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Princeton University Press Books in Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America
This wide-ranging series in twentieth-century U.S. political history presents not only works that represent the best of traditional political history but also those that integrate insights and methodologies of social and cultural history, challenge conventional periodizations, and situate the American political experience in a comparative framework.
Hamilton, S.: Trucking Country: The Road to America's Wal-Mart Economy.
Trucking Country is a social history of long-haul trucking that explores the contentious politics of free-market capitalism in post-World War II America. Shane Hamilton paints an eye-opening portrait of the rural highways of the American heartland, and in doing so explains why working-class populist voters are drawn to conservative politicians who seemingly don't represent their financial interests.
Joe Bageant: A Yard Sale in Chernobyl
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President Obama understands the featureless not-so-new American aesthetic. So well that he had the world's most politically correct, authority sanctioned, but absolutely worst poet, Elizabeth Alexander, read at his inauguration. ("We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed, words to consider, reconsider") Like the soothing, ambiguous language of the Super Corporate State, it sounds as if it means something. Which is close enough for government work. More importantly, she has been vetted by proper authorities and is credentialed and licensed by Yale University to practice poetry. The marketing theme of the event was Obama's s alleged blackness. Alexander is a sorta black too, but not black enough to scare away business. Welcome to the domination of the business aesthetic. Literate people all over the world found Alexander's reading to be like one of those eye watering farts you just wait through until it blows away. Still, millions of Americans listened and cried, in accordance with the marketing theme almost on command, "happy to be born in America, where a black man can be elected president." Personally, I was sorry as hell I'd sworn off bourbon for the month.
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But seldom to never do we get news and information as to the global scale of the genuine emergency facing humankind. Bad news is bad for business, therefore said to be bad for you and me. We all accept that consumer confidence is the foundation of the whole shebang, the confidence game that is capitalism. Thus confidence and cheery optimism is mandatory among the citizen consumer-producer marks. Willingly we self-police our behavior, shunning, criticizing or mocking what we perceive as "negative people." We drive past the empty parking lots, abandoned housing developments, through networks of cameras and cops with radar guns, stun guns and real guns every few blocks, numb to it all, listening to government commercial propaganda officialized by Katie Couric and Ben Bernanke.
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Globalization Leads to Civic Leadership Culture Dominated by Real Estate Interests | Newgeography.com
Why is it that "real estate interests" dominate in a local economy like Cleveland? Because, to a great extent, they are among the only ones left. Consider the local industries that were not as subject to roll-ups. Principal among these are real estate development, construction, and law. This means the local leadership of a community is now made up of executives in those industries, and they bring a very different world view versus the previous generation.
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Where then is the source of transactions these firms can turn to in order to sustain their business? The public sector, of course.
I would hypothesize that many local transactionally oriented services companies have seen the public sector take on a greater share of billings than in the past. With the old school bankers and industrialists mostly out of the picture, the leadership in our communities consists increasingly of the political class and a business community dominated by transactional interests.
When you look at the composition of this group, it should come as no surprise that the publicly subsidized real estate development is the preferred civic strategy. Politicians get to cut ribbons. Cranes always look good on the skyline. Local architects, engineers, developers, and construction companies love it. And there is plenty of legal work to go around.
: : : HIGH GLITZ : : :
photo book on child beauty pageants
Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination
Situations intends to address the current malaise of the radical imagination in both left theory and in popular consciousness. We aim to explore the social conditions and lived experiences that lead to this malaise and to support explanations which do not reduce political phenomena to a reflection. Situations will foster modes of thinking that recognize the creative role that society plays in its own production. In opposition to simple determinisms, Situations will attempt to show the contingencies and peculiarities of political phenomena.
pandagon.net - The cops work for you, or they’re supposed to
Victim blamers are often also telling a story about how they personally will never be raped, or in this case, arrested unfairly for doing something totally legal. To blame Gates for being stupid is to say, ”I would never get arrested for breaking into my house, because I have the sort of self-preservation instincts that this man is clearly missing.” People enjoy the illusion of having more mastery of the world than they do, because it makes them feel safe, but it also contributes to an atmosphere where victim-blaming can flourish, particularly in situations that are loaded with racial or gender politics.
Magazine Preview - Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch - NYTimes.com
Julia Child and television cooking.
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Shapiro shows that the shift toward industrial cookery began not in response to a demand from women entering the work force but as a supply-driven phenomenon. In fact, for many years American women, whether they worked or not, resisted processed foods, regarding them as a dereliction of their “moral obligation to cook,” something they believed to be a parental responsibility on par with child care. It took years of clever, dedicated marketing to break down this resistance and persuade Americans that opening a can or cooking from a mix really was cooking. Honest. In the 1950s, just-add-water cake mixes languished in the supermarket until the marketers figured out that if you left at least something for the “baker” to do — specifically, crack open an egg — she could take ownership of the cake. Over the years, the food scientists have gotten better and better at simulating real food, keeping it looking attractive and seemingly fresh, and the rapid acceptance of microwave ovens — which went from being in only 8 percent of American households in 1978 to 90 percent today — opened up vast new horizons of home-meal replacement.
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For Lévi-Strauss, cooking is a metaphor for the human transformation of nature into culture, but in the years since “The Raw and the Cooked,” other anthropologists have begun to take quite literally the idea that cooking is the key to our humanity. Earlier this year, Richard Wrangham, a Harvard anthropologist, published a fascinating book called “Catching Fire,” in which he argues that it was the discovery of cooking by our early ancestors — not tool-making or language or meat-eating — that made us human.
Weblogg-ed » “Tinkering Toward Utopia”
To that end, Schlechty refers to past efforts at reform as “tinkering toward utopia” and says that if we continue to introduce change at the edges, we’ll continue to spin our wheels. He says that schools are made up primarily of two types of systems, operating systems and social systems, and makes the point that up to now, most efforts to improve schools have centered on changing the former, not the latter.
Joho the Blog » Transparency is the new objectivity
In fact, transparency subsumes objectivity. Anyone who claims objectivity should be willing to back that assertion up by letting us look at sources, disagreements, and the personal assumptions and values supposedly bracketed out of the report.
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Transparency prospers in a linked medium, for you can literally see the connections between the final draft’s claims and the ideas that informed it. Paper, on the other hand, sucks at links. You can look up the footnote, but that’s an expensive, time-consuming activity more likely to result in failure than success.
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In the Age of Links, we still use credentials and rely on authorities. Those are indispensible ways of scaling knowledge, that is, letting us know more than any one of us could authenticate on our own. But, increasingly, credentials and authority work best for vouchsafing commoditized knowledge, the stuff that’s settled and not worth arguing about. At the edges of knowledge — in the analysis and contextualization that journalists nowadays tell us is their real value — we want, need, can have, and expect transparency. Transparency puts within the report itself a way for us to see what assumptions and values may have shaped it, and lets us see the arguments that the report resolved one way and not another. Transparency — the embedded ability to see through the published draft — often gives us more reason to believe a report than the claim of objectivity did.
OnTheCommons.org » Art, God and Copyright
Two examples of copyright and religion in conflict: Indonesian batik designers, and sermon sharing sites.
Greater Good Magazine | Why is There Peace?
Violence is declining, argues psychologist Steven Pinker. What are we doing right?
The Weedy Garden of Familyhood « Easily Distracted
On the other hand, I think he’s missing something new about contemporary middle-class childhood. Sometimes, yes, it’s about ferrying the kids between contained, safe experiences. But also, I think that a lot of middle-class family life is now about the simultaneous adventures of children and adults, that children and adults are sharing far more of their experiences.
Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood - The New York Review of Books
There are reasons for all of this. The helmeting and monitoring, the corralling of children into certified zones of safety, is in part the product of the Consumer Reports mentality, the generally increased consciousness, in America, of safety and danger. To this one might add the growing demands of insurance actuarials and the national pastime of torts. But the primary reason for this curtailing of adventure, this closing off of Wilderness, is the increased anxiety we all feel over the abduction of children by strangers; we fear the wolves in the Wilderness.
James Wolcott on Cultural Snobbery | vanityfair.com
Pity the culture snob, as Kindles, iPods, and flash drives swallow up the visible markers of superior taste and intelligence. With the digitization of books, music, and movies, how will the highbrow distinguish him- or herself from the masses?
Pope Criticizes World Economic System, Calls for Social Responsibility - washingtonpost.com
Pope Benedict XVI criticized the international economic system yesterday and called for a new global structure based on social responsibility, concern for the dignity of the worker and a respect for ethics.
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