by then? What if that person becomes fabulously renowned (and wealthy) for his ground-breaking pirate scholarship, while I toil away in oblivion trying to come up with a new dissertation topic? WHAT IF THIS IS MY LAST IDEA EVER AND I NEVER HAVE ANOTHER IDEA AGAIN?? WON'T I BE SORRY FOR GIVING THIS ONE AWAY???"

Yes, I would. So, readers, I'm not going to tell you my idea about pirates in political thought after all. Don't worry, it wasn't really that good anyway. But this is why grad school and blogging are essentially incompatible. Instead, I will direct you to this very funny post about Paris Hilton's new TV show by Emily Hale.

Urban wildlife

2011-07-07T19:40:00.000-04:00

This visitor was spotted in a neighbor's driveway:

I know wild turkeys are common in New England, but I just can't get over the novelty.

And this is an update on my fungi:

Apparently, I can't even keep hardy invasive species alive on my windowsill. The whole indoor herb plan is doomed.

“GGG”: The best conservative argument for marriage ever

2011-07-06T16:33:00.001-04:00

Why doesn’t my husband fill my cavities or cut my hair? Because, according to Dan Savage via Mark Oppenheimer, he isn’t GGG for these activities. Fortunately, we never had to negotiate this particular outsourcing of extra-marital labor, because we already live in a society so accepting of the primacy of our dental needs and hair-styling desires that it makes expert providers of these services commercially available to us outside our marriage. So why doesn’t it accept that our exotic sexual interests ought to get the same professional—err—touch? If I would like sex to involve donning a pink bunny suit and being whipped by a clown on an elephant while hanging upside-down from a trapeze, but my husband, who lacks trapeze and elephant-riding training, can’t or won’t accommodate that, why shouldn’t I seek out someone who can? And not someone who will replace my husband, who is perfectly acceptable in other, non-trapeze respects (he makes great scrambled eggs!), but in addition to him? Our marriage isn’t the least bit undermined when I get my teeth cleaned by a dentist or my hair cut by a stylist, so why should getting my sex from the circus be any different?

Even if my husband offered to make a sincere effort at the elephant-and-trapeze, he’d unlikely surpass a professional in his skill. And I don’t select my hair stylists or dentists based on the sincerity of their effort, but on the final product. So why should I settle for DIY sex when I could have professional results? Just as society doesn’t expect me to stick with one hair stylist for life and call that person my husband, it should relax its expectations about sex.

If you are skeptical of this proposal, perhaps that’s because you’re wondering what the point of staying married to someone is if I’m getting trapeze satisfaction from someone else? Maybe that’s a sign that the marriage ought to end? [Clarification: Phoebe points out that she only means pre-marital relationships here.] But whoever said that sexual exclusion was some fundamental aspect of marriage? I don’t want a divorce, just a circus in addition to a marriage! Oppenheimer doesn’t really say what the purpose of marriage is because I guess that would counterproductively narrow the choice-iness that Savage stands for, but whatever it is, sex is no necessary part of it. Still, Savage is “conservative” about marriage because he wants to keep marriages together even if we don’t know why they are formed in the first place. Well, that’s a kind of conservatism, I guess, though a strangely ungrounded one for someone whose argument relies so much on rational contract-making. So we may not know why we get married, but we do know that once we do, we have individual rights to sexual satisfaction (which is to say, the satisfaction of any sexual desire we might entertain, so long as we think through what we want rationally) and these are pretty sacred, if not yet legally actionable. So it follows that if our spouses don’t satisfy these desires, we are within our rights to find other means to their satisfaction. There is no more necessary connection between spouse and sex than between spouse and hair styling.

And what will become of our spouses once we start shacking up with the circus? Potentially, there are the children, though these need not be strictly connected to spouses either. Oppenheimer channeling Savage seems to think it’s somehow psychically better for children to be strictly connected to spouses, though their interests are so unfortunately contrary to the “nonmonogamy” preferences of adults (pesky children!). But it has been pointed out that nonmonogamy may also lead to children who will lack such psychically beneficial spousal connections, and moreover, when individual sexual rights are pitted against the psychic goods of children, we can’t always expect the kids to win out even in the most flexible nonmonogamous arrangement. (At some level of nonmonogamy, do the psychic benefits to children of their parents staying together begin to erode? Like when I install the circus in my backyard?) So, if all else fails, I guess we will still have the scrambled eggs! Long live marriage.

Photographic representations of mid-summer

2011-07-03T16:39:00.000-04:00

1. I have been trying for two years with remarkable un-success to grow herbs indoors. Every single thing I've attempted to nurture has died with the sole exception of catnip, which I can't even eat. Given that the cat for whom this nip is intended is a determined destroyer of all my other potted plants, the survival of the catnip is doubly ironic. Anyway, I got a new batch of herbs last April, and the oregano has been looking droopy and brown since June, but then I woke up this morning and found this horrifying development:

WHAT IS THIS??? It's so repulsive that I refuse to touch it with even a stick or a projectile, but I'm afraid that if I don't remove it somehow, I will have a whole pot of them by tomorrow. How can I evict this slime??

2. The best sidewalk stencil I've ever seen, spotted in Watertown en route (or, getting lost en route) to Target:

3. I'm doing research on monarchist and sovereignty theories this summer for a professor. Being paid by the hour to read and digest early modern tracts is kind of an ill-fitting adaptation of the wage labor model for scholarship since, on the one hand, I can't read fast enough to justify my hourly wage, so I am overpaid, but on the other hand, I have to read all the time to produce the quantity of notes that merits my hourly wage. Here, Nigel is helping me with research by making sure that none of extra desk space goes unused:

An open letter to unemployed scholars who know French and Latin

2011-06-28T23:57:00.000-04:00

Dear unemployed scholars,

Did you know that Jean Bodin's complete Six Books of the Republic has not been translated into English since 1606? That, as you may have noticed, was a long time ago. English has changed a lot since then. Plz get to work.

Love,
Miss Self-Important

Dear universe, please stop writing articles about Gen Y's First World Problems

2011-06-25T19:59:00.001-04:00

People, there is a world-historical crisis afoot: twentysomethings have to work multiple part-time jobs in order to live in really expensive apartments, take vacations, and avoid contravening their values, which include being happy by not working in an office. Because, really, what is their choice:

But full-time jobs don’t suit everyone. Ms. Gassman, for example, has been offered a full-time job at SoulCycle, complete with full benefits, but she doesn’t want it. “I wouldn’t be able to go on auditions in the middle of the day,” she explained. “Of course, it stresses me out not to have health insurance, but what is my choice? Work in an office and be unhappy? Being happy is a superhigh value to me.

But, as it turns out, a studio on the Upper West Side is also a "superhigh value" to her.

In case readers persist against all reason in finding their motives puzzling, anthropological experts on the native habits of this exotic tribe are available to answer your questions:

Professor Snyder at Southern Cal doesn’t see multiple job-holding as a trend that will disappear anytime soon. “The likelihood of this generation devoting their professional life to just one job or career at the same time is simply counterintuitive to their worldview,” he said. “I think we would be seeing this generation pursuing multiple jobs and careers at once even in a robust economy.”

Oh, it's counterintuitive to their worldview. Ok then. "The Economy Sucks" is the evident pretext of this article, but the actual argument is, maybe the economy sucks, but more importantly, some people prefer to be full-time visionaries (or, “aesthetic consultants”) and only part-time employees, even if that equation doesn't quite resolve in favor of their savings account, whatev.

I realize this is kind of a Styles style piece, but what are we to learn from all these laments about the supposed predations of "the economy" that are actually about the poor decision-making skills of twentysomethings. Is the economy bad, or are the people who volunteer themselves for these articles morons? Does the NYT really want to pose this as a mutually exclusive proposition? This is undermining my effort to argue that labor ought to be compensated (isn't the NYT onboard with that? it is unionized, after all) so that vapid people who don't want real jobs can navel-gaze about their difficult trade-offs.

Skokie in the NYT!

2011-06-14T18:35:00.001-04:00

Admittedly, a passing mention in an otherwise uninteresting article, but I'll take what I can get:

The Rev. Michael J. Garanzini, president of Loyola University, a Jesuit university in Chicago, said of Mr. Patel’s group: “They don’t have the knowledge base or experience in theology, but they have provided the data on where our kids are. The world we grew up in was all Irish, Italian and German. Now it’s Vietnamese, and Poles and Jewish kids from Skokie. We are not automatically able to reflect on their reality.”

YA lit: The only genre whose public discourse has not changed in 40 years

2011-06-09T21:34:00.002-04:00

Last week, this eminently reasonable op-ed about YA lit appeared in the WSJ:

It is also possible—indeed, likely—that books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures. Self-destructive adolescent behaviors are observably infectious and have periods of vogue. That is not to discount the real suffering that some young people endure; it is an argument for taking care.

The same op-ed has appeared every few years in various newspapers and magazines since about 1969. It always generates the same outraged response from YA authors, ostensibly in the name of the children.* No one should be surprised that YA lit feeds off of book banning outrage--the genre was born from it. Book censorship had a decent history before YA lit came onto the scene in the late '60s, but no one remembers that history. Public libraries removed Communist and other politically incendiary stuff from the shelves from the '30s through the '50s, and many of these removals were challenged and overturned. Why then does the phrase "book banning" immediately make us think of Judy Blume and The Catcher in the Rye, while memories of those poor leftist tracts have totally faded from our consciousness? Mid-century Communists, whatever their other failings, at least had a political project, a project whose circulation was perhaps slightly diminished by library removal, but which did not exist merely for the sake of library circulation. Anyone can read Marxist ideas and remain unconvinced--a failure for the project. But YA lit of this "realist" strain has no argument except the exposure imperative. Children must be exposed to it or they will remain forever naive. This excuses every excess and failure of style and skill. The writing might be total crap--all the better. That's more real. Real people, after all, are inarticulate, and bad writers. The main thing is to describe in lurid detail ever more exotic forms of misery. (All things I've written about before.) The next step is to wait for adults to object to the lack of moral and aesthetic judgment contained in the work, and then launch the Typical YA Lit defense, which goes like this:

Think of the children! They must learn of the facts of life--the "real things" that happen to "real people" in the "real world"! These include, but are not limited to, the following forms of misery: racism, drug abuse, eating disorders, rape, sexual abuse, self-mutilation, incest, murder (preferably by gangs). These are the constitutive elements of reality (if your life does not feature them, it might not be real), from which you prudish parents have unjustly been shielding your children by such evasions as selectively introducing them to people who don't engage in these behaviors, moving to neighborhoods where these problems are uncommon, and encouraging them to avoid these fates themselves. This kind of "sheltering" is not only foolish, but it is downright negligent. That is why we, YA authors, are here to save your children from your misguided moralizing efforts by exposing them to these realities early without passing judgment. Only sufficient exposure can bring about understanding. And this is what the children themselves want to read. (We know this because they send us fan mail!) Wait, what now? You want to prevent your children from being exposed to our important work? This can only mean that you prefer to abet abuse, disorder, rape, and murder! Censorship! Censorship! We are being muzzled! The very fact that you object demonstrates how very important our work is--you are trying to hide the truth from your children, while we are revealing it! We are heroes!

This rhetoric merged with the supposed illiteracy crisis of the 1970s (it's hard to believe this was a real event) to create an entirely amoral argument for YA lit: kids these days don't read anymore, and non-reading leads to academic failure, school dropout, juvenile delinquency, and death. Therefore, we must encourage kids to read! Reading anything is better than nothing! And this is the key: somehow, the actual benefits of reading literature were never raised in all the sloganeering, and what remained was basically a call to force children to scan words with their eyes. If they pronounced some books "boring" then and refused to lend them their eyes, the solution was to find something more visually captivating that still contained words. YA lit, which made no pretense to be literary at first, was a natural candidate for this exercise. Thus, we get this tale of miraculous literary awakening from a 1972 issue of the Phi Delta Kappan (a journal for teachers and ed school monkeys):

In a local school, a student teacher purchased and took two paperback copies of Paul Zindel's The Pigman into a junior class of "nonreaders," and overnight two students read the novel. Returning the next day, they commented that this was the first book they had ever read and asked where they could find more like it… Their reading began with a few of the now young adult novels but led away and for a few, eventually, included some of the Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Stephen Crane found within the approved school sources.

If you are my age, you will perhaps recall how your teachers pinned similar hopes on such illustrious works as the Goosebumps series: "At least they're reading something! Who knows--maybe RL Stine will nourish a lifelong passion for Shakespeare!" I bet it will.

Which brings us to Alan Jacobs's very good point:

According to these writers, YA fiction has achieved something no other human invention has ever achieved: it is capable of doing extraordinary, glorious good, and cannot do any harm at all...What I’d like to see from these YA writers is less panicky defensiveness and more actual thinking. Admit — please — that some books are bad for some people. Admit that writers can make aesthetic misjudgments, so that certain scenes, or even whole books, can have effects on many readers that they don't intend. And admit that some writers — yes, even YA writers — are nasty people who write nasty books. And then try to think about what distinguishes a book that is likely to help most of its readers from a book that isn’t.

The reason that it is commonly thought that YA saves is because it's widely believed that reading saves. Reading is the opposite of illiteracy. Ergo, even reading the phonebook is a step in the right direction. This view is so entrenched in Jacobs's commenters that they can't even think of a book that could possibly do any harm. Even reading total crap apparently "helped develop my critical facilities." I'm hard-pressed to think of another activity that merits such unstinting praise that we can't even discern failure in it. Imagine if we felt this way about music: Even listening to tomcats howling in an alley helped me by showing me what disharmony sounds like. I now seek out alleycat wailing to experience this pleasure again and again. Jacobs offers a perfect example of harmful teenage reading--Ayn Rand--and even this is rejected because apparently reading Ayn Rand is valuable in helping us to see what is wrong with Ayn Rand.

What seems to be lost here all sense of what it means for a book to be harmful. Jacobs's readers, and YA's defenders generally, are mired in the rhetoric of book banning and seem to think that if they admit that a book is harmful, that means it will either kill you or move you to kill someone else, and it should therefore be burned. But that is of course not what a harmful book is, and no one is proposing a ban on such books. The effect that harmful books have is either that they cement pernicious views of the world that adolescents are already inclined to hold, or simply that they waste time that could be spent on better books or better experiences. This is not world-shattering harm, of course, and perhaps that's why it's hard to notice against the supposedly self-evident good of reading. But growing up is a complex process of perceiving the reality of the adult world, and small things that do no more than draw one's attention away from one emphasis to another still play their part in forming these perceptions. When all the books marketed at adolescent girls are about eating disorders, high school social tyrannies, and sex, these topics form their intellectual horizons. Is being encouraged to inhabit such narrow horizons--to think there is nothing to do or contemplate beyond reputation-honing and calorie-counting and shopping--not a form of harm? It's not clear how spending three hours reading a trashy novel is superior to spending those hours playing video games or watching paint dry, but the act of eyes scanning words on a page has come to be thought a morally upstanding activity.

*Do you want to know how old and tired this rhetoric is? Below the cut is a short history of Judy Blume and her reception in the 1970s from a paper I once wrote on this topic but will not impose on you involuntarily (complete with archival research--thanks grad school!):

In a feature essay in the New York Times in 1969, the paper’s children’s book editor made a call—itself quite in the style of overwrought teenage poetry—for a more authentic approach to books for adolescents, demanding that the new literature speak to adolescents like rock music:

“It comes to them hot and strong, uninhibited, expressing their moods and longings. It moves. Sometimes it’s tender, sad, a lamentation. Then it’s wild and irresponsible. Sometimes contemptuous of tradition, sometimes it goes nowhere, as if it were waiting, just as they themselves often wait, for what’s going to happen next. And what we need are books to match their music; books that handle life’s depths and despairs, its joys and exaltations, too. What’s needed is to pick up the beat and tempo of life as it’s known to them...Teen-age books are carrying on a love affair with the past, venerating the old, traditional ways and days, old modes and styles. They are still trying to indoctrinate their audience with the noble virtues, still sermonizing…”

Judy Blume was not the first writer to heed this call to depict without moralizing, but her career as a young adult writer, beginning in 1970 with the publication of Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret, is among the most prominent and controversial. The book appeared at the beginning an era of what was soon christened “new realism,” “problem novels,” and “young adult” literature—books for younger adolescents that matter-of-factly depicted sex and the panoply of controversial social issues that had absorbed adults in the decade before. Often praised for its courage in exposing these issues to a squeamish public, the genre found its share of skeptics even before it fell into parents’ hands. “Some years ago, when the taboo was lifted on treating subjects like drugs, poverty and premarital sex in writings for children, books on relevant topics slid off the presses and into libraries and bookstores, in many cases merely replacing old clichés with new ones seasoned with a bit of street language,” wrote one reviewer in 1972, just as the books were becoming mainstays of children’s publishing.

One by one, Blume’s books approached such topics as menstruation, sexual awakening, divorce, peer pressure, masturbation, body image, adoption, and random violence through stories of adolescents who face these problems. The books were meant to be informational as well as entertaining; Blume said that the impetus for Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret, whose heroine spends much of the book contemplating her pre-pubertal body and anticipating her first period, was the relative lack of information about puberty and sex available to girls raised by traditional and reticent parents. “When I was nine, my father sat me on his knee and gave this vague version of the facts of life, which left me with the impression that whenever the moon was full, women all over the world were menstruating,” Blume told a reporter in 1978. She contended that she was only serving a need that had been too long ignored by parents: “to kids of the age I write for, [sexual topics and body changes] are the consuming interests.” Blume’s books were very much efforts to educate children, but this education had to be undertaken against and over the wishes of parents, many of whom did not agree with Blume that this education was essential and best conveyed to their children by strangers.

In addition to information, Blume sought to provide her readers with form of therapy by giving public voice to the things they had previously encountered only privately. “Realism is letting young people read about some feelings they have and coping with some problems they have. There is a need to let them know that they’re not alone in the world,” Blume told the LA Times in 1980. But there was a puzzling contradiction contained in this formulation of YA literature’s purpose: how can experiences which are either common enough to merit popular attention or effectively universal like puberty be at the same time so traumatic and isolating? What Blume had managed to confuse in her campaign to spread knowledge was the difference between ignorance and privacy.

It strains the imagination to believe that puberty, which had been occurring in humans for some time before the publication of Are You There God?, was utterly mysterious to everyone who experienced it. That explanations had not been marketed to children before the new realism hardly means that they were not being transmitted, and Blume’s books did not so much provide girls with new information about their bodies or sexuality as heighten their sense of its importance in their lives and promote discussion about it—they created the consuming interest that Blume claims her books were intended to address. The early reviews of Blume’s books emphasize the social aspect of reading them; they describe friends passing around copies with the important pages dog-eared (“page 85” of Forever—the sex page—became such a widespread code word among girls that newspaper features were dedicated to its meaning). One middle school girl interviewed by the New York Times about her interest in Blume’s books said, “[Adults] get mad because we read Judy Blume, but we knew about that stuff before.” Even Blume herself, growing up in a world devoid of Judy Blume books, recalls stuffing her bra and faking her first period, hardly the behavior of a girl who is clueless about sexuality. Blume’s innovation was not in telling girls the facts of life, as she sometimes claimed, but in making the facts of life into a matter of public education to which all children must be given access, regardless of their parents’ wishes.

Book removal efforts elsewhere during this period demonstrated that even the most innocuous passages could arouse parental opposition. However, opposition to Blume did not come solely from parents offended by the mere mention of controversial sexual or social issues in children’s books. More often, objections came as a result of her amoral treatment of these issues. One mother interviewed by the New York Times in 1978 expressed a similar disappointment with Forever: “I’d rather have my daughter read pornography than Forever. At least she’d know that was wrong, instead of having a book about a nice, normal girl who has sex and then it ends and the book’s over.” When parents in the affluent, liberal Washington suburb of Bethesda complained in 1980 that Blubber’s explicit language and depictions of cruel bullying made it inappropriate for the elementary school library, one of their objections was that the bullying was never redressed or punished. But Blume countered in a Washington Post interview that, “The fact that it’s not resolved is the most important part of the book. I don’t think you can change children’s behavior. You can make them aware.”

Raising awareness—one of the decade’s most popular and inane social projects—was the second great impetus of the new realism. It was premised on the assumption by writers like Blume that the best way to address the conflicts she chronicled in her books was to depict them stripped of consequences that could be mistaken for moral lessons. “Blume explores the feelings of children in a nonjudgmental way,” wrote Robert Lipsyte, himself a YA author in The Nation. “The immediate resolution of a problem is never as important as what the protagonist…will learn about herself by confronting her life.” But the idea that the behavior of the characters in YA novels—the social cruelty, illicit drug use, premarital sex, and so on—were intractable facts of adolescence was a radical one. Although G. Stanley Hall had first suggested in 1905 that adolescence was a fraught stage of development, characterized by rebellion against authority and established norms, parents continued for several decades to labor under the evident delusion that there could be convincing moral arguments made against such behavior, and that their children could actually be persuaded against behaving irresponsibly through some combination of reward, discipline, and moral education.

The new realism moved away from that view by presuming that teenage rebellion was inevitable and intractable. On this view, moral education and persuasion is doomed. The best adults could do was make sure that teenagers were “made aware” of how to minimize the damage resulting from their bad decisions, as in fact the ideal parents in Blume’s books do. Real parents who remained hesitant to reveal to teenagers all the secrets of adulthood that Blume’s books dispensed were now more than merely protective; they were downright negligent. “What’s called the new reality is just common respect for the child,” the vice president of Harper & Row Junior Books said in 1980. Where risky behavior is certain, ignorance and naivete can only result in riskier behavior. The teen who doesn’t know about birth control will not only engage in premarital sex, but he will impregnate his partner in the process—a worse outcome for all concerned.

Although Blume’s books treated parents who withheld information about sexuality from their children as contemptible, Blume herself was careful not to characterize herself as an enemy of insufficiently progressive parents, but rather a supplement. She explained to a Chicago Tribune reporter in 1978 that the problem was that, “Kids close off at 14…I know it’s not easy for every parent to discuss sexuality. That’s where my books come in. It’s easy to use somebody else.” But while she may have aimed to position herself as only “a bridge of words” between parents and their alienated children, as Lipsyte put it, the reality was that, by the end of the decade, the new realism’s ubiquity in libraries and on booklists made the books more than an optional parenting supplement.

By driving a wedge between parents and their children, YA authors found themselves in the rather strange position of speaking in what they took to be the best interest of children by speaking as children. According to her own view that children and adults inhabit two mutually hostile worlds, Blume could claim to be no more “in touch” with teenagers than the parents whose authority she was supplanting. By refusing to moralize, Blume found a way to overcome her own adulthood and “relate” to children. Judy Blume told pre-teens exactly what they wanted to hear—that all their parents’ talk of guilt and consequences was nonsense; in reality, there would not always be repercussions awaiting them for bad behavior. The girls who taunt Linda in Blubber are never taken to task, and Katharine and Michael’s premarital sex in Forever results in no pregnancies, venereal diseases, or even broken hearts.

Indeed, the only way for adults to overcome their traditional authority over children was to become increasingly like children. One of the most common ways that reporters described Blume was by emphasizing her own childishness. “She is emotional, impulsive, endearing, innocent….She could fit right in as a guest at a seventh-grade slumber party,” wrote one reporter in an adoring 1978 profile. Another described her as having, “something of the eternal teen in her bubbly enthusiasm.” Children’s book reviewer Zena Sutherland even rejoiced that adults were increasingly interested in reading children’s literature. “Now you don’t have to be young to like children’s books,” the headline of her 1974 Chicago Tribune article proclaimed.

Blume believed that withholding truths about sex and violence was a dangerous injustice to children. “I hate the idea that you should always protect children. They live in the same world we do. They see things and hear things. The worst is when there are secrets, what they imagine, and what they have to deal with alone, is usually scarier than the truth. Sexuality and death—those are the two big secrets we try to keep from children…” And it is no doubt true that children must be told these truths eventually if they are to become adults, and thereby bearers of these secrets themselves. But how should these secrets be revealed, and by whom?

An open letter to purveyors of faux leather vintage goods on Etsy

2011-06-01T21:01:00.000-04:00

Dear purveyors,

The little ruse whereby you call pleather items "vegan" is clever, but ultimately ineffectual. By these standards, high fructose corn syrup and nuclear bombs are also vegan. Just tell me if the leather is real or not.

No love,
Miss Self-Important

Bear lair

2011-05-31T19:36:00.000-04:00

Following on the gnome home, a photo of the bear lair next to the Science Center:

It was actually vandalized recently, having previously looked like this. The sign next to it says the new door is courtesy of the generosity of the Eeyore Restoration Fund or something like that.

The end of civilization, part who's counting anymore?

2011-05-26T00:57:00.000-04:00

Maybe Nietzsche signaled the end of Western philosophy, but for me, the cultural bellwether is furries. When furries achieve mainstream social acceptance--which is to say, when casual interlocutors of mine cease to find them hilarious--I will know that civilization is over. Now that Rihanna's "S&M" is playing non-stop on the top-40 station, I think we are one step closer to that happening. If S&M subculture can be made into a fun pop song, furry pop hits must be just around the corner. Even these lyrics can be amenable. For example:

I am a wolf, I'm perfectly good at it
Sex with a bear, I love the smell of it
Sticks and stones may break my bones
But fangs and tails excite me

Well, it's a start, anyway. All I'm saying is that if we are doomed to be the last men, I would at least like a cut of the royalties.

"Creepy can be fixed" and other errors of judgment

2011-05-18T19:12:00.000-04:00

"Creepy can be fixed"...but probably not by becoming a pick-up artist. Forgive me peeps, I realize this article is like so last week, but last week, I was like so 20 centuries ago, cramming Plato and congressional voting models into my puny brain (space was so limited that things fell out as quickly as I put them in), so I come late to this field. Still, when there is an article that introduces me to such a brilliant phrase as "pumping the iron of math," I am there.

Unlike the woman at a party who drooled all over Wesley Yang when she'd read something he'd written, I fail to see how this writing conveys tortured genius. The main gist seems to be that Asian men--or Yang in particular--have noticed that bros get all the jobs, promotions, and girls, and would like to have a piece of the bro-pie. (It seems that 'bro' is the new parlance for 'douchebag,' which is a phenomenon previously discussed here.) This is the unmistakable bro MO:

“It’s like, we’re being pitted against each other while there are kids out there in the Midwest who can do way less work and be in a garage band or something—and if they’re decently intelligent and work decently hard in school …”

Bros don't study and they don't work hard; they just down cheap beer, pop their collars, exercise their firm handshake, and make partner at JP Morgan. Bros are generally white, I guess, but maybe there are black bros too. I'm not an expert on the racial breakdown of bro-dom. Apparently though, there aren't many Asian bros, and Yang is angry about that. Yang would also like to be a bro.

Only, why? Why would anyone actively want to be a bro? Doesn't recognizing one's superiority to morons discourage one from wanting be a moron? Worse, why would anyone who is not a complete life failure see PUA-dom as a road to self-improvement? If you graduate at the top of your class, and go to Stanford or Harvard, and have a serious job, do you not feel even the slightest twinge of shame participating in this exercise:

Before each student crosses the floor of that bare white cubicle in midtown, Tran asks him a question. “What is good in life?” Tran shouts.
The student then replies, in the loudest, most emphatic voice he can muster: “To crush my enemies, see them driven before me, and to hear the lamentation of their women—in my bed!”

In addition to being absurd, how is this strategy--becoming a bro via becoming a PUA--going to help the ostensible victims of this article, young Asian men who want to be writers and poets but apparently scowl too much? Will standing with their legs at the right angle and seducing busty white chicks "get Jefferson Mao or Daniel Chu the respect and success they crave"? If they want to be recognized for their writing, that would seem to be kind of distracting. But where is the tragedy in their lives? They just graduated from college. They're 22. They have plenty of time to be successful, and I don't think having pumped the iron of math in grade school or scowled too much in college is really what's going to make or break them in poetry or fiction.

Then we are in anti-Amy Chua land, which is by now a really dull place. Yang is upset that Asian parents apparently fail to inculcate the requisite sense of entitlement and smugness that all white people get from their parents. Instead of playing Scrabble with their kids, Asian parents send them to pump the iron of math. (Yes, I do plan to use this phrase as often as possible in everyday conversation now.) I've already endorsed pumping the iron of math as an educational strategy, so there is no need to re-hash that. But the problem is that "Chua’s Chinese education had gotten her through an elite schooling, but it left her unprepared for the real world." Well, so it goes with all educations and upbringings. Perhaps you have heard of the Bildungsroman? It is not a Chinese word. Adulthood is a problem in the West--it screws up everyone, including the people from abroad. The Scrabble-playing parents are wringing their hands just as hard fearing that their kids will become oxycontin addicts. You can push too hard, and your children risk becoming yessir-ing robots, or you can not push at all, and your kids risk ending up on the dole. Or, vice versa, and robot child will rebel and get many piercings and a boyfriend named Lizard and never speak to you again while lazypants child will succeed in spite of you and disdain you so much that she will never speak to you again. Given these options, Amy Chua's life trajectory doesn't seem so bad.

Unfortunately, 'Tiger Daughter' is coming to Harvard next year, where I predict she will be intensely hated by all her classmates, but others predict that she will throw expensive parties with live animals and become extremely popular.

Announcement of summer

2011-05-17T20:09:00.001-04:00

I am laying in bed watching Netflix movies and eating pasta out of a tupperware for dinner on a Tuesday night. What does this mean? It means it's summer. True, you would not conclude this by going outside, where it's been cold and rainy every day for months, but according to the chronological accounting of university calendars, it is so. Last week, I passed my generals (an event involving not insubstantial humiliation, of which we shall never speak again), then I took my language exam, which I assume I passed, although I haven't heard anything about it since, so now I guess I'm ABD, plus or minus an overdue paper (or, um, two). Or maybe that pnly happens post-prospectus? I can't be expected to know. So that leaves us with this summer, and the small mountain of work waiting for me. But, maybe I will actually blog sometimes, and this blog's two loyal readers will be recompensed for their vigil.

The history of political thought: a pictoral tour

2011-05-02T20:28:00.001-04:00

My exams--by which I mean generals/comps/quals/whatever they were called in your department--are next Thursday. In preparation, I've been reading and going over my old notes and such things, and it occurred to me that perhaps you too would like to learn about my exam field: political theory--ancient, medieval, and modern. Technically, it only includes one medieval author--Aquinas--and only tiny excerpts of him at that (excerpts of the excerpts!), so I personally am in favor of abolishing the pretense that anyone in my department has actually studied something called "medieval political thought," although I did once pick up a copy of John of Salisbury's Policraticus, but I flipped open to a long discussion of whether witches are real (no) and got bored and put it back down. So much for that. Also, by "modern," we only mean to "up to Nietzsche," since everything after him is called "contemporary" and, in an unusual display of pedagogical reaction on the part of the department, we have not been made responsible for that. Conveniently, my notes contain many useful illustrations of the subject matter we do have to cover, which I will share with you below the fold. As you will see, these illustrations touch on all the main points of these texts.

1. Plato

Student question: What would Thrasymachus do if the dialogue was set in winter?

2. Aristotle

Same student as above asked a question I no longer specifically recall, but it was something about ruling in relation to parts and wholes, using the example of cutting a baguette

Professor: Numbers in Aristotle are always numbers of something, not abstractions, because the form can only exist in the matter. Like when you take plates out of the dishwasher and stack them--one dish, two dishes, three dishes, four dishes... [Not pictured here but added immediately afterward, "Also, one apple, two apples, three apples, four apples...]

3. Stoics and Epicureans

The paradox of the heap: how many stones makes "a heap of stones"?

4. Short Break: A goose

5. Machiavelli

Professor: Can philosophers be thumotic? The Germans did not think so.

6. Hobbes

This is apparently a direct quote from the lecture. I don't understand it; it's British.

7. Kant

Professor: Kant believes that his law extends to all rational creatures, including Wookies.

8. Short Break #2: An important spring semester question

Answer: Because the school believes in sustainability and uses only "organic fertilizers."

9. Hegel

Self-explanatory.

10. Marx

Explanation unavailable.

11. The post-exam future

Professor: Do you know what's really fascinating? The English garrison at Utrecht in the 17th century. No one has done sufficient work on it yet. [10 more minutes on history of the English garrison at Utrecht.] One of you should really learn Dutch and do a dissertation on the topic. It's a fascinating question.

12. What I will miss now that coursework is over

This is what I have to look forward to

2011-04-23T12:58:00.000-04:00

Possibly the apex of the entire academic year: party at our professor's house. Grad school shrinks horizons.

A modest serious proposal for inter-apartment internet-sharing arrangements

2011-04-16T11:54:00.000-04:00

I live in a building with at least 18 units, and each of these seems to have its own wifi network. Most of them have figured out how to secure their networks, but as is always the case with oldsters and large samples, not everyone is so adept. So Seb and I have been mooching off the weak signals of various neighbors for the entire year. This isn't all that convenient, since the connections vary in strength depending on where in the apartment one stands. (The bathroom is a particularly good location, but it's hard to stream Buffy episodes from the bathtub.)

Not that we're averse to paying for internet; we're just averse to paying Comcast $60/mo for internet when there is so much unused bandwidth floating around on all sides. I have proposed to Seb, who is always complaining about the unreliability of our stolen connections, that we send a letter to our next-door neighbor offering to pay half his Comcast bill if he gives us his wifi password. He is old and lives alone, and I doubt he's spending his hours on bandwidth-devouring activities like World of Warcraft (although that would be an amusing revelation). He has plenty of internet to go around.

Seb thinks this is a bad idea, but I think it's eminently rational. I suppose one could worry about personal data theft in such cases, but I for one don't have the skillz to steal anyone's data even when it's naked, and financial sites are encrypted, so I would have to possess the additional skillz of decrypting the stolen data. Using a university network on any given day is much more dangerous than sharing your wifi with Miss Self-Important. Maybe I will add this point to the letter.

In any case, this is my proposal. I think it could be implemented in many multi-unit buildings, and if bandwidth use were a threat to the environment like every other human activity seems to be, I could even make my neighbors feel guilty/virtuous for declining/participating in it. Has anyone tried this? Or, more importantly, would you try it if you received a note under your door from me asking you to?

An open letter to the IRS and the MA Dept. of Revenue

2011-04-12T12:06:00.000-04:00

Dear IRS and MA Dept. of Revenue,

Blood-sucking demons! I will join the Tea Party!

No love,
Miss Self-Important

Good jokes courtesy of the weather

2011-04-01T10:27:00.000-04:00

April fools, peeps! HA!

Also, yes, this blog is now devoted to chronicling the weather. Noted.

Big and small potatoes

2011-03-24T21:47:00.001-04:00

My high school district recently decided that private schools have no right to hog all the alumni love and dollars in America, and began soliciting donations and sending out an occasional alumni newsletter with updates on the lives of some tiny proportion of its graduates. If nothing else, this newsletter demonstrates just why it is that these kinds of materials should be limited to private schools, particularly those where competition and self-promotion are more thoroughly ingrained. The newsletter informs me that someone from the class of 2005 won a local mural contest and someone from the class of 1987 self-published his self-help book. Someone from the class of 1992 works at a pizza restaurant and someone else works in the district administration. And several people from various classes are dead--announcements which are indelicately interspersed among the sunnier news.

By contrast, the much glossier UChicago alumni magazine offers a picture of lives lived and promoted on a larger scale (as well as a segregated morgue). Research scientists and international journalists and...the Oregon State varsity basketball coach? The back matter feature book publications, promotions to law firm partnerships, world travels culminating in gallery openings, and so on. (The older alumni make a point of emphasizing their world travels, as if to dispel any suspicion that their age has slowed them down. I suppose this is what instills jealousy among the 60+ crowd the way that making partner is the 35 year-old's way of grinning smugly in 20 words?)

But. District 219 reminds us that it has one alumnus of note who will put all of UChicago's feverishly competitive strivers to shame. He is featured in every issue of the alumni newsletter, and his success is apparently not intended to diminish the rest of us toiling away at our pizza restaurants and writing our self-help books, but rather to lift us up with him. His triumph gives us all a name. And who is this great-souled being? As it turns out, the guy who founded Match.com is a Niles West alum. But that's not all. Not only did he found Match.com, but he has also recently launched a new venture--Sex.com. Verily, through him, we touch eternity.

Undergrad marginalia call-and-response

2011-03-17T18:18:00.001-04:00

Notes in part II of Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality from my first (enthusiastic) and second (tempered) reading:

Spring break plans for extraordinary goal accomplishment (paper! article! presentation! generals reading!) totally ruined by onset of the flu.

This is for Phoebe

2011-03-08T21:17:00.001-05:00

An excellent article via Ari on Dan Savage's--what shall we call them?--metaphysics:

All the same, behind Savage’s pragmatism stand some fairly strong claims about how sex relates to selfhood. Whatever else he ends up advising a correspondent to do, Savage tends to insist that sexual inclinations—from high libido and a desire for multiple partners to very rare kinks and fetishes—are immutable and even dominant characteristics of any personality. Some desires may be impossible to fulfill, others are flagrantly immoral, and most any can be destructive when pursued without regard for the kinds of ethical guidelines Savage lays out. But for Savage, no matter how we direct its expression, our sexual self is our truest self.

In recent years Savage’s moral elevation of sexual fulfillment has been bolstered by his embrace of popularized accounts of evolutionary biology, which purport to find our true human nature in the primordial past or in our evolutionary cousins, the randy bonobos and aggressive chimpanzees. Last year Savage cowrote one week’s column with the authors of Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, calling their book “the single most important book about human sexuality since Alfred Kinsey.” It caused a stir among his readers, so he followed up with his own comments. “What the authors of Sex at Dawn believe—and what I think they prove—is that we are a naturally nonmonogamous species, despite what we’ve been told for millennia by preachers and for centuries by scientists.” Culture—represented here by hectoring, fanatical preachers, and hectoring, misguided scientists—is a long postscript, an imposition on our true selves. People should live up to their monogamous commitments, which, after all, have the form of a mutually negotiated contract. But they should not expect anything unrealistic from themselves or each other, since such agreements, however binding, are unnatural. Sex will have its way with us one way or another—either by shaping our commitments to the form of its fulfillment or by making us miserable. For Aristotle, we are what we repeatedly do. For Dan Savage, we are what we enduringly desire.

As it happens, this vision fits rather well in a society built around consumption. If Savage’s ethical guidelines—disclosure, autonomy, mutual exchange, and minimum standards of performance—seem familiar or intuitive, it’s probably because they also govern expectations in the markets for goods and services. No false advertising, no lemons, nothing omitted from the fine print: in the deregulated marketplace of modern intimacy, Dan Savage has become a kind of Better Business Bureau, laying out the rules by which individuals, as rationally optimizing firms, negotiate their wildly diverse transactions.

Classical liberalism, however, may prove just as inadequate in the bedroom as it has in the global economy, and for many of the same reasons. It takes into account only a narrow range of our motivations, overstates our rationality and our foresight, downplays the costs of transactions, and ignores the asymmetries of information that complicate any exchange of love or money. For society as a whole, it entails a utopian faith in the capacity of millions of appetites to work themselves out into an optimal economy of sex—a trading floor where the cultural institutions of domesticity once stood. And for the individual, it may only replace the old sexual frustrations with new emotional ones. People who think they are motivated only by lust may end up feeling love; people who forswear any strings may feel them forming; and perfect transparency may prove an ideal no less unattainable than perfect monogamy...

...Potential romantic partners, unlike firms in the classical free-market model, are not infinite in number, and a life of comparison shopping is not free of cost. If the aspiring HND dissolves this years-long transaction in order to find a partner who is just as lovable but less jealous, or who shares his libido at every point, he will likely have a lonely road ahead of him.

A perfect ~~storm~~ haze of blurred distinctions--between the human animal and the other animals, between economics and politics, between eros and utility. The invocation of Aristotle is not for nothing.

UPDATE: Phoebe responds, and gets profiled (unrelated events). To relate them, however, we might note that this is perhaps the source of all of my Phoebe's disagreements (going "all the way down," in the professional philosophy lingo I recently picked up): "What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to combat? > Anti-modernity."

I need a new category for Styles Style

2011-03-05T11:55:00.000-05:00

We've discussed Styles Style here before--that brilliant NYT approach to simultaneously glorifying and demeaning the city's wealthiest residents. You may scoff at this clever innovation on society pages, but I happen to know that there are only so many new spellings of Qaddafi/Khadafy/Ghadhafi/etc. that you can absorb before you find yourself clicking through to personal interest articles like this about the travails of young New York socialites struggling to reconcile arbitrary exclusivity with their thoroughgoing bourgie-ness. Now, this article isn't even personally interesting to an audience wider than five people, and yet, thanks to the gem about slow-minded middle America that the writer has managed to get out of one of his subjects, it has something even for me. The NY-specific class resentment of journalists joins forces with America's generalized aversion to snobbery to produce #1 most emailed articles on topics relevant to no one in America except the person interviewed for the article. Consider this brilliant quote:

To Anne de la Mothe Karoubi, 24, who went to the Marymount School, it’s an intellectual precociousness. “When you grow up in New York City, our minds develop faster,” she said. “You’re not from Wisconsin, you’re not from the middle of America. We’re international, we’re focused, we’re driven.”

The craft involved in this! A reporter got this presumably educated, culturally-aware woman to utter these words on the record to an NYT reporter!

And notice the elegant pairing of the subjects' illustrious prep schools with their humdrum colleges: Dalton, Trinity, Browning (which I'd never heard of before--new knowledge!) goes to Lafayette, GWU, Trinity in Hartford and studies that greatest of all thoroughly middle-brow vocational majors in the world--marketing. I mean, you may as well get an AA in dental hygiene. The reporter delights in all this obviously--he probably went to Brown or Cornell or someplace with an acceptably selective admissions policy and thinks, my SATs were double yours, you airheaded clown in a checked Burberry suit. And just to prove it, he demonstrates that he too knows about "sipp[ing] Côtes du Rhône at sidewalk cafes" and which are the most exclusive enclaves in the Hamptons, so there.

The great tragedy of this article is that the reporter never vindicates the characters in Metropolitan, who are infinitely more interesting than these people, and he doesn't follow the potentially promising line of questioning that may begin by asking exactly what a 23-year-old "art dealer and consultant" actually does, or what is entailed in being a "stylist and fashion designer" at 22. But we'll cut him slack for that if it bought him that Wisconsin quote.

The closest to a podcast that this blog will ever come

2011-02-28T14:32:00.001-05:00

Miss Self-Important on the radio (very briefly). And yes, after hearing "Our baby is Hartford," I'm done with this topic, for now.

Varieties of propositions

2011-02-26T14:31:00.000-05:00

In college, one of my roommates was a frequent target of the Vulgar Proposition by Random Dudes. Living as we did in Hyde Park, Random Dudes frequently included members of the subgroups, Apparently Homeless Dudes, and also Aimlessly Joyriding Dudes Yelling Out of Their Cars, but also the more typical Dudes Walking Down the Street, and Dudes in Dive Bars. Alex was not the type to encourage such requests, so they were always quite funny, especially since the verbal creativity of such people is surprisingly boundless. My personal favorite was when a Random Dude--I can't recall if he was Apparently Homeless or just Walking Down the Street--suggested to her that they would make a great couple because together, they could "make chocolate milk." (I suspect Alex will correct this inaccurate rendering of the incident.)

There is a kind of reasonableness, at least, to asking women one can actually see if they'd like to "make chocolate milk." I, for example, as a plain and permanently scowling person, have never been asked any such thing. But what is the reason for proposition emails? You can't even know if the object of your request is hot. Nonetheless, here is an email I received last week:

I guess I'll start by introducing myself. Hi, my name is [redacted]. I've recently read your article...and I was struck by your honest, challenging, and clear-sighted take on a very timely topic. I immediately liked you as a writer, and I'm writing you now because, well, good writers have got it going on. I, myself, am a very mediocre writer, but then again, I do drive a '99 Chevy Silverado, and there's something women like about a pickup man. You don't happen to be a country music fan, do you? For some reason, someone who goes to Harvard doesn't seem to me like they'd have the right kind of appreciation for country music. That's ok, nobody's perfect.

Now, as readers may know, Miss Self-Important is a fan of country music, and does not appreciate the insinuation that Harvard=effete coastal liberal=listens exclusively to emo-nostalgic hipster nonsense=Miss Self-Important. Miss Self-Important is so down with Real America! She catches your little country song allusion--like lolcats, she sees what you did there! Thus, I was moved to reply:

Thanks for your email. I'm glad you enjoyed my article. Contrary to your presuppositions, I am a country--and especially bluegrass--music fan. Harvard students aren't generally born at Harvard, and some even hail from places where they have a chance to develop the right kinds of appreciations. However, in keeping with my disdain for aimless young adult drifting, I'm also married, which has substantially curtailed my interest in pickup men. But as a pick-up man yourself, I'm sure you'll understand since, as far as meeting wives goes, email may be less effective than traffic jams.

Apparently, however, this doomed me to a multi-part email exchange about pick-up trucks and pick-up trucks. Random Dudes, in life and over email, are strangely persistent. I'm hoping this last response, which I post in homage to another college roommate, will end the conversation:

I have no doubt that there are many available female admirers of pick-up men remaining, more even in [the Midwest] than in New England, although I have learned not to underestimate the residents of New Hampshire on this account.
Best of luck,
Miss Self-Important

παιδεια

2011-02-25T10:51:00.000-05:00

The entire month of February has gone by, and all I've done is study Greek so that someday soon I might be able to produce better translations than this. Did you know that if you learn a new Greek verb form every day for an entire month, you still won't know them all by the end of that month? You will, however, develop a kind of low-level, permanent exhaustion from waking up at 7 AM every day to try.

This leads me to wonder:
1. Is any currently-spoken language as inflected as Greek, and how did anyone in the 5th century speak it correctly?
2. A friend points out that grammars seem to simplify over time--Attic Greek to Koine, for example, or classical Latin to modern Latin--but why would that happen? Shouldn't they become more elaborate instead? Or does the proliferation of vocabulary serve the elaborating function?

Aggressive undergrad marginalia

2011-02-21T18:29:00.000-05:00

A note found in my copy of The Prince, next to the part of ch. 3 about the Roman conquest of Philip and Antiochus:

Pre-emption: take the war to the terrorists before they bring the war here

Grrr! What must we have been discussing in first quarter sosc?

Inside and out

2011-02-01T14:24:00.002-05:00

Front row seats for snowstorm #231 of the winter

WEDNESDAY UPDATE: Exciting new weather atrocity--snow turns to rain, rain causes flood, flood freezes to ice, all on top of the pre-existing two feet of snow. Harvard shuttle buses continue to taunt with the banner, "Think spring!"

UPDATE II: Evidently no inclement weather pattern was to be slighted today, as it's now hailing. Next up, perhaps frogs. Or better, icy frogs.

Things that sound romantic, but aren't

2011-01-26T12:57:00.000-05:00

Nor'easters: a quaint idea, until one comes every week for the entire winter. Why not drop the regional hokey-ness and call it what it is--nonstop blizzards?

Analogies

2011-01-25T08:25:00.007-05:00

I just finished up a long overdue paper, and was getting ready to start in on another one when I opened the draft and discovered to my great surprise that I had already written 10 pages of it. I felt just like when I find unexpected change under the couch cushions, except like $200 worth of change.

Elsewhere

2011-01-24T15:50:00.000-05:00

I can has an article.

"Greatest hits of the '60s, '70s, and now the '80s"

2011-01-22T19:39:00.000-05:00

This is the new tagline of the Boston oldies station, at least since the new year. There are two problems with this change. First, I happen to like the greatest hits of the '50s and want them back. Second, I was alive in the '80s. Oldies have always been an expressly historical genre, representing pop music that happened before I existed and thus was of interest to me for purely antiquarian reasons. (I mean, it's hard to explain how I was an antiquarian at age six, when I first started listening to the radio, but suffice it to say, I was.) Now, oldies and I have apparently converged. History has fused with the present! What outrage is next? My present will be the present's past? Oldies will represent my personal nostalgia instead of the nostalgia of old people? I WILL BE OLD???

Unacceptable.

Final thoughts in support of Amy Chua, who will disappear from the internet any minute now

2011-01-21T15:45:00.001-05:00

As I predicted, the controversy immediately turned into a heated racial conflict in which white people applauded themselves for loving their children more than Asians and Asians complained that Chua rekindled memories of their own childhood traumas and was reinforcing pernicious model minority myths just when it seemed like Asians drug dealers and hip hop dancers might finally get their place in the limelight. Since I still don't care about these things enough to worry that China will eat us or think that Asian children are merely deformed versions of our infinitely well-adjusted non-Asian American children (back pats all around), I only want to answer some final comments on the previous post and clarify my original endorsement of the argument for making your children do things they don't want to do on completely Western grounds (which are Chua's grounds too), since I have no idea what the Chinese grounds would be.

Last week, I played tennis a couple of times for the first time in probably six years. At first, I couldn't quite master the size of the court and the height of the net, but a few minutes in, the old rhythm returned, and I was able to keep up (though not beat) my much more recently-practiced companions. And it felt quite satisfying and, in Chua's words, fun. And this could not happen unless I had started playing tennis when I was eight and kept at it for 10 years, and I wouldn't have done that had my mother not pressured me to.

That pressure was not always or even mostly well-received--I liked tennis well enough and was objectively better suited to it than many other activities (I tried basketball about the same time, but was alas doomed to be 5'2), but I did not like having to practice it in any sustained way. Thus my childhood tennis career featured many tantrums on my part, much parental resentment, waking up at 7 am on Saturday mornings to get to lessons, and then four years of varsity team regimens, the last year of which was combined with my last-ditch effort to get into a selective college that involved taking so many courses that I didn't have a lunch period but still had to stay to play tennis until 6 pm every weekday and all day Saturday and never sleep. And all this was to maintain a very low level of competitiveness--my high school team sucked and my parents realized that my future was not going to hinge on tennis and never sent me to tennis camps or farmed me out to private instructors so that I could compete at a higher level.

The result of all this is that now I can play tennis tolerably well. And what is the value of that for a political theory grad student, you ask? Because it is fun to be good at things, and most things are only fun when you're good at them. People who take up tennis as adults are extremely unlikely to become even as tolerably good as me, in large part because it is very difficult to master the correct stroke form as an adult, and improvement in tennis is based almost entirely on good form. When adults try to improve their game and their form is wrong (you may have seen old dudes trying to hit really hard while basically punching the ball at your local community courts), they develop sports injuries. And when you're not good, tennis is an extremely frustrating waste of time--all your shots fly into the sky or fall into the net, and you can't keep a satisfying rally alive. The same principle applies to many satisfying kinds of knowledge and activity--music, languages, sports--they can only be mastered if one gets an early start, and one can only get an early start if parents pressure. (Sure, there are some children who will practice diligently out of pure love for the activity and will not need any external pressure, but they are rare and more likely to make a vocation of the activity rather than a hobby.)

Parental pressure can backfire--hence the stories of all the resentful forced pianists who now avoid piano on pain of death as a result of being pressured as children. But, given that they would also not play as adults if they hadn't been pressured at all, that outcome seems to be a wash. Not playing piano because you hate it and not playing because you don't know how put you in the same non-playing place. If we account for the haters and the ignorant, we are left with a sizable middle portion of pressured children who will come out of the experience with a tolerable competence in the activity, and that seems to be the goal of most parents who override their children's indolent wills and demand that they practice or rehearse.

The other arguments against parental pressure--that it breeds resentment and diminishes the time left to the child to imagine and play and find himself or whatever--seems equally biased towards the extremes. This might be true if a child is being forced to practice violin or whatever 20 hours a day, but most parents, including all the Asian parents I've ever known, are not that demanding. They know their children and realize quite quickly, like my parents did, that, unless their child shows remarkable early talent, violin or tennis or French is not going to be the whole of that child's future and so doesn't warrant the kind of full-time dedication that a vocation would. Those who oppose parental pressure because it monopolizes childhood time seriously underestimate how much time there is in childhood. I spent 10 years playing tennis regularly, and yet I could basically forget about the entire experience until last week's tennis playing reminded me. There were so many other things that happened in those 10 years that tennis is not even among my primary memories of that time.

As with time, so with parental resentment. The fights I had with my mother over tennis had also faded from mind until I thought about this Amy Chua thing. I still don't understand quite how she got her daughters to go along with her regimen since I was not so amenable to much milder versions of that kind of pressure and could be moved to tantrums by much slighter provocation. But even by high school, I had pretty much forgotten any resentments I harbored against my mother for making me play tennis in the years prior. Again, one might point to extreme cases of festering child-parent resentments born of parental pressure, but I don't see how they demonstrate the intrinsic evil of pressure, since never overriding your children's preferences can result in an equal degree of resentment that you never gave them opportunities or developed their potential and left them with no long-practiced and developed skills in adulthood.

A final argument against this kind of pressure is that its objects are chosen arbitrarily. Why violin and not ice hockey or French or bassoon or Japanese or carpentry? How can you know that the activities you choose for your children now will serve them as adults if you can't know their future occupations in advance, or even that they will be able to enjoy these activities later? (If they don't have access to a piano, for example, they can't play it.) Rousseau acknowledges this same problem in Emile as a fundamental difficulty of all modern education:

In the social order where all positions are determined, each man ought to be raised for his. If an individual formed for his position leaves it, he is no longer fit for anything. Education is useful only insofar as fortune is in agreement with the parents' vocation. In any other case it is harmful to the student, if only by virtue of the prejudices it gives him. In Egypt where the son was obliged to embrace the station of his father, education at least had a sure goal. But among us where only the ranks remain and the men who compose them change constantly, no one knows whether in raising his son for his rank he is not working against him.

For the most part, the problem of the unsuitability of the education one gives to children for their future needs is insurmountable. We simply can't know any longer (if we ever could) what our children will be and what they will need to know in advance. Nonetheless, we can't not educate them for this reason. So, unless you take this as a reason to follow Emile's curriculum, which is expressly designed to educate the universal human being who is prepared for anything that comes his way, you have to make arbitrary choices for your children. You can justify them with some kind of argument about how piano or basketball or Japanese will teach them fundamental "life skills" of some sort, and it's true in some cases. Diligence and persistence are good "life skills" that might be learned from almost any childhood activity diligently and persistently pursued, but that's just the problem--any activity. So which one to impose on your children?

The answer, I think, is that it doesn't much matter, so pick whichever activities are 1) the most conducive to your children's individual natures and temperaments (says Locke) and 2) the most demanding and satisfying, and 3) most worth preserving for the future of our civilization. There is no great shame--contra many Chua detractors--in selecting something that will also look good on a college application, since in large part, college admissions does value those skills that are actually difficult to master and valuable for the world, even if it does for superficial and instrumental reasons. Which leads us to the final point--pressure to do well in school.

Look people, it is important to do well in school, both for short term ends like getting a job and for long-term goods like happiness, understanding, and self-knowledge. Pushing your children to master the middle school math curriculum when they would rather get C's is not a form of cruelty or an impossibility--middle school math is not that hard and far more children can master it than currently do. I know you all know of dozens of people (including yourselves) who are geniuses despite their indifferent academic records, but you and those people would not be less brilliant if they'd also done well in 10-grade geometry. It is easy enough for kids like me, who quite liked school, to decide at age eight that they're good enough at reading and writing, so don't really need to also be good at math and to promptly stop trying for the next 10 years. This was a mistake. Yes, things have so far turned out fine despite this mistake, but it was no less a mistake. It is as important to understand mathematics as it is to understand any of the other constitutive structures of our society (language, literature, history, etc). It's too bad that I constitutionally suck at math, yes, but I could've sucked somewhat less if I hadn't simply given up in grade school. Whether the suckage differential would've been significant in any way, I don't know, but at the very least, it would not have hurt to try. Childhood is long and its petty injustices are easily forgotten, so a few more math problems would hardly have made a dent.

On the other hand, of course, spilt milk. Childrearing as a political question has historically been a matter of on average (for Locke and Rousseau), and is now a matter of in aggregate. It never offers much assistance when one is faced with an actual screaming child. So good luck with that, peeps. Consider Greek and Latin instruction at an early age.

Speaking of gym class

2011-01-12T14:09:00.000-05:00

In a serendipitous moment, just as Alpheus tries to candy-coat the futility and cruelty of gym class, my own high school district finally relaxes the class's iron grip on students.

The plan as voted on will reduce staff in the physical wellness department by incorporating health–now a one-semester stand-alone class–into sophomore physical education classes, cut drivers education, and schedule junior and senior electives more efficiently...

After listening to teachers talk about the importance of physical activity and drivers education, Superintendent Nanciann Gatta pointed out that while physical activity is important, the district now requires eight semesters of physical education and one of health–and only six of math and four of science.

I suppose I should not get worked up over the fact that these requirements have been in place--in that ratio--for at least a decade. One semester of gym class for every semester of high school enrollment--and no exceptions for such irrelevant substitutes as varsity sports participation. (Although that last rule may have changed since my tenure.)

Sure, I would've preferred to have a lunch period my senior year instead of standing out on a softball diamond in shorts and a t-shirt in November for 40 minutes a day. I probably could've found something better to do with my time instead of a summer school health class I was forced to take because it too was required for graduation on top of all that gym time, during which I spent eight weeks watching powerpoint presentations depicting the symptoms of chlamydia that the instructor had outsourced to the students so that he could get paid to surf internet sports sites. (He also told us he invented the cheese hat that Green Bay Packers fans wear and became a millionaire from it.) One day, when we look back on the successes and shortcomings of NCLB, the elimination of the colossal waste of time that was health class at Niles West will rank among its triumphs.

It's true that things worked out ok for me in the end. Now, maybe they will also work out better for other people. After much searching, I finally found the actual restructuring plan. (Notably, the revamped school "newspaper" has opted to forgo coverage of teacher firings and curriculum changes in order to whinge more extensively about how unfair the school ban on Facebook is.) While I am deeply dismayed to see such illustrious traditions as "Fashion Workshop," "Sports and Entertainment Marketing," and "Interior Design 1 and 2" (we had this???) bite the dust, I find it difficult to be upset about increased emphasis on real subjects at the expense of such otherwise edifying and important instruction as "Chlamydia 101, or How I Became Rich By Selling Cheese Hats."

Crowdsourcing my future plans

2011-01-11T11:39:00.003-05:00

Dear internet,

Assuming I pass my generals and all that, what should I do this summer?

Hearts,
Miss Self-Important

Greatest victory for cheapness ever

2011-01-10T13:23:00.000-05:00

Emily Hale gives us a tour of the Used Food Store. Intrigued, I Googled the store, and found this testimony on Yelp: "If you don't care the food is a little bit expired, you will love this place."

I anticipate that something like this will open in Cambridge in approximately never. I really should re-consider my aversion to small town life.

A study in comparisons: How fun should learning be?

2011-01-09T10:46:00.007-05:00

As a long-time proponent of both not freaking out about teh Azns and not permitting pedagogy to surrender to juvenile interests in video games and texting, the contrast between this:

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up.

...and this:

A.P. teachers have long complained that lingering for an extra 10 or 15 minutes on a topic can be a zero-sum game, squeezing out something else that needs to be covered for the exam. PowerPoint lectures are the rule. The homework wears down many students. And studies show that most schools do the same canned laboratory exercises, providing little sense of the thrill of scientific discovery.

All that, says the College Board, is about to change...A preview of the changes shows that the board will slash the amount of material students need to know for the tests and provide, for the first time, a curriculum framework for what courses should look like...In biology, a host of more creative, hands-on experiments are intended to help students think more like scientists...The new approach is important because critical thinking skills are considered essential for advanced college courses and jobs in today’s information-based economy. College administrators and veteran A.P. teachers familiar with the new biology curriculum believe the changes...might bring some of the excitement back to science learning.

greatly pleases me. Except I realize that, in approximately seven seconds, Teh Internets will tear Amy Chua to shreds for 1) not authentically representing Chinese people everywhere*, 2) exacerbating negative cultural stereotypes about Smart Asians, and 3) being tyrannical, repressive, and possibly psychotic, whereas the changes to the AP exams will be lauded as beneficial and progressive. But I maintain that there is nothing about the supposed Chinese/Asian/ambiguously ethnic attitude towards education that is not wholly in keeping with fully mainstream American values, which, if you need to be reminded, do actually include hard work, persistence, discipline, and parental obedience. I have no doubt that ideas truly foreign to us do prevail in China, but these ideas don't make it to Scarsdale High without undergoing some congenial modifications. The real question is, how did Amy Chua get her children to obey?

*Sometimes, I am glad that there are, numerically, very few Jews in the world so that I will never be held to the standard of accurately representing the views of one billion people.

My twiblings, myself

2011-01-08T13:01:00.000-05:00

In grade school, I was instructed to begin my five-paragraph essays for standardized tests with a "hook," which I was told could take one of two forms: a dictionary definition, or a famous quote. As a result, I'm now skeptical of any essay that begins with these tricks, which I associate with an ensuing narrative about either the writer's trip to Disneyworld or why his mother is his hero. Beginning with a famous quote is suspicious, but the beginning with a quote from a book the writer immediately admits to never having read is downright dismal. And Melanie Thernstrom's essay on farming out her baby-making to a small stable of women is indeed dismal. I assume it was pitched as a "let me show you my bizarrely technologically-enhanced family to demonstrate why it's justifiable to do almost anything to have children you plan to love with great intensity" kind of thing. But the tone! It shifts maniacally between celebration of babies and bitter disdain of surrogacy haters, who turn out to be pretty much everyone.

Having developed an all-consuming desire for babies at any cost (but, notably, not the cost of adoption, which she insists is too high while the cost of six cycles of IVF, an egg donor, and two gestational carriers is apparently not...), she proceeded to arrange an elaborate process by which a stranger's eggs would be deposited into two different women's wombs in order to produce two almost simultaneously-delivered but only fractionally-related children. She then convinced herself this was a totally logical and ethical route to parenthood, so it must be made "transparent" to everyone, and anyone who disagrees or simply isn't aware of her personal philosophy about multi-player baby-conception schemes must be destroyed. Maybe you even want to help her along on this road to family manufacturing, but mention a term she doesn't like in her presence, or express a trace of skepticism or even well-intentioned but badly-received sympathy, and you will be cut out of Thernstrom's life.

Here is a partial list of Thernstrom's victims in this article:

“You won’t have anything in common with the carriers,” a director of a Los Angeles agency (which we decided not to work with) insisted dismissively.

“TELL EVERYONE or tell no one,” the director of an egg-donation agency advised me. ”...In that instant I made up my mind to be completely transparent about it (and to warn people to avoid her agency).

I hated the way women would volunteer that I wasn’t missing anything by not being pregnant and then regale me with their pregnancy war stories, their eyes gleaming with pride.

I was irked by all the people — especially health care professionals — who were unable to master the term “gestational carrier” and referred to Melissa and Fie as “birth mothers” or “biological mothers” even after I explained that the term was inappropriate outside the context of adoption.

I was infuriated when the pediatrician in the little hospital on the coast where our daughter, Violet, was born said she didn’t know these “newfangled” words and continued to call Fie “the mom.”

“Actually, there is no biological mother,” I’d sometimes add, in a tone that I hoped suggested Isn’t this interesting rather than You are an insensitive fool.

The nurse urged me to stick with it. “We don’t want you to feel like you can’t nurse,” she said. I suddenly felt cross. Did she really think I couldn’t handle the reality that my body was not producing milk after it didn’t give birth to my baby? I knew she was trying to be supportive, but her concern made me feel diminished...

I felt similarly when Violet was born five days later and another perfectly nice nurse presented us with the hospital’s certificate to commemorate her birth, on which there was no mention of Fie.

We arranged for a doula to come over...she took it upon herself to tell me, in a empathetic voice, “just because you’re not their biological mother doesn’t mean you’re any less a mother.” “Yup,” I replied evenly. “For sure.” But I made sure never to have her to our house again.

Michael was hesitant. “You’re comfortable with it?” he asked. But his solicitousness made me uncomfortable...

Even the wonderful! perfect! incredible! egg donor and surrogates (who are described in great physical detail down to their swollen breasts "dripping with fecundity," while the babies themselves are hardly described at all) are heaped with praise for their fun/outdoorsy/carefree qualities, but seem to be missing a range of intelligent/driven/diligent attributes. Women who sign up to bear your children, it seems, have "delightful personalities," but you know...

And then there is the crux of all this TMI, the justification for the entire baby-farming enterprise:

"For many couples, the most crushing aspect of fertility treatment is not all the early morning blood-draws but the haunting feeling that the universe is telling them that their union is not — in a spiritual, as well as a biological, sense — fruitful. But I knew Michael and I were a great couple — I had pined so long for the elusive feeling of rightness, and now that I finally had it, I was damned if I was going to let biology unbless us. And I knew if we let biology become Mother Nature, we actually would be damned."

Having admitted that she doesn't believe in such things as a "spiritual" demand for a "fruitful" union, she goes on to admit a mere two sentences later that she also doesn't believe in biology, at least not as a force that demands or constrains. Unmoved by arguments from from religion or any philosophy of nature, Thernstrom doesn't seem to have any reason at all to believe her marriage ought to produce children. So why does she? Perhaps she has very deeply absorbed the images of the family in popular culture, but why should we endorse behavior that is admitted to be the result of seductive pop culture messaging?

Then there is the baby-farming as positive good argument nestled into all this. Thernstrom says that five parents are better than two because "I wanted to avoid what I think of as the claustrophobia of the nuclear family. I wanted my children to have as many other influences as possible..." I agree that the tendency towards exclusive inwardness and insularity of the nuclear family may be a dangerous one, and it can cut people off from other important stabilizing relationships in the world, like friends and neighbors, etc. But why is it necessary for a child to have five parents to avoid this danger? Can't parents make an effort to socialize with extended families, friends, and neighbors to achieve the same effect for their children instead of demanding a genetic contribution from every adult that is to come into contact with them?

Snark aside, my sincere question about all this is, why? Why do some women suddenly want to have children so much that they're willing to go through such technological and social contortions--through IVF, elective single motherhood, the use of strangers' gametes and wombs--to produce them? Why are they willing to endure six rounds of IVF? Why are they willing to bend their society's legal and social definitions of maternity, paternity, parenthood, and custody into shapes whose near-future contours they can't even imagine? It's not as if Thernstrom is opposed to the principle of exclusive parenthood or even to the traditional family; it's just the opposite. But she seems totally uninterested in the ways her campaign for babies might diminish her own claim to her children, so long as the law accommodates her present desire for fractionally biological children. A couple years ago, when Cheryl was writing about ART, I read a lot about the legal and ethical implications of baby technology, but it always seemed that a fervent, indeed obsessive desire for babies among infertile couples was simply a given, if not a kind of noble tragedy.

Having a family is good for most people, and, as what Phoebe would call a natalist, I'm all for it. I can easily believe that women--some more than others, no doubt--have strong innate urges to bear children that they can't fully rationalize, and that discovering that they or their partners are infertile is devastating. But I don't see how these innate desires should obviously lead couples down the Thernstrom road to baby-making, except maybe among particularly devout couples whose wish to fulfill a religious commandment to bear children goes beyond personal desire. But those couples would seem to be the least likely to turn to ART and the most likely to accept infertility and find other ways to include children in their lives (if you want to read a long list of such stories, search for "infertility" at Christianity Today).

If there has been no better time or place in history for secular, educated, and steadily-employed women to find happiness in pursuits other than child-rearing, why is the market for assisted reproduction growing so quickly? For those women who, like Thernstrom, don't adhere to biblical imperatives or conceptions of nature that demand procreation, and who, moreover, were previously willing to delay the whole business of family knowing that this might make its eventual realization difficult or impossible, where does such an intense and sudden desire to produce children at any cost come from? I don't doubt that people who conceive children through ART love them a great deal and perhaps even more than some couples who come about their children the old-fashioned way, but is that itself a justification?

Thernstrom is--for a professional writer--surprisingly vague and incoherent about her own motivations. She offers only that "having children was one of life’s great acts of self-definition." Does she mean by this that people without children are undefined? Or that your own identity is determined by how your children turn out? Or that children are the ultimate customizable ornament that conveys your conception of yourself? Almost any way you parse this line, the meaning seems pretty awful and quite wrong.

Picking up the resolution thread

2011-01-01T01:59:00.000-05:00

I skipped last year due to grad school-induced life malaise, but this year low-ambition, self-replicating resolutions are back. They are:
1. Finish my MA.
2. Read more, play cell phone Mah-Jong in the library less.
3. Write more, using fewer words.
4. Finish furnishing my apartment.
5. Be less unhappy a year from now.
Optional 6: Finish War and Peace.

More considerations on YA lit

2010-12-28T21:40:00.000-05:00

As promised, I read my former classmate's YA novel over Christmas. As a frequent browser of the Barnes and Noble YA section, I bring you this and other news from the trenches of market-researched girldom:

Vampire sex mush is still in, and now even has an entire sub-section of its own called "paranormal romance." Melodramatic amoral "realism" is also still in, despite having probably exhausted its credibility. You know, the books where an innocent, straight-laced girl drinks one beer at a party and then ends up pregnant, a heroin junkie, and DEAD IN A GUTTER? Do girls still like these books? The convention is already 40 years old--authors too timid to suggest that maybe some adolescent behaviors are bad in principle, that they reveal a lack of restraint and prudence, say that make you a bad person, so they invent incredible (and, needless to say, incredibly unlikely) consequences to warn girls away from them. If conscience doesn't punish you for drinking that beer because conscience is too moralistic and the author doesn't want to seem judgmental, then the wrath of nature must. It seems like this illusion should wear off once girls realize that ending up pregnant or dead from a couple of beers is not, in fact, "realistic." And most girls know this by, what, age 13? So who's left to read these books except 10-year-olds and emotional voyeurs? Which, come to think of it, really encompasses a lot of girls.

Anyway, Sales's book admirably avoids both vampires and melodramatic amoral realism. No one dies from beer or pot. It also avoids the vulgarity, hyperactive sexuality, and adulation of low culture of the other books it shares shelf-space with at Barnes. There is no product positioning and no female characters who are, at the age of 16, utterly consumed by their passion for some guy in the grade ahead. Instead, the characters spend a lot of time doing homework. And, as some of you know, one of my greatest media-related desires is to see intelligence established in some way other than the mere repeated assertion that Character X is really smart, even though she never goes to class, does any homework, reads any books, or otherwise demonstrates the slightest intellectual inclination. Often, such characters will out of nowhere ace their SATs as a convenient testament to their latent genius. Like the outsized lust that would fit better in a novel with a voluptuous woman in the arms of a man with hair that could plausibly be described as a "mane" on the cover, this characterization of adolescence is a fail. Smart girls do a lot of homework. The characters in Mostly Good Girls do too, so I approve of this, although it still isn't all that intelligence portrayed could be.

And really, the writing is quite witty and the characters are well-formed. There are many things that are both funny and true (to, um, my own life, which is my only measure for YA lit), like the quest for dessert ("Personally, I will do many undesirable things, like babysit total demon children and eat dinner at my Uncle Rick's, if I believe a good dessert will come at the end of it"), and the badness of high school suicide poetry. On balance, I'm pretty sure that I also liked dessert more than any guy I met in high school. I realize I might unusual in this regard, but I think not extremely.

The only problem is that I have no idea what the point of the book is. There are two girls--one is the hard-working, level-headed narrator who wants to get good grades and date some cute guy, and the other is her best friend who is awesome at everything but then for some reason decides to sabotage herself because she feels she doesn't deserve her good luck, so after hooking up for a while with some loser Starbucks barista who lives in Somerville(!), she transfers from their exclusive prep school to public school (Brookline High!). Perhaps I fail to see the true magnitude of this precipitous fall from prep school to perfectly good public school, but I never understood why exactly Perfect Friend decided to fail (or, in her words, "to embrace [her] second, or third, or fiftieth best"), what this even means, or how exactly her behavior constitutes a notable failure in the end.

It's as though the plot of the story was supposed to be "stuff we did during junior year as narrated by witty, self-aware people" and then someone demanded that a poignant life-altering event involving elements of Modern Girl Dangers (of which there are three: sex, drugs, and bad grades) be worked in. I realize this is a convention of the genre. Ordinarily, I can accept this because even cheesy constraints can sometimes be a basis for inventiveness (as in, for example, Buffy!). The problem is that the convention of YA lead almost without exception to treacly garbage, and the pushback against this garbage is disproportionately weak.

Adults both produce and judge the merits of books intended for children, and children--contrary to the claims of realists that the reason that children don't like to read is because traditional books are boring and only books in which all the characters die of heroin overdoses can hold their attention--actually read whatever adults give them. (It's also true that some children don't read at all, but those children have also, for 40 years, failed to be won over to the activity by the publication of increasingly vulgar and melodramatic fiction. YA books about gang rape and drug addiction basically share their readership with Jane Austen--that is, they are aimed at girls who read, and those girls do so more or less indiscriminately.*)

Children, unlike adults, are a captive audience whose tastes are shaped by book marketing far more than those of adults. Fiction doesn't yet reflect to them a world they already know and whose truth they can judge by the standard of experience; it projects an image of what the world (and they themselves) should and will be like in anticipation of their experience of it. So girls don't reject bad YA lit when that's what dominates the world of books available to them; instead, they assume that this is what books basically are, and that their contents are what their near-future will and perhaps should be. It's either this, it seems, or dragons, and even I would rather read about anorexic meth addicts than dragons.

As a result, there seems to be very little incentive to break with treacle-inducing convention in YA lit and a lot of incentive to disparage the intellect of readers. But just because girls will read almost anything doesn't mean they should be offered only lowest common denominator stuff, if only because it forms them more effectively than beach reading does adults. I realize that the existence of libraries makes offerings cumulative--they have as much access to Austen as to Twilight--even as publishers have to constantly put out new material. Still, there are clearly better writers than Meg Cabot and the woman who wrote the Crank series out there who understand adolescent girldom as something other than either a period of endless horror or of endless shopping. Mostly Good Girls almost gets there, and clearly is an effort to avoid some of the genre's worst diseases. But I suspect Leila Sales can do better. She has great style; she should just come up with a plot worthy of it. Also, maybe better cover art.

*Yes, yes, I know that like five adolescent girls in the entire country are exclusive readers of scifi and fantasy. Fine, let what I say be inapplicable to them, and that still leaves 90 percent of the teen girl book market.

Trader Joe's, my love

2010-12-25T16:21:00.000-05:00

I can't believe I was not alerted to this article before. In Chicago and DC, I liked Trader Joe's well enough, but except for a few select items (specifically, avocados and beer), it was still more expensive than the local supermarket chains. True, it had some cool options that Jewel and Giant lacked, but because it was out of the way and inconvenient, I rarely went. Then I moved to Boston, where even the local supermarket chain cost as much as Whole Foods, and suddenly Trader Joe's was glorious, conveniently-located, cheap food land of both excitement and staples. After my entire refrigerator and pantry was populated by its items, I too started to wonder what was happening in Monrovia, CA (also, where Monrovia, CA even was). Given that all of Trader Joes' products seem to be warehoused there, I imagined that the whole place was some kind of company town--a wonderland of cheap beer and sweetened dried green mangoes.

Last, year, Trader Joe's sold an extremely excellent paid thai starter-in-a-box that came with the fish-soy-tamarind sauce mix and the rice noodles, and required that you add in the fresh ingredients yourself. This was such a great idea! Do you know how hard it is to find tamarind pulp in a grocery store to make pad thai from scratch? SO HARD. On the other hand, do you know how gross and salty the pre-made, microwaveable pad thai-in-a-box meals are? SO GROSS. This starter was the most perfect pad thai thing ever made! And it made two portions each time--lunch AND dinner! So great! And then...they stopped stocking it.

This is the downside of Trader Joe's. You come to love some item, to entrust maybe all of your meal-consumption to it, to rely on it for all your sustenance, and then one day, it's gone. The pad thai starter disappeared over a year ago, but when I go to Trader Joe's now, I still visit the place on the shelf where it used to live, hoping that the benevolent will of the Trader Joe's Gods decides to have it re-stocked it while I'm not looking. In the meantime, I have to make pad thai from scratch, without the tamarind, which I still haven't found anywhere, not even Trader Joe's. It's not as good.

In defense of product turnover, I do love the new green mangoes, although unlike the pad thai, they can't become both lunch and dinner every day.

The new commercial domesticity: Miss Self-Important tries to make stuff

2010-12-18T18:03:00.000-05:00

Many of the women I know (who are my age; I don't actually know very many people older than me, which I suppose is strange in its own right) have, since graduating from college, succumbed to some kind of hand-making disease which involves channeling primal housewife urges in every context where something could be bought, and insisting on making it instead.

Don't get me wrong; this isn't a moral scourge. In fact, the general trend to hand-make stuff led to the creation of Etsy (which is, notably, totally dominated by women), which is maybe the third or fourth greatest Internet Thing ever, after Amazon and Google and Lolcats. I have benefited a great deal from other women's crafting urges. But it's still a strange impulse to me, since my reaction to the post-college mode of acquiring things was not wonder at how many commercial products could be handmade instead, but wonder that I could actually afford to purchase commercial products. The awe and glory of having a real income for the first time in ever made me think, "I can now purchase soap any time I want, anywhere I want!", not "I can now purchase lye and glycerin and boil them for hours to make my own soap!" Making stuff that costs almost nothing at a supermarket is for poor people in places without supermarkets, not people with a weekly paycheck full of relief from necessity, like me (or, the me that used to get a weekly paycheck).

There are many universalizing arguments advanced for The New Commercial Domesticity (which is local! organic! healthy! sustainable! neighborly! anti-corporate!), but they all seem to be excuses for the urge of the young and hip to--as the name of an old and uncannily accurate Facebook group once phrased it--"Aestheticize My Life As a Means of Justifying My Existence." The primal housewife is channeled to customize not just traditionally decorative objects but everything one owns and consumes an aesthetic representation of the self. My pencil case was purchased only after an exhaustive winnowing of options not compatible with my style aspirations. I buy into this ideology (see pencil case) so far as it involves the purchasing end of things, not so much in the sphere of domestic aesthetics (in this sphere, thrift still largely trumps aesthetics), but very much in the sphere of gift exchange. Every Christmas, I leech off the impressive domestic craft talentz of at least a dozen women on Etsy so that I can send people gifts that demonstrate that I took account of each one's individual aesthetic aspirations. (And I did, peeps! I spent a lot of time thinking about what to get you!)

Still, buying other people's handmade goods, while an essential part of the New Commercial Domesticity, is not alone sufficient (alas, a problem plaguing shopping as a solution to Social Problems in general). It's just substituting organic lip balm from the local bee farm for Chapstick. Since the whole thing is at bottom opposed to commerce and consumption, it aspires to be a large-scale in-kind exchange rather than a market. It's just that, as you might imagine, money is a really convenient form of exchange. But the way to compensate for that unfortunate fact is to contribute your own goods to the market--to make and sell, and use the proceeds to buy what others make. Amateurs welcome! Cue to my female friends, who make many things, but not yet their living on Etsy. (You might notice that this is basically a voluntary and redundant replication of the origins of capitalism. But isn't that the point? To make for yourself things that already widely exist pre-made? Including soap and the present political order?)

Incorporating hand-making into gift-giving is a big challenge since 1) I am not extremely crafty, and 2) I am extremely cheap, and it's rarely cheaper to buy all the ingredients and packaging for a hand-made gift than to buy the gift whole. But on occasions when one must shop for people with expensive tastes that cannot be satisfied by my gift budget and who live nearby (shipping is expensive), it can be cost-effective. Hand-made things suggest the expenditure of housewifey effort and time that is hard to quantify into a price tag. And it's hard not to be appreciative when people give you things they made, as long as those people are over the age of 12 and their creations don't consist of popsicle sticks and dry macaroni.

Thus, my effort for this Christmas, for the person who will be cat-sitting for the next two weeks:

(Coconut brigadeiros and chocolate truffles)

(Bow-tying technique could use work)

And do you know what Sebastian said when I showed this to him? "Why did you spend so much time on this? Can't you just buy her chocolates?" At least we can be assured that, even if women tried to reinvent the wheel and hand-make everything, men might still keep the principle of practicality alive.

Best campus news story ever

2010-12-17T18:42:00.000-05:00

Between muggings, fraud, and death, the Crimson brings you this delightful tale: 'Justice' Exam Blue Books Stolen From TF. This is precisely the kind of absurd scandal that should be rocking a college campus. What are the chances this actually happened, and the TF didn't just lose the exams somewhere and make up this story? I'm not sure, though it does seem pretty strange to break into a car and steal some undergrad exams, but not the car itself. Then again, maybe the exams are worth a lot in Asia...

Open letter to the writers of Buffy

2010-12-16T23:21:00.001-05:00

Dear writers of Buffy,

For five seasons, you managed to avoid getting all after-school special-y on some Major Social Issue, and then in season six, you give us Willow's "magic addiction" that just happens to look exactly like a heroin habit? And suddenly it's all compulsion, lying, screaming hysterics, and "withdrawal symptoms"? Please, gag me with a spoon.

And what exactly is nature of witchcraft on this show? Because you're always telling us how Willow is such a remarkably powerful witch, but it seems like even amateurs can successfully pull off powerful spells when they try. Anya conjured a room full of bunnies and a sword-fighting skeleton, Jonathan made himself Awesome, and Dawn brought her mother back from the dead without a whole lot of practice. So why does Willow have to spend two years perfecting her pencil float? And all the supposed side-effects of magic, aren't they a little less convincing than you make them sound? Willow's spells never actually go wrong because she does them wrong or isn't sufficiently powerful. A little spark leaping from the fireplace and onto a pile of brambles is just chance, not side effect or error. The whole magic construct just isn't as logical as the demon universe or the technologically-animated evil constructs. (Yes, I did just say that.)

Also, is it just me, or does the new vampy magic Willow kinda kill the show?

No love,
Miss Self-Important

Tidings

2010-12-12T14:37:00.000-05:00

Phoebe may insist that the one remaining criterion of American, assimilated, secular, modern, probably inter-married Judaism is the refusal to celebrate Christmas, but I don't feel particular beholden to such pointless crusades any longer. I, for one, love Christmas. I love lights and trees and songs and presents and huge retail markdowns. This year, to demonstrate my long-standing but never before enacted love of Christmas, I purchased this very small tree at Trader Joe's (shown with cat for scaling):

It's not much, I realize. I also realize that it's crooked and fairly ugly. But it's a start. Next year, bigger tree and nicer lights. And cookie baking! There will also be cookie baking! But not this year, because this year, there are finals instead. Aspiration is about 90% of the Christmas spirit though, so I think I'm doing it right.

Extracurricular activities in grad school

2010-12-11T19:40:00.000-05:00

My department requires that second-year grad students produce the entertainment for the annual holiday party. Here is what my cohort produced. It will be of interest to only an extremely small audience outside the department, and in fact, I can't even identify all the faculty featured in it.

Devolutions

2010-12-07T15:17:00.000-05:00

This may explain what happened to the Midway Review:

John Podhoretz, Jonah, and others, have done a very good job highlighting the incoherence of the “No Labels” project—it’s basically a way to label as unconstructive people who disagree with the no labels crowd. John Miller also brings up O’Sullivan’s First Law (“all organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing”) in this context.

Oops, my bad.

An open letter to my high school newspaper

2010-12-05T19:35:00.001-05:00

Dear high school newspaper,

Isn't the purpose of going online-only to actually post some content online at some point? Just a thought.

Some love,
Miss Self-Important

UPDATE: Oops, I hadn't realized it moved and became a giant blog. I can't bring myself to update the link on my sidebar to this.

An open letter to the characters on Buffy

2010-12-04T14:07:00.001-05:00

Dear characters on Buffy,

Do you really expect me to believe that you have lived in Southern California all your lives and only two of you know how to drive by the age of 20? And one of those two is actually an old British guy? Look--vampires, demons, trolls, hellmouths--all that I am willing to believe. But your inability to drive crosses the boundary of the absurd.

No love,
Miss Self-Important

Sleeping at Lamont

2010-12-03T14:12:00.000-05:00

The Crimson responds to my despair with a photo series. Note the bare-footed guy! Not ok!

I can has a better political theory of education?

2010-12-02T18:46:00.000-05:00

I've been doing a lot of research this semester on homeschooling for reasons that, again, aren't really clear to me. In general, I think that public schooling is at once not as bad as it is made out to be and also much, much worse, so it's quite easy for me to endorse alternatives without getting all, "Down with the public schools!" about it. Barring huge changes in the labor market however, I doubt homeschooling will ever be extremely popular, which is all the more reason to let it be. This makes me a bad political theorist, since, as I've learned from my research, consequentialism is SLOPPY THINKING and we need RIGOROUS PRINCIPLES ROOTED IN TEH JUSTICE to evaluate every policy. However, the rigorous principle thinking seems to have led political theory into an abyss of craziness, wherein it rejects all private education as anti-democratic.

Much of this rejection flows from of the liberal academic fear of the religious right, which liberal academics pretend is a matter of abstract first principles rather than the merely partisan reaction to the last 30 years of American politics that it really is. It's true that a small but steady proportion of homeschoolers are actually lefty types who are totally in favor of all the lofty goals for children--autonomy, tolerance, self-motivation, etc.--that academic theorists think only public schools can effectively achieve, but these people are a collateral casualty of political theorists' fear of teh fundamentalists (a term that "in the literature," seems to describe anyone who identifies with a theology more conservative than Unitarianism). It is dangerous to let teh fundamentalists spend too much time with their children because they will teach them all kinds of horrible things, like hierarchy, authority, God, sin, and so on, resulting in a systematic suppression of their autonomy. Also, they are racists.

However plausible this sounds in theory (authoritarian parents = military upbringing, or something like that), I have a hard time connecting systematic suppression with anything that goes on in most American homes, even those of people who follow entire K-8 curricula based on the Sermon on the Mount. What would systematic suppression look like if parents still have personal, individual, and changing relationships with their children? I've never even met a person who could attest to having been systematically disciplined by his parents--the part of childrearing that is perhaps most amenable to systemization. Parents always make exceptions, slip up, negotiate, etc. Systematic suppression--systematic anything--would seem to be the particular specialty of bureaucratic institutions precisely because they depend on sets of rules instead of sets of individual relationships, and families could only make a second-best attempt. So how can you reasonably assert that, for example, autonomy can only flourish in schools while it can only be constrained in the home (even the homes of the hippie unschooling parents!)?

And, conveniently, sociology seems to be amenable to me on this question. I've read a couple of ethnographies of teh fundamentalist homeschooling families, and they've all borne out my skepticism about Teh Great Facist Indoctrination in which innocent children are being turned into obedient, doctrinaire, unthinking soldiers of the Tenth Crusade for the Purification of America. Basically, the ethnographies depict families whose children read the Bible way more than I did at their age, but otherwise have exactly the same give-and-take relationship with their parents that I and everyone I knew did, though theirs is less permissive. It turns out that homeschooling, even Christian homeschooling, unsurprisingly requires quite a lot of individualized response to children's interests and preferences. The image of homeschooling indoctrination robots that comes out of political theory doesn't appear at all in these ethnographies (although occasional rednecks do).

Political theorists have no interest in such observations because they don't follow from the logic of autonomy, defined as the ability to deconstruct all personal commitments and beliefs. The logic runs thus: being deconstructed by their children runs counter to the self-interest of parents, ergo parents can't facilitate autonomy, and the state must step in. Done. Now that we've established this, let's move on to grounding the state's right to do this.

By contrast, sociology deals with much more closely with education than the various "political theories of education," which consist almost entirely of abstract and vague sketches of what the ideal democratic or liberal educational universe should look like. We can learn, for example, that it should not discriminate by race or gender! In an ideal democratic world, all public schools should be high-performing! All children should learn and be happy! Schools should be run democratically, which will teach children to think critically and engage actively and also politically! Some more adverbs! You may be thinking, what would we do without political theory to show us the way? Sociology, on the other hand, has apparently not yet succumbed to the disease of "ideal theory" (or maybe it has now; I'm reading way old stuff), and instead considers such questions as, how influential are teachers and peers on children? What is the social structure of a school? How do teachers teach? How does discipline work?

Why can't political theory do this? Empirical work might seem like an obstacle but Coleman's empirical work is clearly driven by his very broad theory of education and not the other way around, so it need not be. Talking about boring curricular minutia might also seem like an impediment, but it wasn't for Locke and Rousseau, so the approach has a fairly impressive lineage. Over the past half-century, almost everything about the structure and purposes of public schooling has changed--curricula, teacher-student relationships, academic and non-academic expectation, students' social lives--and this is all politically consequential. In the meantime, it's completely crazy to think that a handful of teh fundamentalists (and the Amish!) are the source of the problems in American education, and to devote books and articles to debating just how much enforced secularism is too much, and call this and some vague imperative about "nondiscrimination" and "nonrepression" the political theory of education.

Writing the lobbing grenades paper

2010-12-01T23:27:00.000-05:00

I'm almost finished with a paper--the first such that I've written--in which I undertake an energetic and sustained (40+ pages!) but unfocused attack on a school of thought I'll call "civic educationalism." This paper is pretty much a laundry list of every single error, contradiction, groundless assertion, and sleight-of-hand ideological insertion in a series of books and articles that I have no idea why I even read in the first place. The basic problem is that my thesis is that no one should be doing political theory this way, but that means that I make no argument until around page 39, when I offer some vague suggestions for other, better ways to think about these things, while crossing my fingers that something on pages 1-38 has actually convinced anyone. It is much like blindly lobbing a barrage of grenades over a wall, ducking while they explode, and going over later to check if any of them have managed to hit the target. It was kind of fun to write (at some point about 35 pages in, the momentum gained through such prolific grenade-lobbing may have led to my calling the authors names) but I wonder how effective this new tactic will be.

Cooking for one, Thanksgiving for two, and other impossibilities

2010-11-26T18:01:00.000-05:00

I've discussed before how hard it is to cook for one. But then I solved that problem by getting married and doubling the audience for my dishes. This was going really well until Thanksgiving came around and I discovered that a Thanksgiving for two is like cooking for one, squared. And I didn't even cook most of it. (Ahem, thanks, Whole Foods turkey roasters.) There is no way that two people can eat all the requisite Thanksgiving dishes in one, or two, or seven sittings, even when we made sure to buy/make small portions.

Small portions:

I've come up with the best solution I can imagine to this problem. I am imagining that Thanksgiving is a seven-day holiday. Every day for seven days, a new Thanksgiving. This might not seem like a departure from the usual view of Thanksgiving leftovers, nor does it seem to resolve the problem of getting tired of eating the same food every night. BUT, an important part of Thanksgiving is not eating much else but dinner that day. So, if you don't eat any other food for seven days, dinner will always be appetizing, even if it's Day 7 of Turkey.

Unless it goes bad first.

The other solution is to combine efforts with others next year.

Signs of the onset of finals

2010-11-22T20:17:00.000-05:00

Sitting in the library with my dutiful pile of JSTOR printouts and half-written paper, watching episodes of Buffy. Even the undergrads express scorn.

A call for returning to antisocial media

2010-11-20T22:43:00.000-05:00

The proliferation of social media options underneath web text is beginning to drive me insane. Why do I have to "digg", "twitter," "stumbleupon," "like," "subscribe," "delicious," or "connect via Meebo" (also, Meebo???) to an article? Can't I just "read" it?

9th District Doom

2010-11-15T01:40:00.000-05:00

In the past, it was possible to attribute the terrible performance of Republican nominees for the 9th District House race to their craziness or questionable literacy. The 9th District isn't actually competitive even though Jan Schakowsky's husband is a convicted felon and she's been involved in many sketchy ethics conflicts, but Miss Self-Important has long seen it as an opportunity if played right, and she even had a plan to play it right. But then Joel Pollak played about three-fourths of her plan, and got 33 percent of the vote. Miss Self-Important is forced to conclude that the 9th District is one of those places so deeply entrenched in its habits that it will keep re-electing its incumbent even after the incumbent's death.

Onwards to my other political ambitions, then: the illustrious District 219 school board.

The future of political theory, or mopes about paper-writing

2010-11-13T18:57:00.000-05:00

When people around me want to talk about "the future of the discipline"--and not just political theory but any discipline--I respond with an immediate and pressing urge to discuss television and eat cookies instead. However, Emily Hale has two interesting posts summarizing recent talks at Georgetown on this question (the question being the future, not cookies).

I often wish I could "focus on something besides disciplinary debates" when I write papers, and I try to conceive of papers that will be more than that initially. But disciplinary debates have proven to be a centrifugal force that sucks in all thought that hovers in its proximity. In the first place, there is a disciplinary obligation to "engage with the literature" on whatever subject you're working on. And when you start the process of engaging, not only do your own thoughts start falling into the well-worn grooves cut by years of previous work on the same topic, but you get caught up in debating these people, often on their own terms. The deliberative democrats are wrong, for example, and you must show them the error of their ways! This is very urgent and requires many pages, because Amy Gutmann is sure to read your grad student term paper and be cowed! This is as true of work on political issues as work on political thinkers, although of course one's enemies change. But dangers lurk at the other end of the spectrum as well, where political theory relies on no precedent from past work, but instead advances arguments grounded in some kind of internal or assumed logic of the world in general (for example, "justice requires that..."). Here, by avoiding "the literature" and any grounding in reality, political theory becomes vague, confusing, bizarre, and finally floats off into the clouds somewhere, never to be read or cited again.

What Strauss, Arendt, and Shklar did is unusual and exemplary in this sense, but also extremely hard to imitate. (Actually, I know very little about what Shklar did outside of writing a book on Rousseau, so let's just leave her out of this example although she's in Emily Hale's.) This is why they're awesome, and I'm just a mediocre grad student. But it's also not clear that what they did can really be re-created now in academic departments, since, surely if the canon itself has been exhausted, the subfield of explaining in sweeping, unified ways the decline of the West in the past century is spent, too.

Still, political thought doesn't actually end. I feel a kind of strange hope every time I am "engaging with the literature" and suddenly realize that it has colonized my mind and patterned all my thoughts after its insipid little template. At that point, my paper is usually doomed to petty disciplinary debate status, but I think maybe someday, someone else will use this epiphany to do something bigger than bicker with deliberative democrats, like show why such patterns of political thinking are based on grave errors and will imminently destroy us. That person will be the more direct descendant of Strauss and Arendt than we quibblers and scribblers are.

Worlds collide

2010-11-12T09:10:00.000-05:00

Two of my favorite things--UChicago and YA novels--meet. Some may recall the author of this book as the writer of the only actually funny humor column ever to be published in the Maroon. (I think maybe some other of her columns were funny, but this one stands out in my memory and I'm not about to pore over the archives.)

In the past, I have worried over the decline of YA novels into melodramatic mush, and I should update that concern to include the new danger of stupid vampire sex mush. Hopefully, a Chicago alum will have done better. I'll find out when I have time to read this book by buying and then returning it to the Coop (life is hard when the university library isn't into the YA genre), like maybe over winter break.

An open letter to the students at HKS

2010-11-09T14:30:00.000-05:00

Dear students,

Do you really entertain thoughts like, "I really like how you contribute a different perspective to our discussions" and "I'm so sorry for disagreeing with you, but I want to reassure you my disagreements are respectful"? Please tell me no, and that this is just an HKS-specific form of cruelty you have chosen to inflict on yourselves in order to "network" with one another. If that is the case, you should recognize that I will never be running the State Department or the UN, and as a result I will never be in a position to employ you or otherwise determine your fate, so you do not need to placate me or include me in your Circle of Warm Fuzzies. While I'm sure you're all nice enough, we travel in different worlds, HKS peeps. Let's keep it that way.

No love,
Miss Self-Important

"Harvard's Heated Discussion Classroom"

2010-10-20T21:16:00.001-04:00

A fellow grad student alerted me to the news that "Justice" is huge in Japan. This closely follows the trend of absurd things becoming huge in Asia. The best parts of the trend are the Japanese name of the class, and the following juxtaposition of sentiments:

“I am astonished and delighted by the popularity of ‘Justice’ in Japan,” Prof. Sandel told JRT by email. “There seems to be a great yearning, in Japan as in the U.S., for public discussion of big ideas, especially about ethics and values.”

One Japanese fan, self-identified as “Greenbellove,” tweeted: The show is “intellectually stimulating. Professor Sandel might be my ideal guy. I should seriously consider making him the wallpaper for my cell phone.”

UPDATE: "Justice" also huge in Korea. Maybe next year, I will be TAing sections of the "global community" instead of just Harvard children?

The pumpkin party returns

2010-10-17T12:34:00.001-04:00

All my guests seemed to think that pumpkin carving is "crafting," which they were not good at in second grade and so gave up permanently in all respects. So they all came pumpkin-less.

Religious knowledge PWN

2010-09-30T21:23:00.000-04:00

Even better than my annual civic knowledge results. (Sad life fact, but even though ISI asks exactly the same questions each year, I always get the same two wrong.) Notably, the most incorrectly answered question is the one about the First Great Awakening. Peeps clearly need to be schooled about Teh Great Jonathan Edwards, and conveniently, I am here to help. Call me, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

What would Matthew Crawford say

2010-09-26T18:41:00.000-04:00

...about Ikea? On the one hand, obviously not craftsmanship. On the other, putting their packed sawdust combinations together is the closest I ever get to working with my hands. I am thinking that if this grad school thing doesn't work out, I may try to peddle my services as an expert builder of every item in the Ikea Malm series.

Violations of my human rights

2010-09-22T22:31:00.000-04:00

I have learned a new fakt in my human rights class: it turns out that my human rights have been violated! I was really excited to discover this when I read the UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. Apparently, it is illegal to deprive citizens of their nationality where doing so would leave them stateless because they have not acquired another nationality. But that totes happened to me. I am a victim! So, logically, my next question was, who can I sue about this?

Turns out, no one. For one thing, the Soviet Union never signed on to the Convention. For another, there is apparently no international jurisdiction for this kind of thing.

Kind of a disappointment. Now I have to return to my baseline belief that human rights are meaningless.

The semester of wasted time

2010-09-19T10:48:00.006-04:00

It is my great hope that this will be my last semester of coursework, but in order to make that happen, I have had to settle for less in terms of course quality than even the (very low) Harvard average. (I have had several occasions in the past few weeks to marvel at how drastically grad school has diminished my reverence for the idea of the university.) This semester, I gave in and enrolled in the required statistics course I tried to evade last year. That's eight hours a week typing out incorrect variations of Stata code until I get one that doesn't generate errors. Then there is an undergrad class that mercifully has not required much attention yet. There is Calvin's Institutes, which I am plodding through at an embarrassingly slow pace and trying, so far unsuccessfully, to convince my neighbor to care about so I can have someone to discuss it with. And there is a class featuring my German nemeses, Kant and Hegel, in preparation for this spring's effort to convincingly mask my ignorance when examined about them. And finally, there is a class about something called "international children's rights."

Let me tell you about this class. The first thing one must consider is that it's in the Kennedy School. Therefore, enrollment consists almost entirely of former NGO workers who don't want to think very hard about the premises of children's rights and whether or not there can even be such a thing, but instead want to tell stories about the time when they worked in Sad Third World Nation and witnessed Horrible Scenes of Human Degradation and this inspired them to want Bring Justice to All the Oppressed Peoples of the World. The way to do this apparently is to make a list of as many nice things as possible (education, comprehensive health care, wealth, freedom of expression, protection and autonomy in the most desirable proportions, freedom from all coercion and feelings of unhappiness, puppies, rainbows, sunshine), call these things "human rights," or, where "human" seems to be too exacting, "children's rights" since people are more willing to give stuff to children, then mail this list to all the Sad Third World Nations, and check back every few years to lament how few of these demands have been fulfilled. Everyone agrees this is correct and will eventually be effective, and the only question is really what to do with the men of Sad Third World Nations, who turn out to be major heels who make less money, capitalize less well on their educations, care less effectively for their children, make worse investments, and contribute much more to crime, violence, corruption, venereal disease and general ill-health, and economic underdevelopment than women.

I don't know how to solve this problem except by the mass removal of men to forced labor camps, which I suggested (but was not taken seriously). Nonetheless, I need to produce a paper for this class. My great desire is NOT to write anything about any Sad Third World Nation or the Scenes of Human Degradation therein. I would like to focus on America. If necessary, I can expand to Canada. Worst case scenario, Mexico. But no farther out than that. It will need to relate to children and politics. So far the main contender is a long-intended paper on Dewey's educational thought, which is only very tenuously related to this course. Any other ideas?

Gnome home

2010-09-18T19:39:00.000-04:00

Seen in my neighborhood:

A post on reactionary Puritans for FLG

2010-09-18T00:42:00.001-04:00

FLG and I have been having a two-year long back-and-forth on the merits of Timothy Dwight, grandson of Jonathan Edwards (which, if you ever look at Puritan genealogies, will establish him as the descendant of Every Important New England Personality Evar), head of the Connecticut Federalists, and president of Yale, and so I finally decided to put the debate to rest by crushing FLG with sheer verbiage and writing a paper in defense of Dwight. The benefit of such an undertaking is that it gives one opportunity to read up on New England theology and arm oneself with such terms as free sovereign grace, immediate imputation, antinomianism, Arminianism, and the possibly sophistic distinction between regeneration and election, so that if FLG tries to dispute my conclusions, I can clobber him with mah newly-acquired fancypants theological vocabulary which I myself barely understand.

I promised this post to FLG a long time ago, and then I wrote a lot of it, and--like I do with all my grad school papers--gave up midway through and forgot about it. Now that it's been about eleventy years since I initially promised it and since I wrote the paper, I'm going to do a terrible, unforgivable thing and copy and paste vast swaths of the paper to my blog. You might notice a shift in tone where that occurs.

I think the main question in our dispute is whether Dwight is an extremist nutjob based on “The Duty of Americans at the Present Crisis,” his 1798 sermon arguing that the French Revolution was the seventh vial prophesied in Revelations, the millenium is nigh, and in the meantime, everyone should fight the forces of infidelity (those being, the French, the Enlightenment philosophes, and, most importantly, the Freemasons and the Illuminati) which are secretly trying to destroy America by de-Christianizing it and eventually turning it into revolutionary France. The best way to fight these evildoers is, it turns out, by going to church on Sundays. Readers of Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics will be familiar with this sermon since it is briefly noted in the beginning as an early example of the paranoid style. But Hofstadter was totally wrong and there is no such thing as an American paranoid style.

My view, after considered reading of some of Dwight's vast corpus is that, while Dwight was not a very good poet, he was definitely not crazy. The paranoia about the Masons and the Illuminati has been covered in a previous exchange, but even his skepticism about Enlightenment rationalism has roots in a conservative strain of Congregational theology of this period (the New Divinity, for anyone who cares) that saw the potential danger behind natural religion and rationalism, and watched them issue in the French Revolution.*

Some contemporary historians [and FLG], finding Dwight's style too inflammatory and his politics too reactionary for their tastes, have dismissed his argument against infidelity as mere Federalist opportunism, or as evidence of a fundamentalist impulse to turn New England into a Puritan theocracy. But Dwight’s sermons are a testament to the winding complexity and—-to modern eyes-—contradiction of Calvinist theological and political commitments in the early republic, which could not be classified either on the left or the right, even after their opposition to the French Revolution. Dwight’s sermons draw on a distinctly Calvinist logic of opposition the Revolution--one that is forward-looking, reformist, and ultimately millenarian--and illuminate the distance between European reaction to the Revolution, and the strangely un-reactionary resistance of American Puritans. [endpaperexcerpthere, sorry guys!]

The best way to read Dwight is, I think, to consider him in his theological context. (If he were a greater writer, this might not be necessary, but he was not.) His theology is the product of half a century of incessant and intense doctrinal contest in America, starting with the First Great Awakening. In fact, the contestants in these feuds mirrored with uncanny accuracy the arrangement of the parties in the French Revolution. The evangelicals of the Great Awakening fought with the orthodox Calvinist "Old Lights" over the legitimacy of their conversions, eventually won (in part because many of the Old Lights adopted versions of Deistic natural religion and rejected Calvinism altogether), then themselves split into two camps--the radicals (separatists and universalists on the frontiers of New England who became Baptists and Methodists) and the moderates (the New Divinity) who took over many of the pulpits in southern New England.

In other words, Dwight had seen the French Revolution and its disputes--over hypocrisy, antinomianism, subversion, etc--play out in advance in the realm of theology (and New England had established churches at this point so this was not an indifferent issue politically). But theology demands certain limits on these questions that are absent in the determinedly secular politics of the Revolution. You can't send a man to the guillotine for falsely believing he is saved--the state of his soul can only be known for certain by himself and by God, and other men can no more than suspect that he is lying, but they have no authority to go further. But the Committee on Public Safety could transform sin into political crime committed by enemies of the Revolution, whose “unconverted” souls found their correction not in God but in the guillotine. In secular politics, as Arendt points out, accusations of hypocrisy encounter no limits. Thus, for Dwight, that “Three millions of Frenchmen have perished in the Revolution…The siege of Lyons, and the judicial massacres at Nantes, stand, since the crucifixion, alone in the volume of human crimes.”

What is most interesting about his opposition to the Revolution is not that it's reactionary or conspiratorial or anything like that. It's rather how different it is from European opponents like Burke and de Maistre and Barruel, from whom he actually cribs much of his material on the Masons and the Illuminati. It is so intensely Protestant. The past has no authority for Dwight, and he does not want to go back to a more orderly, pre-Enlightenment epoch, but rather into a more orderly, post-Enlightenment millennium. Like Samuel Hopkins, who was a prolific anti-slavery writer in addition to writing some of the foundational systematic theology of the New Divinity, Dwight looks to social reform as the appropriate response to decaying faith. This seeming immunity to the traditionalist impulse runs through the most otherwise conservative of late 18th century Puritan divines, and while it is baffling to me, it is neither absurd nor delusional. And it seems in some way quite important to understanding contemporary American conservatism and its continuing distance from its European counterpart.

*I know that everyone and his brother will jump down my throat now to insist that the French Revolution was not Rousseau's fault, and Rousseau would even have condemned it and if only people had read Rousseau more carefully and reflected on it better and blah blah... I agree that all this is true and good, except that it hardly stopped anyone from misreading Rousseau and cutting off heads. In any case, Dwight's enemies were primarily second-rate English rationalists--Tyndal, Chubb, Shaftesbury, and also Hobbes. In earlier sermons on infidelity that were not targeted at the French Revolution, this is more clear.

On APSA

2010-09-04T15:41:00.000-04:00

Well, that was a supposedly fun thing I'll never do again.

A consoling thought for the beginning of another year of grad school

2010-08-31T21:58:00.001-04:00

"One should therefore consider that practically everything has been discovered on many occasions--or rather an infinity of occasions--in the course of time...Hence, one should use what has been adequately discovered while attempting to seek out what has been passed over."

--Aristotle, Politics, 1329b24-35

Some of you might notice that a certain later thinker either found this old idea about new ideas to be one that had been detrimentally passed over, or else re-discovered it herself.

Life according to TV (might not exist in the space between NYC and CA), and other idle queries

2010-08-29T20:55:00.002-04:00

I was watching some Bob Newhart the other day and it occurred to me that there were more shows from the Nick at Nite era (or at least those that made it to Nick at Nite) that were anchored in American cities which are now almost totally unrepresented on network TV. For example, Chicago is featured prominently in Bob Newhart; in I Dream of Jeannie, the show relies on proximity to Cape Canaveral. In The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Mary moves from New York to--wait for it--Minneapolis to make it. Laverne and Shirley is in Milwaukee, Good Times is in Chicago, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood is in Pittsburgh (ok, peeps, I had to resort to Wikipedia here...). Since the 1990s, network series and especially network sitcoms, seem to have been set in one of three places: 1) New York, 2) California, or 3) a generic suburb that is intended to represent Anytown, USA. This third setting is sometimes given a fictional name and a vague location in the course of the series, but it doesn't rely on being anyplace in particular (except sometimes a place where it could plausibly snow, so the characters can sometimes be seen in stylish coats). In contrast, New York and California shows have tended to be very setting-specific in the sense that Friends or Sex and the City or Seinfeld or Mad Men could not be anywhere but New York, Veronica Mars is thoroughly Southern California, etc.

For obvious industry reasons, New York and California were always staples of network TV (now network+HBO), but they weren't the only places where, according to TV, endearing and sympathetic people live. Since the 1990s, there have still been shows set outside these places (Seb points out that ER was in Chicago--fair enough), but I haven't come across very many that make their settings central to the plot. I can think of a few shows prominently set outside the NY/CA Zone of Hipness, but most of them are set in outer space. Of those which aren't, almost all of them are geographical laments in one way or another: The Wire, which hardly paints a livable picture of Baltimore, or Glee, where everyone wants to get out of Lima so much, or a bunch of reality shows that demonstrate (to viewers if not participants) how hideous the real inhabitants of other places are. (Some of the NY/CA shows criticize their locations too). If aliens from outer space (or from the shows taking place in outer space) were to try to piece together an account of contemporary America from its network TV, they would think that 95 percent of the country lived in New York or California, there were no other cities, and the remaining five percent was spread out in indistinguishable suburban flyover country between them. In this vast, empty in-between dwelled a handful of exasperated, ironic individuals who had all the good lines but the misfortune of not being dropped off in the cool places, while everyone else went about their dull lives in sweater sets.

Seb does not agree with my argument here on the grounds that I don't watch enough TV to know one way or another about its trends, and that my readers will immediately prove me wrong. Also, while we were looking at Wikipedia's (very incomplete) list of shows by setting, he was quite satisfied that the setting in Boston of the "very important show" Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place demonstrated decisively that my analysis was incorrect. It's true that I don't watch enough TV to get a good sample, so you are free to disprove away.

And in case you went a step further in this argument, yes, this is a call for shows set in Skokie.

Calls for creative thinking

2010-08-28T16:22:00.000-04:00

Thanks to the wedding gift generosity of everyone we know, most of our apartment is now set up:

But we have one remaining problem: no couch. No couch and a cavernous, empty living room currently occupied by some bookshelves and a cat litter box. So today, we went to Bob's Discount Furniture ("no gimmicks"), a place that includes an indoor fish pond, and a cafe where all the "food" is free and Disney movies play non-stop, and salespeople who never stop hounding you. We found an acceptable couch, but then we had a thought: our front door is only 32 inches wide. The couch would never fit. In fact, possibly no couch will ever fit. So we went home.

Now we are stumped. The only solution I have come up with is Ikea, which has some affordable couches that are shorter than 32 inches. But these couches look bizarre and hard. What else can we do for very little money? Is there some way to move furniture that is wider in every dimension than the door through which it must travel?

School starts next week, so we are on a couch deadline.

Department of Bad Ideas: Emerging Adulthood

2010-08-23T14:55:00.002-04:00

There is an interesting, possibly Hegelian, probably insane assumption underlying the NYT Mag piece on 20-somethings. It seems that in the very recent past, human life was inauthentic and un-free because it was constrained by necessity. People had to marry and bear children young, start working early and never stop, and otherwise do things that we now put off, because otherwise, they would starve to death or be eaten by bears. Now, however, we have "emerging adulthood," an indicator that we live in a blessed age when those necessities no longer apply, and the resulting lives we forge in their absence are therefore more authentically human and free.

The first evidence of this new freedom was adolescence, which was discovered when the necessity of child labor was peeled away to reveal the angsty, rebellious, hormonal but authentic 14-year-old within. This asshole of a creature demonstrated that the previous incarnation of the 14-year-old--the one who worked in the mines or the fields or the kitchens--was a product of necessity and not truth. The adolescent was now liberated. But necessity still bound everyone beyond adolescence. Now emerging adulthood is here to advance the upper limits of human freedom by a few more years by casting off later necessities: "fewer entry-level jobs even after all that schooling; young people feeling less rush to marry because of the general acceptance of premarital sex, cohabitation and birth control; and young women feeling less rush to have babies given their wide range of career options and their access to assisted reproductive technology if they delay pregnancy beyond their most fertile years." Newly free from these externally applied burdens, we 20-somethings have more space to shape our lives according to our own arbitrary wills. We are free! We are authentic! And what have we made of ourselves in light of all this? Well, it seems that at present, the self-realization of the will manifests itself in...hipsters. But ok, no matter.

Emerging adulthood is good because freedom of the will is good, and so obviously constraint of the will by external necessity is bad. We know constraint is bad because if emerging adulthood was thought to be a product of new and different necessities, like the unavailability of jobs, or a fatal mismatch between educational preparation and employment qualifications, or a society in decline that no longer supports family and childrearing, then we would be fretting instead of celebrating our uniqueness. We would be feeling the despair of 1932 and not the euphoria of 2010. But marriage and family are basically lifestyle options now--valid but not necessary--and although the article flirts with economic explanations, they have to be rejected because unlike the 20-somethings of 1932, the emerging adults of 2010 have their parents' savings standing between them and the constraints of economic necessity. The economy might not be great, but 20-something hipsterdom can still be freely chosen; with no spouse or children to support, a Peace Corps stipend or barista salary goes a lot further, and your parents can always help you pay the cell phone bill (and full disclosure: my parents paid mine until last month--family plan savings, peeps!).

In practical, hard-nosed American terms, freedom from necessity is good because it buys time, and time results in better decisions: "Maybe if kids take longer to choose their mates and their careers, they’ll make fewer mistakes and live happier lives." This seems to be intended as the article's most persuasive argument in favor of adopting emerging adulthood as a developmental phase. I don't doubt that many adults wish in hindsight that their youth had lasted longer, but it's not actually clear from such nostalgia and wistfulness that a longer youth would've resulted in a happier or wiser adulthood, assuming they ever made it to adulthood. Since time itself is not guidance in matters of marriage or vocation (especially if both are delayed because neither seem available or obviously worthwhile), 20-somethings may just take longer to make the same mistakes. Unless we believe that the longer one takes to make a decision, the better it will be (so people who marry at 90 are most likely to choose the best mates), we have to look to some other standard to determine the wisdom of such decisions.

Or maybe these past decisions were not mistakes at all? After all, the view that all previous decisions about marriage, work, and childrearing were wrong is the biggest assumption of this piece. What evidence do we have that the decisions people made in the past about these things were wrong? Henig/Arnett rely on the assumption that more time must result in better decisions. For example, this neuroscientific hypothesis:

When people are forced to adopt adult responsibilities early, maybe they just do what they have to do, whether or not their brains are ready. Maybe it’s only now, when young people are allowed to forestall adult obligations without fear of public censure, that the rate of societal maturation can finally fall into better sync with the maturation of the brain.*

Well, but did these poor past victims of necessity perform their responsibilities ineffectively? How do we know they were forced to take them up too early if we don't know that they did them badly, or in some clearly immature way? And then we come up against the problem that the freedom-quashing necessities of the past are actually still present in most of the world right now:

It’s rare in the developing world, he says, where people have to grow up fast, and it’s often skipped in the industrialized world by the people who marry early, by teenage mothers forced to grow up, by young men or women who go straight from high school to whatever job is available without a chance to dabble until they find the perfect fit.

Apparently, the discipline of psychology requires that an observed group behavior be universally observable to be classified as a developmental stage, and Henig goes through some perfunctory hand-wringing over emerging adulthood's narrow application to affluent Westerners, and mostly Americans at that, since European emerging adults are actually constrained by unpleasant necessities like expensive urban housing, which force them to live with their parents forever. But in reality, the narrowness of observed emerging adulthood is no problem, since its premise is that all 20-somethings would behave this way if they could only be untethered from the grinding pressures that force them "to grow up fast." Underneath every seemingly grown up 20-something with a family and a steady job, a direction-less emerging adult is gasping to be released. Given freedom from economic want, social mores that encourage early marriage, and limits to college access, every poor Vietnamese rice farmer and rural Pakistani bride of an arranged marriage could be living in Greenpoint, going to yoga classes, and selling her handmade textiles on Etsy. The world could be much more awesome now, plus the future will be that much better when these emerging adults do finally decide to settle down and become actual adults--more "self-explored" and "self-discovered" adults than the world has ever seen before. And isn’t that something we may want to promote through--hint, hint--government programs?

Just look at the present unjust inequalities in emerging adulthood. We have a woman who, in a strikingly mature, actually adult way, managed to hold down a full-time job, take care of her family, and earn a degree. But think how much more fun she could be having if she didn't have all those pesky responsibilities to weigh her down:

Is it only a grim pessimist like me who sees how many roadblocks there will be on the way to achieving those dreams and who wonders what kind of freewheeling emerging adulthood she is supposed to be having?

Suddenly we've made the leap from emerging adulthood as an ambivalent period that has started to appear in the lives of affluent meritocrats to emerging adulthood as a human right, and one that federal programs are obliged to provide for everyone:

There aren’t institutions set up to serve people in this specific age range; social services from a developmental perspective tend to disappear after adolescence. But it’s possible to envision some that might address the restlessness and mobility that Arnett says are typical at this stage and that might make the experimentation of “emerging adulthood” available to more young people. How about expanding programs like City Year, in which 17- to 24-year-olds from diverse backgrounds spend a year mentoring inner-city children in exchange for a stipend, health insurance, child care, cellphone service and a $5,350 education award? Or a federal program in which a government-sponsored savings account is created for every newborn, to be cashed in at age 21 to support a year’s worth of travel, education or volunteer work...It requires only a bit of ingenuity — as well as some societal forbearance and financial commitment — to think of ways to expand some of the programs that now work so well for the elite, like the Fulbright fellowship or the Peace Corps, to make the chance for temporary service and self-examination available to a wider range of young people.

If the great difficulty of Arnett's theory is that emerging adulthood is not yet universal, then the universalization of emerging adulthood through government incentives will take care of that problem. And I personally can think of no more important use of taxes in this country than to level the emerging adulthood playing field so that the less fortunate can have equal access to a year or two of aimless hipsterdom after college. Let's call it the Federal Initiative for Equalizing ~~Navel-Gazing~~ Self-Examination Opportunities.

But, it seems, we are too hasty in condemning self-examination as a kind of laziness. Laziness is in the eye of the beholder:

A century ago, it was helpful to start thinking of adolescents as engaged in the work of growing up rather than as merely lazy or rebellious. Only then could society recognize that the educational, medical, mental-health and social-service needs of this group were unique and that investing in them would have a payoff in the future. Twenty-somethings are engaged in work, too, even if it looks as if they are aimless or failing to pull their weight, Arnett says. But it’s a reflection of our collective attitude toward this period that we devote so few resources to keeping them solvent and granting them some measure of security.

So if we all collectively convince ourselves that what 20-somethings are doing when they cycle through relationships and short-term barista gigs and their parents pay their rent is really "the work of growing up," we will be happier to give them more subsidies to do it.

But if self-reflection is a kind of essential psychological labor that needs to be recognized and supported by society, then what principle limits it to 20-somethings? Important life changes and decisions arise in subsequent years, too. If, "during the timeout they are granted from nonstop, often tedious and dispiriting responsibilities, 'emerging adults develop skills for daily living, gain a better understanding of who they are and what they want from life and begin to build a foundation for their adult lives,'" why can't adults do the same? Certainly the 20's can't be the only time when people wish for a reprieve from punching the clock and sweeping the floor. People in their 30's and 40's need to think through things too! What about the social-service needs of these groups? Why is the government subsidy machine ignoring them? Maybe everyone in America should just take a break from the constraints of necessity and be paid to meditate full-time? I say, forget "emerging adulthood" with its narrow, age-ist benefits! Freedom from necessity for all!

Who's with me?

*Silly pop-neuroscience alert? What the heck is a societal rate of maturation vs. a brain rate of maturation?

Quebec, considered

2010-08-20T23:22:00.000-04:00

Quebec is a great place, and in particular, Montreal. It's like the best kind of foreign country there can be--nearby, easy to get to, and very similar to America. You can attempt to practice your French but switch to English when you fail and still be understood, and nearly all the social rules and brand names remain recognizable. It has good coffee and rent-able bikes and--truly the best thing ever--bike lanes separated from traffic! Plus, it is pretty! And it has moose! I can't believe it was not earlier and more thoroughly impressed on me that I should visit it. When can I go back?

Addition to the list below

2010-08-18T01:52:00.000-04:00

4. Sword-fighting in the park:

Any ideas?

Three essential but dying elements of Western Civilization that are being preserved in Montreal

2010-08-17T00:18:00.000-04:00

1. Cigarette smoking
2. Public payphones
3. Rollerblades

Global facts

2010-08-15T22:27:00.000-04:00

Miss Self-Important, looking for a way to change money in Montreal: There is only one Citibank in Canada, and it's in Toronto.

Mr. Self-Important: Oh. We should publicize that, so people know what they're getting into.

Love, marriage, baby carriage, etc.

2010-08-14T00:23:00.001-04:00

Because Pam got married a couple weeks before me, I was avidly following her account of wedding preparations and comparing them to my own. But, clearly, something went wrong between reading this post about crafting excitement, and scrambling to finish my own favor tags and name cards on Microsoft Word, crookedly cutting them out like a third-grader with a pair of safety scissors. An obvious craftiness FAIL. Would this be fatal to the wedding?

Weddings are high-pressure events. They're like the anecdote I was told in my intro econ class in college about long-distance relationships: they almost always fail because expectations are unreasonably inflated by the cost and effort of seeing one another, and few actual experiences together seem to be worth the price. Same with weddings--people expend money and energy to fly in, to stay at a hotel, to buy you gifts. What can you really do to make it worth it for them short of renting an elephant and giving them turns riding it? The traditional motions--ceremony, reception, cake--hardly seem sufficient, especially for the guests most distant--in terms of both friendship and location--from you. This is where the elephant would help. But instead of arranging for elephants, people (and by people, I mean, theknot.com, which has both guided and terrified me through this whole process) re-double their focus on the details of the traditional things and appraise the curliness of the letters and the straightness of the edges of the favor tags.

My sloppy favor tags were not, I think, fatal. The wedding generally went smoothly and I had a great time. I don't know if all the guests enjoyed it as much as I did, but at least the 5402, fueled by Long Island Iced Teas, danced into the night. But I'm still ambivalent about weddings. Our initial desire last summer was to go to the nearest courthouse, get the license signed, and be done with it. In fact, this was what my then-roommate did around the same time, and it seemed smart. It wasn't that we didn't think much of marriage--quite the opposite--but that we didn't think much of wedding pomp. I just wanted to be married and didn't care so much about how we marked the occasion. But then I started having all these wishy-washy feelings about the public aspect of marriage and the significance of familial and communal celebration and other such dangerous overthinkings.

The problem is that marriage is so uncertain. All the activities of marriage can at present be undertaken outside of it quite easily, so there is little besides a concern with appearances or with politics and ideology to compel us (at least those of us who are not religious) to marry. There are few good examples of actual marriages to which one might aspire (and, ironically, for reasons I won't get into here, publicizing such examples is almost as bad as not having any). None of the obvious answers to "Why get married?" really satisfy, so how convincing can the answers to "Why stay married?" be? The extravagance of weddings seems like an arrogant refusal to admit that all this uncertainty extends to you. You can spend your thousands of dollars, obsess over your hairstyle and the china on your registry for six months, haul all your friends and relatives in from 2,000 miles away, and then split up a few years later. Even if you put aside contemporary social developments, it is a mammoth feat to stay married to and happy with one another for an entire life. I suppose it could be argued that all the immense expense and effort of weddings applies some external pressure to stay together and not look like a fool, but that hardly seems to be borne out by the reality. Wouldn't the more prudent and proportionate response to the great uncertainty of marriage be increased humility? Shouldn't you think not, "Look at us EVERYBODY! We are SO IN LOVE! Our love is UNSTOPPABLE!", but rather, "We are making a go of it amid all this confusion and doubt, this is our small effort, and we hope for the best."

But the very same contemporary developments that make marriage so uncertain seem to work against minimizing wedding pomp, which brings us back to the long-distance relationship conundrum. People move around and away, and even bringing together a few of them to mark one's marriage becomes a big to-do requiring the assistance of a legion of conveniently specialized and extremely expensive services dedicated to such events. One thing that occurred to me this year was that there is no such thing as a small wedding. Once the army of wedding specialists gets involved, it no longer matters much whether you have 30 guests or 300--the logistics and absurdity are nearly commensurate. The result is an unresolvable contradiction between the impulse to publicize and celebrate marriage, and to remain humble in the face of powerful countervailing forces.

But, at any rate, now that all this wedding business is over, I will go back to keeping up with the Pamses next week when I get return from our honeymoon, clean up the gigantic pile of boxes accumulating in my kitchen, and indulge my own (and, I swear, pre-existing!) Smitten Kitchen aspirations. I will also try to finish up these incompletes from last year and, you know, think about Aristotle in addition to banana bread...

Oh, and I was just kidding about the baby carriage. That's not happening yet.

Status update

2010-08-11T00:14:00.000-04:00

I've been gone for awhile, but I had good reason. There was Publius, then College Summit, then this:

This is a slightly politically incorrect photo since I'm not wearing my glasses as I am in all the others, but Julia took it and my mother really liked it, so we'll have to leave it be. Anyway, in real life, I'm changing my name, but in blog-life, you may now refer to me as Mrs. Self-Important.

Resolution: Never moving to California

2010-07-07T20:09:00.000-04:00

Earthquakes! Not cool.

Uses of cryptic lines in blogging

2010-07-06T14:42:00.000-04:00

OMG. Magazine mirrors of life. Not bad ones either.

Just like the Cold War, or the Rocky and Bullwinkle version thereof

2010-06-29T12:43:00.000-04:00

Russian spies in my backyard (really--Trowbridge and Kirkland)! My interest in false identities can now extend to them, especially this part:

There were also hints that Russian spy bosses feared that their agents, ordered to go native in prosperous America, might be losing track of their official purpose. Agents in Boston submitted an expense report with such vague items as “trip to meeting” for $1,125 and “education,” $3,600.

In Montclair, when the Murphys wanted to buy a house under their names, “Moscow Center,” or “C.,” the S.V.R. headquarters, objected. “We are under an impression that C. views our ownership of the house as a deviation from the original purpose of our mission here,” the New Jersey couple wrote in a coded message. “From our perspective purchase of the house was solely a natural progression of our prolonged stay here. It was a convenient way to solving the housing issue, plus ‘to do as the Romans do’ in a society that values home ownership.”

American consumer culture undermines our values AND Russian espionage.

It turns out that one of them has a still-available Facebook page, which I think is mostly about her internet start-ups, but I can't really tell. This might be the one and only time I wish I knew more Russian, so I could read the good links in under three weeks.