Monday, April 30, 2018
TRYING TO UNDERSTAND AND CONFRONT ONE'S RACISM
Robert L. Pellegrino, I See Color: Identifying, Understanding and Reducing Our Hidden Racism" A White Perspective (New Haven, Ct: Book Design, 2015):
We are at our best when we want to learn more, and at our worst when we act out of ignorance. If you are a white American like me, this book is about overcoming our ignorance, and learning as much as we can about our racism and about black Americans. It's not an easy goal.Id. at 25.).
INSPECTOR MAIGRET #17
Georges Simenon, Liberty Bar (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by David Watson (New York: Penguin Books, 2015) ("As for the girl, with her full, almost too buxom figure squeezed into a dress of dark silk, she was a classic pseudo femme fatale." Id. at 13.).
Sunday, April 29, 2018
THE MARSHALL PLAN
Benn Steil,The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018) ("[I]n the quarter century since the passing of the Soviet Union, Grand Strategy has been set aside in favor of improvisation to pacify competing interests. Democratization has been conflated with security objectives, serving neither. The result is an under-resourced NATO facing growing pressure from an increasingly embittered and authoritarian Russia." Id. at 403. "Great acts of statesmanship are grounded in realism no less than idealism. It is a lesson we need to relearn." Id. at 404.).
Saturday, April 28, 2018
GEORGE MARSHALL IN CHINA
Daniel Kurtz-Phelan,The China Mission: George Marshall's Unfinished War, 1945-1947 (New York & London: Norton, 2018):Id. at 358.
Foreign policy is made by analogy. The stories we tell matter. How we tell them matters.
When considering their country's role in the world, Americans like stories of heroism or villainy, of clear triumph or utter catastrophe. In the standard telling, the years covered in this book [1945-1947] are a prime exhibit of heroism and triumph. They mark the start of the American era, a period of visionary leadership that supplied doctrines and models still invoked today . . .
More than any other figure in that narrative, George Marshall embodies the conception of American leadership at its best--strong, generous, bold.
.
Friday, April 27, 2018
Thursday, April 26, 2018
DOES BASEBALL MATTER?
Susan Jacoby, Why Baseball Matters (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2018):
I told a young friend--a fantasy baseball enthusiast who rarely attends games or watches them on television--that I was planning to write a short book about the challenges facing baseball, as a game and a business, in an era of fragmented attention spans and unprecedented competition for fans' attention among all sports. [] My concerns about the future of baseball--a $10 billion sport enjoying an unprecedented era of financial success and labor peace---are not based on misplaced nostalgia for a 'pure' game that never existed. They are based on the dissonance between a game that demands and depends on concentration, time, and memory and a twenty-first-century culture that routinely disrupts all three with its vast menu of digital distractions.Id. at xv.
Tuesday, April 24, 2018
THE YEAR 1947
Elisabeth Asbrink, 1947: Where Now Begins, translated from the Swedish by Fiona Graham (New York: Other Press, 2017):
It is easy to commit genocide, notes Raphael Lemkin, as no one wants to believe it can happen until it is too late. Out there, the world repeats, 'never again.' But Lemkin knows the history of genocide, he knows the logic it actually follows is 'next time.' It has happened, so it can happen again.Id. at 248.).
Monday, April 23, 2018
COMEY'S INSTALLMENT TO THE NARRATION OF AN AMERICAN FARCE: THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY
James Comey, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership (New York: Flatiron Books, 2018).
INSPECTOR MAIGRET #16
Georges Simenon, The Misty Harbour (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Linda Coverdale (New York: Penguin Books, 2015) ("''Of course1 Everyone has the right to have himself beaten up if he likes that!' grumbled Maigret." Id. at 106.).
Sunday, April 22, 2018
KAFKA
Reiner Stach, Kafka: The DecisiveYears, translated from the German by Shelley Frisch (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005, 2013).
Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Early Years, translated from the German by Shelley Frisch (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017).
Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Years of Insight, translated from the German by Shelley Frisch (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013, 2015).
Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Early Years, translated from the German by Shelley Frisch (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017).
Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Years of Insight, translated from the German by Shelley Frisch (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013, 2015).
Saturday, April 21, 2018
Friday, April 20, 2018
FIRST THEY CAME FOR THEM,THEN THEY CAME FOR ME, EVENTUALLY THEY WILL COME FOR YOU!
Jonathan Weisman, (((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2018):
Steven J. Zipperstein, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (New York: Liveright, 2018):
Are we in a momentary blip of resurgent intolerance, a last gasp of ethnonationalism that will recede to the inevitable advance of liberal internationalism? Or will historians look back at the post-World War II era as the exception to a human history of warring tribes?Id. at 199-200.
'Life is political,' Timothy Snyder writes, 'not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do.'Id. at 224.
The world is watching.
Steven J. Zipperstein, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (New York: Liveright, 2018):
T'he point about the melting pot,' wrote Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the pathbreaking 1963 study, Beyond the Melting Pot, 'is that id did not happen.'Id. at 205, citations omitted.
Thursday, April 19, 2018
HOW TO BE A NAZI
Johann Chapoutot, The Law of Blood: Thinking and Acting As a Nazi, translated from the French byMiranda Richmond Mouillot (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harard University Press, 2018).
Wednesday, April 18, 2018
FOOD FOR POLITICAL THOUGHT: AMERICANS AS DUPES
Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018):
Trump's advance to the Oval Office had three stages, each of which depended upon American vulnerability and required American cooperation. First, Russians had to transform a failed real estate developer into a recipient of their capital. Second, this failed real estate developer had to portray, on American television, a successful businessman. Finally, Russia intervened with purpose and success to support the fictional character 'Donald Trump, successful businessman' in the 2016 presidential election.
Throughout the exercise, Russians knew what was fact and what was fiction. Russians knew Trump for what he was: not the 'VERY successful businessman' of his tweets but an American loser who became a Russian tool. Although Americans might dream otherwise, no one who mattered in Moscow believed that Trump was a powerful tycoon. Russian money had saved him from the fate that would normally await anyone with his record of failure.Id. at 219.
Unlike Russians, Americans tend to get their news from the internet. According to one survey, 44% of Americans get their news from a single internet platform: Facebook. The interactivity the internet creates an impression of mental effort while impeding reflection. The internet is an attention economy, which means that profit-seeking platforms are designed to divide the attention of their users into the smallest possible units that can be exploited by advertising messages. If news is to appear on such platforms, it must be tailored to fit a brief attention span and arouse the hunger for reinforcement. News that draws viewers tends toward a neutral path between prejudice and outrage. When each day is devoted to emotional venting about supposed enemies, the present becomes endless, eternal. In these conditions, a fictional candidate enjoyed a considerable advantage.Id. at 247-248.
Tuesday, April 17, 2018
ASSESSING THE LIKELIHOOD OF AN AMERICAN AUTHORITARIAN STATE
Cass R. Sunstein, ed., Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America (New York: Dey St./William Morrow, 2018) (This collection of essays, from a wide range of social, political, legal. etc., commentators and writers, are accessible and worth the investment. Were I forced to pick one passage which best captures the overall gist of this collection it would be from Tom Ginsburg & Aziz Huq, "How We Lost Constitutional Democracy":
So could it happen here? Looking to these recent examples suggests that the US Constitution may be good at checking coups or the antidemocratic deployment of emergency powers, but it is not well suited to stall the slow decay of democracy. Our eighteenth-century Constitution singular lacks the provisions necessary to slow down a would-be autocrat bent on the slow dismantling of democracy.Id. at 135, 151.
Monday, April 16, 2018
CAN BLACK MEN SAVE THEMSELVES?
Alford A. Young, Jr., Are Black Men Doomed? (Debating Race) (Medford, Ma.: Polity Press, 2018).
INSPECTOR MAIGRET #15
Georges Simenon, The Madman of Bergerac (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Ros Schwartz (New York: Penguin Books, 2015) ("Where was his weak spot? A man doesn't reach the age of sixty-five without something going wrong!" Id. at 99.).
Sunday, April 15, 2018
NEW YORK CITY BLUES
Edward G. Burrows & Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford U. Press, 1999).
Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 (New York: Oxford U. Press, 2017).
Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 (New York: Oxford U. Press, 2017).
Friday, April 13, 2018
EVERYBODY KNOWS JIM CROW STILL LIOVES IN AMEICA
Anders Walker, The Ghost of Jim Crow: How Southern Moderates Used Brown v. Board of Education to Stall Civil Rights (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Thursday, April 12, 2018
THE END OF PURPOSEFUL SEX
Henry T. Greely, The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press, 2016) (From the book jacket: "Within twenty, maybe forty, years most people in developed countries will stop having sex for the purpose of reproduction. Instead, prospective parents will be told as much as they wish to know about the genetic makeup of dozens of embryos and they will prick one or two for implantation, gestation, and birth. And it will be safe, lawful, and free.".
Tuesday, April 10, 2018
9/27-2001-2011
Christa Wolf, One Day a Year, edited by Gerhard Wolf, translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire (New York & London: The German List. Seagull Books, 2017).
Monday, April 9, 2018
INSPECTOR MAIGRET #14
Georges Simenon, The Flemish House (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside (New York: Penguin Books, 2014) ("'So few people look intelligent! For example, if I'mu in the presence of a possible culprit, I make a point of acting like an imbecile . . .'" Id. at 121.).
Saturday, April 7, 2018
ON GARBAGE AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN INDIA
Assa Doron & Robin Jeffrey, Waste of a Nation: Garbage and Growth in India (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press, 2018).
Friday, April 6, 2018
WE'RE A BUNCH OF CHIMPS!
Will Storr, Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us (New York: Overlook Press, 2018):
So chimps are a like us in that our models of the ideal self are very similar, at least in outline. What we also share is our occupation with hierarchy. We have this preoccupation because our tribes, like theirs, have hierarchies that are fluid. An alpha male's reign usually lasts less than five years. This means we're constantly surrounded by intrigue and rumour. There are plots and victories; blood and drama. We're intensely interested in status, partly because that status has a high capacity to change. What our species also have in common is that members of our tribes band together to attack different tribes. The biological anthropologist Professor Richard Wrangham has observed that chimps and humans share 'a uniquely violent pattern of lethal intergroup aggression . . . Out of four thousand mammals and ten million or more animal species, this suite of behaviors is known only among chimpanzees and humans.'Id. at 29-30. Makes one wonder whether to be 'civilized' is, at its core, to have overcome this preoccupation with hierarchies and tribes.
Thursday, April 5, 2018
Wednesday, April 4, 2018
"FRIENDLY FASCISM"
Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1985). From the Preface:
Friendly Fascism portrays two conflicting trends in the United States and other countries of the so-called 'free world.'Id. at xi-xii, citations omitted. Food for thought in this, our, post-democratic America . . . post-democratic world.
The first is a slow and powerful drift toward greater concentration of power and wealth in a repressive Big Business-Big Government partnership. This drift leads down the road toward a new and subtly manipulative form of corporatist serfdom. The phrase 'friendly fascism; helps distinguish this possible future from the patently vicious corporatism of classic fascism in the past of Germany, Italy and Japan. It also contrasts with the unfriendly present of the dependent fascisms propped up by the U.S. government in El Salvador, Haiti, Argentina, Chile, South Korea, the Philippines and elsewhere.
The other is a slower and less powerful tendency for individuals and groups to seek greater participation in decisions affecting themselves an others. This trend goes beyond mere reaction to authoritarianism. It transcends the activities of progressive groups or movements and their use of formal democratic machinery. It is nourished by establishment promises--too often rendered false--of more human rights, civil rights and civil liberties. It is embodied in larger values of community, sharing, cooperation, service to others and basic morality as contrasted with crass materialism and dog-eat-dog competition. It affects power relations in the household, workplace, community, school, church, synagogue, and even the labyrinths of private and public bureaucracies. It would lead toward a truer democracy--and for this reason is bitterly fought.
These contradictory trends are woven fine into the fabric of highly industrialized capitalism. The unfolding logic of friendly fascist corporatism is rooted in 'capitalist society's transnational growth and the groping responses to mounting crises in a dwindling capitalist world.' Mind management and sophisticated repression become more attractive to would-be oligarchs when too many people try to convert democratic promises into reality. On the other hand, the alternative logic of true democracy is rooted in 'humankind's long history of resistance to unjustified privilege' and in spontaneous or organized 'reaction (other than fright or apathy) to concentrated power . . . and inequality, injustice or coercion.'
A few years ago too many people closed their eyes to the indicators of the first tendency.
Tuesday, April 3, 2018
Monday, April 2, 2018
President Donald Trump Contradicts Himself With US Border Claims | Morni...
IT IS VERY IMPORTANT TO WATCH THE END OF THIS VIDEO!!!
INSPECTOR MAIGRET #13
Georges Simenon, The Saint-Fiacre Affair (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside (New York: Penguin Books, 2014) ("How odd life was! Years and years without the slightest incident, with nothing to break the monotony of the days. And then, all of a sudden, incomprehensible events, dramas, things you don't even read in the newspapers!" Id. at 51.).
Sunday, April 1, 2018
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