Try not to think of me in a cute little hooded red cape now. Just try it.
A somewhat opaque interview with Rita Felski, author of, among other books, The Limits of Critique. She's not opaque but her interviewer is. Hey, pro tip for interviewers: ask brief questions and make sure you realize the point is not to make you look smart, but to get your interviewee's thoughts out there to a wide audience. I guess no one told this guy. Well, we see you guy! You are smart! You have things to say! For my money, you're wasting them with long convoluted prolegomenatical statements to Felski, and you should try to publish them in journals and as books, but maybe that's not your thing.
"How is it that a discipline fundamentally based on scarcity has failed to accurately price in the damage we’re doing to our most important, scarce resource: the environment?" Good questions from Jared Bernstein, Obamanaut economist, on mis-pricing things--especially in terms of our ignorance, and then once we knew our indifference, on the cost to the environment of our carbon-energy economy. It's a bit misleading, because the point of the piece is not a serious critique of the way that the discipline of economics has mis-represented the world (though that would be interesting). The point of the piece is instead, finally, that we ought to support the Green New Deal in the US. That may be so, but I still think some sort of large-scale grappling with the limits (as well as the power) of the economic way of looking at the world still needs to be written. Lots of people have written bits of it, but no one has brought it all together. That's an interesting job for someone out there with the competence to do so.
This is, to my mind, the best review of Benjamin Moser's recent biography of Susan Sontag that I have yet read. Elaine Showalter is a mature thinker who has registered over many years her affiliations and her disagreements with Sontag, and is not cowed by her, nor is she someone who feels a need to defend her against the inevitably brutal flourescence that is, at its best, a serious and meticulous biography. Like a valet or a priest or a spouse in their different ways, a biographer must try to confront the full scope and depth of a person, and not flinch.
It would be more than ironic if the Trump era had as its major political consequence the "wokification" of white liberals, but it does seem to be having that effect, and it's not clear what other large political effects it is having. Whether this is good for the Democratic party and for America, because it generates a larger base of people willing actively to confront white supremacy, or whether it ends up creating a cul-de-sac of progressive white smugness that hardens political polarization and provokes a political backlash, remains to be seen. Probably a bit of both, and more, and the devil will be in the details of the proportions of those effects.