No real reason to say these are for Father's Day. But it is Father's Day! And here are some links.
My UVA colleague and friend Gregory Fairchild has published a piece on his family and the Tulsa "race riot," which was actually an attempt by whites to annihilate a successful black neighborhood. His family is from there.
Recently, Ortman and Jose Lobo from Arizona State University took a deep dive into data from the farming towns that dotted the Rio Grande Valley between the 14th and 16th centuries. Modern metropolises should take note: As the Pueblo villages grew bigger and denser, their per capita production of food and other goods seemed to go up, too.
Busy streets, in other words, may lead to better-off citizens.
A pretty granular story of how this moment in America is tearing many white churches apart. I say “white churches,” because it seems that it’s only white churches who are discovering these problems now. Black churches have known about them for a long time. The white churches are the ones that are now cornered.
The demise of the “liberal world order” means different things to different people, and much of the difference stems from which intellectual conversations you are most fully embedded in, which often comes down to which academic disciplines, or which mindsets, you take as your “primary vocabulary,” that idiom which provides you with the terms in which you most basically frame the world. I’ve noticed that people who are massively critical of “liberalism” in academia come out of the humanities, while people who are interested in defending “the liberal world order” mostly come out of the social sciences and especially political science, and within that especially international affairs. This piece offers a picture of how the IR theorists see the world. It’s educational for that reason alone. The author’s analysis of the humanities’ appeal to “radical democracy” as a response to (what he sees as) the liberal order’s crisis of legitimacy is, it seems to me, correct: the consolation of greater participation by the populace (which would produce greater legitimacy for the order) is merely chimerical, as the order itself would still wield all the power. An interesting, bleak, and I think overly-pessimistic conclusion:
So we are faced with a terrible choice. We can continue to embrace the nationalist strategy of keeping the liberal order alive by creating the conditions under which it will die. That will end in the dissolution of the order, collapsing economic growth, with massive increases in the costs of goods and services. Our living standards will be dramatically reduced. The nation-state will make a comeback, but at the cost of the prosperity that we have been building since the Second World War.
Or we can embrace radical democratic reforms, and attempt to convince ourselves that they will empower us, or at least give us the satisfying feeling of empowerment. We can retreat into localism, even as the critical decisions are taken far away from us. We can build a realm of illusions, where the institutions we participate in are not the ones that shape our lives.
Finally, we could try to salvage the order by constructing institutions that enable us to meaningfully govern it. But to do that, we’d have learn to do politics with people who are different from us. Can that be done? Probably not. And that means either the nation-states will kill the liberal order, or they will find a way to disguise it in democratic daydreams. The liberal order might not last much longer.
Another thing on the liberal world order: a new book by Robert Gates. Gates is a coelacanth, a creature from another age, when the GOP cared about political realities more than ideology, though they were certain about their ideological views as well, and when foreign policy and defense policy people could look past the frontiers of the US and you couldn’t entirely tell if whaat they saw was seen from a Democratic or a Republican point of view. Gates’s previous books, From the Shadows and Duty, are both worth reading, for your disagreements as well as for how you learn. Here comes another book also worth reading, arguing in defense of not simply funding the Defense Department.
New technology allows very large-scale analysis of buried human ruins without ever lifting a shovel, as shown in the mapping of the ancient Roman city of Falerii Novi. This is further evidence of amazing technological advances that will help us understand our history.
Reflections on “Anti-Blackness and Christian Ethics,” by scholars who wrote a book about this a few years ago. It is a very good book. The comments suggest weary fury. Little has changed. Will things change now?
A thoughtful review, by my UVa colleague Ira Bashkow, of a new book on Franz Boas:
Anthropology grapples with its demons in a way most disciplines do not, but often at the cost of holding up its past as fit for nothing but scorn. Certainly, no anthropologist today would have written a book with half the generosity shown towards the history of the field as the international affairs professor Charles King has. In breathing new life into Boas’s story he has given a gift to the field of anthropology and to us all.
What is the value of public higher education? This piece offers some data.
To what extent do public colleges and universities improve economic mobility? Two-thirds of U.S. college students seeking bachelor's degrees enroll in public four-year colleges and universities, yet we have surprisingly little causal evidence on whether access to this sector improves students' economic trajectories. Smith et al. address this need by estimating the economic impacts of students' access to the University System of Georgia. Their results show that enrollment dramatically increases students' B.A. completion rates and raises their incomes around age 30 by 20% on average. Students from low-income high schools see a 40% increase in income. Access to this sector has no clear impact on student loan balances or other measures of financial health. However, for the marginal student, enrollment has large private returns in the short run and positive returns to state budgets in the long run.
An essay about an old apocalyptic novel, Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, which seems oddly appropriate—to the writer—to this moment.
A Paris Review “Writers at Work” interview with Wallace Shawn. It’s pretty much what you would want it to be—a sense of Shawn, his history, what he’s trying to do in his writing—and it gives you a sense of the ongoing commentary on Wallace Shawn that must go on in Wallace Shawn’s head all the time.
Reminiscences of Levon Helm in upstate New York, in the last few years of his blessed life. Take a load off, Levon.
You too--take a load off. Listen to The Band, or whatever you want. Think about your father, or father figures. Try to be grateful. I know it's not always easy. But try to be, for yourself as much as for the cosmos.