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Javier E

Opinion | Bernie Angry. Bernie Smash! - The New York Times - 0 views

  • There was a time when optimism was considered a desirable trait in politicians: Barack Obama and Bill Clinton had it; Ronald Reagan had it in spades.
  • Joe Biden has it. In his 2012 victory speech, President Obama hailed him as “America’s happy warrior.” Who knows? It may be that it is this — a sense of buoyancy and hope — that accounted for his extraordinary series of Super Tuesday victories.
  • more often Mr. Sanders seems to be driven less by joy than by fire, less inspired by the delights of what President Richard Nixon called “the arena” than by the seriousness of the revolution he is trying to bring about.
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  • like the Hulk, Mr. Sanders too is driven, at times, by what seems like rage.
  • We should be filled with rage, not joy, because of all the ways in which our democracy does not work.
  • The Trump era has left so many people feeling just like this — angry all the time, so infuriated by the cruelty and the lies that we forget that the process of taking him down ought to fill us with joy.
  • To quote Molly Ivins again, “Keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
  • Hulk smash. But optimism and hope smash too. Why should we not be happy warriors, even as we prepare to battle our archnemesis?
lmunch

Opinion: There is a key word missing from the climate movement - CNN - 0 views

  • And those memories have me thinking about climate change. As a father, Christian pastor and full-time climate organizer, climate change is rarely far from my mind. But now that President Joe Biden has made it the centerpiece of his legacy-defining American Jobs Plan -- with its investment in clean energy, its overhaul of our outdated energy grid, its commitment to clean transportation, and its promise of millions of family-sustaining jobs -- it's bound to be top of mind for many Americans for some time to come.
  • After all, the phrase "climate change" elicits a laundry list of emotions for most of us: anger, dread, guilt and grief, among them. A growing body of research is revealing the toll climate grief is taking on our collective mental health, and insomnia and other mental health concerns related to climate-induced anxiety have been documented across 25 countries. Absent from most of our climate-related emotional inventory is delight, contentedness or joy.We need to change that.
  • What else can I feel but shame as the land God has commanded me to hold in trust for my children and grandchildren is desecrated? What else is there to feel but guilt at my own ignorance and complicity, and rage at the behemoth vested interests who have worked so hard to thwart my efforts at every turn?
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  • For sustained, long-term action -- the kind needed to face down the threat of climate change -- we need more than anger. Every one of us needs a sense of agency. We need a community of belonging. We need hope that our actions can make a difference. We need joy.
  • I began to notice a curious alchemy as I continued to plunge my hands into the earth and look my neighbors in the eye on the bus and cook new plant-based meals with friends. Guilt was slowly transforming into gratitude, despair into joy.
  • When I think of the world my son is set to inherit, my stomach clenches. But even in those moments, I can find joy again when I think of the world we could all create, with enough political will and commitment to the common good. When I think about that world, and the millions of everyday people cultivating communities of belonging in order to dream it into being, my heart sings.
Javier E

Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse? - The Atlantic - 0 views

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  • The recent rise in American anti-Semitism is well documented. I could fill pages with FBI hate-crime statistics, or with a list of violent attacks from the past six years or even the past six months, or with the growing gallery of American public figures saying vile things about Jews. Or I could share stories you probably haven’t heard, such as one about a threatened attack on a Jewish school in Ohio in March 2022—where the would-be perpetrator was the school’s own security guard. But none of that would capture the vague sense of dread one encounters these days in the Jewish community, a dread unprecedented in my lifetime.
  • What I didn’t expect was the torrent of private stories I received from American Jew
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  • well-meaning people everywhere from statehouses to your local middle school have responded to this surging anti-Semitism by doubling down on Holocaust education. Before 2016, only seven states required Holocaust education in schools. In the past seven years, 18 more have passed Holocaust-education mandates
  • These casual stories sickened me in their volume and their similarity, a catalog of small degradations. At a time when many people in other minority groups have become bold in publicizing the tiniest of slights, these American Jews instead expressed deep shame in sharing these stories with me, feeling that they had no right to complain. After all, as many of them told me, it wasn’t the Holocaust.
  • These people talked about bosses and colleagues who repeatedly ridiculed them with anti-Semitic “jokes,” friends who turned on them when they mentioned a son’s bar mitzvah or a trip to Israel, romantic partners who openly mocked their traditions, classmates who defaced their dorm rooms and pilloried them online, teachers and neighbors who parroted conspiratorial lies. I was surprised to learn how many people were getting pennies thrown at them in 21st-century Americ
  • the blood libel, which would later be repurposed as a key part of the QAnon conspiracy theory. This craze wasn’t caused by one-party control over printing presses, but by the lie’s popularity
  • I have come to the disturbing conclusion that Holocaust education is incapable of addressing contemporary anti-Semitism. In fact, in the total absence of any education about Jews alive today, teaching about the Holocaust might even be making anti-Semitism worse.
  • The Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center is a victim of its own success. When I arrived on a weekday morning to join a field trip from a local Catholic middle school, the museum was having a light day, with only 160 students visiting
  • the docent established that the ’30s featured media beyond town criers, and that one-party control over such media helped spread propaganda. “If radio’s controlled by a certain party, you have to question that,” she said. “Back then, they didn’t.”
  • I wondered about that premise. Historians have pointed out that it doesn’t make sense to assume that people in previous eras were simply stupider than we are, and I doubted that 2020s Americans could outsmart 1930s Germans in detecting media bias. Propaganda has been used to incite violent anti-Semitism since ancient times, and only rarely because of one-party control.
  • The Nazi project was about murdering Jews, but also about erasing Jewish civilization. The museum’s valiant effort to teach students that Jews were “just like everyone else,” after Jews have spent 3,000 years deliberately not being like everyone else, felt like another erasur
  • I was starting to see how isolating the Holocaust from the rest of Jewish history made it hard for even the best educators to upload this irrational reality into seventh-grade brains.
  • the docent began by saying, “Let’s establish facts. Is Judaism a religion or a nationality?
  • My stomach sank. The question betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of Jewish identity—Jews predate the concepts of both religion and nationality. Jews are members of a type of social group that was common in the ancient Near East but is uncommon in the West today: a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture, of which a nonuniversalizing religion is but one feature
  • Millions of Jews identify as secular, which would be illogical if Judaism were merely a religion. But every non-Jewish society has tried to force Jews into whatever identity boxes it knows best—which is itself a quiet act of domination.
  • “Religion, right,” the docent affirmed. (Later, in the gallery about Kristallnacht, she pointed out how Jews had been persecuted for having the “wrong religion,” which would have surprised the many Jewish converts to Christianity who wound up murdered. I know the docent knew this; she later told me she had abbreviated things to hustle our group to the museum’s boxcar.)
  • The docent motioned toward the prewar gallery’s photos showing Jewish school groups and family outings, and asked how the students would describe their subjects’ lives, based on the pictures.“Normal,” a girl said.“Normal, perfect,” the docent said. “They paid taxes, they fought in the wars—all of a sudden, things changed.”
  • the museum had made a conscious decision not to focus on the long history of anti-Semitism that preceded the Holocaust, and made it possible. To be fair, adequately covering this topic would have required an additional museum
  • The bedrock assumption that has endured for nearly half a century is that learning about the Holocaust inoculates people against anti-Semitism. But it doesn’t
  • Then there was the word normal. More than 80 percent of Jewish Holocaust victims spoke Yiddish, a 1,000-year-old European Jewish language spoken around the world, with its own schools, books, newspapers, theaters, political organizations, advertising, and film industry. On a continent where language was tightly tied to territory, this was hardly “normal.” Traditional Jewish practices—which include extremely detailed rules governing food and clothing and 100 gratitude blessings recited each day—were not “normal” either.
  • the idea of sudden change—referring to not merely the Nazi takeover, but the shift from a welcoming society to an unwelcoming one—was also reinforced by survivors in videos around the museum
  • Teaching children that one shouldn’t hate Jews, because Jews are “normal,” only underlines the problem: If someone doesn’t meet your version of “normal,” then it’s fine to hate them.
  • When I asked about worst practices in Holocaust education, Szany had many to share, which turned out to be widely agreed-upon among American Holocaust educators.
  • First on the list: “simulations.” Apparently some teachers need to be told not to make students role-play Nazis versus Jews in class, or not to put masking tape on the floor in the exact dimensions of a boxcar in order to cram 200 students into i
  • Szany also condemned Holocaust fiction such as the international best seller The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, an exceedingly popular work of ahistorical Christian-savior schlock
  • She didn’t feel that Anne Frank’s diary was a good choice either, because it’s “not a story of the Holocaust”—it offers little information about most Jews’ experiences of persecution, and ends before the author’s capture and murder.
  • Other officially failed techniques include showing students gruesome images, and prompting self-flattery by asking “What would you have done?
  • Yet another bad idea is counting objects. This was the conceit of a widely viewed 2004 documentary called Paper Clips, in which non-Jewish Tennessee schoolchildren, struggling to grasp the magnitude of 6 million murdered Jews, represented those Jews by collecting millions of paper clips
  • it is demeaning to represent Jewish people as office supplies.
  • Best practices, Szany explained, are the opposite: focusing on individual stories, hearing from survivors and victims in their own words. The Illinois museum tries to “rescue the individuals from the violence,
  • In the language I often encountered in Holocaust-education resources, people who lived through the Holocaust were neatly categorized as “perpetrators,” “victims,” “bystanders,” or “upstanders.” Jewish resisters, though, were rarely classified as “upstanders.
  • I felt as I often had with actual Holocaust survivors I’d known when I was younger: frustrated as they answered questions I hadn’t asked, and vaguely insulted as they treated me like an annoyance to be managed. (I bridged this divide once I learned Yiddish in my 20s, and came to share with them a vast vocabulary of not only words, but people, places, stories, ideas—a way of thinking and being that contained not a few horrific years but centuries of hard-won vitality and resilience
  • Szany at last explained to me what the dead Elster couldn’t: The woman who sheltered his sister took only girls because it was too easy for people to confirm that the boys were Jews.
  • I realized that I wouldn’t have wanted to hear this answer from Elster. I did not want to make this thoughtful man sit onstage and discuss his own circumcision with an audience of non-Jewish teenagers. The idea felt just as dehumanizing as pulling down a boy’s pants to reveal a reality of embodied Judaism that, both here and in that barn, had been drained of any meaning beyond persecution
  • Here I am in a boxcar, I thought, and tried to make it feel real. I spun my head to take in the immersive scene, which swung around me as though I were on a rocking ship. I felt dizzy and disoriented, purely physical feelings that distracted me. Did this not count as a simulation
  • I had visited Auschwitz in actual reality, years ago. With my headset on, I tried to summon the emotional intensity I remembered feeling then. But I couldn’t, because all of the things that had made it powerful were missing. When I was there, I was touching things, smelling things, sifting soil between my fingers that the guide said contained human bone ash, feeling comforted as I recited the mourner’s prayer, the kaddish, with others, the ancient words an undertow of paradox and praise: May the great Name be blessed, forever and ever and ever
  • Students at the Skokie museum can visit an area called the Take a Stand Center, which opens with a bright display of modern and contemporary “upstanders,” including activists such as the Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai and the athlete Carli Lloyd. Szany had told me that educators “wanted more resources” to connect “the history of the Holocaust to lessons of today.” (I heard this again and again elsewhere too.) As far as I could discern, almost nobody in this gallery was Jewish.
  • As Szany ran a private demo of the technology for me, I asked how visitors react to it. “They’re more comfortable with the holograms than the real survivors,” Szany said. “Because they know they won’t be judged.”
  • t the post-Holocaust activists featured in this gallery were nearly all people who had stood up for their own group. Only Jews, the unspoken assumption went, were not supposed to stand up for themselves.
  • Visitors were asked to “take the pledge” by posting notes on a wall (“I pledge to protect the Earth!” “I pledge to be KIND!”)
  • It was all so earnest that for the first time since entering the museum, I felt something like hope. Then I noticed it: “Steps for Organizing a Demonstration.” The Nazis in Skokie, like their predecessors, had known how to organize a demonstration. They hadn’t been afraid to be unpopular. They’d taken a stand.
  • I left the museum haunted by the uncomfortable truth that the structures of a democratic society could not really prevent, and could even empower, dangerous, irrational rage. Something of that rage haunted me too.
  • the more I thought about it, the less obvious it seemed. What were students being taught to “take a stand” for? How could anyone, especially young people with little sense of proportion, connect the murder of 6 million Jews to today without landing in a swamp of Holocaust trivialization, like the COVID-protocol protesters who’d pinned Jewish stars to their shirt and carried posters of Anne Frank?
  • weren’t they and others like them doing exactly what Holocaust educators claimed they wanted people to do?
  • The 2019 law was inspired by a changing reality in Washington and around the country. In recent years, Kennedy said, she’s received more and more messages about anti-Semitic vandalism and harassment in schools. For example, she told me, “someone calls and says, ‘There’s a swastika drawn in the bathroom.’ ”
  • Maybe not, Kennedy admitted. “What frightens me is that small acts of anti-Semitism are becoming very normalized,” she said. “We’re getting used to it. That keeps me up at night.”“Sadly, I don’t think we can fix this,” Regelbrugge said. “But we’re gonna die trying.”
  • Almost every city where I spoke with Holocaust-museum educators, whether by phone or in person, had also been the site of a violent anti-Semitic attack in the years since these museums had opened
  • I was struck by how minimally these attacks were discussed in the educational materials shared by the museums.
  • In fact, with the exception of Kennedy and Regelbrugge, no one I spoke with mentioned these anti-Semitic attacks at all.
  • The failure to address contemporary anti-Semitism in most of American Holocaust education is, in a sense, by design
  • the story of the (mostly non-Jewish) teachers in Massachusetts and New Jersey who created the country’s first Holocaust curricula, in the ’70s. The point was to teach morality in a secular society. “Everyone in education, regardless of ethnicity, could agree that Nazism was evil and that the Jews were innocent victims,” Fallace wrote, explaining the topic’s appeal. “Thus, teachers used the Holocaust to activate the moral reasoning of their students”—to teach them to be good people.
  • The idea that Holocaust education can somehow serve as a stand-in for public moral education has not left us. And because of its obviously laudable goals, objecting to it feels like clubbing a baby seal. Who wouldn’t want to teach kids to be empathetic?
  • by this logic, shouldn’t Holocaust education, because of its moral content alone, automatically inoculate people against anti-Semitism?
  • Apparently not. “Essentially the moral lessons that the Holocaust is often used to teach reflect much the same values that were being taught in schools before the Holocaust,”
  • (Germans in the ’30s, after all, were familiar with the Torah’s commandment, repeated in the Christian Bible, to love their neighbors.) This fact undermines nearly everything Holocaust education is trying to accomplish, and reveals the roots of its failure.
  • One problem with using the Holocaust as a morality play is exactly its appeal: It flatters everyone. We can all congratulate ourselves for not committing mass murder.
  • This approach excuses current anti-Semitism by defining anti-Semitism as genocide in the past
  • When anti-Semitism is reduced to the Holocaust, anything short of murdering 6 million Jews—like, say, ramming somebody with a shopping cart, or taunting kids at school, or shooting up a Jewish nonprofit, or hounding Jews out of entire countries—seems minor by comparison.
  • If we teach that the Holocaust happened because people weren’t nice enough—that they failed to appreciate that humans are all the same, for instance, or to build a just society—we create the self-congratulatory space where anti-Semitism grow
  • One can believe that humans are all the same while being virulently anti-Semitic, because according to anti-Semites, Jews, with their millennia-old insistence on being different from their neighbors, are the obstacle to humans all being the same
  • One can believe in creating a just society while being virulently anti-Semitic, because according to anti-Semites, Jews, with their imagined power and privilege, are the obstacle to a just society
  • To inoculate people against the myth that humans have to erase their differences in order to get along, and the related myth that Jews, because they have refused to erase their differences, are supervillains, one would have to acknowledge that these myths exist
  • To really shatter them, one would have to actually explain the content of Jewish identity, instead of lazily claiming that Jews are just like everyone else.
  • one of several major Holocaust-curriculum providers, told me about the “terrible Jew jokes” she’d heard from her own students in Virginia. “They don’t necessarily know where they come from or even really why they’re saying them,” Goss said. “Many kids understand not to say the N-word, but they would say, ‘Don’t be such a Jew.’ ”
  • There’s a decline in history education at the same time that there’s a rise in social media,”
  • “We’ve done studies with our partners at Holocaust centers that show that students are coming in with questions about whether the Holocaust was an actual event. That wasn’t true 20 years ago.”
  • Goss believes that one of the reasons for the lack of stigma around anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and jokes is baked into the universal-morality approach to Holocaust education. “The Holocaust is not a good way to teach about ‘bullying,’ 
  • Echoes & Reflections’ lesson plans do address newer versions of anti-Semitism, including the contemporary demonization of Israel’s existence—as opposed to criticism of Israeli policies—and its manifestation in aggression against Jews. Other Holocaust-curriculum providers also have material on contemporary anti-Semitism.
  • providers rarely explain or explore who Jews are today—and their raison d’être remains Holocaust education.
  • Many teachers had told me that their classrooms “come alive” when they teach about the Holocaust
  • Holocaust-education materials are just plain better than those on most other historical topics. All of the major Holocaust-education providers offer lessons that teachers can easily adapt for different grade levels and subject areas. Instead of lecturing and memorization, they use participation-based methods such as group work, hands-on activities, and “learner driven” projects.
  • A 2019 Pew Research Center survey found a correlation between “warm” feelings about Jews and knowledge about the Holocaust—but the respondents who said they knew a Jewish person also tended to be more knowledgeable about the Holocaust, providing a more obvious source for their feelings
  • In 2020, Echoes & Reflections published a commissioned study of 1,500 college students, comparing students who had been exposed to Holocaust education in high school with those who hadn’t. The published summary shows that those who had studied the Holocaust were more likely to tolerate diverse viewpoints, and more likely to privately support victims of bullying scenarios, which is undoubtedly good news. It did not, however, show a significant difference in respondents’ willingness to defend victims publicly, and students who’d received Holocaust education were less likely to be civically engaged—in other words, to be an “upstander.”
  • These studies puzzled me. As Goss told me, the Holocaust was not about bullying—so why was the Echoes study measuring that? More important, why were none of these studies examining awareness of anti-Semitism, whether past or present?
  • One major study addressing this topic was conducted in England, where a national Holocaust-education mandate has been in place for more than 20 years. In 2016, researchers at University College London’s Centre for Holocaust Education published a survey of more than 8,000 English secondary-school students, including 244 whom they interviewed at length.
  • The study’s most disturbing finding was that even among those who studied the Holocaust, there was “a very common struggle among many students to credibly explain why Jews were targeted” in the Holocaust—that is, to cite anti-Semitism
  • “many students appeared to regard [Jews’] existence as problematic and a key cause of Nazi victimisation.” In other words, students blamed the Holocaust on the Jews
  • This result resembles that of a large 2020 survey of American Millennials and Gen Zers, in which 11 percent of respondents believed that Jews caused the Holocaust. The state with the highest percentage of respondents believing this—an eye-popping 19 percent—was New York, which has mandated Holocaust education since the 1990s.
  • Worse, in the English study, “a significant number of students appeared to tacitly accept some of the egregious claims once circulated by Nazi propaganda,” instead of recognizing them as anti-Semitic myths.
  • One typical student told researchers, “Is it because like they were kind of rich, so maybe they thought that that was kind of in some way evil, like the money didn’t belong to them[;] it belonged to the Germans and the Jewish people had kind of taken that away from them?
  • Another was even more blunt: “The Germans, when they saw the Jews were better off than them, kind of, I don’t know, it kind of pissed them off a bit.” Hitler’s speeches were more eloquent in making similar points.
  • One of the teachers I met was Benjamin Vollmer, a veteran conference participant who has spent years building his school’s Holocaust-education program. He teaches eighth-grade English in Venus, Texas, a rural community with 5,700 residents; his school is majority Hispanic, and most students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. When I asked him why he focuses on the Holocaust, his initial answer was simple: “It meets the TEKS.”
  • The TEKS are the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, an elaborate list of state educational requirements that drive standardized testing
  • it became apparent that Holocaust education was something much bigger for his students: a rare access point to a wider world. Venus is about 30 miles from Dallas, but Vollmer’s annual Holocaust-museum field trip is the first time that many of his students ever leave their town.
  • “It’s become part of the school culture,” Vollmer said. “In eighth grade, they walk in, and the first thing they ask is, ‘When are we going to learn about the Holocaust?’
  • Vollmer is not Jewish—and, as is common for Holocaust educators, he has never had a Jewish student. (Jews are 2.4 percent of the U.S. adult population, according to a 2020 Pew survey.) Why not focus on something more relevant to his students, I asked him, like the history of immigration or the civil-rights movement?
  • I hadn’t yet appreciated that the absence of Jews was precisely the appeal.“Some topics have been so politicized that it’s too hard to teach them,” Vollmer told me. “Making it more historical takes away some of the barriers to talking about it.”
  • Wouldn’t the civil-rights movement, I asked, be just as historical for his students?He paused, thinking it through. “You have to build a level of rapport in your class before you have the trust to explore your own history,” he finally said.
  • “The Holocaust happened long ago, and we’re not responsible for it,” she said. “Anything happening in our world today, the wool comes down over our eyes.” Her colleague attending the conference with her, a high-school teacher who also wouldn’t share her name, had tried to take her mostly Hispanic students to a virtual-reality experience called Carne y Arena, which follows migrants attempting to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Her administrators refused, claiming that it would traumatize students. But they still learn about the Holocaust.
  • Student discomfort has been a legal issue in Texas. The state’s House Bill 3979, passed in 2021, is one of many “anti-critical-race-theory” laws that conservative state legislators have introduced since 2020. The bill forbade teachers from causing students “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex,” and also demanded that teachers introduce “diverse and contending perspectives” when teaching “controversial” topics, “without giving deference to any one perspective.
  • These vaguely worded laws stand awkwardly beside a 2019 state law mandating Holocaust education for Texas students at all grade levels during an annual Holocaust Remembrance Week
  • the administrator who’d made the viral remarks in Southlake is a strong proponent of Holocaust education, but was acknowledging a reality in that school district. Every year, the administrator had told Higgins, some parents in her district object to their children reading the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night—because it isn’t their “belief” that the Holocaust happened.
  • In one model lesson at the conference, participants examined a speech by the Nazi official Heinrich Himmler about the need to murder Jews, alongside a speech by the Hebrew poet and ghetto fighter Abba Kovner encouraging a ghetto uprising. I only later realized that this lesson plan quite elegantly satisfied the House bill’s requirement of providing “contending perspectives.”
  • The next day, I asked the instructor if that was an unspoken goal of her lesson plan. With visible hesitation, she said that teaching in Texas can be like “walking the tightrope.” This way, she added, “you’re basing your perspectives on primary texts and not debating with Holocaust deniers.” Less than an hour later, a senior museum employee pulled me aside to tell me that I wasn’t allowed to interview the staff.
  • Many of the visiting educators at the conference declined to talk with me, even anonymously; nearly all who did spoke guardedly. The teachers I met, most of whom were white Christian women, did not seem to be of any uniform political bent. But virtually all of them were frustrated by what administrators and parents were demanding of them.
  • Two local middle-school teachers told me that many parents insist on seeing reading lists. Parents “wanting to keep their kid in a bubble,” one of them said, has been “the huge stumbling block.”
  • “It is healthy to begin this study by talking about anti-Semitism, humanizing the victims, sticking to primary sources, and remaining as neutral as possible.”
  • Wasn’t “remaining as neutral as possible” exactly the opposite of being an upstander?
  • In trying to remain neutral, some teachers seemed to want to seek out the Holocaust’s bright side—and ask dead Jews about i
  • We watched a brief introduction about Glauben’s childhood and early adolescence in the Warsaw Ghetto and in numerous camps. When the dead man appeared, one teacher asked, “Was there any joy or happiness in this ordeal? Moments of joy in the camps?”
  • These experiences, hardly unusual for Jewish victims, were not the work of a faceless killing machine. Instead they reveal a gleeful and imaginative sadism. For perpetrators, this was fun. Asking this dead man about “joy” seemed like a fundamental misunderstanding of the Holocaust. There was plenty of joy, just on the Nazi side.
  • In the educational resources I explored, I did not encounter any discussions of sadism—the joy derived from humiliating people, the dopamine hit from landing a laugh at someone else’s expense, the self-righteous high from blaming one’s problems on others—even though this, rather than the fragility of democracy or the passivity of bystanders, is a major origin point of all anti-Semitism
  • To anyone who has spent 10 seconds online, that sadism is familiar, and its source is familiar too: the fear of being small, and the desire to feel big by making others feel small instead.
  • Nazis were, among other things, edgelords, in it for the laughs. So, for that matter, were the rest of history’s anti-Semites, then and now. For Americans today, isn’t this the most relevant insight of all?
  • “People say we’ve learned from the Holocaust. No, we didn’t learn a damn thing,”
  • “People glom on to this idea of the upstander,” she said. “Kids walk away with the sense that there were a lot of upstanders, and they think, Yes, I can do it too.”
  • The problem with presenting the less inspiring reality, she suggested, is how parents or administrators might react. “If you teach historical anti-Semitism, you have to teach contemporary anti-Semitism. A lot of teachers are fearful, because if you try to connect it to today, parents are going to call, or administrators are going to call, and say you’re pushing an agenda.”
  • But weren’t teachers supposed to “push an agenda” to stop hatred? Wasn’t that the entire hope of those survivors who built museums and lobbied for mandates and turned themselves into holograms?
  • I asked Klett why no one seemed to be teaching anything about Jewish culture. If the whole point of Holocaust education is to “humanize” those who were “dehumanized,” why do most teachers introduce students to Jews only when Jews are headed for a mass grave? “There’s a real fear of teaching about Judaism,” she confided. “Especially if the teacher is Jewish.”
  • Teachers who taught about industrialized mass murder were scared of teaching about … Judaism? Why?
  • “Because the teachers are afraid that the parents are going to say that they’re pushing their religion on the kids.”
  • “Survivors have told me, ‘Thank you for teaching this. They’ll listen to you because you’re not Jewish,’ ” she said. “Which is weird.”
  • perhaps we could be honest and just say “There is no point in teaching any of this”—because anti-Semitism is so ingrained in our world that even when discussing the murders of 6 million Jews, it would be “pushing an agenda” to tell people not to hate them, or to tell anyone what it actually means to be Jewish
  • The Dallas Museum was the only one I visited that opened with an explanation of who Jews are. Its exhibition began with brief videos about Abraham and Moses—limiting Jewish identity to a “religion” familiar to non-Jews, but it was better than nothing. The museum also debunked the false charge that the Jews—rather than the Romans—killed Jesus, and explained the Jews’ refusal to convert to other faiths. It even had a panel or two about contemporary Dallas Jewish life. Even so, a docent there told me that one question students ask is “Are any Jews still alive today?”
  • American Holocaust education, in this museum and nearly everywhere else, never ends with Jews alive today. Instead it ends by segueing to other genocides, or to other minorities’ suffering
  • But when one reaches the end of the exhibition on American slavery at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C., one does not then enter an exhibition highlighting the enslavement of other groups throughout world history, or a room full of interactive touchscreens about human trafficking today, asking that visitors become “upstanders” in fighting i
  • That approach would be an insult to Black history, ignoring Black people’s current experiences while turning their past oppression into nothing but a symbol for something else, something that actually matters.
  • It is dehumanizing to be treated as a symbol. It is even more dehumanizing to be treated as a warning.
  • How should we teach children about anti-Semitism?
  • Decoster began her conference workshop by introducing “vocabulary must-knows.” At the top of her list: anti-Semitism.
  • “If you don’t explain the ism,” she cautioned the teachers in the room, “you will need to explain to the kids ‘Why the Jews?’ Students are going to see Nazis as aliens who bring with them anti-Semitism when they come to power in ’33, and they take it back away at the end of the Holocaust in 1945.”
  • She asked the teachers, “What’s the first example of the persecution of the Jews in history?”
  • “Think ancient Egypt,” Decoster said. “Does this sound familiar to any of you?”“They’re enslaved by the Egyptian pharaoh,” a teacher said
  • I wasn’t sure that the biblical Exodus narrative exactly qualified as “history,” but it quickly became clear that wasn’t Decoster’s point. “Why does the pharaoh pick on the Jews?” she asked. “Because they had one God.”
  • I was stunned. Rarely in my journey through American Holocaust education did I hear anyone mention a Jewish belief.
  • “The Jews worship one God, and that’s their moral structure. Egyptian society has multiple gods whose authority goes to the pharaoh. When things go wrong, you can see how Jews as outsiders were perceived by the pharaoh as the threat.”
  • This unexpected understanding of Jewish belief revealed a profound insight about Judaism: Its rejection of idolatry is identical to its rejection of tyranny. I could see how that might make people uncomfortable.
  • Decoster moved on to a snazzy infographic of a wheel divided in thirds, each explaining a component of anti-Semitism
  • “Racial Antisemitism = False belief that Jews are a race and a threat to other races,”
  • Anti-Judaism = Hatred of Jews as a religious group,”
  • then “Anti-Jewish Conspiracy Theory = False belief that Jews want to control and overtake the world.” The third part, the conspiracy theory, was what distinguished anti-Semitism from other bigotries. It allowed closed-minded people to congratulate themselves for being open-minded—for “doing their own research,” for “punching up,” for “speaking truth to power,” while actually just spreading lies.
  • Wolfson clarified for his audience what this centuries-long demonization of Jews actually means, citing the scholar David Patterson, who has written: “In the end, the antisemite’s claim is not that all Jews are evil, but rather that all evil is Jewish.”
  • Wolfson told the teachers that it was important that “anti-Semitism should not be your students’ first introduction to Jews and Judaism.” He said this almost as an aside, just before presenting the pig-excrement image. “If you’re teaching about anti-Semitism before you teach about the content of Jewish identity, you’re doing it wrong.
  • this—introducing students to Judaism by way of anti-Semitism—was exactly what they were doing. The same could be said, I realized, for nearly all of American Holocaust education.
  • The Holocaust educators I met across America were all obsessed with building empathy, a quality that relies on finding commonalities between ourselves and others.
  • a more effective way to address anti-Semitism might lie in cultivating a completely different quality, one that happens to be the key to education itself: curiosity. Why use Jews as a means to teach people that we’re all the same, when the demand that Jews be just like their neighbors is exactly what embedded the mental virus of anti-Semitism in the Western mind in the first place? Why not instead encourage inquiry about the diversity, to borrow a de rigueur word, of the human experience?
  • I want a hologram of the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks telling people about what he called “the dignity of difference.”
  • I want to mandate this for every student in this fractured and siloed America, even if it makes them much, much more uncomfortable than seeing piles of dead Jews doe
  • There is no empathy without curiosity, no respect without knowledge, no other way to learn what Jews first taught the world: love your neighbor
Javier E

David Brooks on emerging from loneliness to find 'moral renewal' | PBS NewsHour - 0 views

  • we have slipped into some bad values. We're too individualistic, when we should be a little more communal. We're too cognitive, up in our head, and analytical, when we should be more emotional and relational. We steer our kids toward career success, and not toward moral joy.
  • And when you have bad values, you steer — you end up in a bad place
  • I found people who realized the core truth, you can't solve your problems on the level of consciousness at which you created them. They went deeper into themselves. And they discovered a level of ability for care. And they lead marvelous lives.
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  • I was down in the valley. And I went through that period. And I discovered you can either be broken or you can be broken open. And some people get broken. They turn fearful in their bad moments, and they lash out. They turn hostile and violent and tribal. And they're full of resentments.
  • But some people get broken open. You just realize the depths of yourself, and you realize that only spiritual and emotional food is going to fill those depths. So, you think, I got to change my world view.
  • it's useful to make a distinction between happiness and joy.
  • We spend a lot of time thinking about happiness. And happiness is when you win your victory, when something goes well, you got a promotion. And happiness is an expansion of self.
  • But joy is when the self disappears, when you transcend yourself. There's a woman in the book who I interviewed in Ohio who the worst thing happened to her that could happen. She came home one Sunday, and her husband had killed their kids and himself.
  • And now she leads a life of pure service, pure gift. She has a free pharmacy. She teaches at Ohio University. She helps women who've suffered violence. And she said: "I did it partly out of anger. I wanted to show, whatever that guy tried to do to me, he didn't do it. I was going to make a difference in the world."
  • I think it works for everybody.I have been with rich people and poor people, and everybody needs spiritual growth. Everybody has a soul. It gives us infinite value and dignity. And what the soul does is, it yearns for righteousness.
  • at bottom, the Trump moment is a spiritual and moral crisis. We just treat each other badly. We're not compassionate towards one another. We stereotype, rather than see the dignity of each human person.
  • it flows out of loneliness and disconnection. A lot of people who voted for him, their communities are falling apart. And they needed something new.
  • And then we're in a tribal warfare where we don't communicate with each other well, we don't see deeply into each other's souls, we don't befriend one another. And so we get this volleys of hatred.
  • to me, our problems are, we have political problems, we have economic problems, but we also have spiritual and moral problems. And we have become not great about talking about them, because it always seems like, oh, you're the problem. We don't live for relationship. And that's the change that has to happen.
  • I started something called — at the Aspen Institute called Weave: The Social Fabric Project. And I meet weavers wherever you go. And these are people who are weaving relationship. They are weaving community.
anonymous

Pride Celebrations Aim To Bring Joy In A Safe Way As Cities Reopen : NPR - 0 views

  • The Stonewall Inn isn't having any big, in-person events to kick off Pride Month. It hosted a virtual event instead. But across the street from the historic bar, a slow stream of visitors stops to admire Greenwich Village's Stonewall National Monument. It's a small, gated park circled by rainbow flags and photographs of the 1969 Stonewall Riots.
  • Menendez usually celebrates by marching in the New York City Pride parade and walking around Greenwich Village. He expects a lot of joy this Pride, because over the past few weeks New York City has relaxed many restrictions on dining and gathering. "The streets are going to be on fire and alive, and I think people are going to be everywhere celebrating," he says.
  • A year ago, most Pride celebrations were completely off the table due to the pandemic. This year, Pride organizers are planning events throughout the month of June and trying to bring back the joy, while still navigating COVID-19 restrictions.
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  • Last month, New York City Pride did announce a new policy limiting police presence at its events until 2025. This includes participation of the NYPD's Gay Officers Action League, which normally marches in the Pride parade.
  • Pride is a crucial economic season for most LGBTQ bars.
  • Many LGBTQ bars are also having trouble predicting what Pride month will look like. Alexi Minko, owner of the Black queer bar Alibi in Harlem, says he was surprised when the city announced that many dining and event restrictions would be lifted by June.
  • He is still figuring out the logistics of putting an event together by the end of the month. But he's excited that people can celebrate Pride at Alibi this year.
  • One in-person event planned for New York City is the Queer Liberation March. It's an alternative rally that started a few years ago. Organizers said corporations and police were too present at the official Pride parade.
  • She reopened indoor seating for fully vaccinated people. But customers still cannot stand inside. That means crowds can't pack in, shoulder-to-shoulder, like they normally do during Pride.
  • Menichino expects to see a lot of joy and relief from customers this Pride month, even if they're sitting at carefully placed tables rather than dancing.
  • She says crowds might be smaller anyway because so many public events are still virtual. But she's grateful for a partial return of Pride programming.
Javier E

The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (Hainish Cycle Book 5) (Ursula K. Le Guin) - 0 views

  • instead of merely looking at it from outside. He took on two seminars and an open lecture course. No teaching was requested of him, but he had asked if he could teach, and the administrators had arranged the seminars. The open class was neither his idea nor theirs. A delegation of students came and asked him to give it. He consented at once. This was how courses were organized in Anarresti learning centers by student demand, or on the teacher’s initiative, or by students and teachers together. When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. “Do they expect students not to be anarchists?” he said. “What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up!” He had no intention of being administered out of the course—he had fought this kind of battle before—and because he communicated his firmness to the students, they held firm. To avoid unpleasant publicity, the Rectors of the University gave in, and Shevek began his course to a first-cay audience of two thousand. Attendance soon dropped. He stuck to physics, never going off into the personal or the political, and it was physics on a pretty advanced level. But several hundred students continued to come. Some came out of mere curiosity, to see the man from the Moon; others were drawn by Shevek’s personality, by the glimpses of the man and the libertarian which they could catch from his words even when they could not follow his mathematics. And a surprising number of them were capable of following both the philosophy and the mathematics. They were superbly trained, these students. Their minds were fine, keen, ready. When they weren’t working, they rested. They were not blunted and distracted by a dozen other obligations. They never fell asleep in class because they were tired from having worked on rotational duty the day before. Their society maintained them in complete freedom from want, distractions, and cares. What they were free to do, however, was another question. It appeared to Shevek that their freedom from obligation was in exact proportion to their lack of freedom of initiative. He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him; he could not imagine a greater deterrent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it at demand. At first he refused to give any tests or grades, but this upset the University administrators so badly that, not wishing to be discourteous to his hosts, he gave in. He asked his students to write a paper on any problem in physics that interested them, and told them that he would give them all the highest mark, so that the bureaucrats would have something to write on their forms and lists. To his surprise a good many students came to him to complain. They wanted him to set the problems, to ask the right questions; they did not want to think about questions, but to write down the answers they had learned. And some of them objected strongly to his giving everyone the same mark. How could the diligent students be distinguished from the dull ones? What was the good in working hard? If no competitive distinctions were to be made, one might as well do nothing. “Well, of course,” Shevek said, troubled. “If you do not want to do the work, you should not do it.” The boys went away unappeased, but polite. They were pleasant boys, with frank and civil manners. Shevek’s readings in Urrasti history led him to decide that they were, in fact, though the word was seldom used these days, aristocrats. In feudal times the aristocracy had sent their sons to university, conferring superiority on the institution. Nowadays it was the other way round: the university conferred superiority on the man. They told Shevek with pride that the competition for scholarships to Ieu Eun was stiffer every year, proving the essential democracy of the institution. He said, “You put another lock on the door and call it democracy.” He liked his polite, intelligent students, but he felt no great warmth towards any of them. They were planning careers as academic or industrial scientists, and what they learned from him was to them a means to that end, success in their careers. They either had, or denied the importance of, anything else he might have offered them.
  • Shevek touched her, silver arm with his silver hand, marveling at the warmth of the touch in that cool light. “If you can see a thing whole,” he said, “it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.”
  • instead of merely looking at it from outside. He took on two seminars and an open lecture course. No teaching was requested of him, but he had asked if he could teach, and the administrators had arranged the seminars. The open class was neither his idea nor theirs. A delegation of students came and asked him to give it. He consented at once. This was how courses were organized in Anarresti learning centers by student demand, or on the teacher’s initiative, or by students and teachers together. When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. “Do they expect students not to be anarchists?” he said. “What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up!” He had no intention of being administered out of the course—he had fought this kind of battle before—and because he communicated his firmness to the students, they held firm. To avoid unpleasant publicity, the Rectors of the University gave in, and Shevek began his course to a first-cay audience of two thousand. Attendance soon dropped. He stuck to physics, never going off into the personal or the political, and it was physics on a pretty advanced level. But several hundred students continued to come. Some came out of mere curiosity, to see the man from the Moon; others were drawn by Shevek’s personality, by the glimpses of the man and the libertarian which they could catch from his words even when they could not follow his mathematics. And a surprising number of them were capable of following both the philosophy and the mathematics. They were superbly trained, these students. Their minds were fine, keen, ready. When they weren’t working, they rested. They were not blunted and distracted by a dozen other obligations. They never fell asleep in class because they were tired from having worked on rotational duty the day before. Their society maintained them in complete freedom from want, distractions, and cares. What they were free to do, however, was another question. It appeared to Shevek that their freedom from obligation was in exact proportion to their lack of freedom of initiative. He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him; he could not imagine a greater deterrent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it at demand. At first he refused to give any tests or grades, but this upset the University administrators so badly that, not wishing to be discourteous to his hosts, he gave in. He asked his students to write a paper on any problem in physics that interested them, and told them that he would give them all the highest mark, so that the bureaucrats would have something to write on their forms and lists. To his surprise a good many students came to him to complain. They wanted him to set the problems, to ask the right questions; they did not want to think about questions, but to write down the answers they had learned. And some of them objected strongly to his giving…
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  • He found himself, therefore, with no duties at all beyond the preparation of his three classes; the rest of his time was all his own. He had not been in a situation like this since his early twenties, his first years at the Institute in Abbenay. Since those years his social and personal life had got more and more complicated and demanding. He had been not only a physicist but also a partner, a father, an Odonian, and finally a social reformer. As such, he had not been sheltered, and had expected no shelter, from whatever cares and responsibilities came to him. He had not been free from anything: only free to do anything. Here, it was the other way around. Like all the students and professors, he had nothing to do but his intellectual work, literally nothing. The beds were made for them, the rooms were swept for them, the routine of the college was managed for them, the way was made plain for them.
  • she was not a temporal physicist. She saw time naïvely as a road laid out. You walked ahead, and you got somewhere. If you were lucky, you got somewhere worth getting to. But when Shevek took her metaphor and recast it in his terms, explaining that, unless the past and the future were made part of the present by memory and intention, there was, in human terms, no road, nowhere to go, she nodded before he was half done. “Exactly,” she said. “That’s what I was doing these last four years. It isn’t all luck. Just partly.”
  • Shevek touched her, silver arm with his silver hand, marveling at the warmth of the touch in that cool light. “If you can see a thing whole,” he said, “it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.”
  • all. Odo wrote: “A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well—this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection, and of sociality as a whole.” There was an undercurrent of joy, in that sense, in Abbenay that summer. There was a lightheartedness at work however hard the work, a
  • Fulfillment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell. Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings. It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it. So, looking back on the last four years, Shevek saw them not as wasted, but as part of the edifice that he and Takver were building with their lives. The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.
Javier E

I have become a Marie Kondo disciple. I am proud and ashamed. - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Wellness crazes are common and well-documented, but this manifestation seems like a particular sign of our times. The KonMari method emphasizes order, in a year — or span of years — that hasn’t seen very much of it.
  • And there’s its fixation on lessening consumption, grown more compelling as the potential for climate disaster becomes more real every day.
  • But it’s also deeply humane. Joy and kindness call to us, and they are at the heart of Kondo’s philosophy. The key to deciding what to keep or discard is to take each object in hand and ask “does this spark joy?” If it does, it can stay
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  • The KonMari method, despite its rather gimmicky portmanteau, isn’t a diet or a class, but a system of manual and emotional labor. And yes, there is actual labor involved.
  • Following KonMari doesn’t result in evanescent numbers on a screen or slides in a deck, but in a closet once full made empty, or a kitchen once cluttered turned clean and still.
  • “As I am both lazy and forgetful,” Kondo wrote, “I can’t take proper care of too many things. That is why I want to cherish properly the things I love, and that is why I have insisted on tidying for so much of my life.”
  • The Marie Kondo craze is just us and our everyday lives, calmly being put into order again. As it turns out, that’s all we really want.
Javier E

Opinion | We'll never solve our many crises without this key ingredient - The Washingto... - 0 views

  • So, am I wrong to delight in this bird when so much woe stalks birds in general? The question seems pertinent when our mental bandwidth is packed with generalized gloom
  • There is the problem of climate, the problem of democracy, the problem of gun violence, the water problem, the social media problem, the free speech problem, the policing problem, the inequality problem, the debt problem, the border problem, the overdose problem, and the linked problem of inflation and bank collapses. Oh, yes: And the bird problem.
  • Nor might it be coincidence that the Wall Street Journal and the National Opinion Research Center — excellent sources when it comes to opinion surveys — report that the ground has begun crumbling beneath American morale.
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  • Joy is becoming countercultural; in fashion instead is a heavy coat of doom. Anxiety and depression are endemic, psychologists tell us, and why wouldn’t they be, when optimism and cheerfulness are taken as signs of obtuseness?
  • When happiness is a dead giveaway that someone either doesn’t know, or doesn’t care, how very bad things are?
  • One cannot usefully address a threat to birds if they do not delight in individual birds.
  • One cannot meaningfully answer the climate crisis if they lack excitement about the human capacity for invention and reinvention
  • one cannot build the future if one fears the future.
  • It stands to reason — doesn’t it? — that the answer is not greater and greater attention to more and more crises
  • It is more time spent by each of us on the nurture of joy and the cultivation of hope.
Javier E

In Silicon Valley, You Can Be Worth Billions and It's Not Enough - The New York Times - 0 views

  • He got a phone call about the imminent sale of a tech company and allegedly traded on the confidential information, according to charges filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The profit for a few minutes of work: $415,726.
  • rarely has anyone traded his reputation for seemingly so little reward. For Mr. Bechtolsheim, $415,726 was equivalent to a quarter rolling behind the couch. He was ranked No. 124 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index last week, with an estimated fortune of $16 billion.
  • Last month, Mr. Bechtolsheim, 68, settled the insider trading charges without admitting wrongdoing. He agreed to pay a fine of more than $900,000 and will not serve as an officer or director of a public company for five years.
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  • Nothing in his background seems to have brought him to this troubling point. Mr. Bechtolsheim was one of those who gave Silicon Valley its reputation as an engineer’s paradise, a place where getting rich was just something that happened by accident.
  • “He cared so much about making great technology that he would buy a house, not furnish it and sleep on a futon,” said Scott McNealy, who joined with Mr. Bechtolsheim four decades ago to create Sun Microsystems, a maker of computer workstations and servers that was a longtime tech powerhouse. “Money was not how he measured himself.”
  • researchers who analyze trading data say corporate executives broadly profit from confidential information. These executives try to avoid traditional insider trading restrictions by buying shares in economically linked firms, a phenomenon called “shadow trading.”
  • “There appears to be significant profits being made from shadow trading,” said Mihir N. Mehta, an assistant professor of accounting at the University of Michigan and an author of a 2021 study in The Accounting Review that found “robust evidence” of the behavior. “The people doing it have a sense of entitlement or maybe just think, ‘I’m invincible.’”
  • He went to Stanford as a Ph.D. student in the mid-1970s and got to know the then-small programming community around the university. In the early 1980s, he, along with Mr. McNealy, Vinod Khosla and Bill Joy, started Sun Microsystems as an outgrowth of a Stanford project. When Sun initially raised money, Mr. Bechtolsheim put his entire life savings — about $100,000 — into the company.
  • “You could end up losing all your money,” he was warned by the venture capitalists financing Sun. His response: “I see zero risk here.”
  • An impromptu demonstration was hastily arranged for 8 a.m., which Mr. Bechtolsheim cut short. He had seen enough, and besides, he had to get to the office. He gave them a check, and the deal was sealed, Mr. Levy wrote, “with as little fanfare as if he were grabbing a latte on the way to work.
  • Mr. Page and Mr. Brin couldn’t deposit Mr. Bechtolsheim’s check for a month because Google did not have a bank account. When Google went public in 2004, that $100,000 investment was worth at least $1 billion.
  • It wasn’t the money that made the story famous, however. It was the way it confirmed one of Silicon Valley’s most cherished beliefs about itself: that its genius is so blindingly obvious, questions are superfluous.
  • The dot-com boom was a disorienting period for longtime Valley leaders whose interest in money was muted. Mr. Bechtolsheim’s Sun colleague Mr. Joy left Silicon Valley.
  • “There’s so much money around, it’s clouding a lot of people’s ethics,” Mr. Joy said in a 1999 oral history
  • Mr. Bechtolsheim didn’t leave. In 2008, he co-founded Arista, a Silicon Valley computer networking company that went public and now has 4,000 employees and a stock market value of $100 billion.
  • Mr. Bechtolsheim was chair of Arista’s board when an executive from another company called in 2019, according to the S.E.C. Arista and the other company, which was not named in court documents, had a history of sharing confidential information under nondisclosure agreements.
  • immediately after hanging up, the government said, he bought Acacia option contracts in the accounts of a close relative and a colleague. The next day, the deal was announced. Acacia shares jumped 35 percent.
  • Arista’s code of conduct states that “employees who possess material, nonpublic information gained through their work at Arista may not trade in Arista securities or the securities of another company to which the information pertains.”
  • Mr. Levy, the “In the Plex” author, said there were plenty of legal ways to make money in Silicon Valley. “Someone who is regarded as an influential funder and is very well connected gets nearly unlimited opportunities to make very desirable early investments,”
Javier E

New Statesman - The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now - 0 views

  • Art & Design Books Film Ideas Music & Performance TV & Radio Food & Drink Blog Return to: Home | Culture | Books The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now By George Levine Reviewed by Terry Eagleton - 22 June 2011 82 comments Print version Email a friend Listen RSS Misunderstanding what it means to be secular.
  • Societies become truly secular not when they dispense with religion but when they are no longer greatly agitated by it. It is when religious faith ceases to be a vital part of the public sphere
  • Christianity is certainly other-worldly, and so is any reasonably sensitive soul who has been reading the newspapers. The Christian gospel looks to a future transformation of the appalling mess we see around us into a community of justice and friendship, a change so deep-seated and indescribable as to make Lenin look like a Lib Dem.“This [world] is our home," Levine comments. If he really feels at home in this crucifying set-up, one might humbly suggest that he shouldn't. Christians and political radicals certainly don't.
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  • None of these writers points out that if Christianity is true, then it is all up with us. We would then have to face the deeply disagreeable truth that the only authentic life is one that springs from a self-dispossession so extreme that it is probably beyond our power.
  • Adam Phillips writes suggestively of human helplessness as opposed to the sense of protectedness that religious faith supposedly brings us, without noticing that the signifier of God for the New Testament is the tortured and executed corpse of a suspected political criminal.
  • he suspects that Christian faith is other-worldly in the sense of despising material things. Material reality, in his view, is what art celebrates but religion does not. This is to forget that Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit. It is also to misunderstand the doctrine of Creation
  • What exactly," he enquires, "does the invocation of some supernatural being add?" A Christian might reply that it adds the obligations to give up everything one has, including one's life, if necessary, for the sake of others. And this, to say the least, is highly inconvenient.
  • The Christian paradigm of love, by contrast, is the love of strangers and enemies, not of those we find agreeable. Civilised notions such as mutual sympathy, more's the pity, won't deliver us the world we need.
  • Secularisation is a lot harder than people tend to imagine. The history of modernity is, among other things, the history of substitutes for God. Art, culture, nation, Geist, humanity, society: all these, along with a clutch of other hopeful aspirants, have been tried from time to time. The most successful candidate currently on offer is sport, which, short of providing funeral rites for its spectators, fulfils almost every religious function in the book.
  • If Friedrich Nietzsche was the first sincere atheist, it is because he saw that the Almighty is exceedingly good at disguising Himself as something else, and that much so-called secularisation is accordingly bogus.
  • Postmodernism is perhaps best seen as Nietzsche shorn of the metaphysical baggage. Whereas modernism is still haunted by a God-shaped absence, postmodern culture is too young to remember a time when men and women were anguished by the fading spectres of truth, reality, nature, value, meaning, foundations and the like. For postmodern theory, there never was any truth or meaning in the first place
  • Postmodernism is properly secular, but it pays an immense price for this coming of age - if coming of age it is. It means shelving all the other big questions, too, as hopelessly passé. It also involves the grave error of imagining that all faith or passionate conviction is inci­piently dogmatic. It is not only religious belief to which postmodernism is allergic, but belief as such. Advanced capitalism sees no need for the stuff. It is both politically divisive and commercially unnecessary.
Javier E

We Can't Teach Students to Love Reading - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Highe... - 0 views

  • While virtually anyone who wants to do so can train his or her brain to the habits of long-form reading, in any given culture, few people will want to. And that's to be expected. Serious "deep attention" reading has always been and will always be a minority pursuit, a fact that has been obscured in the past half-century
  • From 1945 to 2000, or thereabouts, far more people than ever before in human history were expected to read, understand, appreciate, and even enjoy books. In 2005, Wendy Griswold, Terry McDonnell, and Nathan Wright, sociologists from Northwestern University, published a paper concluding that while there was a period in which extraordinarily many Americans practiced long-form reading, whether they liked it or not, that period was indeed extraordinary and not sustainable in the long run. "We are now seeing such reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class."
  • much of the anxiety about American reading habits, and those in other developed nations to a lesser degree, arises from frustration at not being able to sustain a permanent expansion of "the reading class" beyond what may be its natural limits.
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  • The extreme reader, to coin a phrase, is a rare bird indeed. ("I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing," Lynne Sharon Schwartz writes. "Can I go back to my books now?") Such people are born, not made, I think; or mostly born and only a little made.
  • It is more common to come across the person who has known the joys of reading but who can be distracted from them. But even those folks are a small percentage of the population.
  • American universities are largely populated by people who don't fit either of these categories—often really smart people for whom the prospect of several hours attending to words on pages (pages of a single text) is not attractive.
  • Steven Pinker once said that "Children are wired for sound, but print is an optional accessory that must be painstakingly bolted on." The key here is "painstakingly": There can be many pains, in multiple senses of the word, for all parties involved, and it cannot be surprising that many of the recipients of the bolting aren't overly appreciative, and that even those who are appreciative don't find the procedure notably pleasant.
  • the printing press ushered in an age of information overload. In the 17th century, one French scholar cried out, "We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire." Such will be our fate "unless we try to prevent this danger by separating those books which we must throw out or leave in oblivion from those which one should save and within the latter between what is useful and what is not."
  • Rarely has education been about teaching children, adolescents, or young adults how to read lengthy and complicated texts with sustained, deep, appreciative attention—at least, not since the invention of the printing press. When books were scarce, the situation was different:
  • Bacon tells such worried folks that they can't read them all, and so should develop strategies of discernment that enable them to make wise decisions about how to invest their time. I think Bacon would have applauded Clay Shirky's comment that we suffer not from "information overload" but from "filter failure."
  • especially noteworthy is Bacon's acknowledgment that there is a place for what Katherine Hayles would call "hyper attention" as well as "deep attention." Some books don't need to be read with patience and care; at times it's OK, even necessary, to skim (merely to "taste" rather than to ruminate). And as Shreeharsh Kelkar, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has pointed out, "To be successful today, it not only becomes necessary to skim, but it becomes essential to skim well."
  • Except in those cultures in which books have been scarce, like Augustine's Roman North Africa, the aims of education have often focused, though rarely explicitly so, on the skills of skimming well. Peter Norvig says: "When the only information on the topic is a handful of essays or books, the best strategy is to read these works with total concentration. But when you have access to thousands of articles, blogs, videos, and people with expertise on the topic, a good strategy is to skim first to get an overview. Skimming and concentrating can and should coexist."
  • education, especially in its "liberal arts" embodiments, has been devoted to providing students with navigational tools—with enough knowledge to find their way through situations that they might confront later in life.
  • All this is to say that the idea that many teachers hold today, that one of the purposes of education is to teach students to love reading—or at least to appreciate and enjoy whole books—is largely alien to the history of education.
  • Rose's book is largely a celebration of autodidacticism, of people whose reading—and especially the reading of classic texts, from Homer to Dante to Shakespeare to the great Romantic poets—wasn't imposed on them by anyone, and who often had to overcome significant social obstacles in order to read. "The autodidacts' mission statement," Rose writes, was "to be more than passive consumers of literature, to be active thinkers and writers. Those who proclaimed that 'knowledge is power' meant that the only true education is self-education, and they often regarded the expansion of formal educational opportunities with suspicion."
  • Over the past 150 years, it has become increasingly difficult to extricate reading from academic expectations; but I believe that such extrication is necessary. Education is and should be primarily about intellectual navigation, about—I scruple not to say it—skimming well, and reading carefully for information in order to upload content. Slow and patient reading, by contrast, properly belongs to our leisure hours.
  • There is a kind of attentiveness proper to school, to purposeful learning of all kinds, but in general it is closer to "hyper attention" than to "deep attention." I would argue that even reading for information—reading textbooks and the like—does not require extended unbroken focus. It requires discipline but not raptness, I think: The crammer chains himself to the textbook because of time pressures, not because the book itself requires unbroken concentration. Given world enough and time, the harried student could read for a while, do something else, come back and refresh his memory, take another break ... but the reader of even the most intellectually demanding work of literary art would lose a great deal by following such tactics. No novel or play or long poem will offer its full rewards to someone who consumes it in small chunks and crumbs. The attention it demands is the deep kind.
  • for people like Erasmus (with his "cry of thankful joy" on spying a fragment of print) or Lynne Sharon Schwartz ("Can I get back to my books now?"), books are the natural and inevitable and permanent means of being absorbed in something other than the self.
  • But then there are the people Nicholas Carr writes about in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, and Carr himself: people who know what it is like to be lost in a book, who value that experience, but who have misplaced it—who can't get back,
Javier E

Free exchange: Joy to the world | The Economist - 0 views

  • WHAT is the point of economics? It often seems that the objective is to make the world richer.
  • Yet this is the season when, for devout Christians at least, the ineffable supplants the material (and the other way around for most folk). That makes it a good time to ponder whether maximising income should really be the be-all and end-all of economic policy.
  • people in the ten richest countries in the world have a life expectancy 25 years higher than people in the ten poorest. People with more cash can afford better education, more varied leisure activities and healthier food, all of which improve the quality of life.
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  • A survey of 43 countries, published on October 30th, found that people in emerging markets are within a whisker of expressing the same level of satisfaction with their lives as people in rich countries.
  • While Scrooge found it easy to count his riches, happiness is harder to pin down. People are prone to what philosophers call “adaptive preferences”, meaning that they may fail to report their “true” happiness
  • If measuring happiness is so difficult, what else could economists look at? Amartya Sen, of Harvard University, argues that “capabilities” are the way to go. The definition of a capability is a bit fuzzy: at its simplest, a capability is something that people have reason to value. The list of potential capabilities is endless: the opportunity to live a long and healthy life, the freedom to take part in political life or to be well nourished.
  • Capabilities, says Mr Sen, are ends that economists should strive to maximise: income is just one of the many means by which we get there.
  • That begs the question of which capabilities a society should maximise. Some worry that the capability approach is deeply paternalistic
  • Ms Nussbaum goes so far as to recommend “ten central capabilities” that are essential for a good life. For economists, who tend to be lovers of freedom, this is controversial stuff.
  • But the capability approach may be less illiberal than it seems. Insisting that GDP is the true measure of economic progress is itself a value-judgment. What is more, according to Mr Sen and Ms Nussbaum, people must have the freedom to select which capabilities they ultimately pursue.
  • Measuring capabilities may be even more difficult than measuring GDP or happiness. There are, though, decent proxies. A country with a high life expectancy probably offers its citizens things like good health care and helps to shield them from pollution, which makes it easier for them to live a long, healthy life.
  • Some measures of economic success use such data. The Human Development Index (HDI), which Mr Sen helped to devise in 1990, considers not only income, but also life expectancy and schooling, as elements of development
  • the capability approach has spawned so many measures, each more complicated than the last, that GDP starts to look appealing again. What other single number can give a decent approximation of quality of life?
malonema1

Mr. President, Your Toga Is Showing - The New York Times - 0 views

  • President Trump’s assertion of his “genius,” athwart recent reporting that his inner circle describes him in somewhat different terms — “moron,” “idiot,” “like a child” — along with concerns about his mental health, awakened a dormant memory of a scene in the 1970s TV adaptation of Robert Graves’s classic novel of ancient Rome, “I, Claudius.”
  • Uncle Claudius’s frozen face is right out of Dorothy Parker’s “What fresh hell can this be?” He knows that this “change” portends no joy in Caesarville. But his life at the palace has made him nothing if not an artful survivor. Feigning delighted shock and awe, he tells his nephew: “I was blind not to see it instantly. You’re no longer human! May I be the first to worship you, as a g-g-g-god?
  • He invented besides a new kind of spectacle, such as had never been heard of before. For he made a bridge, of about three miles and a half in length, from Baiae to the mole of Puteoli.
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  • Historians are uncertain whether this floating bridge to nowhere, for the sole purpose of Caligula joy-riding across it in pointless triumph, was ever actually built. They do however agree that it is evidence the emperor wasn’t playing with a full set of marbles. Some might discern a similarity between it and the $18 billion Mexican border wall we may be building, at a time of declining illegal border crossings.
  • So there it is, or as Suetonius might say, Res ipsa loquitur. Whatever the similarities, Mr. Trump certainly differs from “Little Boots” in one respect: Unlike the emperor, he hasn’t undergone a “momentous transformation.” The record indicates that he has always known he’s divine.As to how — on earth — we arrived at this point, here, perhaps, a note of consolation, in an earlier scene in “I, Claudius.” Caligula’s great-uncle Tiberius, another beauty of a Caesar, informs him: “I will make you my successor, Gaius Caligula. Rome deserves you.”
Javier E

Fun is dead. - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Sometime in recent history, possibly around 2004, Americans forgot to have fun, true fun, as though they’d misplaced it like a sock.
  • Instead, fun evolved into work, sometimes more than true work, which is where we find ourselves now.
  • Fun is often emphatic, exhausting, scheduled, pigeonholed, hyped, forced and performative
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  • Things that were long big fun now overwhelm, exhaust and annoy. The holiday season is an extended exercise in excess and loud, often sleazy sweaters.
  • Which means it is nothing of the sort. This is the drag equivalent of fun and suggests that fun is done.
  • Adults assiduously record themselves appearing to have something masquerading as “fun,” a fusillade of Coachellic micro social aggressions unleashed on multiple social media platforms. Look at me having so much FUN!
  • Vacations are overscheduled with too many activities, FOMO on steroids, a paradox of choice-inducing decision fatigue, so much so that people return home exhausted and in need of another one.
  • Weddings have morphed into multistage stress extravaganzas while doubling as express paths to insolvency: destination proposals for the whole family, destination bachelorette and bachelor blowouts, destination weddings in remote barns with limited lodging, something called a “buddymoon” (bring the gang!) and planners to help facilitate the same custom cocktailsness of it all.
  • What could be a greater cause for joy or more natural than having a baby? Apparently, not much these days. Impending parenthood is overthought and over-apped, incorporating more savings-draining events that didn’t exist a few decades ago: babymoons and lethal, fire-inducing, gender-reveal gatherings and baby showers so over-the-top as to shame weddings.
  • Retirements must be purposeful. Also, occasions for an acute identity crisis. You need to have a plan, a mission, a coach, a packed color-coded grid of daily activities in a culture where our jobs are our identities, our worth tied to employment.
  • “I feel like I should be having more fun than I’m actually having,” says Alyssa Alvarez, a social media marketing manager and DJ in Detroit, expressing a sentiment that many share. “There are expectations of what I want people to believe that my life is like rather than what my life is actually like.”
  • “The world is so much less about human connection,” says Amanda Richards, 34, who works in casting in Los Angeles and is a graduate of Cudworth’s course. “We do more things virtually. People are more isolated. And there’s all this toxic positivity to convince people of how happy you are.”
  • For eons, early adulthood was considered an age of peak fun. Now, according to several studies, it’s a protracted state of anxiety and depression.
  • Because there is now a coach for everything, Alvarez hired the “party coach” Evan Cudworth, taking his $497 course this fall on how to pursue “intentional fun.” (It now costs $555.)
  • Blame it on an American culture that values work, productivity, power, wealth, status and more work over leisure
  • Blame it on technological advances that tether us to work without cessation
  • Blame it on the pandemic, which exacerbated so much while delivering Zoomageddon.
  • Blame it on 2004, with the advent of Facebook, which led to Twitter (okay, X), Instagram, Threads, TikTok and who-knows-what lurking in the ether.
  • Blame it again on 2004 and the introduction of FOMO, our dread of missing out, broadcast through multiple social media spigots
  • “So many people are retreating into their phones, into anxiety,” says Cudworth, 37, from Chicago. “I’m helping people rediscover what fun means to them.”
  • His mandate is redefining fun: cutting back on bingeing screen time, eradicating envy scrolling, getting outside, moving, dancing. “With technology, we don’t allow ourselves to be present. You’re always thinking ‘something is better around the corner,’” Cudworth says, the now squandered in pursuit of the future.
  • Instead of this being the most wonderful time of the year, we battle holiday fatigue, relentless beseeching for our money and, if Fox News is to be believed, a war on Christmas that is nearing its third decade.
  • ow do Americans spend their leisure hours when they might be having fun with others, making those vital in-person connections? Watching television, our favorite free time and “sports activity” (yes, that’s how it’s classified), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an average of 2.8 hours daily.
  • “That’s way more television than you really need. We put play on the back burner,” says Pat Rumbaugh, 65, of Takoma Park, Md. She’s “The Play Lady,” who organizes unorganized play for adults
  • Catherine Price, the author of “The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again,” believes “we’re totally misdoing leisure” and “not leaving any room for spontaneity.”
  • To Price, True Fun is the confluence of connection (other people, nature), playfulness (lightheartedness, freedom) and flow (being fully engaged, present), which is not as challenging as it sounds. “You can have fun in any context. Playfulness is about an attitude,”
  • Back in the day, co-workers were friends. (Sometimes, more.) After hours, they gathered for drinks, played softball. Today, because of email, Slack and remote work, offices are half empty and far quieter than libraries.
  • “We go to work and there’s no sense of connection and camaraderie,” says Davis, who was long employed by his city’s department of parks and recreation. “People feel emotionally disconnected. Healthy conversations are the precursor of fun. We’ve lost the art of communication. Our spirit comes home with us. If you don’t communicate at work, what are you coming home with?”
Javier E

An Original Thinker of Our Time by Cass R. Sunstein | The New York Review of Books - 1 views

  • The most influential, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970), explores two ways to respond to unjust, exasperating, or inefficient organizations and relationships. You can leave (“exit”) or you can complain (“voice”). If you are loyal, you will not exit, and you may or may not speak out.
  • The Passions and the Interests (1977) uncovers a long-lost argument for capitalism in general and commercial interactions in particular. The argument is that trade softens social passions and enmities, ensuring that people see one another not as members of competing tribes, but as potential trading partners
  • Shifting Involvements (1982) investigates the dramatically different attractions of political engagement and private life, and shows how the disappointments of one can lead to heightened interest in the other
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  • Hirschman was suggesting that doubt could be a source not of paralysis and death but of creativity and self-renewal. One of his last books, published when he was about eighty, is called A Propensity to Self-Subversion. In the title essay, Hirschman celebrates skepticism about his own theories and ideas, and he captures not only the insight but also the pleasure, even the joy, that can come from learning that one had it wrong.
  • Hirschman’s work changes how you see the world. It illuminates yesterday, today, and tomorrow. His categories become your categories.
  • Hirschman sought, in his early twenties and long before becoming a writer, to “prove Hamlet wrong.” In Shakespeare’s account, Hamlet is immobilized and defeated by doubt. Hirschman was a great believer in doubt—he never doubted it—and he certainly doubted his own convictions. At a conference designed to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of his first book, who else would take the opportunity to show that one of his own central arguments was wrong
  • Who else would publish an essay in The American Economic Review exploring the “overproduction of opinionated opinion,” questioning the value of having strong opinions, and emphasizing the importance of doubting one’s opinions and even one’s tastes? Hirschman thought that strong opinions, as such, “might be dangerous to the health of our democracy,” because they are an obstacle to mutual understanding and constructive problem-solving.
  • The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991) is a study of the reactionary’s tool kit, identifying the standard objections to any and all proposals for reform. The objections are “perversity” (the reform will make the problem even worse), “futility” (the reform will do nothing to solve the problem), and “jeopardy” (the reform will endanger some hard-won social gain). Hirschman shows that these objections are stupefying, mechanical, hyperbolic, and often wrong
  • He insisted that human history provides “stories, intricate and often nonrepeatable,” which “look more like tricks history has up its sleeve than like social-scientific regularities, not to speak of laws.” He was interested in “the many might-have-beens of history,” including “felicitous and surprising escapes from disaster.
  • Hirschman was delighted by paradoxes, unintended consequences (especially good ones), the telling detail, inventories of actual practices (rather than big theories), surprises, and improvisation. In his view, “history is nothing if not farfetched.”
  • He invented the term “possibilism,” meant to draw attention to “the discovery of paths, however narrow, leading to an outcome that appears to be foreclosed on the basis of probabilistic reasoning alone.” In his lifetime, one of many such outcomes was the abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, which almost no one anticipated.
  • Shifting Involvements—a small masterpiece that illuminates the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and protest movements of diverse kinds. Hirschman emphasized that human beings are often choosing between private and public life, and thus between the different forms of happiness that are associated with each of them. He described “pendular motions of collective behavior,” in which people swing from happiness to disappointment in one kind of activity, and then to the other. For example, the disappointments and frustrations of the student rebellions of the late 1960s encouraged a return to private life in the 1970s and 1980s. Rejecting the highly influential idea that the problem of collective action has a kind of invariable, ahistorical “logic,” Hirschman drew attention to the immense importance of history and timing as, in Adelman’s words, “people leave the streets and plazas disenchanted with politics to seek happiness in the shopping malls”—and vice versa.
  • The Rhetoric of Reaction, written in his mid-seventies, was an outgrowth of the conservative ascendancy of the 1980s, and it speaks directly to our current debates. Hirschman was struck by the routine, stylized, even mechanical character of much conservative thinking—and its close connection, in its rhetoric, to arguments that have been made for hundreds of years. Indeed, conservative rhetoric is the book’s target, perhaps above all in the person of Edmund Burke,
  • But if The Passions and the Interests was his favorite, and Exit, Voice, and Loyalty his most important, there can be no question about his most characteristic: The Rhetoric of Reaction. The sustained attack on intransigence, the bias in favor of hope, the delight in paradox, the insistence on the creative power of doubt—all these prove a lot of people wrong, not just Hamlet.
Javier E

Diderot, an American Exemplar? Bien Sûr - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Rare are the writers whose legacy has shifted as dramatically as Diderot’s. When he died in 1784, at age 70, the vast majority of his short stories, novels and philosophical works lay hidden away in trunks. He was remembered primarily for two things: coediting the world’s first comprehensive encyclopedia, a project to which he contributed an astonishing 10,000 articles, and being a scandalous freethinker and atheist.
  • Armed with both hindsight and access to his unpublished writings, we now know a different Diderot. By the 19th century, the writer’s “discovered” texts began inspiring the likes of Goethe, Hegel and Nietzsche. Marx cited him as his favorite writer — twice. Freud, too, was a great fan.
  • Readers today never fail to be amazed by Diderot’s willingness to confront both the unconscionable and the uncomfortable, often embracing subject matter that his contemporaries fled. He vehemently condemned the enslavement of Africans (and gave a philosophical voice to the slave); he challenged his era’s views on religious celibacy and forced vocations (in a tear-jerking pseudo-memoir of a sexually abused nun); and he entertained the possibility that his cherished materialism denied us free will (in his novel “Jacques the Fatalist”).
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  • An ardent empiricist, Diderot also took pride in questioning his own beliefs. In “Rameau’s Nephew,” Diderot gave life to a character who assailed the author’s deep-rooted humanism. One of the most memorable eccentrics in all of literature, the hedonistic protagonist preached the beauty of evil, the joys of social parasitism and the right to be a self-seeking individual.
Javier E

"You're supporting a bigot. That makes you part of the bigotry." Charles Blow's master ... - 0 views

  • As I explained in an earlier Salon piece, Donald Trump, with his background in reality TV and professional wrestling, created a spectacle that rewarded him with at least $3 billion in free media coverage. Trump’s sophisticated meta game also allowed him to exploit a risk-averse news-media establishment that operates according to a clear and predictable set of rules and conventions governing “the boundaries of the approved public discourse.”
  • These rules and conventions consist of maintaining the appearance of “objectivity” and “fairness,” perpetuating a “both sides do it” framework when discussing Republicans and Democrats, and an obsessive need to present “all sides of an issue.” Clear statements of fact and truth are treated as mere opinions though as Paul Krugman once said, “if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read ‘Views Differ on Shape of Planet.’”
  • The American corporate news media also prefers to feature generalists who understand these rules as opposed to real experts who will not obey said script. Ultimately, in covering political campaigns and elections, the American corporate news media is more interested in covering the “horse race” — because it is an easy story to communicate — than in critically evaluating the specific policy proposals and qualifications of a given candidate.
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  • When confronted by the Donald Trump phenomenon, the American corporate news media was flummoxed by his disregard for facts, inconsistency and willingness to rapidly change his positions on a given issue, overt racism and bigotry of his followers and movement, fascism-fueled hostility and contempt for journalists, and utter disregard for the rules of normal politics.
  • On Monday’s edition of “CNN Tonight with Don Lemon,” New York Times columnist and author Charles Blow refused to comply with Donald Trump’s political con job and an American corporate news media that has acted irresponsibly in aiding and abetting his presidential campaign.
  • In social psychology, the bystander effect is a phenomenon whereby a group or crowd of people will often ignore an individual person who is in distress. This dynamic changes when a member of the crowd or group decides to render aid to the person in distress. Other people will then follow the new rule — what is now one of care and concern — instead of ignoring and looking away
  • On Monday’s edition of “CNN Tonight with Don Lemon,” Charles Blow established a new rule for how journalists and other commentators should interact with Donald Trump’s agents and rabble
  • The question now becomes, Will other members of the Fourth Estate follow Charles Blow’s lead and the new rule that he has tried to establish or will they continue to be supplicants for Donald Trump?
rachelramirez

Chattanooga All-Girls Charter School's Path to Success - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • The Key Ingredient to Fixing a Failing School
  • More than 90 percent of its students are black or Latino. Nearly all are low income. The school’s brochure says it was founded “to improve educational opportunities for low-income, underserved girls in Hamilton County.”
  • And critics can point to research published in Science magazine that suggests single-sex schools don’t foster better academic outcomes and accuse charters of pulling resources away from neighborhood schools.
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  • Elaine Swafford was hired as CGLA’s executive director in 2012 and given less than a year to transform the then-failing school, which had launched several years earlier as the state’s first single-gender public charter school and then tanked.
  • Math proficiency was in the single digits. Few students had solid prospects for the future.
  • . Last year, the school achieved a 93 percent graduation rate and nearly every graduate went on to college.
  • Over the last decade, new research has increasingly suggested that strong school leaders are a crucial component of success, and even that turning around failing schools is virtually impossible without a strong leader at the helm.
  • On an adjoining wall, hundreds of magnets bearing individual names track each girl’s proficiency in a range of subjects, from below basic to advanced.
  • When she took over, half of the school’s teachers turned over after she informed the staff they would need to reapply for their jobs.
  • Swafford’s way of thinking is based on the idea that if she can’t deliver the well-rounded education both in and out of the classroom that middle-class kids get, her students will never catch up to their more affluent peers
  • Each student at CGLA is assigned an adult mentor and Swafford recently hired a college-access counselor to help students work through the federal financial-aid application and to stay connected with recent graduates
  • After she recently discovered that 85 of the school’s 350 students don’t have internet access at home, Swafford set about securing a hotspot for each wifi-less child.
  • The school receives some extra funding from the government because it serves such a high number of low-income students, but it’s not nearly enough to pay for all of the programs the school offers, so Swafford has gotten very good at raising money
  • Twenty-nine percent of the school’s budget is from fundraising, she told me, which helps fill a $4,500-per-student gap in funding.
  • Teachers are expected to believe that every child is capable of success and then help them achieve it by doing whatever it takes, regardless of any obstacles
  • The school recently implemented “grit” grading, and, Swafford acknowledged unapologetically, “everybody’s not happy about it.”
  • “grit” grading
rachelramirez

When Finland's Teachers Work in America's Schools - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • When Finnish Teachers Work in America’s Public Schools
  • Kristiina Chartouni, a veteran Finnish educator who began teaching American high-school students this autumn, said in an email. “I am supposedly doing what I love, but I don't recognize this profession as the one that I fell in love with in Finland.”
  • In Tennessee, Chartouni has encountered a different teaching environment from the one she was used to in her Nordic homeland—one in which she feels like she’s “under a microscope.”
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  • Chartouni misses that feeling of being trusted as a professional in Finland. There, after receiving her teaching timetable at the start of each school year, she would be given the freedom to prepare curriculum-aligned lessons, which matched her preferences and teaching style.
  • In general, U.S. public-school teachers report that they have the least amount of control over two particular areas of teaching: “selecting textbooks and other classroom materials” and “selecting content, topics, and skills to be taught.
  • Marc Tucker, the president and CEO of the National Center on Education and the Economy, suggested to me that the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which he called “the inauguration of [America’s] accountability movement,” significantly affected how U.S. public-school teachers perceived their level of autonomy.
  • Under NCLB, America’s public schools needed to make adequate yearly progress, decided in large part by student performance on state standardized tests, or face serious consequences, such as school closures.
  • As a public-school educator in Tennessee, Chartouni is seeing how some accountability measures—ones that are unobserved in Finnish schools—have reduced her level of professional freedom.
  • ” So, occasionally, Chartouni decides to assign easy bell work as she greets her exhausted students: “sit down, relax, and breathe.” (In Finland, students and teachers typically have a 15-minute break built-into every classroom hour.)
  • She described it as a rote job where she follows a curriculum she didn’t develop herself, keeps a principal-dictated schedule, and sits in meetings where details aren’t debated.
  • “I feel rushed, nothing gets done properly; there is very little joy, and no time for reflection or creative thinking (in order to create meaningful activities for students).”
  • “And the countries that give [teachers] more autonomy successfully are countries that have made an enormous investment in changing the pool from which they are selecting their teachers, then they make a much bigger investment than we do in the education of their future teachers, then they make a much bigger investment in the support of those teachers once they become teachers.
ecfruchtman

Reid on Trump's Cabinet picks: 'Quite frankly, scary' - 0 views

  •  
    Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader, sits down with David Axelrod to talk about the changes he's seen in Washington during his 34 years there, what he views as the greatest professional joy of his life and how Democrats should approach a Donald Trump presidency.
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