Author: Saul DeGraw

I realize how closely earning power is connected to masculinity in the United States. It must be very difficult to face life when not only can you not earn enough to get above the poverty line, but you’re incapable of earning anything at all. The mental retreat into this violent fantasy world in which white males with guns are the sole remaining virtuous members of humanity does not follow quite so easily. On his own it’s unlikely this man would have chosen that particular mental escape route. But he doesn’t live in a vacuum. He lives in a world in which tens of thousands of other angry, minimally educated and economically marginalized white men have already created a support structure (of sorts) into which he can be welcomed.

From: UNDISCIPLINED RETREAT | Gin and Tacos

P”To understand how truly bizarre this method of opining is, consider the following: Had polling showed that relatively few Trump supporters believe black people are lazy and criminally-inclined, if only a tiny minority of Trump supporters believed that Muslims should be banned from the country, if birtherism carried no real weight among them, would journalists decline to point this out as they excoriated her? Of course not. But the case against Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” is a triumph of style over substance, of clamorous white grievance over knowable facts.

This is what Andrew Breitbart, and his progeny, ultimately understood. What Shirley Sherrod did or did not do really didn’t matter. White racial grievance enjoys automatic credibility, and even when disproven, it is never disqualifying of its bearers. It is very difficult to imagine, for instance, a 9/11 truther, who happened to be black, becoming even a governor. And yet we live in an era in which the country’s leading birther might well be president. This fact certainly horrifies some of the same journalists who attacked Clinton this weekend. But what they have yet to come to grips with is that Donald Trump is a democratic phenomenon, and that there are actual people—not trolls under a bridge—whom he, and his prejudices against Latinos, Muslims, and blacks, represent.”

From: Why the Media Didn’t Bother to Verify if Hillary Clinton’s Remark About Half of Donald Trump’s Supporters Being ‘Deplorable’ Was True – The Atlantic

“I was aware, of course, of the drift toward pre-professionalism on college campuses, of widespread concern over student debt, of stories about college-educated baristas living in basements, of governors threatening to cut off state funding for French literature and anthropology. Even so, I found it shocking that some of the brightest students in Virginia had been misled — by parents, the media, politicians and, alas, each other — into thinking that choosing English or history as a major would doom them to lives as impecunious schoolteachers.

And it’s not just at state schools like Mason. Harvard University professor Jill Lepore recalled hosting an information session at her home for undergraduates interested in a program she directs on history and literature. One student who attended, Lepore told the New York Times, kept getting text messages from her parents ordering her to leave the meeting immediately.”

From: Meet the parents who won’t let their children study literature – The Washington Post

In his nearly 40 years working for The Times, Mr. Cunningham operated both as a dedicated chronicler of fashion and as an unlikely cultural anthropologist, one who used the changing dress habits of the people he photographed to chart the broader shift away from formality and toward something more diffuse and individualistic.

At the Pierre hotel on the East Side of Manhattan, he pointed his camera at tweed-wearing blue-blood New Yorkers with names like Rockefeller and Vanderbilt. Downtown, by the piers, he clicked away at crop-top wearing Voguers. Up in Harlem, he jumped off his bicycle — he rode more than 30 over the years, replacing one after another as they were wrecked or stolen — for B-boys in low-slung jeans.

From: Bill Cunningham, Legendary Times Fashion Photographer, Dies at 87 – The New York Times

The [admissions] committee agonized over whether it should accept fewer students or keep its class size roughly constant and admit weaker candidates. In the end, it opted for the latter, a decision [Bruce Berner, retired Valparaiso associate dean] admits wasn’t entirely on the merits, since fewer students would have meant less revenue.

“There was a lot of pressure, of course, from the central administration to keep the numbers up,” he said. (Mark A. Heckler, the university president, said that admissions decisions were entirely up to the law school but that the financial model was for the school to fund itself.)

By 2014, the limitations of the strategy had become apparent: The figures the school reported for the rate at which its graduates passed the Indiana bar exam, which had already been dipping, crashed to about 61 percent, from about 77 percent the year before. An enormous number of students wouldn’t be able to work as lawyers in the state even if jobs were theoretically available.

From: An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It – The New York Times

You’ve written that “it is possible to graduate with a degree in English language & literature by exclusively reading the works of (mostly wealthy) white men.” It is possible to graduate a lot of ways, and every English major is responsible for taking advantage of the bounty of courses the department offers to attain a full and deep education. What is not possible is to reckon with the racist, sexist, colonist poets who comprise the canon—and to transcend their failures—via a “see no evil, hear no evil” policy.

I want to gently push back, too, against the idea that the major English poets have nothing to say to students who aren’t straight, male, and white. For all the ways in which their particular identities shaped their work, these writers tried to represent the entire human condition, not just their clan. A great artist possesses both empathy and imagination: Many of Shakespeare’s female characters are as complexly nuanced as any in circulation today, Othello takes on racial prejudice directly, and Twelfth Night contains enough gender-bending identity shenanigans to fuel multiple drag shows and occupy legions of queer scholars. The “stay in your lane” mentality that seems to undergird so much progressive discourse—only polyamorous green people really “get” the “polyamorous green experience,” and therefore only polyamorous greens should read and write about polyamorous greens, say—ignores our common humanity.

From: Yale students want to remake the English Major requirements, but there’s no escaping white male poets in the canon.

On Twitter and other social-media platforms, it can be difficult to determine who supports whom. Yes, several of the people making anti-Semitic statements had references to the presumptive GOP nominee in their Twitter IDs and photos, though those references could mean anything. What has been clear for some time is that criticizing Trump while being Jewish is a hazardous online activity. On Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro, a prominent conservative commentator, documented the anti-Semitic backlash that followed his own opinionating about Trump. {…}

Shapiro Wednesday offered a further exploration at National Review under the headline, “Trump’s Anti-Semitic Supporters.” He writes: “I’ve experienced more pure, unadulterated anti-Semitism since coming out against Trump’s candidacy than at any other time in my political career. Trump supporters have threatened me and other Jews who hold my viewpoint. They’ve blown up my e-mail inbox with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. They greeted the birth of my second child by calling for me, my wife, and two children to be thrown into a gas chamber.”

From: New York Times staffer tweets out op-ed critical of Trump, faces anti-Semitic avalanche – The Washington Post

And when it comes to the staleness of recent political conventions, Trump is (gulp) right. Calling them boring is like saying one of his xenophobic policy proposals is controversial. The conventions are overly scripted affairs that are devoid of drama not by accident; they’re intentionally crafted to avoid drama in the first place. (They’re not offering substance in place of showmanship either.)

Trump’s secret, meanwhile, isn’t that he’s promising an unscripted event, only that it seems like he is. He isn’t planning a convention where anything could happen; he’s planning one where it feels as though anything could. I believe this is called “reality TV.” As another Trump campaign source put it: “Announcing the vice presidential nominee before the convention is like announcing the winner of Celebrity Apprentice before the final show is on the air. This is one of the only opportunities to create tension and drama in the whole show.”

From: Donald Trump’s plan to make the GOP convention must-see TV.

The U.S. economy’s power-law features, in which averages disguise massive inequalities in outcomes, go a long way in explaining how Obama can tell a story about the economy vastly different from the ones that are propelling some presidential candidates. A prime example is the pattern of income growth. Between 2009 and 2013, most measures of real personal income showed slow but steady improvement. Average hourly earnings for private sector workers grew about 7 percent. But what about the distribution? The top 1 percent saw its disposable income grow by 11 percent. Everybody else got close to nothing. For the bottom 99 percent, income actually declined through the first five years of the recovery. “So far all of the gains of the recovery have gone to the top 1 percent,” the economist Justin Wolfers wrote.

From: The U.S. Recovery Is Historically Good. Why Does It Feel Terrible? – The Atlantic

The catalyzing episode occurred on May 17, 1968, six weeks after the murder of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the outbreak of new riots in dozens of cities. Nine Catholic activists, led by Daniel and Philip Berrigan, entered a Knights of Columbus building in Catonsville and went up to the second floor, where the local draft board had offices. In front of astonished clerks, they seized hundreds of draft records, carried them down to the parking lot and set them on fire with homemade napalm.

From: Daniel J. Berrigan, Defiant Priest Who Preached Pacifism, Dies at 94 – The New York Times

Unemployment? Yes, 2 or 3 percent of the working-age population has dropped out of the labor force, but the headline unemployment rate is 5 percent. Wages? They’ve been stagnant since the turn of the century, but the average family still makes close to $70,000, more than nearly any other country in the world. Health care? Our system is a mess, but 90 percent of the country has insurance coverage. Dissatisfaction with the system? According to Gallup, even among those with incomes under $30,000, only 27 percent are dissatisfied with their personal lives.

Why do I care about this? Because if you want to make a difference in this country, you need to be prepared for a very long, very frustrating slog. You have to buy off interest groups, compromise your ideals, and settle for half loaves—all the things that Bernie disdains as part of the corrupt mainstream establishment. In place of this he promises his followers we can get everything we want via a revolution that’s never going to happen. And when that revolution inevitably fails, where do all his impressionable young followers go? Do they join up with the corrupt establishment and commit themselves to the slow boring of hard wood? Or do they give up?

Source: Here’s Why I Never Warmed Up to Bernie Sanders | Mother Jones

Ms. Trauss’s cause, more or less, is to make life easier for real estate developers by rolling back zoning regulations and environmental rules. Her opponents are a generally older group of progressives who worry that an influx of corporate techies is turning a city that nurtured the Beat Generation into a gilded resort for the rich.

Those groups oppose almost every new development except those reserved for subsidized affordable housing. But for many young professionals who are too rich to qualify for affordable housing, but not rich enough to afford $5,000-a-month rents, this is the problem.

Adding to the strangeness is that the typical San Francisco progressive and the typical mid-20s-to-early-30s member of Ms. Trauss’s group are likely to have identical positions on every liberal touchstone, like same-sex marriage and climate change, and yet they have become bitter enemies on one very big issue: housing.

“We have liberal Democrats, and very liberal Democrats, and yet we are as polarized as the rest of the country,” said Tim Colen, executive director of the San Francisco Housing Action Coalition.

From: In Cramped and Costly Bay Area, Cries to Build, Baby, Build – The New York Times