Duke Ellington, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” (1943).

“People start pollution. People can stop it.”

Bessie Smith sings the St. Louis Blues (1929).

Thinking like a historian.

From the staff at the Wisconsin Historical Museum via my friend Paul:

“Run away!”

AHA Today sent me to this article at Inside Higher Ed from a distressed college professor who’s leaving the profession:

Higher education for too many undergraduates at too many liberal arts colleges has become a puffy sofa nestled with down pillows. For a few bucks and in a few hours, students can take a test and learn that they are language disabled, or mathematically disabled, or for a few bucks more, both. Students increasingly ask me during advising sessions if a class is tough or hard, or if the professor assigns a lot of reading, because they need to “lighten their load.” “I want to take a class with Professor So-And-So. I have a lot on my mind, and I don’t want to stress out.” “Don’t worry,” I say, “you won’t.”

This comfy zone of mediocrity extends beyond the classroom. “Student life” largely serves to debilitate the notion of a genuine, deliberative, academic community. Rather than fuel cerebral discussions with activities for the mind, resident advisors and their adult supervisors plan activities that redefine anti-intellectualism. There is Sensitivity Day, Tolerance Day, and Wear [insert color here] Day, and a host of other events that are aimed at “inspiring.” Dorm life is supposed to be cool, fun and engaging. For me, it was simply a place to sleep.

And what does this have to do with the price of tea in China? Un-coddle them then! But apparently that’s not the only group people at this college that this person has a problem with:

Intellectual sparring (dare I use the term) about ideas – among students and faculty – has been replaced by one-sided, partisan drivel (for example, Obama = admirable. McCain = terrible and, for the record, I will be voting for Obama). While it would be easy to blame a liberal bias among faculty for this groupthink, it should be noted that this simple world of good and bad pervades the world around us. On radio, television and the Internet, ideological pundits scream at one another with vitriol and fervor. My partisan colleagues are universally National Public Radio listeners. They do not hear the other side, so it is easy to demonize the other side. Their students are listening, and sadly think of conservatism in its many forms as horrific. Worse still, they now conflate liberal passion and advocacy with justice, and by default, analytic rigor and reason. They do not weigh evidence, or take note of pro, cons, costs or benefits. Doing so would be to admit that there are merits to positions they do not hold. To acknowledge that their ideology is imperfect is the first step towards compromise, or in their overused, precious phrase, “selling out.”

This is about the only part of the essay that is at all self-reflective:

I have learned after almost 20 years that I am woefully ill-suited for today’s classroom.

I always hate it when people suggest I don’t have a real job, but this person could probably use one. It’ll be an education for them.  They’ll learn that outside of academia nobody gets to pick their colleagues, and if they complain about their customers they’ll eventually go out of business. [I hate that term when used in the context of higher education, but I can't think of anything else that would be the "real world" equivalent of students.]

Furthermore, assuming we’re talking about tenured or tenure-track faculty, nobody anywhere gets our kind of job security. Indeed, with a recession/depression coming up fast, I’d think now is the absolute worst time in the last 20+ years to switch careers.

To put it briefly as possible: The killer rabbit is guarding the exit to the cave of academia, not its entrance. Don’t complain that it’s dark and damp in here because when you go outside you’re going to get mauled.

D-Day (from the German perspective).

Who knew they had German WWII newsreels on YouTube?:

That explains why I hate text messaging.

I’ve always hated text messaging, even before students started doing it during my classes. I always figured the problem was that I was boring students during lectures, but Louis Menand at the New Yorker is nice enough to offer a different reason:

Back when most computing was done on a desktop, people used to complain about how much pressure they felt to respond quickly to e-mail. At least, in those days, it was understood that you might have walked away from your desk. There is no socially accepted excuse for being without your cell phone. “I didn’t have my phone”: that just does not sound believable. Either you are lying or you are depressed or you have something to hide. If you receive a text, therefore, you are obliged instantaneously to reply to it, if only to confirm that you are not one of those people who can be without a phone.

OK, I admit the problem still might lie with me, but it’s good to know there’s an alternative explanation. But even if this is the reason for text messaging mania among young people nationwide, I still don’t sympathize. My life is crazy too, but I have no problem being one of those people without their phone. After all, you can always try my e-mail. How important can it be?

“Women in Defense” (1941).

And yes, that is Katherine Hepburn.

What does a breadline look like?

While I’ve been looking for documentary footage of Depression era breadlines and coming up short, there are certainly lots of great pictures out on the internet to help us understand what might be in store for us during our new Great Depression:

How not to review a book.

When UD first showed me Jonathan Chait’s hostile review of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine in The New Republic a few weeks ago, I bit my tongue. Heaven knows the intellectual history of free market conservatism is not my strong suit. It didn’t help that I hadn’t read Klein since it came out almost a year ago.

Thank goodness Naomi Klein has now responded to that review and other critiques of The Shock Doctrine herself. The key points of the Chait review are that Klein ignored Milton Friedman’s opposition to the war in Iraq and messed up the definition of neo-conservatism. She handles both of those points in turn:

Despite his later protestations, Milton Friedman openly supported the war when it was being waged. In April 2003, Friedman told the German magazine Focus that “President Bush only wanted war because anything else would have threatened the freedom and the prosperity of the USA.” Asked about increased tensions between the U.S. and Europe, Friedman replied: “the end justifies the means. As soon as we’re rid of Saddam, the political differences will also disappear.” [Read the whole interview in German and our translation.] Clearly this was not the voice of anti-intervention. Even in July 2006, when Friedman claimed to have opposed the war from the beginning, he remained hawkish. Now that the U.S. was in Iraq, Friedman told The Wall Street Journal, “it seems to me very important that we make a success of it.”

All of this has nothing to do with my book, however. In The Shock Doctrine, I describe the invasion and occupation of Iraq as the culmination of Friedman’s ideological crusade because he was America’s leading intellectual favoring the privatization of the state – not because he personally supported the war, which is irrelevant. For more than five years Iraq has been the vanguard of this radical privatization project. Private contractors now outnumber U.S. soldiers and corporations have taken on such core state functions as prisoner interrogation.

Furthermore, I never said Friedman was a “neo-conservative” and I discuss, at length, how difficult it is to find terms to describe the corporatist project that are acceptable to all readers.

Looking at her response, I was reminded of what I’m certain is the absolute worst book review I have ever read, Greg Easterbrook’s review of Jared Diamond’s Collapse. Here’s a piece of that:

Oddly, for someone with a background in evolutionary theory, he seems not to consider society’s evolutionary arc. He thinks backward 13,000 years, forward only a decade or two. What might human society be like 13,000 years from now? Above us in the Milky Way are essentially infinite resources and living space. If the phase of fossil-driven technology leads to discoveries that allow Homo sapiens to move into the galaxy, then resources, population pressure and other issues that worry Diamond will be forgotten.

And if the Earth is struck by a giant asteroid tomorrow, nobody will ever read Jared Diamond’s books again. So what? [For added entertainment value, you might want to read Brad DeLong beat the intellectual living daylights out of Easterbrook here.]

What do both these reviews have in common? For one thing, both authors write for The New Republic. Coincidence? Probably not. Second, they both ignore most of the book the author actually wrote in an attempt to make that author look like an idiot. Chait’s review in particular reminds me of Presidential politics in a way. The author or candidate gets one thing wrong, therefore they’re a liar and you can’t trust anything they say.

When I review a book, I always try to remember that it isn’t about me and it isn’t about the author. A review should be about what that author wrote on the page. And if you can’t restrict yourself to what’s on the page because you feel moved to tell the author how their book should have been written, you better be absolutely positive you’ve done your homework. Otherwise you’re the one who’s going to look like an idiot, even if you do write for The New Republic.