An easy way to annoy an academic, if you’re so inclined, is to ask her what she did for her summer break. Few academics have much of a break over the summer, but they are not very good at communicating this to the public.. or even their students, including those who are on the academic career track. To address this, I decided to write up the various tasks that can keep academics busy during non-teaching months (recognizing that some people also teach in the summer). I was mainly drawing on my own experiences, which had the added benefit of reminding me that even during a summer that didn’t seem particularly productive, I had actually gotten a ton done. And to be clear, the reflection is not meant as a complaint about my job, there are many things about it that I love (I won’t pretend that I love it all, of course). But I do think that academics do themselves and also their students a disservice by not being more forthcoming about how they spend their time outside of the classroom. I will be following up with another piece on what obligations are added to our list once the academic year kicks in so I welcome items that are not on this list either because I forgot that they occur over the summer or because they mainly concern term time.

Here.

“Ralph Miliband taught me and I can say he was one of the most inspiring and objective teachers I had. Of course, we had different political opinions but he never treated me with anything less than complete courtesy and I had profound respect for his integrity.”

“He had come here as a refugee, done his duty to his adopted country by serving in our Royal Navy during the war, become a great academic and raised a good family.

“I saw him week after week and it beggars belief that the Daily Mail can accuse him of lacking patriotism. I never heard him ever say one word which was negative about Britain – our country.

“The Daily Mail is telling lies about a good man who I knew. The people of this country are good and decent too. They do not want the Daily Mail attacking the dead relatives of politicians to make political points.”

Apparently, there is some question now about whether Paul Dacre’s father served during WWII. Unlike Ed Miliband’s father.

Erick Erickson:

Democrats keep talking about our refusal to compromise. They don’t realize our compromise is defunding Obamacare. We actually want to repeal it.

I guess the next stage is to seek compromise on what ‘compromise’ means. Conservatives want ‘compromise’ to mean: we get almost everything. You get nothing. Erickson’s planning to threaten the dictionary people, maybe? (‘Dat’s a nice language you got ‘der. Be a shame if somethin’ wuz teh happin to it.’)

A kidnapper who asks for $1 million or he shoots the kid is seeking compromise, so long as he would prefer $10 million?

UPDATE: Here’s another use of the new word from Grover Norquist:

The administration asking us to raise taxes is not an offer; that’s not a compromise. That’s just losing. I’m in favor of compromise. When we did the $2.5 trillion spending restraint in the BCA, we wanted $6 trillion. I considered myself very compromised. Overly reasonable.

‘Compromise’ means conservatives getting a lot for nothing, just not absolutely everything you might ever want, for nothing. But bottom line: if you have to give to get, that’s just losing, not compromise.

To distract attention from having fired one fifth of the army, the Conservative defence secretary Phil Hammond needed something positive, whizzy and modern to tell his party members (average age: 68) at their conference last weekend. What better than to announce how go-ahead Britain is in all things cyber and defence? Well, he went one better, and announced that the UK will soon have the power that dare not speak its name; cyber strike capability.

You see, just as ‘everyone knew’ that the NSA was eavesdropping on all manner of phone and Internet traffic, including that of the US’s supposed allies, everyone also knows that the US, Russia, China, Israel, Iran– and probably North Korea if they can string together some cast-off Lenovo servers with galvanised wire – everyone is developing and has in some manner already deployed the ability to attack other countries’ critical networked infrastructure. It’s just that no one wants to admit to it.
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ought to be cut down to size.
Pulped and reduced to a nauseous juice,
and dried out at flattened ’til ready for use,
Then covered in newsprint and lies.

And whoever edits it could do with the same treatment.

If, contrary to the truth, Ralph Miliband had had any sympathy with Britain’s enemies during WWII, of course, the Daily Mail would no doubt have offered him a column!

With this post, I’d like to kick off a five-part series on the intellectual history of fear.

Long before I was writing or thinking about conservatism and the right, I was writing and thinking about politics and fear. I began working on this topic with a dissertation in the early 1990s. I concluded that work with my first book Fear: The History of a Political Idea, which was published in 2004.

When I embarked upon the project, not many people in the academy were interested in fear. By the time I concluded it, everyone, it seemed, was. What had happened in the intervening years, of course, was 9/11.

To some degree, I think 9/11 has short-circuited our thinking about fear. Not in the obvious ways—frightened people are not in much of a position to think about anything, or so the argument goes—but in a more subtle way. [click to continue…]

Since a shutdown of the US government now appears inevitable, I thought I would look back at a post from 2010, in which I predicted such an outcome, expecting it to come in 2010. As it turned out that was premature, but much of the analysis still stands up pretty well, notably including the final sentence

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My daughter loves My Little Pony. So does this guy. And that, apparently, is a problem. Grown men are not supposed to like the same things as young girls.

The guy—though Gawker has done a story on him, he remains anonymous—is a dad in his late 30s. He calls himself “a fairly big fan.” He made the picture of one of the show’s characters the background image on his desktop. He talked to the boss’s 9-year-old daughter about the show. His co-workers, and the boss, got freaked out. According to the guy, the boss told him that “it’s weird and it makes people uncomfortable that I have a ‘tv show for little girls as a background.'”

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Today I finished grading more than 250.000 words of MA-theses (that’s what you get when students who don’t graduate by September need to pay fees for an additional year). It feels wonderful, to have an evening in which I can bring the kids to bed without stressing about all that still needs to be done, to make a cup of tea, sit down, and ask myself: ‘So, what shall I do tonight?’.

So lucky me, since today is also the day that De Correspondent got launched, a new completely on-line advertisement-free ‘newspaper’ (not really, no). 100% funded by crowdsourcing – by people who want journalists who serve the readers rather than the stockholders, who don’t want sensation on their frontpage, nor censorship of and selfcensorship by the journalists.

You have to be ‘a member’ to be able to read all the pieces, and it’s all in Dutch. I read a few pieces – on income and wealth inequality in the Netherlands, on the increasing numbers of walls on Earth that separate countries or areas, and a column by Arnon Grunberg — and my first thoughts were: this looks really good. The lay-out is great, it’s user-friendly. I like it. Yet content-wise, it’s much more like our place here then like a newspaper. But with much more power: they have money (more than 20.000 ‘members’ who donated money), and with those monies they could hire journalists – I mean, ‘correspondents’. Some of these correspondents will be writing full-time for De Correspondent, but some will hold other positions, like Ewald Engelen, who holds a chair in financial geography at the University of Amsterdam.

Since the platform is online-only, since pieces will be released at several moments during the day, and since readers can leave comments, I would think that the correspondent is a blog, really – though very likely and hopefully a high-powered blog. It’s interesting that they don’t present themselves as such. Why that would be – I have no idea. In the meantime I’m really glad they are there, proud to be a supporter of this adventure (oops, I should say ‘member’), and looking forward to watching their impact on the quality of the public debate.

I know that headline will set the menfolk off. Maybe the womenfolk, too. No matter. I just wanted to get your attention. For an entirely different purpose (though it really is a terrific film, with some lovely shots of Carroll Gardens.)

Wanting to bring together some recent CT threads on gender, sexism, and film, I thought this scene—which Michael Pollak reminded me of—does a brilliant job of capturing how and why academic men of a certain generation would have been so freaked out by the rules and laws of sexual harassment.

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The scene is between an older male professor—wonderfully played by John Mahoney, who also played that creepy dad in Say Anything, the father of the girl John Cusack was in love with—and Olympia Dukakis. She asks him why he likes to sleep with his female students. He tells her, and even though it’s 1987, i.e., a bit before the debate about faculty sexual harassment would really hit American campuses, he gives a visceral, concrete sense of what a male prerogative it was, to be able to fuck your students at will. And by implication why so many male faculty would freak out when they were told they couldn’t do it anymore.

Laws against sexual harassment really spelled the end of their world, the end of the old regime, the death of a whole way of life. A way of life that they thought was concomitant with education itself.

That’s how privilege works, as I’ve argued. The privileged imagine it to be an intrinsic part of the enterprise they’re engaged in, so that when the privilege goes, the enterprise goes with it too. And so the privileged freak: not just for themselves, but for all of humanity.

So I’m doing this thing where I rewatch 80’s Hollywood blockbusters, for science. John Hughes. Disappointing. Ghostbusters holds up. But that’s Bill Murray. (You know, I was watching Ted Cruz’ speech – well, bits of it. And I thought to myself: why am I even able to watch this for a second? I think the answer is: he looks a little like Bill Murray. The eyebrows.) Beverly Hills Cop. Unwatchable. Die Hard. Damn good, after all these years. And on and on, for the sake of science. Finally I got to Raiders of the Lost Ark. On Blu-Ray. I was so looking forward to this one. Haven’t watched it in 20 years. I was sure it was going to be, just as I remembered it, a perfect gem. A love letter to the pulps. The Platonic Form of summer blockbuster fun. It knows what it wants to be, and it is that thing, and that’s fine. And just enough comedy to go with the action. A perfect role for Harrison Ford. Spielberg is a great director. And – it turns out to be … just good. Not great. Dammit. I didn’t love it anymore! Where has my love gone! [click to continue…]

A new report  from the British think-tank Demos (for the group of the Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament) on the quality of democracy in European countries makes some interesting claims. It states that Hungary and Greece are ‘the most significant democratic backsliders, with Hungary in the bottom quartile for all measures of democracy’.

But while democratic values may be at risk in both countries, it seems to me that this is happening in different ways. In particular, the way government control is exercised in the presence of parties of the far right is quite different. In Hungary, the government has consolidated political control by moving further toward the positions adopted by the far right. In Greece, the state faces a crisis of authority that is worsened by the activities of the far right.

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Oh, Belle. Belle, Belle, Belle. First, you told us some authors were such a bunch of sexist dillweeds that you didn’t really like their novels all that much. In a throwaway sentence! A sentence that made it clear that you in fact didn’t read such books at all, but merely checked the covers for sexist content and then threw the books away in the trash. In. The. Trash. And then John said you could read fast. Biased much LOL! Yeah, well, so fast that you stopped reading books completely after you reached a sexist sentence! Because that’s manifestly what ‘reading fast’ means. Yes, and then you had an actual man testify again on your behalf that you finished books even if you didn’t super-love them. Like–probably the only chick in the world, seriously! How was any of us to know that “reads books fast” means “reads books”? What is this, some kind of crazy advanced logic class, or a blog?

So then you explained at length, that you were only talking about this one group of male authors who wrote more or less from the ’50s on, and that you didn’t like their novels because you thought they weren’t good novels. When since is that a reason not to like a novel, I would like to know, Missy? Any anyway, Belle, your problem is that you’re reading the wrong thing. Nobody cares about these books anymore! Or, as a commenter suggested: “No. It seems your definition of ‘important’ is skewing your choice of reading, so not surprising that your results are skewed. I’d suggest that you drop everything else for a while until you’ve finished reading all of Pratchett and Banks.” [Here I must note that for whatever odd reason this rubbed me the wrong way. I have already read all of Pratchett and Banks (except maybe one Tiffany Aching one?). The knowledge that there will be no new Iain M. Banks novels dismays me. He’s one of my all-time favorite writers full-stop. WHY AFTER 500 COMMENTS WOULD SOMEONE NOT ASK IF I HAD READ THEM ALL FIRST BECAUSE YOU KNOW, I VERY WELL MIGHT HAVE? Unnamed commenter: I don’t hate on you; it was almost bad luck that you…naw, you still shouldn’t have been so patronizing. But, like, talk to me, dude, what were you thinking?]

Well, dear readers, someone does care about these authors. Someone cares very, very much, and that man is University of Toronto Professor David Gilmour. In a recent interview with Random House Canada’s Emily Keeler, he explained his teaching philosophy:

I’m not interested in teaching books by women. Virginia Woolf is the only writer that interests me as a woman writer, so I do teach one of her short stories. But once again, when I was given this job I said I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love. Unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women. Except for Virginia Woolf. And when I tried to teach Virginia Woolf, she’s too sophisticated, even for a third-year class. Usually at the beginning of the semester a hand shoots up and someone asks why there aren’t any women writers in the course. I say I don’t love women writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down the hall. What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth….
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Van Jones to Cornel West:

Do you think that you’ve shown enough love toward President Obama?…Where is the love for this president?…You’ve got the first black president, and where is the love? I understand the critique, but where is the love?”

It’s like what Gershom Scholem wrote to Hannah Arendt in response to Eichmann in Jerusalem:

There is something in the Jewish language that is completely indefinable, yet fully concrete — what the Jews call ahavath Israel, or love for the Jewish people.  With you, my dear Hannah, as with so many intellectuals coming from the German left, there is no trace of it.

Only classier.