But this survey is hardly matchmaking Eddie Punchclock and Suzy Housecoat to the Divine Muse of Art. This brings me to item two. NEA support for The Capital of Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeyland Review. The DNA of Literature Project. This is just fantastic. It's great. Wonderful! Searchable and everything.
Welcome to the DNA of literature—over 50 years of literary wisdom rolled up in 300+ Writers-at-Work interviews, now available online—free. Founder and former Editor George Plimpton dreamed of a day when anyone—a struggling writer in Texas, an English teacher in Amsterdam, even a subscriber in Central Asia—could easily access this vast literary resource; with the establishment of this online archive that day has finally come. Now, for the first time, you can read, search and download any or all of over three hundred in-depth interviews with poets, novelists, playwrights, essayists, critics, musicians, and more, whose work set the compass of twentieth-century writing, and continue to do so into the twenty-first century.
"There is no other archive quite like The Paris Review interviews. The National Endowment for the Arts could not be more pleased or more proud than to make this resource available free to the American public."
—Dana Gioia, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts
A callow critic might object that taxpayer support for this sort of thing still amounts to wealth transfer from everyone else to the artsy fartsy classes. (And if these writers are so all-fired American, why are they pretending they're French?) I do admit the force of this libertarian argument. But I think:
1) No one's going to get too upset that high-quality PDF's from folks like Hemingway, Faulkner, et. al. are being released in the wild. (Not just to US citizens, to the world! Cultural outreach. Winning hearts and minds. Yes, most of these personalities are too prickly or lofty or insane to be ambassadorial. And drunken. But I understand that is not a preclusion to an ambassadorship, traditionally. In the 19th century, it was a tradition to post literary men as ambassadors. Anyway.)
2) Implicit in this approach is a maximally democratic conception of the NEA's mission. (Maybe the libertarians won't buy it, but they should be a little placated.) To explain:
The standard objections to the NEA are that projects funded are leftist (so why should righties be compelled to fork over?) and elitist (so why should regular folk have their pockets picked?) Also, it is absurd that a bureaucracy should be in the new art business. The avant garde should should take care of itself, and its own. State-supported art should be derriere garde (since bureaucrats are artists at covering rears, if nothing more.) State-supported art should have something conservative about it. Its proper objects should be aesthetic analogs to national landmarks and wilderness areas. The NEA should be the department of conserving cultural matter which lots and lots and lots of people have already pretty much come to accept would be a loss to everyone if it went away.
I think it's not, in fact, fair to charge the NEA with falling down on the job under this description of the job. It's a pretty conservative outfit. (It's just you only hear about it when it isn't.) I personally don't even object to a few of my tax dollars going for a little speculation in art futures. It seems to me that sometimes works out and (unlike bad wars) doesn't cost too much when it doesn't. But let us continue to push the democracy angle.
State-supported arts elitism seems to work OK for countries like - well, France. The Academy and Immortals and all that gloire. But we Americans have our own academy awards; we call our Immortals 'stars', to indicate they are not entities subject to sublunary corruption. Obviously no state support needed. American literary and arts culture couldn't be strait-jacketed into anything like the French Academy. I remember reading a funny story about Sartre coming to America and wanting to meet Nathanael West. (I hope I'm remembering this right.) He asked his agent to help him meet 'the author of Miss Lonelyhearts.' His agent tracked down some astonished spinster, authoress of a romance novel of that title. She came to the meeting, wondering what this famous Frenchman wanted with her. Eventually Sartre figured out that West was dead, killed in a car accident. (Something fishy about this story. West was already a screenwriter in Hollywood by the time of his death, so Sartre's agent must have been a bit of a slouch.) Sartre marvelled that, in France, all writers of West's caliber are drawn to the center - the hub - Paris and the Academy. They become part of the establishment. You could find them through the establishment, which would be keeping tabs. They wouldn't succeed and continue to toil in atomistic isolation, Barton Fink-fashion. I don't know whether it's true that all French writers, or the vast majority, join the state arts apparatus/culture. Perhaps it was more true then than now. But it is most definitely not true, never has been, of American artists and writers that they are prepared to do any such thing. But it is a basic tenet of good government that funding needs oversight and control. You can't give money to people who won't be accountable. It wouldn't be wise. Forcibly extracting money from some folks to give to other folks to do as they like - without any clear correlative obligation - is a headache recipe.
If there isn't a demonstrably elligible arts elite (I'm not hating on the artists myself; I'm just saying the libertarians have more than half a point); if Hollywood doesn't need the money, what's left? What can the government do better than individuals, plus the market? What can the people deputize the government to buy, arts-wise, with the expectation that the government will do a better job? For that matter, what conservative model can be hit upon that won't utterly alienate the proponents of new art (who will inevitably be griped if funding for such is cut, but perhaps they can be placated.) For that matter, what is to be done about the division between high and low arts. Unclear as it is, it exists; or is at least perceived to. Which is sufficient for acrimonious polarization.
One possibility (which might or might not fit in with Matt Yglesias
'vouchers' proposal) is a kind of redistributionist transfer. Take arts
dollars from the rich to give to the poor. This would do for the poor
what they can't do for themselves. But I don't see this line as at all
promising You ought to forcibly redistribute, if at all, with an eye
for securing necessities, not luxuries. (Yes, I know art is necessary
for the soul. Still.)
It seems to me there is a potentially correct answer, however. The NEA could buy: cultural DNA . The NEA could plausibly do, on a larger scale, what it has done with the Paris Review. Pay to have culture set free. As is often the case, Timothy Burke says it best , articulating a view of cultural value and a threat to it [emphasis added by me when we get to the threat]:
I look at my DVDs, my television shows, my books, my comics, my computer games, at something like The Avengers and I think to myself, “This is not the best world that ever could be, but it’s a damn sight better than any other historical world that humans have inhabited so far”. Some despair at the size of it all, some despair at its variety, some despair at what they see as the lack of variety. Some bemoan the ironic nostalgia or pastiche of popular culture, others complain at its superficiality, and still others of its immorality or vacuity.
Not what I see. What I see is the unlocking of human imagination, the democratization of creativity, an explosion of meaning and interpretation and possibility. Of course the cultural world is beyond any of us now, too big to know or see or understand. So are all the stars in the sky, but that doesn’t lead anyone to call for a permanent shroud of clouds to blot out that hateful infinity. I love the profligacy of modern popular culture, I’m delighted by the thousands of clever and interesting texts, songs, web pages, comic books, films, television shows, performances, artworks that appear every day, even knowing that I’ll never see or know about most of them.
Embracing the whole doesn’t require you to embrace every part of that whole. You can still hate a particular book, a particular film, or a particular system of cultural production. You can still shake your head at the short-sightedness of the Hollywood system, complain of the glut of dully imitative Top 40 songs, or bitch about massively-multiplayer computer games. It’s just that no act of critique calls into question the phenomenon of the cultural moment itself, the architecture of modern global culture.
I’m very concerned at the danger of a modern enclosures movement, where the quiet eddies and subcultural nooks of global popular culture get dragged inside giant corporate conglomerates and intellectual property law is used to sterilize rather than liberate the work of cultural creation. It’s a real danger we face, a reason for vigilance. The twin dangers of regulatory zeal and monopoly ownership could kill the beautiful profligacy of global popular culture at the cusp of its greatest achievements.
I’m less willing to credit complaints about cultural imperialism, because I don’t see in the outpouring of global popular culture the monolithic, unvarying homogeneity that most of the chief complaints about cultural imperialism attribute to modernity. I don’t see expressive culture as a zero-sum game. But it’s true that those forms of expressive practice which are fundamentally antagonistic to a cultural marketplace—the equivalent of usufruct ownership of land, the kinds of cultural practices that are unowned and unownable, collective and communal, and that require a protected relation to power, are threatened by the explosive force of market-driven popular culture. My feeling about that is the same feeling I have about gemeinschaft in general: good riddance. There is a thermodynamics to hermeneutics: almost no meaning, no idea, is ever truly lost or destroyed forever. The solids which seemingly melt into air are still there, and any sudden cooling of the atmosphere crystallizes them anew, often in surprising or unexpected places and forms. All that is lost are the forms of social power that reserved particular cultural forms as the source of social distinction or hierarchy, all that is lost are the old instrumentalities of texts, performances, rituals. The achievement of liberty loses nothing save the small privileges of intimate tyrannies. Culture, even in the premodern world, is ceaselessly in motion and yet also steady as a rock. In getting more and more of it for more and more people, we lose little along the way. The existence of South Park does not kill opera or gamelan.
Now maybe you don't buy all that. If not, you probably won't buy what I'm about to say. But if you do - well, here it is. The modern enclosures movement - e.g. copyright extension and its fundamentally evil ways and means - is nearly irresistable. But there are ways of working around, potentially. There are mountains of works in the Library of Congress that could be bought for a song (including many songs) because they are of little commercial value. But they are not bought for that very reason. But, taken in mass, these troves are of great cultural value. (No one thinks the Library of Congress is a bad idea.) The NEA could be charged with buying up and releasing the cheap stuff into the public domain. (All the other stuff can find its market in the usual way: through the market.) Let the NEA make it available online, in relevant forms: PDF, mp3, maybe even QuickTime. A National Public Library, not just for borrowing but there for the taking. Cultural DNA to be worked into new, rich, strange cultural products.
Now I realize that the Paris Review is not exactly cheap, so it may seem that I am picking an incongruous jumping-off point for my public domain dream. But these interviews are not exactly hot properties either. I am sure their public release cost a moderate sum. But once you pay for this thing, it's forever (if you make that a condition). The public library builds and builds. So you buy some expensive items to be the jewels in the crown. For the rest, you bargain hunt. Here it seems to me there would be room for serious economies of scale: tracking down and bargaining with the owners of the obscure old stuff. Books, magazines, tapes, archival matter. If you buy by the truckload, with a dedicated bureaucratic staff to handle the legal paperwork, I'll bet it goes better. Plus the more you buy, the more people use it because they come to know that it's there. Plus it would not be unreasonable to legislate the right to a government agency to release stuff as public if certain reasonable efforts have been made, and failed, to track an owner. (If the owner shows up later, there could be reasonable legislative measure to insulate against unduly costly legal problems.)
Obviously libertarians might object that they aren't interested in cheap old stuff, so why should they be forced to pay? But it seems to me (admittedly on a priori grounds) that this might be a case in which no private model could substitute. It's a money-loser. It just loses with cultural dignity. That is to say, it projects to recover its costs in cultural creative destruction and reformation of all it releases. This consideration ought to extract grudging tolerance from libertarian types.
Also, there's high and low art in this category: old, commercially
unsaleable classical music recordings; not just old pulp fiction.
Also, the proposal is politically non-toxic. Releasing stuff online, in this day and age, is about as democratic as it gets. The past is a less partisan country, in hindsight. If absolutely necessary, you could have red state and a blue state allowances. Speaking of the stars in sky - as Timothy Burke does, for cultural products are as numerous and energetically enduring - I am reminded of a fine old Tex Ritter song. (Sadly, our vinyl is in storage, but memory is undimmed.) You can listen here to a snippet. Mostly it's spoken word poetry.
I DREAMED OF A HILLBILLY HEAVEN
I dreamed I was there in hillbilly heaven (Oh what a beautiful sight)
Last night I dreamed I went to hillbilly heaven. And you know who greeted me at the gate? The ole cowboy-philosopher himself, Will Rogers. He said to me, he said "Tex, the Big Boss of the riders up here has asked me to kinda show you around. Now, over yonder are a couple of your ole compadres." My, was I glad to see them, Carson Robison and the Mississippi blue yodeler Jimmie Rodgers.
I dreamed I was there in hillbilly heaven (Oh what a beautiful sight)
He introduced me to Wiley Post, and he showed me the Hall of Fame with all the gold guitars and fiddles hanging on the walls. Then he said, "Tex, step over this way, there are two more of your friends I know you'll want to see, they're waitin' for you." There they were standin' side by side and smilin' at me-- Hank Williams and Johnny Horton. I met all the stars in hillbilly heaven Oh what a star-studded night Then I asked him who else do you expect in the next, uh, say a hundred years? He handed me a large book covered with star dust. We'll call it the Big Tally Book. In it were many names and each name was branded in pure gold. I began to read some of them as I turned the pages: Red Foley, Ernest Tubb, Gene Autry, Roy Acuff, Eddy Arnold, Tennessee Ernie, Jimmy Dean, Andy Griffith, Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter (Whaaaat?)
Tex Ritter? Oh, well, that's when I woke up. And I'm sorry I did, because ...
I dreamed I was there in hillbilly heaven Oh what a beautiful sight.
'The Big Tally Book' became a minor (very minor) graduate school joke. Whenever anyone committed the sin of introducing a technical term as a convenient abbreviation, then didn't actually use it, you put them in their place by saying, ' let's call it The Big Tally Book instead'. Except only about four people would get it, oddly enough. (It could be that the line is "Will called it the Big Tally Book." Then the joke doesn't work as well.)
The concept of a Big Tally Book, with every name branded in pure gold - immortal, uncorrupted - is perfectly culturally sound. It's just not quite the French Academy. But it is less offensive to "guys named Jethro who own pickup trucks," as Chait puts it. Obviously Jethro listens to New Country, not Tex Ritter, but at least he probably wouldn't get mad if the NEA bought up the rights to obscure old country music albums on the cheap and released them for free as mp3's. (I realize that Tex Ritter has some commercial value, but not much. He's about equivalent to old Paris Review interviews, I wager.)
Now I know what you're thinking.
Hipsters.
They want to the government to pay for their old country albums vinyl collections as well as their back issues of Paris Review. And they want plum posts as government craphound-advocates for the public. You could be right, you could be right.
Makes sense to me.
Jim Lewis has a piece on Slate about the photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue, who is famous for candid shots of fashionable French people in the early 1900s. The stock story about Lartigue was that he “achieved late-life fame as one of the first masters of the medium, an unschooled amateur who achieved genius entirely by naive instinct.” But there’s plenty of evidence that, in fact, this is rubbish:
His father was a camera buff, and the son was given every possible advantage: the newest equipment, lots of leisure time, and a thorough education in the ways of the medium. Moreover, it was an era when amateur photography was all the rage, when magazines and books were full of instruction, debate, and example.
Still, Lartigue presented his work as the innocent expression of a wonderstruck boy amateur, and MoMA was happy to promote it as such.
I recently came across a nice discussion of this phenomenon in Alan Bennett’s superb Writing Home:
Here is Bennett writing in his diary for March 15th 1980:
Finish a draft of my piece for the Larkin Festschrift, Larkin at Sixty. Parts of it I like and are what I want to say, but I detect a note of Uriah Heep-like self-abasement, which could be taken to denote (and maybe does denote) arrogance. I seem always to be saying ‘What am I doing here I’m not a literary person at all.’ Apropos of this I have just ordered a copy of a book I saw reviewed, a translation of Ernest Kris and Otto Kurtz’s Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist, the main point of which is that there is a tradition, in which the artists themselves conspire, of making a painter’s beginnings humbler and less sophisticated than in fact they were. The public liked to believe an artist had no training, that he astonished his elders, who picked out his skill when he was in lowly or unlikely circumstances. This has always been the case, and K. and K. demonstrate it from many periods. I suspect this is also true of literature. My contribution to the Larkin book discusses his poem ‘I Remember, I Remember’, in which e recalls what elsewhere he called the ‘forgotten boredom’ of his childhood and Coventry ‘where my childhood was unspent.’ He is trying to appear an artist without a past. And so am I in my piece, claiming I had little reading and no literary appreciation until I was in my thirties.
It’s an old story. Not even the Son of God himself was above indulging in it a little. It is closely tied to the desire for authenticity (the wish, that is, both to project and experience it). We want to present our abilities and achievements as the unforced outcome of our natural talents because this is one of the main means through which we legitimize our social identity and, in the process, stay ahead of the competition. The best way to win a race is to insist you’re not in one, while still managing to convey the impression that if there were such a race you would happen to be comfortably in the lead. You might be surprised to learn that the degree to which this sort of thing is a conscious strategy or an ingrained disposition is an important question in social theory. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s spend much of his career circling round the problem. His theory of practice tries to get a grip on the fit between class position and one’s disposition to speak or act in particular ways, or develop some tastes rather than others. Bourdieu’s key concept, a slippery one, is the habitus. Loic Wacquant provides a good, compact discussion of the idea in this encyclopedia article:
Because it is both structured (by past social milieus) and structuring (of present representations and actions), habitus operates as the “unchosen principle of all choices” guiding actions that assume the systematic character of strategies even as they are not the result of strategic intention and are objectively “orchestrated without being the product of the organizing activity of a conductor”
If the style of Francophone social theory is a little much for your Anglo-Empiricist mind — Bourdieu’s style is enough to give anyone a migraine after a while, frankly, though he would probably say that both his prose and your headache can be traced to differences in the habitus of French and Anglo-American academic cultures — then consider this comment from a later part of Bennett’s Writing Home, which conveys the nub of the issue very well:
There is a passage in [Namier’s] England in the Age of the American Revolution …: ‘A man’s status in English society has always depended primarily on his own consciousness … whatever is apt to raise a man’s self-consciousness — be it birth, rank, wealth, intellect, daring or achievements — will add to his stature; but it has to be translated into the truest expression of his sub-conscious self-valuation: uncontending ease, the unbought grace of life.’
It’s the process of generating the (apparently) “unbought grace of life” that concerns Bourdieu, and that Lewis is probing in Lartique’s history. Transparent efforts to acquire and display it are bound to fail, but we try anyway. One of the favorite tropes of the blogging world, for instance, is the David vs Goliath story of the lone (self-taught, self-powered, grittily independent) blogger assiduously fact-checking Big Media or producing a devastating critique of some bit of mainstream science or other. It’s the same story: the lone blogger is just another version of the artist without a past, upending the conventional wisdom with his special brand of outsider-status and sui generis credibility.
A strange and interesting article from the Washington Post, which highlights an urban subculture I know nothing about, despite having lived in D.C. for many years (not recently, though). The article is long, but the gist is this: there are about 30 high-end T-shirt and warm-up gear stores in D.C., each of which vies for its target audience with constantly changing styles and local spokesmen, from comedians to go-go bands. Apparently the trade started as a back-of-the-truck thing at clubs and concerts in the ‘80’s, and grew into a big enterprise. The shirts usually sell at $100 each.
Around 1995, the style changed from silkscreens to elaborately embroidered shirts. And an enterprising Korean immigrant named Jung Kang began to sell his services, first as an embroiderer with unheard of turn-around time (he would deliver the shirts back the same day), then as a T-shirt producer as well. It seems like almost all the D.C. lines were using Kang. But then he got the idea to start his own shop, and his own line, called Visionz. He hired a popular local comedian as a spokesman, and hired local designers to come up with the T-shirt designs. And then he started selling the shirts for $30.
I think you can guess what happened next.
Unity Clothing Association was hastily formed, and it immediately set about “educating” the public about Visionz’s true ownership through a flood of fliers at clubs, basketball courts and at Iverson Mall, a testament to racial sensitivities in established black neighborhoods where Asian business owners are sometimes viewed as intruders.“There is already a carryout and liquor store in every black community run by Asians,” the fliers pleaded. “How long will we let them RAPE the Urban community? Wake Up! Don’t be Bamboozled or Hoodwinked!”
The association leaned on Kang’s two black pitchmen — Griffin and Reggie “Polo” Burwell, leader of the go-go band TCB. For those who’d already bought Visionz clothes, they offered amnesty: Customers could exchange Kang’s Visionz brand T-shirt for a black-owned line, free of charge, “just like a gun buy-back program.”
“We are hoping that Mr. Kang will just go back to making clothes,” says Ronald “Mo” Moten, the community activist and concert promoter tapped to lead the Unity Clothing Association. “He’ll realize what he did was wrong, and we can continue having a good relationship.”
“Realize what he did was wrong” seems a bit rich. Some customers have been swayed by the Unity Association:
For more than 25 years, this [the George Goodman League at Barry Farms public housing complex] has been the place where street ballers ball, and the players play on the sidelines in the latest gear. In recent weeks, Unity Clothing Association persuaded Rawls to include, between plays, public service announcements about its plight and the need to support black businesses. That’s when Kwame Stoure first heard about it. “They make a valid point,” the 34-year-old says. “If the Asian guy isn’t part of your community, they want to keep the black dollars in the black community. He took the same idea and ran away with it.”
Others…well, not so much:
A 17-year-old wearing a blue Sabiato shirt and hat doesn’t want to give his name, but says he stopped wearing Visionz after reading the fliers. When a reporter points out a plump young man wandering the sidelines in a white Visionz T-shirt, he lowers his voice and leans in close. “They make good clothes. Walk around and you’ll see a lot of people wearing it.” Kevin Jackson, a 34-year-old car salesman from Fort Washington, has just picked up an order of fried fish outside the chain-link fence surrounding the court. “You allowing the Korean to make the stuff, right?” he asks. “So why are you mad at him? He gon’ try to make that money. . . . I think they should make their own clothes. For real, I think that it’s overpriced. And that’s why people were buying Visionz, because it’s affordable.”
What do you think? Is the Unity Association right to educate customers who may well want to direct their money to black-owned businesses (the article says that the comedian/pitchman was claiming to be part-owner of Visionz)? Are they crazy to try and bully Kang out of storefront business but still hire him to make all their shirts (as it appears they are)? Does it make any sense to be so hostile to the Korean family that runs the mini-mart on your corner? And why don’t black people run many or most of liquor stores and mini-marts in predominantly black neighborhoods anyway? Discuss.
My first reaction after reading about a Singaporean student who set a new world record for speedy text messaging was that it’s a really silly thing to bother competing over. [Thanks to LiL for the link.] But then I realized that we probably all have taken part in similarly silly games when we were young (or possibly even when we got older). My most memorable such “competition” (in quotes because it was always informal) was in middle school during breaks between classes. We used to race against each other to see who could solve Rubik’s Magic puzzle first (no, not the cube, that would have taken most of us too long to bother with during breaks). The “Magic puzzle” is much easier than the Rubik’s cube. In fact, once you know how it goes, you’ve pretty much solved it for good. Nonetheless, we just loved doing it over and over and over and over again. Last time I was at my parents’ I picked up a bunch of these logic toys I used to have and brought them with me back to the States. My place is now littered with Rubik puzzles and other similar brain teasers I can no longer solve. Maybe I just used to have more patience (and more time?) back then. I’m still working on getting the Magic puzzle right again…
Inspired to play, but don’t have a Rubik’s cube on hand? Check out this site that lets you play with the cube.. and then solves it for you in case you get stuck.
PS. Ernõ Rubik is another one in the relatively long list of Hungarian math wonders.
PPS. Yes, my blogging has picked up in the past couple of days. Let’s just say a blogger sick at home can be dangerous indeed. Maybe it’s time to go work on those puzzles…
Sometimes I wonder how companies come up with names for their products. I just noticed that the shower knob in my bathroom is called Monitor. (I just moved so most things at my place are new to me.) I guess that may seem innocent enough, but not after having just watched this episode of The Practice. In it, one of the characters finds out that her superintendent has been making video tapes of her in the shower (using a hidden camera in the vent) and has been posting these online. As if this wasn’t bad enough, we find out that there is nothing illegal about such videotaping as potentially relevant laws only apply to audio recordings. So it’s not that I’m overly paranoid, but I would’ve probably preferred a name with less meaning on my shower knob (except who runs around thinking about shower knob name preferences?!;).
À Gauche
Jeremy Alder
Amaravati
Anggarrgoon
Audhumlan Conspiracy
H.E. Baber
Philip Blosser
Paul Broderick
Matt Brown
Diana Buccafurni
Brandon Butler
Keith Burgess-Jackson
Certain Doubts
David Chalmers
Noam Chomsky
The Conservative Philosopher
Desert Landscapes
Denis Dutton
David Efird
Karl Elliott
David Estlund
Experimental Philosophy
Fake Barn County
Kai von Fintel
Russell Arben Fox
Garden of Forking Paths
Roger Gathman
Michael Green
Scott Hagaman
Helen Habermann
David Hildebrand
John Holbo
Christopher Grau
Jonathan Ichikawa
Tom Irish
Michelle Jenkins
Adam Kotsko
Barry Lam
Language Hat
Language Log
Christian Lee
Brian Leiter
Stephen Lenhart
Clayton Littlejohn
Roderick T. Long
Joshua Macy
Mad Grad
Jonathan Martin
Matthew McGrattan
Marc Moffett
Geoffrey Nunberg
Orange Philosophy
Philosophy Carnival
Philosophy, et cetera
Philosophy of Art
Douglas Portmore
Philosophy from the 617 (moribund)
Jeremy Pierce
Punishment Theory
Geoff Pynn
Timothy Quigley (moribund?)
Conor Roddy
Sappho's Breathing
Anders Schoubye
Wolfgang Schwartz
Scribo
Michael Sevel
Tom Stoneham (moribund)
Adam Swenson
Peter Suber
Eddie Thomas
Joe Ulatowski
Bruce Umbaugh
What is the name ...
Matt Weiner
Will Wilkinson
Jessica Wilson
Young Hegelian
Richard Zach
Psychology
Donyell Coleman
Deborah Frisch
Milt Rosenberg
Tom Stafford
Law
Ann Althouse
Stephen Bainbridge
Jack Balkin
Douglass A. Berman
Francesca Bignami
BlunkettWatch
Jack Bogdanski
Paul L. Caron
Conglomerate
Jeff Cooper
Disability Law
Displacement of Concepts
Wayne Eastman
Eric Fink
Victor Fleischer (on hiatus)
Peter Friedman
Michael Froomkin
Bernard Hibbitts
Walter Hutchens
InstaPundit
Andis Kaulins
Lawmeme
Edward Lee
Karl-Friedrich Lenz
Larry Lessig
Mirror of Justice
Eric Muller
Nathan Oman
Opinio Juris
John Palfrey
Ken Parish
Punishment Theory
Larry Ribstein
The Right Coast
D. Gordon Smith
Lawrence Solum
Peter Tillers
Transatlantic Assembly
Lawrence Velvel
David Wagner
Kim Weatherall
Yale Constitution Society
Tun Yin
History
Blogenspiel
Timothy Burke
Rebunk
Naomi Chana
Chapati Mystery
Cliopatria
Juan Cole
Cranky Professor
Greg Daly
James Davila
Sherman Dorn
Michael Drout
Frog in a Well
Frogs and Ravens
Early Modern Notes
Evan Garcia
George Mason History bloggers
Ghost in the Machine
Rebecca Goetz
Invisible Adjunct (inactive)
Jason Kuznicki
Konrad Mitchell Lawson
Danny Loss
Liberty and Power
Danny Loss
Ether MacAllum Stewart
Pam Mack
Heather Mathews
James Meadway
Medieval Studies
H.D. Miller
Caleb McDaniel
Marc Mulholland
Received Ideas
Renaissance Weblog
Nathaniel Robinson
Jacob Remes (moribund?)
Christopher Sheil
Red Ted
Time Travelling Is Easy
Brian Ulrich
Shana Worthen
Computers/media/communication
Lauren Andreacchi (moribund)
Eric Behrens
Joseph Bosco
Danah Boyd
David Brake
Collin Brooke
Maximilian Dornseif (moribund)
Jeff Erickson
Ed Felten
Lance Fortnow
Louise Ferguson
Anne Galloway
Jason Gallo
Josh Greenberg
Alex Halavais
Sariel Har-Peled
Tracy Kennedy
Tim Lambert
Liz Lawley
Michael O'Foghlu
Jose Luis Orihuela (moribund)
Alex Pang
Sebastian Paquet
Fernando Pereira
Pink Bunny of Battle
Ranting Professors
Jay Rosen
Ken Rufo
Douglas Rushkoff
Vika Safrin
Rob Schaap (Blogorrhoea)
Frank Schaap
Robert A. Stewart
Suresh Venkatasubramanian
Ray Trygstad
Jill Walker
Phil Windley
Siva Vaidahyanathan
Anthropology
Kerim Friedman
Alex Golub
Martijn de Koning
Nicholas Packwood
Geography
Stentor Danielson
Benjamin Heumann
Scott Whitlock
Education
Edward Bilodeau
Jenny D.
Richard Kahn
Progressive Teachers
Kelvin Thompson (defunct?)
Mark Byron
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