The cover story to this week’s issue of The Nation is an article by Christopher Phelps on the new Students for a Democratic Society. I read it in a couple of earlier drafts, and can’t imagine anything more fair to the young people who are being radicalized by the war. As Phelps says, it’s not that they tend to know a lot about the old SDS and want to relive it. They aren’t antiquarians. But “democratic society” just sounds like a good a name for what they want — and they know better than to think they are living in one now.
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Last month I mentioned that Political Theory Daily Review had found a sponsor — the magazine Bookforum. As it happens, the new issue just arrived in my mailbox yesterday, even before it reached the newstand, which doesn’t always happen.
Well, now you can read it, too. As of the April/May issue, nearly all of the contents are online for free. It looks like a couple of items are print-only, out of about 45.
I’m still partial to the paper version. Easier on the eyeballs, for one thing; plus, the ads in a book publication actually count as information that I want to see. But at a time when most newspaper review sections are shrinking when not disappearing, it’s good that one publication seems to be doing well enough to make its content available to the largest possible readership.
When a rumor began to circulate during the first week in January that Michael Bérubé would soon be shutting down his blog — confirmed in due course by an official statement/explanation — it was big news in this little world of “web” “logs.” Sure, there are plenty of places online where you can find discussions of Stuart Hall, economic populism, Ralph Nader, the NHL, and disability studies. Just not all in the same place at the same time. Bérubé had been at it for three years, during which he built up a large readership and even managed to include a number of blog entries in a collection of essays published by a university press.
So when the news got out, there was a general groan of dismay from many quarters of the academic and lefty/progressive commentariat in the United States. And in particular from that subset of each consisting of hockey fans. The shutting down of Bérubé’s blog also met, it must be said, with cheering from members of the Peoples’ Revolutionary Committee for a Committee of Revolutionary Peoples who were still upset that he had occasionally written disobliging things about Slobodan Milosevic.
No doubt there were also sighs of relief — gentle tears of gratitude, even — elsewhere.
It was in short an epochal event: the end of an institution, the twilight of an era, etc. Then came February and it all really was history.
Well, after some downtime–during which he’s probably written a couple of books–Michael Bérubé is now joining Crooked Timber. He is being taught the secret password (“Is there no help for the widow’s son?”) and handshake even now. In the meanwhile, please join me in welcoming Michael back into the fray.
Via Shakespeare’s Sister, word of what sounds like an urban legend, though evidently it’s for real. But like many urban legends, it’s also a cautionary tale. An Atlanta TV station, doing a hard-hitting story on the new whole-wheat donut from Krispy Kreme, used an image someone in the art department probably grabbed online shortly before going on the air:
(You can watch the video at ShakeSis.)
Ordinarily I would expect this to have been discussed at Romenesko by now, but so far don’t see anything. All the more surprising given the nonstop debates there in 2003 over nuances of the journalistic ethics involved in covering the opening of Krispy Kreme stores as news.
Suggestion to the Poynter Institute, which not only hosts the Romenesko news blog but sponsors workshops and seminars for editors and reporters: Devote a course to the perils of Google Images, and soon.
As of today, Political Theory Daily Review is sponsored by Bookforum magazine. For a while now, PTDR has provided the widest and deepest pool of links to late-breaking, scholarly, and/or esoteric articles available on the web.
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Looks like everyone around here is just too shy to mention it, but all this week Crooked Timber has been among the blogs discussed and/or vivisected by “Movable Snipe,” a regular feature at the website Jewcy.com. The various CT-related entries are all conveniently available here.
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It is February 14, and that can only mean one thing — the arrival of this year’s batch of Valentine’s Day slogans from the Freedom Road Socialist Organization:
Proletarians And Oppressed Peoples,
1. Progressive And Revolutionary People Everywhere, Resolutely Uphold The Militant Bolshevik Spirit And Revolutionary Romanticism Embodied In Comrade Valentine!
2. Decisively Smash Retrograde And Joyless Ultra-Left Lines Which Disparage Proletarian Love And Desire!!
3. Warmly Celebrate The 20th Anniversary Of ACT-UP, A Militant Organization Which Attacked The Bourgeois State and Big Capital On Behalf Of LGBTQ People And All AIDS-Affected Oppressed Communities Worldwide In 1987 And Has Remained On The Offensive For Two Decades! ! !
Responding to my interview with Danny Postel about Reading “Legitimation Crisis” in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism, Lindsay Waters writes in an email note (quoted here by permission):
The situation he talks about is same one I know from talking to people about Rawls in US/UK versus the Maghreb and China. For my friends in West, Rawls is as evil as Bush. I don’t buy it, because I have talked to people who live under totally unliberal regimes.
(Yeah, well, never underestimate the lingering appeal in some quarters of the doctrine of social fascism, which led to such exciting results in 1933.)
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I’ll mimic Chris’s announcement by mentioning that my old, erratic, permalink-less eyesore of a “blog” (if that was even the word for it) is dead, now that Arts Journal has offered to host something a bit more normally bloggy. It’s called Quick Study, and even has RSS feeds. It feels like I’m finally on the cutting edge of several years ago.
Doing the usual stroll through Bloglines a little while ago (168 feeds and counting), I read:
The Weblog’s military aggression this week against The Valve and Long Sunday has been a radically unqualified success. Further action against Crooked Timber will be unnecessary at this time because The Valve and Long Sunday have been transformed into beacons of democracy and hope for the entire academic blogosphere.
That sounds less like serious de-escalation than momentary retrenchment before an eventual attempted conquest. If you want to watch one of the more self-aware blogspats in recent memory, check out the comments section for this entry at The Weblog, the field headquarters for this bloodstained militarist operation.
It’s now up to more than 400 comments. One of them indicates that the invasion of CT was originally scheduled for this weekend. The above-quoted statement indicates otherwise, but that may be an effort to throw everyone off guard.
A colleague has just forwarded to me a report from Secrecy News about the latest policy of the Congressional Research Service towards the media:
The Director of the Congressional Research Service last week issued a revised agency policy on “Interacting with the Media” that warns CRS analysts about the “very real risks” associated with news media contacts and imposes new restrictions on speaking to the press.
Among other things, they must file “detailed notes on the matters discussed or to be discussed.” The new rules of engagement are spelled out here.
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This YouTube video of our calico cat and a wind-up toy bird has had just over 9,000 hits. My wife initially put it up expecting that just a few friends would take a look. At some point, it went from a few dozen hits to several thousand. For the past couple of months, it has been poised to break the 10k barrier, but lost a lot of momentum somewhere along the way.
This is where you can help.
Besides, it seems like time finally to do my first CT post of 2007, and it was either this or something about the late Seymour Martin Lipset‘s place in the history of the Shermanite faction following its departure from the Workers Party. A tough decision. But I find that the video does not actually decrease my will to go on, so here it is.
UPDATE: See Phil Ford’s response, on “Hot Pants,” at Dial “M”
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While taking in the news that James Brown has died, I’ve been in transit — far away from my CDs, and unable to celebrate his life in fitting manner. It sounds like a joke in really bad taste, but in fact what I most want to hear is the album called Dead on the Heavy Funk 1974-’76. I used to have it on tape but am not sure if it’s still in print. There’s another compilation with a similar title released as part of what sounds like a worthy archival edition covering Brown’s entire career.
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I’m still working my way through the report of the MLA task force on evaluating scholarship for tenure. It’s a hundred pages long, but takes a while to process. One thing does jump out as worrisome and discouraging, though: the status of translation.
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A casual reference to limerick-writing here last week had the effect of unleashing hitherto unexpected powers of versification among some of Crooked Timber’s readership. Seriously, I had no idea.
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