#This video is a detailed analysis of the memoir

[aronarchy]

A copy of the first reading list, if you dislike clicking on Google docs links:

The liberal news media is working overtime to silence Palestinian voices. As we sit thousands of miles away, witnessing the massacre through social media, the least we can do is educate ourselves and work to educate others. Apartheid threatens all of us, and just to reiterate, anti-Zionism ≠ antisemitism.

Academic Works, Poetry and Memoirs

The Revolution of 1936-1939 in Palestine: Background, Details, and Analysis, Ghassan Kanafani (1972)

Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries, Rosemary Sayegh (1979)

Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment, Mazin Qumsiyeh (2011)

My Life in the PLO: The Inside Story of the Palestinian Struggle, Shafiq al-Hout and Jean Said Makdisi (2019)

My People Shall Live, Leila Khaled (1971)

Poetry of Resistance in Occupied Palestine, translated by Sulafa Hijjawi (Baghdad, Ministry of Culture and Guidance, 1968)

On Palestine by Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky (2015)

Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on the US-Israeli War Against the Palestinians, Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé (2013)

The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969-1994, Edward W. Said (2012)

Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique, Sa’ed Atshan (2020)

Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel, Andrew Ross (2019)

Ten Myths About Israel, Ilan Pappé (2017)

Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question, Christopher Eric Hitchens and Edward W. Said (2001)

Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape, Raja Shehadeh (2010)

The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East, David Hirst (1977)

Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom, Norman Finkelstein (2018)

Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians, Noam Chomsky (1983)

Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations, Avi Shlaim (2010)

Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War Against the Palestinians, Baruch Kimmerling (2006)

The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, Norman G. Finkelstein (2015)

Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, Jehad Abusalim (2022)

Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod (2007)

Peace and its discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East peace process, Edward W. Said (2012)

Three Poems by Yahya Hassan

Articles, Papers & Essays

“Palestinian history doesn’t start with the Nakba” by PYM (May, 2023) 

“What the Uprising Means,” Salim Tamari (1988)

“The Palestinians’ inalienable right to resist,” Louis Allday (2021)

“Liberating a Palestinian Novel from Israeli Prison,” Danya Al-Saleh and Samar Al-Saleh (2023) 

Women, War, and Peace: Reflections from the Intifada, Nahla Abdo (2002)

“A Place Without a Door” and “Uncle Give me a Cigarette”—Two Essays by Palestinian Political Prisoner, Walid Daqqah (2023)

“Live Like a Porcupine, Fight Like a Flea,” A Translation of an Article by Basel Al-Araj

Films & Video Essays

Fedayin: Georges Abdallah’s Fight (2021)

Naila and the Uprising (2017)

Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory (2015)

Tell Your Tale Little Bird (1993)

The Time That Remains (2009)

“The Present” (short film) (2020)

“How Palestinians were expelled from their homes”

Louis Theroux: The Ultra Zionists (2011)

Born in Gaza (2014)

5 Broken Cameras (2011)

Little Palestine: Diary of a Siege (2021)

Al-Nakba: The Palestinian catastrophe - Episode 1 | Featured Documentary

Organisations to donate to

Palestine Red Crescent Society - https://www.palestinercs.org/en

Anera - https://support.anera.org/a/palestine-emergency

Palestinian American Medical Association - https://palestinian-ama.networkforgood.com/projects/206145-gaza-medical-supplies-oct-2023

You First Gaza - https://donate.gazayoufirst.org/

MAP - Medical Aid for Palestinians - https://www.map.org.uk/donate/donate

United Nations Relief and Works Agency - https://donate.unrwa.org/-landing-page/en_EN

Palestine Children’s Relief Fund - https://www.pcrf.net/   

Doctors Without Borders - https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/what-we-do/where-we-work/palestine

AP Fact Check

https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-gaza-misinformation-fact-check-e58f9ab8696309305c3ea2bfb269258e

This list is not exhaustive in any way, and is a summary of various sources on the Internet. Please engage with more ethical, unbiased sources, including Decolonize Palestine and this list compiled by the Palestinian Youth Movement.

[lewisinho]

as the anon that asked for the race list: thank you!

now this is totally up to you if you have the time to spend on this, but this is my first year watching the races, and while I've been doing some background research to get up to speed, there is still a lot i don't know. i trust your judgment so what are some races and/or f1 adjacent things i should look into? i'm going through your McLaren list and have watched the last 4 seasons of dts and the brawn documentary. are there any other books/ documentaries/ races (especially seb's) / old youtube videos that are lost in the void that i should also check out?

again no pressure and thank you!

no problem!

(and btw welcome to f1 and the world of watching some glorified hot wheels every other sunday 😁 it’s great!)

i completely get how daunting it can be as a new fan in the sport. when i was getting back into f1 it also took me some time to get back up to speed with everything, especially all the techy stuff; i honestly learned the most through just watching the races (old and new), bc you get to see all the strategies play out, the pit-stops, the overtakes etc. and the terminology just becomes much easier to understand through sheer exposure. there are also some really cool f1 data analysis blogs you might want to follow on twt/x if you want some more detailed tech analysis and graphs if you’re into that sort of thing: (x)

as for seb, oh there’s a whole arsenal of recs i have!

monza 2008, rise of torro rosso wunderkind; i presume you already know the lore with that one but ig you can never get tired of it.

abu dhabi 2010, world championship no.1 “du bist weltmeister!”

interlagos 2012, the infamous one. this one’s a rollercoaster, chaos everywhere and the manifestation of murphy’s law: anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. amidst a title battle against nando, seb was fighting the weather, bruno senna’s front wing, a damaged side-pod, no radio, and somehow managed to claim p6 to win the championship

malaysia 2013, multi-21 (iconique), he was faster, deal with it. 💅

singapore 2013, domination masterclass from quali to the race. (also just all of his singapore wins...lion of singapore and all that)

india 2013, title no.3 secured, changed tyres on lap 2 and came out p17, was third by only lap 13 and then won the race by nearly 30 seconds. it was also his sixth win in a row. he went on to win three more. speaks for itself. also this:

malaysia 2015, first win with ferrari, can't forget that one, also features sewis’ gay knee-touching on the podium.

germany 2019, CHAOS, in which merc got bewitched by the special livery curse 😅, with crashes, spins, 50-second long pit stops, and also features one of seb’s best drives from p20 -> p2

i also highly recommend watching Floz's fan-made docus on youtube about 'the silver war' (there are also docus for the 2014 and 2015 seasons) as well as the merc v ferrari (lewis vs seb) 2017 fight and 'fight for five' in 2018, they're so much better than dts and actually give a full run-down of what happened during the season, with all the action on-track, with interviews and providing all the context! it's so well-edited as well (you literally feel like you're watching a movie about all of the seasons) and they are just incredibly fun to watch.

in general, i love rewatching races from 2017/18 (literally my comfort seasons), personal favs include spain 2017 (strategy galore and lewis v seb), baku 2017 (for obv reasons), austin 2017; and basically the 2018 season in its entirety...

as for books, there are many driver autobiographies e.g. jb (he’s even got two lmao), mark webbah etc. but i think the best f1 book out there is adrian newey’s memoir ‘how to build a car’ if you want lore + great insight into cars!

i’d also recommend watching some older races (i could do a separate post on which ones are my personal favs) but it’s all up to you in the end! go digging, look around on yt for some highlights and just keep exploring! 🫶💜

[thecherokeediaries]

Thank You, Karrine Steffans

Before we had Instagram, influencers, and Instagram baddies, we had video vixens that ruled the late ‘90s and early 2000s with their beautiful faces, alluring charm and natural sex appeal. These women generally had a bad reputation for being ‘undeserving’ of these social circles and for supposedly ‘sleeping their way to the top.’ They even struggled to have their peers take them seriously, so they struggled even more to earn their bosses’ respect in the workplace. Slut-shaming was inevitable as a video vixen at the time, but no one expected them to speak out against those claims the way Karrine Steffans did. Karrine Steffans is not only the most iconic video vixen, but she’s someone who’s influence runs deep over the current influencers we see to this day.

Karrine Steffans, also known as Superhead, is an American author, actress, and former hip-hop music video vixen. She gained significant attention and notoriety in the early 2000s for her memoir, "Confessions of a Video Vixen," which detailed her experiences as a video girl in the music industry.

Born on August 24, 1978, in Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, Steffans moved to the United States as a child and grew up in Florida. She entered the entertainment industry in the late 1990s and quickly became one of the most recognizable video vixens, appearing in numerous music videos for popular artists such as Jay-Z, R. Kelly, and Mystikal.

In 2005, Steffans released her memoir, "Confessions of a Video Vixen," which became a New York Times bestseller. The book provided an insider's perspective on the entertainment industry, shedding light on the exploitation and mistreatment of women in the field. It also revealed her past relationships with several high-profile celebrities.

Confessions of a Video Vixen is Karrine Steffans’ memoir detailing the first 25 years of her life. She had a troubled upbringing in poverty and suffering physical abuse, drug abuse, sexual assault. She lived as a teenage runaway and turned to sex work and hip hop modeling to support herself and her son. The book wasn’t a simple autobiography, but she also divulged the juicy details of her sexual relationships. Some of the men she talked about had kids, girlfriends and wives; they were beloved in their respective industries. Karrine was just a video vixen.

Based on my adult analysis of the situation, I conclude Karrine Steffans was not wrong. I accept the hurt of the women whose partners were mentioned in Karrine's book; however, I disagree with the fact that the men were allowed to get away with their acts. It is not surprising that Karrine takes most of the blame. The men with whom she was involved knew they had girlfriends, wives and families at home, but they still found a way to be with Karrine, who was single. As a result, one of the men she mentioned later gave her a demeaning nickname that is still often used today. The nickname “Superhead” was what she was referred to for the rest of her career, not only was it demeaning but it was dehumanizing if she wasn’t already laughed at from the public this name alone was enough for people to laugh and her as less than.

Following the success of her memoir, Steffans continued to write and release more books, including "The Vixen Diaries" and "SatisFaction: Erotic Fantasies for the Advanced & Adventurous Couple." These books explored her personal experiences, relationships, and sexual encounters.

Aside from her writing career, Steffans has also made appearances on television shows, including "The Oprah Winfrey Show," "The Tyra Banks Show," and "The Wendy Williams Show." She has been involved in controversies and public feuds with other celebrities over the years, further fueling her media presence.

Karrine will always have a place among the most influential women for many reason, but mainly because she is the first woman I saw who refused to let powerful men dictate how her story unfolded. She wrote her book, recounted her own story, told it from her perspective, and didn't allow anyone else to rewrite its story. Previously, the men around Karrine Steffans controlled her narrative and passed it off as truth because people weren't prepared to understand her. Karrine was not seen as a person by those men, so she was expected to keep quiet as they humiliated and belittled her. The culture of slut-shaming has changed greatly over the past few decades, especially for video vixens, and Karrine is a key contributor to the shift.

And to that I say…

Thank You, Karrine Steffans

[beardedmrbean]

Audrey Elizabeth Hale, the 28-year-old trans artist killed by police after opening fire on a private Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee, covered her clothes in handwritten messages before her deadly assault in late March, according to an autopsy report.

The report acknowledges that Hale identified as a trans male but officially lists her as female. She was carrying a knife inscribed with her chosen name, Aiden, according to the autopsy.

Months after police released bodycam video that showed responding officers take down the shooter in the middle of the assault at the Covenant School, Hale's cause and manner of death were unsurprisingly determined to be homicide by gunshot wounds. She also had bruises and abrasions and "minor" blunt force trauma.

NASHVILLE KILLER AUDREY HALE SLEPT WITH JOURNALS ON SCHOOL SHOOTINGS UNDER BED, COURT DOCS REVEAL

However, the report included new details about the attack — including the revelation that Hale's clothes were covered in handwritten notes, drawings and numbers. The report also noted that Hale wore a plastic anklet inscribed with "508407."

It's unclear what was written on her clothes, and the revelation comes as the city faces public records lawsuits to demand the release of Hale's manifesto and other writings, which were recovered at the crime scene and at her parents' home.

Read the autopsy report (Mobile users go here)

The killer slept with journals on other school shootings under her bed, Fox News Digital has previously reported, and police recovered dozens of notebooks and drawings, including two "memoirs" and a hand-drawn map of the Covenant School.

That's where Hale barged in on March 27 and opened fire on helpless students and staff members, killing three adults and three children.

Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake has said that Hale suffered from an unspecified emotional disorder and that the controversial manifesto had been shared with the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, Virginia.

The child victims were all 9 years old: Hallie Scruggs, the daughter of the school church's pastor; Evelyn Dieckhaus; and William Kinney. The adults included 60-year-old Head of School Katherine Koonce, and custodian Michael Hill and substitute teacher Cynthia Peak, both 61.

The forensic pathologist also found a scar across Hale's forehead but none on her wrists. The toxicology report came back negative for the presence of drugs and alcohol.

The autopsy was conducted by Dr. Emily Dennison on March 28.

Hale was 5 feet 2 inches tall and weighed around 120 pounds.

One bullet passed through both lungs and Hale's spine, right to left, back to front and slightly downward, passing through an arm on its way out, according to the report. A second bullet went through the shooter's head, back to front, right to left and upward. A third struck Hale in the femur, fragmented and came out in two places, also traveling right to left.

[enki2]

I saw your response about anime style history and was absolutely fascinated. Do you have any reading/watching recommendations about the histories of different genres?

The WaveMotionCannon blog is a great resource for detailed analyses and primary sources about trends in the anime industry (including genre trends), but they go really deep and get into the weeds so I'd recommend some overviews first. I'm not really sure why, but general-audience books on the subject tend to be both broad and full of errors.

Luckily, Youtube has a lot of channels that specialize in a mix of overviews and deep dives:

Pause and Select comes out of the academic world (specifically, the anime-centric part of cultural studies) and does a lot of broad surveys of trends in genre, situated with cultural, political, and technical context. They used to do periodic book clubs, too, which was a great way to get exposed to academic sources (important because industry, academic, and fan histories of anime kind of sit in their own bubbles and rarely interact, in part because of language barriers; each can illuminate the others in interesting ways).

Mercury Falcon does both genre overviews and deep dives into particular franchises, with a focus on the 70s and 80s. This channel has an absolute wealth of information about early anime industry drama (particularly in the mecha space in the 70s) and early localization efforts. Kenny Lauderdale does some of the same stuff, but with a lighter tone -- he's more interested specifically in rarities and oddities, but when he dives into history, he will sometimes dig up information nobody else has, and he's got some insights into media preservation that are worth hearing.

KaizerBeamz's series "Kyoto Video" shines a spotlight on older, forgotten shows and as a result often provides an insight into the outer edges & branches of current genres (and a reminder of now-dead genres). He sometimes provides a lot of historical context, as well.

The Canipa Effect focuses on the contemporary scene, but dives into the histories of particular studios; where he really shines is explorations of the dynamics of the industry (something that doesn't get talked about very much even in Japan, and where translations of first-person accounts are rare). Canipa was important in spreading awareness of the working conditions of animators among the western anime fandom. Worth checking out alongside Archipel, a Japanese-language channel (with high-quality translations) that documents individuals working in the anime industry with little documentary featurettes about their life and work. Also check out the Japanese public television series Manben, in which manga artists (including veteran revolutionaries like Rumiko Takahashi) are filmed drawing their current projects and then discuss the footage with the host, veteran artist Urusawa Naoki. These deep dives sometimes provide critical insight into whole genres, because anime genres (much like genres in italian film) tend to develop out of imitators of single seminal properties, and so single creators or small groups of creators can wield huge amounts of influence.

STEVIEM's mini-documentaries on Studio 4C and Hideaki Anno are great, though most of his output is general anituber territory. I would also recommend Ygg Studios' Anime Alphabet series, and ErynCerise's Mahou Profile (a series of videos on the evolution of the magical girl genre).

In terms of books, I've found them pretty hit or miss. Some that I can recommend wholeheartedly are:

The Moe Manifesto, a collection of essays about the history of the concept of "moe" -- this is where I got a lot of information about the genesis of the bishojo style

Otaku: Japan's Database Animals, a work of cultural analysis by Azuma that dives into the intersection of anime fandom, the VN space, and online communication technologies and tries to produce a general model of the evolution of how people relate to media (with, IMO, mixed results)

The Notenki Memoirs is a history of the period at Gainax when Evangelion was being developed (and can be combined with Otaku no Video, Gainax's semi-fictionalized OVA retelling a mythic version of their origin; there is also a live action series called Blue Blazes about the early days of Gainax, which I haven't seen, and a documentary about the production of Evangelion 3.0+1.0 that gives interesting insight into Anno himself.)

Some that I recommend with caveats:

Anime Impact, a collection of anime reviews by english speakers (mostly people who were semi-famous online personalities about 10-15 years ago, and only some of whom actually know much about anime), is largely interesting because it's organized chronologically by the date of the show's release, so the early chapters dive into the history of forgotten shows

Robot Ghosts And Wired Dreams, a collection of essays (mostly about science fiction anime) by academics in cultural studies, contains a lot of interesting and compelling material (for instance, the first essay situates Japanese science fiction in the context of the irregular detective genre and connects it with complicated currents in nationalism, and a later essay talks about the semiotics of loan words in the context of Macross Plus and Patlabor) and a couple real duds (for instance, an essay trying to compare Evangelion with Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within wherein the author only watches two episodes of Evangelion and gets their plot confused, then tries and fails to fit it into a framework of second-wave-feminist critiques of transhumanism through a freudian lens)

The History of Hentai Manga is well-researched and detailed, but the author tries to cram in a lot of jokes that don't land, and it seems like there might have been an editorial mandate to put in as many images as possible (because this academic study of hentai manga is being published by a company that mostly publishes actual hentai); the translation is also pretty clunky. In his attempt to come off as breezy, the author uses particular phrases and constructions that are part of japanese fan-culture argot, and the translator does not localize these phrases and constructions (preferring to translate them literally) and also does not provide context for them, so they can be quite confusing to people who haven't come across them before (i.e., people who haven't seen a lot of fansubs of obscure otaku-focused shows from 20 years ago).

If I think of anything else, I'll post it later.

[sorenzi]

So you are telling me these two aren’t canon?! (part 2)

Continuing on this glorious list:

https://sorenlen.tumblr.com/post/660823161771851776/so-you-are-telling-me-that-these-two-arent-canon

Maybe you are right that these two aren’t canon, but here are some brainworms for bait and for your reconsideration (or entertainment):

MochiJun on the VnC anime merch (specifically the rings)

Mochijun mentioned that she liked  to collect rings, then went straight to discuss where these two would wear their respective accessories on their hands. Noe’s would be worn on his thumb on the left hand, Vani on the left hand’s middle finger. (Some one said it’s the right hand but I’ve yet to find the source…) I don’t know the significance of it but it got VnC twitter up in a storm.

Source: https://twitter.com/jun_mdesu/status/1445742456461398027 

Friendly reminder that their respective birthstones are of each other’s color schemes. (Noe = blue sapphire, Vanitas = purple amethyst)

YouTuber Omake

In the YouTuber omake where Vani (goes by V) would have been a popular game streamer with an ‘good’ voice, and Noe would have been a daily lifestyle/local travel vlogger (not quite sure what it is), Mochijun tweeted that they made each other’s profile pictures for their respective channels. (Noe drew the cat scribble for Vani, and Vani took a picture of Murr for Noe.)

Source: https://twitter.com/jun_mdesu/status/1446713546251726850

There are subscribers comments discussing whether if they both live with each other as a viewer recognizes Vani’s ‘distinctive’ voice in one of Noe’s videos.

Source: https://sorenlen.tumblr.com/post/664546132268089344/mochijun-confirmed-that-vanitas-and-noe-did-each

(This is a rumour as I remember reading the Twitter comments but not from the direct translation.) Dante is acquainted with V, and sometimes acts as their video editor even though he has a channel with Riche and Johann too. (KEYWORD: ‘their’, so it’s not just Vani, but Noe and possibly the both of them together)

When your roommate’s pet actually likes you (Murr’s interaction with Vanitas)

Since it’s hinted that they could be roommates and that they’ve used the same animal for their profile pic, gotta bring Vani roommate’s cat (Murr) into the picture that he’s essentially their spoiled kid. 

In Memoire 51.5 (Lost Children), in Noe’s segment, you can see Murr cozy up to Vanitas when Amelia informs him and Dante about his little tour around Paris. 

Murr’s interactions around other characters are decent but Murr seeks out to chill on Vani’s lap which he let’s Murr do. It’s not much of an interaction but it’s very heartwarming to see another species take a liking to Vani when he personally thinks himself as unlovable.

Episode 7/Memoire 12 other shipping details that aren’t as noted

TARTE TATIN. And desserts!

Go read @temporoom​ ‘s analysis on tarte tatin here. It’s very insightful on their interactive dynamic, but to simplify, what non-interested person would give their dessert (even if you don’t like it) to someone else after knowing them for 2 days when you could have left it untouched on the table then have an intimate talk about what love is several hours later???

https://temporoom.tumblr.com/post/660166976290816000/okay-no-i-said-i-would-wait-to-sort-out-my

Sora To Utsuro’s through Noe’s perspective (follow up on the subtle non-platonic elements of the OP and ED songs) 

The scene where Vanitas takes off his glove to treat Chloe’s malnomen causes a temporary bright illusion in the surround area. Noe watches in awe at the sight and Vanitas’ blue moon moment and sees blue and bright twinkling lights (world formula?). The rest of Chloe’s home is devastated but the mysterious white Astermite flowers bloom where the World Formula or Astermite powers have been tinkered. This is actually Vanitas himself.

This reminds me of a the line in ‘Sora to Utsuro’ where the lyrics are the following: 

‘I love this world and the light only you give me Makes the world I see through these fractured eyes Look gleaming and bright.’

And while the light is technically cause of treating Chloe, Vanitas ended up agree to save her and Jean-Jaquces cause Noe didn’t want to give up. Please re-read that chapter and look at how Vanitas emotionally squirms at how Noe’s idealism impacts him.

Also the start of Memoire 53 shows how Noe remember’s his first encounter with Vanitas in the church. Vanitas is literally basking in the light from the stained glass and has a soft expression while the audience saw an unhinged vampire doctor in Chapter 1. (Noe has massive rose-coloured glasses here.)

I’m also convinced that the delay of September’s chapter is not a coincidence and that Mochijun is definitely planning something for Memoire 55. Anyways that is all.

[scrawnydutchman]

“There’s Always More Show”; A Bojack Horseman Essay

It’s about time I talked about one of the finest ongoing shows in animation right now. I. LOVE. Bojack Horseman. I must have binged the whole series 5 times at this point, and it’s rare for even my absolute favorite shows to get me to do that. The dialogue is so poignant I have entire exchanges between characters burned into my memory. The jokes and societal commentary are so on point that many lines have gotten me to burst out laughing among company.The characters themselves are so complex, so filled with depth, that they are all well deserving of their own analysis. The writing is SO tight and the storytelling so consistently engaging that I hang onto every little detail. I swear they foreshadow events from as late as season 4 and 5 as early as season 1. Even it’s animation, while admittedly pretty primitive character rigging with a handful of noticeable errors, takes some amazing creative liberty at times, particularly with subjectivity in the drug trips. While the art design has taken a few people off guard for it’s blinding colors and it’s premise has discouraged a less open minded audience with it’s animal-human hybrids living among people, those who stick with the show will get a sophisticated while simultaneously wacky romp that is both the silliest and most real show you can watch right now. So with a show this dense that has characters this deep, there are many themes it tackles such as the perpetual meaninglessness of existence or the pursuit to being a good person, but there’s a more central theme Bojack keeps bringing up which I’d like to talk about.

Oh and, uh, Spoilers incoming for Bojack Horseman . .  . obviously. Get Netflix and watch all of this show right now before reading. seriously. But for those reading who don’t care about spoilers but are interested in what makes Bojack so great and may like to watch it themselves, here’s a brief summary:

Bojack Horseman (played by Will Arnett) Is a horse-man hybrid living out the so called “glamorous” life style in Hollywood, Los Angeles (later called “Hollywoo” in the series for reasons I won’t spoil here). Out of work, out of shape and out of touch, Bojack wastes away his days in sorrow as a past-his-prime actor who goes day to day being disrespected. Back in the 90s he was the star of a very famous “full house”-esque sitcom called “Horsin’ Around” and he longs for the days where he was in the prime of his life, but nowadays he mostly just sits around the house watching old reruns of his show. He constantly struggles with depression, dependancy on narcotics . . . and the ongoing guilt he feels for every shitty thing he’s done in life . . . and as viewers will no doubt find out . . . Bojack has a LOT of baggage. He finds new friends in life like his responsible ghost writer of his memoir Diane Nguyen (played by Alison Brie), his easygoing  freeloader and best friend Todd Chavez (played by Aaron Paul), his happy go lucky Labrador rival Mr. Peanutbutter (played by Paul F. Tompkins) and his workaholic pink cat agent Princess Carolyn (played by Amy Seradis). The show centres around his ongoing relationships with these people as well as their own journeys of self discovery . . . and the occasional wacky schemes. Through his surrounding positive influences can Bojack learn to grow past his personal demons? Or will his shitty tendencies and depressing outlook permanently spoil the lives of the people closest to him like he so often fears?

Spoilers begin NOW

In what is perhaps my favorite episode of the show, episode 6 of Season 5 titled “Free Churro”, Bojack gives an improvised eulogy for his recently deceased mother . . . and that’s it. The episode is just a full 20 minutes of Bojack talking about his dead mom . . . and struggling to find anything positive to say about her. His mom was nothing but cold, hard and abusive to Bojack his entire life and Bojack laments about how he never received a single loving gesture from his mother for as long as he’s known her . . and now that she’s dead that chance is permanently gone. In his ramblings, he mentions an episode of Horsin’ Around in which the writers juice the idea of main cast character Olivia leaving the show for good, only for her to be written back into the status quo, because as Bojack puts it 

“Of course that’s what happened, because what are you gonna do? Just not have Olivia on the show? You can’t have happy endings in sitcoms -- not really -- because if everyone’s happy, the show would be over, and above all else the show has to keep going. There’s always more show. (And) You can call Horsin’ Around dumb, or bad, or unrealistic, but there’s nothing more realistic than that. You never get a happy ending, because there’s always more show.”

That right there sums up the entire ongoing struggle of every character in this show. In many ways, Bojack Horseman the Netflix series is like a typical sitcom turned upside down. You have an ongoing setup of colourful, over the top characters doing outrageous things for our amusement, and in a lot of ways they’re actually terrible people but they’re just SO endearing that we have to keep tuning into their antics. Much like how an average Friends episode is about every titular friend trying haphazardly to cover up a lie for 20 minutes when their problems would so easily be over if they just had the maturity to be honest about how they’re feeling, characters like Bojack, Todd and Mr. Peanutbutter are always up to something silly whether it’s poorly covering up a lie or coming up with elaborate sabotages for selfish ends. But there’s one core difference. In Friends, everybody forgives each other in the end. In the gritty and merciless world of Bojack Horseman . . . every wrongdoing has long term consequences, some of which can never be forgiven. 

Bojack’s antics especially cause permanent stains on his relationships. When he sabotaged Todd’s rock opera by getting him readdicted to a video game so he wouldn’t leave, he permanently makes a wound in his and Todd’s relationship. He only makes it worse when he has sex with Emily, Todd’s best friend and kinda-sorta girlfriend. Todd had faith in Bojack early on in the show, but he makes it apparent later on that the less he has to do with Bojack the better off he is. Todd’s an easygoing friend that can forgive easily, but Bojack really tests his patience. As he said once he found out Bojack had sex with Emily

“You can’t keep doing shitty things and then feel bad about yourself like that makes it okay. You need to be better.”

In the luxurious  yet phony and superficial world of Hollywoo, everyone has an outlook on life as if it’s a sitcom. The center of mass produced film and television has everyone believing in achieving against the odds, amending their wrongs in the end and getting satisfying conclusions as if the credits of their very own movie will roll any second. But real life keeps on hitting these characters like a truck, as if to say “there is no happy ending , you aren’t the main character and the harm you’ve caused is permanent. Get used to it.” Bojack gets his hard hitting reality more prominently than anyone. He keeps looking for backdoor solutions to his pain like getting back with Charlotte, starting a new Horsin’ Around spinoff, finding meaning far away from L.A. or straight up finding solace in drugs, but every solution to his search for meaning ends in him hurting somebody else even more. He has to separate the idea from his head that shitty things like nearly sleeping with your old friends daughter is just a wacky sitcom hijinks situation, and that the guilt he feels is just an ongoing conflict he feels every day. He even tries at one point to get forgiveness from his old show writer Herb Kezzaz after betraying him, only to be greeted with Herb saying 

“No. I’m not going to give you closure. You don’t get that. You have to live with the shitty thing that you did for the rest of your life.”

Sometimes Bojack will go to more silly extents for his so desired “happy ending”, like humming his own credits as he embraces Sarah Lynn when she comes out of rehab.

But as screwed up as Bojack is, he’s not the only one who’s mind is warped by the empty promise of a “happy ending”. Diane Nguyen, for as much as she comes off as the moral compass of the show who isn’t afraid to call anyone out for their bullshit, is what I like to call “Bojack lite”. While she’d be grossly offended by the accusation that she’s anything like Bojack, she shares a lot of his toxic traits. Sure, she’s not actively life ruining for anyone, but she has a tendency to harshly criticize people as a means to deflect any criticism towards herself and she often manages to find the negative connotation to even the best of situations. Also, she struggles with getting drunk a lot too, which is often enabled by Bojack. Diane makes a lot of rash decisions in her life hoping she’ll find some sort of “happy ending”. She married Mr. Peanutbutter longing for a simpler, more laid back life for she just settles down with her loving husband. However, unwilling to keep up with Mr. Peanutbutters love for spontaneity and grand gestures, she ends up divorcing him, deciding instead to try and find solace in being her own woman who doesn’t need a mans affection to be happy . .  .but that leaves her empty too. Every time she gets what she asked for, she ends up having to fight all the challenges that go with it, and those challenges end up obscuring her vision of that made her want that thing in the first place. She thinks it’s something wrong with her, like she just can’t ever be satisfied.

“Why can’t I be happy? Am I busted?!”

If we’re comparing each Bojack Horseman character to standard sitcom fare, Mr. Peanutbutter likely comes the closest to fitting the mold of what we expect from a likable television comedy protagonist. Everyone loves him. He’s endearing, he’s funny, he’s sweet. He makes silly mistakes but has a good heart, and even if he does touch some raw nerves along the way he can usually win his audience back with some sort of grand gesture. If Diane is Bojack Lite, then Mr. Peanutbutter is the yin to Bojack’s yang. They live virtually the same lives to a point where Mr. Peanutbutter even got famous off of what is blatantly a knock off of Horsin’ Around, The key difference though is that while Bojack is incurably pessimistic, Mr. Peanutbutter is obnoxiously optimistic, and why wouldn’t he be? He sees the good in everything and everyone and manages to get his way shearly through people loving him. He never has to learn anything because nobody ever challenges him. But that precisely is the rub. Mr. Peanutbutter is a cautionary tale about what would happen if you DID get that life full of happy endings and comfortable conclusions. Much like how many a sitcom protagonist never learns to tell the truth or to take responsibility for their own health, Mr. Peanutbutter never grows past his mistakes. It’s why he always does grand gestures for Diane despite her repeating several times that she doesn’t like them. It’s why he keeps dating women much younger than himself. It’s why he keeps getting divorced. He never takes any kind of long term lesson from what happens to him and never evolves as a person. Nowhere is this more prominent than in Season 5. Whenever Mr. Peanut butter does something wrong, he’s usually blind to the responsibility he must take to it. He either dismisses it as somebody else being mean or unreasonable or he makes an empty promise to not do it again. But for the first time ever, he partakes in betraying somebody he cares about. After divorcing Diane and getting with Pickles the Pug waitress . . . he has sex with Diane again behind Pickles’ back. This time there’s nobody to blame but himself . . and he doesn’t know how to deal with the fact that he did an unforgivably shitty thing. In fact, he’s the least equipped character to do so in the whole show. He even pleads for Diane to break the news to Pickles and tries to force a silver lining by getting back with Diane as a result of it. In the season finale, when Mr. Peanutbutter has to tell the awful truth and knowingly hurt somebody close to him . . .much like a sitcom character, he instead pulls a happy ending out of his ass and decides to propose to Pickles instead. He actively decides not to do the tough, but right decision, and thus does not evolve. This is especially interesting in the finale because, for the first time ever, Bojack is a step ahead of Mr. Peanutbutter when it comes to committing to making things right. After Bojack nearly strangles Gina to death on his drug high, he turns himself into rehab with the help of Diane and starts taking real steps to self improvement. In contrast, Mr. Peanut butter . . . is just up to his same old tricks. 

You wanna talk about reaching that sitcom happy ending? It’s all this workaholic cat ever thinks about. Princess Carolyn leads life with the philosophy that with enough grit and go-getter attitude you can make anything happen for yourself . . . and to an extent that actually serves her pretty well. She gets out of her hick town to pursue her dreams as an agent and whenever the other characters are knee deep in their own mess she’s always the one with the solution to get them out. She compulsively helps people while refusing to take help for herself because . . well, she wants a happy ending . . .but she wants to be the one responsible for it. She had an opportunity as a kid to have everything in her life decided for her but once she had her miscarriage and that dream fell apart, she instead decided to pursue a career in the big city. She made tons of sacrifices to get where she is including leaving her own mother, and she’s also afraid of falling into the same trap of dependency she almost fell into as a kid again. That’s why she rejects Ralph Stilton’s offer to help her with her adopted baby, even though he’s irrefutably the best boyfriend she ever had. Time and time again Princess Carolyn will willingly be pushed right up to the edge before she accepts any kind of help, because she thinks doing so is a sign of weakness. She keeps herself motivated with fantasies about that wonderful happy ending, whether that means living in a cottage in a beautiful painting or succeeding enough that some future ancestor can give her class a family heritage report all about what a great ass kickin’ gal she is. While Princess Carolyn is definitely the most well adjusted and most durable to the constant hustle and beating down of reality, she’s got her own toxic tendencies as a result of thinking she’s a main character. She thinks she’s got to do everything on her own . . . . and if she doesn’t get past that insecurity soon, it may swallow her whole.

At long last we come to mr. Todd Chavez, the endearing little brother of Bojack Horseman’s family of main characters. Upon first glance, Todd seems the least prepared for life’s harsh reality out of all our leads. He’s a 20-something year old with no real job, no real responsibilities and no real goals in life. He’s very upfront and honest about how he spends his time, be it spending all day watching Youtube videos . . . or building a knockoff Disneyland. And yet, when we analyze him with the thesis that these “sitcom characters” are all trying to get by in a cruel and merciless world, we suddenly realize that ironically . . . Todd grows the most naturally out of everyone. Bojack lets Todd down time and time again and rather than accepting status quo as God like many a sitcom character might do, he takes it upon himself to distance his relationship with Bojack. He initially has faith in Bojack to be better, but doesn’t beat around the bush when he’s lost his faith in him. When he realizes that he was nothing in common with Yolanda aside from being asexual, he breaks up with her before prolonging the painful inevitable. The cast of Bojack Horseman go through their share of changes in what they want and who they want to be, but Todd is always the one who knows what he needs and makes an honest effort to be better. He’s surprisingly wise for an adult manchild flunky. But he gets up to wacky sitcomish schemes too, about as much as Mr. Peanutbutter (who is often his partner in crime with these things) . . . yet even then through his ernestness and cuttthroat honesty he manages to overcome better than the other characters.

Conclusion:

*decided to include this gif because i love the animation in it*

Hollywoo is a world of sitcom characters pulled out of the TV and trying to get by in everyday life under the harsh, uncompromising grip of reality. In a culture so entrenched in it’s ideals of maintaining superficial likability and celebrating yourself no matter what you do or who you hurt, each character’s mind is warped into buying the illusion that for how screwed up they are there’s a happy ending waiting at the end of the horizon for them. They all deal with it with different levels of success. Some take change in life with stride like Todd. Some think they found their happy ending but only remain empty like Diane. Some get everything they ask for and thus never evolve and never better themselves like Mr. PeanutButter. Some cling on for deal life as they get everything thrown at them, believing that they’ll be rewarded in the end, like Princess Carolyn. And then . . . some are a depressing cocktail of all of those things. They have opportunity land at their feet and think they’ve finally done the thing that will preserve them, only to find themselves empty. They work through the pain in their life hoping that at any point they’ll get some grand gesture or reward that makes everything they endured worth it, only for that chance to become officially non existent. But occasionally . . . very occasionally . . . they do something wonderful and heartfelt and sincere that maintains a glimmer of hope for their capacity to be better. That is Bojack Horseman. Bojack hurts the people closest to him much like his parents did. He remains bitter and sad and petty and self important . . . but he IS better than his folks. He’s like his late mom . . . only for him the grand gesture really does come.

But as Bojack says

“The grand gesture isn’t enough. You have to be consistent. You have to be dependably good. You can’t just screw everything up and then take a boat out on the ocean to save your best friend or solve a mystery and fly to Cansas. You need to do it everyday, which is so . . . hard.”

The truth is, all of these characters, even Bojack, have the potential to be better as long as they deconstruct their worldview shaped by watching television. They have to rid themselves of the illusion. The illusion that there’s some great happy ending that’s going to make all the pain worth it. The only ending in life . . . is death. Until then, there’s always more show. Time’s arrow neither stands still nor reverses; it always marches forward. There will be days these characters make mistakes and days they do great things . . how much they do of either is up to them. Sometimes they’ll do things that they will never get closure for . . things that can’t be forgiven  . . . but that doesn’t ruin their capacity to do right the next day.  Bojack’s right . . .it IS hard to do better every single day. But as the jogger near Bojack’s house says “It gets easier”.

And my essay concludes . . . .riiiiiiight after this anecdote.

I think what makes Bojack Horseman so special is that it holds up a mirror to how a screen infested world has permanently warped our sense of self worth and our understanding of how life really works. In a way, we’re all “sitcom characters” roaming around real life. We think of ourselves as the main characters of our stories, that there’s some sort of satisfying conclusion waiting for us. That we can win whoever we want back with a grand gesture and that we never have to evolve, we just have to be “good enough” . . .and that’s all . . SO wrong. That mentality makes us toxic. It makes us self important and hypocritical and petty, while also leaving us empty. It makes us incomplete. We all have to learn that there’s no ending until we die, that we have to do good every day . . . and that we aren’t the main character.  Everyone is important. Maybe we’ve been watching too many sitcoms and have had these fallacies drilled into our heads . . . and maybe Bojack Horseman is like a rehab for those bad tendencies. As Princess Carolyn points out in the finale of Season 4

“I got into this business because I love stories. They comfort us. They inspire us. They create a context for how we view the world. But also you have to be careful because if you spend a lot of time with stories you start to believe that life is just . . . stories. And it’s not. Life is life . . . and . . .that’s so sad, because . . .there’s so little time and . . . what are we doing with it?”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#2yrsago I Can't Breathe: Matt Taibbi's scorching book on the murder of Eric Garner and the system that let the killers get away with it

Matt Taibbi is one of the best political writers working in the USA today, someone who can use the small, novelistic details of individuals' lives illuminate the vast, systemic problems that poison our lives and shame our honor; his 2014 book The Divide conducts a wide-ranging inquiry into the impunity of corporate criminals and the kafkaesque injustices visited on the poor people they victimize; in I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street, Taibbi narrows his focus to the police murder of Eric Garner, a Staten Island fixture and father, and the system that put murderers in uniform in his path.

Taibbi opens the book with a masterful, novelistic account of the racial divide in Staten Island, the brutal impunity of the NYPD, the lives of the people they stalk, humiliate, beat, and frame. He introduces us to Tomkins Park, the neighborhood where Eric Garner was a fixture, selling untaxed cigarettes he brought in from out of state, and to Garner himself, a complicated, funny, bright, unlucky, likable man whose bad luck and bad choices had put him on that corner, selling smokes to keep his family fed, clothed and sheltered.

As Taibbi unravels the story of Garner, the circumstances that led to him being choked to death by a group of police officers who went on to terrorize Garner's friend for recording a video of the murder and releasing it, who faced no meaningful penalties -- and who, we learn, had long rapsheets for brutal, sadistic policing, he weaves the long history and diverse social and political circumstances that led to that moment.

Taibbi's book is part history lesson, part political science, part biography (of several people, not all of them very nice), part on-the-scene reporting, part lawsplainer. He ranges over statistical models for predictive policing, the realpolitik of New York, where Democrats and Republicans alike have been critical to turning the city into a laboratory for testing and refining racist policing, housing, incarceration, and harassment policies.

Taibbi is a synthesist, able to dig into the personal history of the fathers of "broken windows policing," of rival black activist groups, of Garner and his family, tell their stories, show where they fit in a much larger, systemic analysis of how the nuts-and-bolts of institutional racism and police impunity.

In building understanding, Taibbi is always explaining, but never excusing. Just because Taibbi explains how the quota systems and official stonewalling creates a hospitable climate for sadistic, murdering rapists -- just because he shows that ultimately, these bad cops are taking the rap for an even worse system -- it doesn't follow that he's asking us to shed a tear for the poor cops who choked Eric Garner to death on a city street.

Taibbi's analysis also ranges over the explosion of anti-police-violence demonstrations that occurred in the wake of the Garner killing, after the deaths of Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, and so many other black men and women who were murdered by police officers who nearly never, ever paid any consequences for it. He places the murder of Eric Garner in the context of the election of an openly white supremacist president, and the rage and outrage that followed that election.

All this makes for a book that's as riveting as any novel, and as educational as any manifesto. Like The Divide, it is essential reading that captures a moment that the whole nation is wrestling with, and whose consequences could not be more important to us all.

One note on Taibbi himself: a few months ago, he was embroiled in a scandal of his own when passages from  The eXile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia, a book he co-authored in 2000, were reprinted. The book is a memoir of Taibbi's tenure as a gonzo editor in post-Soviet Russia, co-written with his co-editor, Mark Ames, and it is a gross, tasteless -- and, it turns out, largely fictional -- tale.

The passages that made headlines were ones in which Taibbi and Ames detail subjecting female subordinates to cruel and degrading sexual harassment. When they broke, Taibbi explained that these passages had been written by Ames and were fictional. This struck many people as lame and not-very-credible excuses, but it appears they were true -- journalists who tracked down the co-workers in the book confirmed with them that none of the lurid, awful activities took place.

Which doesn't let Taibbi off the hook: his transgression isn't subjecting women to sexual violence and harassment: it's thinking that making up "gonzo" stories about this kind of thing was funny (rather than offensive and harmful in their own right), and co-signing his name to a published volume of these tales.

This isn't a good thing to have done, but it's also not in the same universe as committing actual sexual assaults. It definitely lowered my opinion of Taibbi, but I feel like making stupid, shitty "jokes" is ultimately a forgivable sin, and the kind of thing that Taibbi has made substantial amends for.

I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street [Matt Taibbi/Random House]

https://boingboing.net/2017/12/15/eric-garner-rip.html

[comicmemoirs-blog]

Analysis of Likewise: The high-school comic chronicles of Ariel Schrag

Voice and Tone:

Voice:

The voice in Likewise, overall was very sociable and approachable to the audience. Additionally, the book is not written in a strict or formal manner because it contains many slang vocabulary.

Tone:

The overall tone setting of the book was funny, relaxed/laid-back, and sexual related. 

Significance of title:

Historical, social and cultural context (3 aspects):

Historical:

· Comic books have usually involved superheroes, and have not been lengthy as comic books as were that were constructed by Ariel Schrag

Social:

· The social aspect of Likewise is the overall student environment. This consisted of the High school atmosphere and interactions between students

Cultural:

· Culturally, the main context that is highlighted is the underlying theme of the LGBT community

How everyone in the group relates to the memoir (theme, characters, plot):

Carlo Dormiendo

I found myself surprised at how much I related to Schrag’s main character in the story, but the way it is written is definitely not for everybody. I think the struggles that she encounters are those that many can identify with. Like a lot of people, high school was a turbulent time for myself as this was a time of great change and personal growth. 

In the book, the final year of high school is very stressful for Ariel as she tries to discover who she is as a person and how she fits in with society as she reaches adulthood. I found Schrag’s struggles with her sexuality, the way others see her, romantic relationships, and getting into post-secondary education all extremely poignant and I empathized with her when she had to deal with these very human issues that teenagers encounter. That said, the manner in which she felt the story had to be told in order to showcase these themes didn’t always land for me, and at times it felt like the honesty and explicitness of her accounts distracted from the point that I thought was trying to be made. There is a sense of self-indulgence in the writing that interferes with the story and kept me from having a greater grasp on the plot and story as it went along.

Muhammad Butt:

In all honesty, I found it hard to relate to Likewise, since the underlying theme was LGBT. I haven’t had any friends in this community. However, over the recent years’ society has accepted the LGBT community and I am learning more about the subject perpetually. I have encountered people in the community and have accepted them for who they are. Additionally, another theme in the story is the matter of acceptance. In high school, especially, there were many groups which were related to a specific focus. If you were an outlier as a person, and were different, it was hard to fit in with other students. As well, to make friends was another struggle. I can relate to this because when I first came to Canada, it was difficult to fit in with others since I saw myself as very different individual. Likewise, others perception of me was same. 

About the Author:

Works and awards: 

Ariel Schrag is the author to graphic memoirs such as Likewise (2009), Potential (2000), Definition (1997), Part of it (2018), and Awkward (2008). While also being the author of the book Adam (2014); which was later made into a film in 2019. 

Ariel Schrag has also been a writer for series: How to make it in America (HBO series), Vinyl (HBO series), and The L Word (Showtime series). 

Additionally, Schrag has been involved in articles, and comics; working for The New York Times Book Review, USA Today, New York Magazine, and Cosmopolitan. 

Two of her works were nominated for awards. Potential was nominated an Eisner Award, and Likewise (last of her High school series) was nominated for a lambda literary Award.

(Schrag, para.1)

Career low and Highpoints: 

Lows:

Ariel Schrag has received negative criticism and remarks for some of her memoirs since she was too explicit and thorough in her drawings related to sexual interactions. Her work was seen to be controversial. Due to this, some of her literature was considered unsuitable for teens; which resulted in the removable of her books from high school libraries(Berlatsky, sec.6)

Highs:

Ariel Schrag's high points in career include during her time of : The High school Chronicles, “Likewise” was the final book in the series, her first ever publication in 2014, when she first starting publishing comics at a young age, and when she entered the TV and film industry.(Berlatsky, para.2)

Interviews: audio and video (link to these): 

Inscribed Interview: https://therumpus.net/2014/09/the-rumpus-interview-with-ariel-schrag/

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kD7jPnj5T-4

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvR2QJ6L7SU&feature=youtu.be

Inscribed Interview : http://www.tcj.com/115363-2/

Reception and Reviews of Work:

Generally, the population has accepted most literature produced by Ariel Schrag; such as Potential and Definition.  Though, a high count of population didn’t like Likewise (the last of the high school series) (Librarything, sec.1). It was also said to be dull, and self-centered. And also was seen to be inappropriate, but also mentioned that the book would have been much better if it wasn’t as long. (goodreads, sec.2). Also, the graphics were seen to be more intriguing in the other series. Another work which received a lot of criticism was the movie adaptation of the book Adam.

Annotated Bibliography:

Berlatsky, Noah. “It’s Still Just Me, Good Ol’’ Ariel": A Conversation With Ariel Schrag |.” 2019, http://www.tcj.com/115363-2/.

The following reference is from “The Comics Journal” home page. The webpage is a written interview between Noah Bertlatsky and Ariel Schrag; highlighting her life and career from beginning to the end. The reliability of the source is high

Goodreads. Likewise: The High School Comic Chronicles of Ariel Schrag by Ariel Schrag. 2019, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2241527.Likewise.

This reference webpage provides detailed reviews good, and bad on Ariel Schrag’s work Likewise: The high school comic chronicles of Ariel Schrag.

Librarything. Reviews: Likewise: The High School Comic Chronicles of Ariel Schrag by Ariel Schrag | LibraryThing. 2017, http://www.librarything.com/work/7584348/reviews.

This reference webpage provides various reviews and criticism of Ariel Schrag’s work: Likewise: The high school comic chronicles of Ariel Schrag.

Schrag, Ariel. About - Ariel Schrag. 2019, http://www.arielschrag.com/about.

The following reference is from Ariel Schrag’s home page. The specific webpage is the “About” section of Ariel schrag’s website. This section gives a concise summary of Ariel  Schrag’s career and life. The reliability of the source is high

[geezeralert]

And in the end . . .

Some 45s from my collection, including the first three from the Beatles.

(Third of three parts)

Now this really IS for Beatles fans only.

Non-fans reading this, even if they managed to pay attention to the first two installments describing my little aural/intellectual immersion into the group’s musical output, will likely find my third discourse hard to take.

For here I will discuss what to outsiders would seem silly -- what it all means, or how does studying each of the tunes recorded by the Beatles make a person any different or change his or her place in the hierarchy of fandom.

For starters, we must clearly acknowledge (as we did at the start) this type of project is all about fun, like a hobby. And any written analysis likewise is done in the spirit of being an entertaining diversion from real life, meaningless in the overall scheme of things.

If you take pop group fandom — or any celebrity fandom — to a level more serious than that, then you are in a place beyond my grasp.

My effort was born of a curiosity about this legendary musical group that was important in my youth. In that regard, the project was an absolute success.

I satisfied my curiosity about Beatles songs big and small, loved and hated, popular and obscure. While I have not committed to memory many of the details, I know where to find answers to just about any questions I might have.

Beatles’ music came at me fast and furious in the 1960s. I rarely stopped to understand its origins, musicianship, meaning or other minutia beyond what was in album liner notes or news media coverage. It was just enjoyable and interesting.

The unique individuals involved also were worth understanding and following, for all their achievements and personal tales.

Now I’ve seen their production up close and personal. Good for me. Fascinating stuff. Totally worth the effort.

Do I want more? Yes, a little.

There are books that still sound interesting, like those I noted in part one (the Lewishon study, the Best or Epstein memoirs, books by Philip Norman and Barry Miles). The much-anticipated “Let It Be” movie reissue also will be fun to watch, after seeing a very rough video of a video of it that I bought off E-Bay (at least it gave me a general idea of what it looked like).

After taking a break from all-things-Beatles, I’ll tackle that stuff from time to time. (To stay sane and clear-headed, I did seek out lots of non-Beatles reading material throughout my project. Lately, I’ve discovered the crime novels of Elmore Leonard, whose works were the basis for some of my favorite movies.)

But I’m pretty sure I will never reach HUGE fan status for the Beatles (or any other celebrity, for that matter).

Those people, of which there are perhaps millions, do know all the details of the Beatles songs without looking them up in a book or the internet or Wikipedia. They own all of them in all of their forms. They also own all the music produced by the individual Beatles both before they formed and after their breakup (I pretty much stopped my purchases a few years into their solo careers, although I picked up John Lennon’s final one and the complete Traveling Willburys collection with George Harrison.)

They would spend the incredible amounts that are being charged for such major works as “Places I Remember. My Time with the Beatles,” by photographer Henry Grossman (going for $2,609); the “RTBBook. Recording the Beatles,” described on Amazon as: “A detailed look at every piece of studio gear used, full explanations of effects and recording processes, and an inside look at how specific songs were recorded,” by Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew, going for $500 (originally $100); and “Kaleidoscope Eyes. A Day in the Life of Sgt. Pepper,” another compilation of Grossman photos going for $688.

(I also once saw a George Martin box set of materials going for over $2,000 but I can’t find it now.)

These super fans have been to Beatles concerts, either when they were together 50 years ago or as individuals in the years since.  I have not, nor do I want to, really.

As I was in the midst of my project, tickets went on sale for Paul McCartney’s concert this July at Dodger Stadium in LA. OK, I said to myself, that could be interesting. He is a legend, after all. And he travels with a tremendous band, I’ve read, even if his own 76-year-old chops have long since gone weak and raspy.

I set myself a limit of $100 a ticket for myself, my wife and my brother. If we could get close enough to really feel the music and see the star performer, that would be worth the price.

Within hours of the ticket pre-sale opportunity, the best seats in the house (ground level in front of the stage) were sold, some for a few thousand dollars, all for amounts well beyond my budget.

The best I could get for $100 was seats up in the stands by the baseball stadium’s press box. I may as well as sit at home and watch the concert on a laptop with headphones. Not much of an experience.

Those people who immediately ponied up the big bucks for such a geezer Beatle performance are the HUGE fans. They have probably been to more than one such concert and will keep going to them.

They would probably also spend serious dough to see Ringo Starr’s all-star band perform, something I would not consider (his songs and solo hits are not in my top 300 favorite Beatles songs, as a group or individuals).  

The closest I would have come to paying a major sum to see a former Beatles was if I had had a chance to see The Traveling Willburys, with Harrison, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan and Jeff Lynne. That was a super group with an outstanding sound.

Huge Beatles fans also travel to London to see the places that are part of the group’s lore, likely have memorabilia like guitars or sticks, have T-shirts or other clothing with Beatles pictures or logos, know every detail of their personal lives and go weak at the sound of their music.

Many probably have rooms decorated with Beatles stuff. They go to downtown LA for Starr’s annual peace and love declaration. They follow news about them every day on their website.

To me, that level of interest borders on obsessive. However, I cannot criticize such people without being somewhat of a hypocrite. I’ve gone to the edge of that pond, after all. I just won’t jump in, and a lot of what’s holding me back is simply the cost (of books, tickets, memorabilia, plane fare, etc.) not philosophy.

I wish nothing for the best for those who do find the time and money to devote to the subjects of their passion, stopping short of stalking or otherwise intruding in the subjects’ lives.

For now, I am happy being a Really Big Beatles Fan with an advanced degree in discography.

[pilferingapples]

Hello! You are one of my favourite Les Mis bloggers. Thanks for all the amazing posts! Especially the ones on Enjolras. Can I please ask you for recommendations of non-fiction books or documentaries that will help understand the social/political context of Les Mis better? Also any books on the French revolution? Have you read Citizens by Simon Schama or A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel? Would love to know your thoughts on them. Sorry for the multiple questions! And thank you!

Aww, thank you! Some books I’ve really enjoyed and think have a lot of concentrated Les Mis context--all English-language, or easily available translated, unless otherwise noted!:

Victor Hugo, by Graham Robb- obviously relevant to Hugo’s life and attitudes, which are written into the book a lot!  But also, Hugo was involved in a lot of notable events through his life, making a good Hugo Bio a pretty good contextual source for Les Mis on a lot of fronts. 

Paris Between Empires, by Philip Mansel -- it’s written in pretty accessible language, and covers Paris *exactly* the years Hugo is writing about, plus a good few more on either side for people wanting to write Fantine Prequel Fic or Post-Barricade stories.   Info on the Siege of Paris (Expelling Napoleon version), the rapidfire changes of government, etc are all welcome-- but there’s also a lot of info on regular lives going on in streets and salons, and Names to Watch. Very handy! 

My Memoirs, Alexandre Dumas -- a close friend of Hugo for their whole careers, Dumas was also involved in an amazing amount of the politics and social movements of  the day! His memoirs are fun, quick , and slightly dizzying whirl of French history from one of the best writers of the day. Highly recommended for both context and a feel for the attitudes of a man from the era!

A History of Romanticism, by Theophile Gautier- a primary source account of some of the figures and events in the Romantic movement in the 1830s. Character-wise, it’s particularly good background for Prouvaire and Bahorel, but context-wise, it’s very relevant to Hugo and the social/artistic movement that Hugo helped lead during the late 1820s-1830s--and like the Dumas memoir, also a look into the particular attitudes of someone from the time, and  someone who definitely figured into Hugo’s own social circle.

 The Flaneur and His City, by Richard D.E, Burton- it’s about half untranslated French quotes, so I only really recommend it if you know some French, but my GOSH it’s such an amazing, compact source on the street life and social makeup of Paris in the July Monarchy!  Fic Detail Central. 

all of those are more general reads-- if you’re looking for barricade-related stuff in particular, my best leads are all in my “barricade relevant’ tag. 

For the French Revolution:

 I’d recommend Mark Steel’s Vive La Revolution as a primer! It’s very much written for a popular audience, and it’s very fun. A lot of the material is available in recorded video lectures on Youtube, too!  (I recommend doing a search for them, as there are several scattered around.)

Also, for all the Revolutions from the first French Revolution to the 1848 Revolution that brought the short-lived Second Republic, I recommend the Revolutions Podcast. I don’t agree with all the analysis and opinions on that podcast--because it’s History, and if I ever Totally Agree with someone’s take on such a broad section of history the shock may kill me--, but it’s GREAT for getting the basic order of things, and has a lot of great info to help you draw your own conclusions!

(I have not read Schama or Mantel; I’ve  been strongly warned away from them, by people whose judgement of the history and of my own taste I trust. I probably *will* read Schama at some point, when I feel I’ve gotten more of a handle on the FRev, because he was a very prominent voice about it and it’s important to get a lot of different views, but I am pretty sure that’s gonna be something of a hate read, and Mantel I think I will avoid entirely.)

That’s probably a good Starter List for reading! 

[lilianrogers]

February Books

In February I read a straightforward story of a man possessed by a white tiger (Man, Tiger by Eka Kurniawan), a memoir-style novel about a young Ghanaian-American scientist’s reckoning with the trauma of her childhood (Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi), a stupendous non-fiction work that delves into Singapore’s social democratic origins (Liberalism Disavowed by Chua Beng Huat), and a biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg focused on the pop culture phenomenon she inspired (Notorious RBG by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik).

For my thoughts in video form check out my YouTube video: https://youtu.be/Nvl4nPd61jM

Man, Tiger by Eka Kurniawan

Margio loves boar hunts, the daughter of his neighbor Anwar Sadat, and the thought of killing his father, who has subjected the boy and his family to years of abuse. But it is through his father’s father that he is passed down the incarnation of a tiger, white as a swan. Though Margio is robbed of the chance to commit patricide, he carries out a murder nonetheless with the help of the tiger. 

This novel starts with the sentence: “On the evening Margio kills Anwar Sadat, Kyai Jahro was blissfully busy with his fishpond”. By the last line we are about to witness this event unfold before our eyes, though we already know its five W’s (who, what, when, where, and why). Kurniawan’s storytelling hops throughout the timeline surrounding this central event, but crisply stays within the structure of the characters and emotions that comprise this world. I liked the smattering of magical realist elements: the ground shifting to refuse Komar bin Syueb’s body, Margio’s smitten adoration the first time he meets his tiger. 

An anecdote given halfway through the book hints that this is a story about how to wield your legacy and lineage. In this story-within-a-story, Kurniawan tells us of the wealthy land-holding woman who sells her property at dirt poor prices to the local villagers to completely circumvent her ungrateful children. She then uses the proceeds to entertain her own whims: sleeping in a new wedding dress, and buying an entire bus (because she enjoyed riding the bus as a child). In a book filled with an arc of seeming inevitability, the matriarch’s story stands out as proof of human agency.  

Rating: 3.8/5

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

In this quasi-memoir, Yaa Gyasi tells the story of Gifty, a first generation Ghanian-American who grew up in the American South and is now pursuing a PhD in neuroscience at Stanford University. In fertile, compact prose, we become enveloped in Gifty’s voice, her traumas, and the shield she has erected to protect herself throughout her life.  She is grappling with the aftereffects of losing her brother to drug addiction, which sends her mother into spiralling mental illness, and reflects on the quiet inability of religious faith to provide a lifeline to herself or her mother. 

There is plenty to unpack in this book, but I’ll just pick one theme that resonated strongly with me: the cleavage that happens when you start to form your own identity as a young adult. For much of our childhoods, we exist as extensions of our parents - in both our minds and theirs. Throughout the book, Gifty considers the force of this separating, feeling both responsible for and resentful of her mother, both burdened by and indebted to the upbringing she had. 

Gifty’s self-reflection is both raw and composed, powerful and measured, and kept me hooked until the very end when the plot stumbles a bit in its pacing. I wasn’t a big fan of the flashforward ending which felt too neat. But I enjoyed the read enough to give her first book, Homegoing, a try.  

Rating: 4/5

Liberalism Disavowed: Communitarianism and State Capitalism in Singapore by Chua Beng Huat

Foreign observers (and expats living in Singapore) easily repeat a hackneyed descriptor when the topic of Singapore’s political system comes up: authoritarian. While there are components of authoritarian rule in the history of PAP’s governance, using this word obliterates the nuance and complexity of Singapore’s political-economic origins in one damning stroke. Having read Chua’s Liberalism Disavowed, I’m fully convinced that it is not a useful simplifier. 

As Chua writes, “What this “encouraged” understanding veils, intentionally or otherwise, is the social democratic origin of the PAP, which explains some of the fundamental social and economic programs which are critical to the economic and political success of the PAP government, and from which it has not wavered in more than its 50 years in power.” 

Chua explains in wonderful detail and with historical context the social democratic origin of the PAP by focusing on four “institutionalized political and economic practices” - 1) ideological anti-liberalism, 2) Singapore’s national public housing program, 3) state capitalism, and 4) multiracialism.[1] In each of the areas, there is much more than meets the eye, and lazy comparisons obscure the reality of Singapore’s history and development. 

Liberalism Disavowed easily makes it into my top books to read about Singapore for its nuanced and rigorous accounting of Singapore’s political-economic development. It’s a much needed counter to the superficial tropes that abound, and I personally learned tons from reading it. 

[1] Chua writes “Their primacy is reflected in the fact that other significant social policies and administrative practices, which are politically important in their own right, can be enfolded within the operating logic of one or more of these four institutions.”

Rating: 4.9/5 

Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik

Though I never would have called myself an RBG stan, I now know that I am one! In addition to groundbreaking legal accomplishments and a convention-busting partnership with her husband, I learned RBG crossed the aisle to have friendships with political opposites (such as Justice Scalia), and preferred to convince through incremental progress rather than swooping decisions. 

I was worried this book might be a bit too “pop” and not enough substance, but it manages to strike the right balance between relevance and import. Don’t expect too much legal analysis or independent reporting or research, but the book does delightfully package together the through line of RBG’s personal life and career. I found it enjoyable to read, and helpful to re-acquaint myself with the history of women’s rights in the US through RBG’s eyes. 

Rating: 3.5/5

[thetrumpdebacle]

When she heard the news story of the 13 siblings allegedly held captive in their California home by their parents, Susanne Reisenbichler’s said her first reaction was, “Oh no. Somebody else.”

Interested in California Captivity Case?

Add California Captivity Case as an interest to stay up to date on the latest California Captivity Case news, video, and analysis from ABC News.

Reisenbichler and her sons Govinda Angulo and Josef Reisenbichler said hearing the reports on the Turpin siblings brought back memories of what they experienced while being confined to a cramped New York City apartment until just a few years ago.

The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department said 13 siblings — ages 2 to 29 — were allegedly being held captive at their home in Perris, California, by their parents David and Louis Turpin. When discovered, several of the children were “shackled to their beds with chains and padlocks in dark and foul-smelling surroundings,” the sheriff’s office said.

Authorities were alerted to the situation when a 17-year-old girl, who apparently escaped from the home, called 911 and said her 12 brothers and sisters were still being held captive there, the sheriff’s office said.

The parents David Turpin, 57, and Louise Turpin, 49, have each been charged with 12 counts of torture, 12 counts of false imprisonment, seven counts of abuse of a dependent adult and six counts of child abuse. David Turpin was also charged with one count of a lewd act on a child under the age of 14 by force, fear or duress. They have pleaded not guilty.

“I was horrified, and beyond that, it brought just a flood of emotions and memories and thoughts of my own experience and my children’s experience,” Reisenbichler told ABC News’ “20/20.” “It really was more than shocking. It was just so many emotions at once: a lot of compassion and empathy and also understanding and knowing exactly what they went through, what those children were feeling.”

Susanne Reisenbichler says since the documentary “The Wolfpack” was released she’s been working on her memoir and writing children’s books.

“It definitely struck a lot of chords throughout the years since that story has been told from our family. I’ve done what I can to put it away, but it’s brought back a lot of memories,” Govina Angulo, now 25, told “20/20.”

For more than a decade, Reisenbichler shared an apartment with her now-estranged husband Oscar Angulo, her oldest child and only daughter Visnu and her sons Govinda, his twin Narayana (who now goes by Josef), Mukunda, Bhagavan, Krsna (who now goes by Glenn) and Jagadesh (who now goes by Eddie).

Oscar Angulo, a Hare Krishna devotee from Peru, forbade his children and wife from leaving their apartment and held the front door’s only key. Aside from the few trips outside allowed for appointments or strictly controlled visits to New York tourist destinations, the children had no contact with the outside world.

ABC News

Twin bothers Govinda Angulo and Josef Reisenbichler reflected on their life since leaving the small New York City apartment they were confined to for over a decade.

“Our father was pretty paranoid about a lot of things,” Govinda said.

On the 16th floor of a public housing development which the family of nine called home in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the children were raised in four small rooms, homeschooled by their mother. Neighbors told “20/20” they didn’t see the children.

By the time the children had reached their mid-teens, Angulo had covered the windows of the apartment with blankets, and claustrophobia began to take a hold on the brothers. It wasn’t until one day in 2010, that Mukunda, the third youngest who was 15 at the time, found the courage to step outside alone for the first time.

Though her family had more freedom and less harsh conditions than the Turpin siblings allegedly lived in, Reisenbichler said she found similarities between her family’s experiences and that of the Turpins.

“When I heard the 17-year-old, I thought, ‘Mukunda was 15 when he broke out, so it’s a very close age,’” Reisenbichler said.

Magnolia Pictures

Until five years ago, the six Angulo brothers were rarely let outside.

“I can’t, you know, speak for every family who’s gone through similar experiences. But I guess … with anybody who’s … confined you only know people from that world that you’ve been confined to,” Josef, now 25, said. “I think we knew in our gut that our situation was not right and we just didn’t fully understand it and but… because you have only each other to reach out to and to make the best you can out of it with whatever you can because a bond happens.”

After the boys, known as “the Wolfpack,” started leaving the apartment more often, they eventually gained more freedom to explore the outside world.

For years, the family didn’t have any outside friends until the brothers met director Crystal Moselle, who befriended them after she saw the boys walking down the streets of the Manhattan with their waist-long dark hair and sunglasses.

Moselle turned the family’s story into the documentary, “The Wolfpack,” which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2015. And their lives haven’t been the same since.

Reisenbichler said it’s a complex question to ask why her children didn’t leave their homes sooner.

“Most people have that thought, ‘Why didn’t you leave? Why didn’t you get out?’ And that is whether the questioner realizes it or not,” Reisenbichler said. “It’s projecting blame onto the victim or the survivor, you know, asking, ‘Why didn’t you do this?’ Because it’s a very, very complex situation and it’s not easy to understand.”

Govinda Angulo

The Angulo brothers who starred in the documentary “The Wolfpack” say they continue to adjust to life outside of their apartment.

Josef said it’s fear of the outside world fostered by his father that made it especially hard to leave.

“That’s why it’s hard to break out and why you hold back for so long and why you hold back from any kind of help that may be possible, because it’s the conditioning, whether you realize it or whether you feel in your gut that it’s wrong. It’s very hard to break that especially when you become used to it your whole life,” Josef said.

Josef said that as his family met more people and slowly got to know more of what it was outside of their apartment, he feared what would happen in the future.

“’Do we go back? Do we break away from it forever?’” Josef recalled thinking. “It’s a break in your reality and you don’t know what’s going to happen and you don’t really know especially how to feel about it. You don’t know that you feel that this is a good thing or if this could just be a road to some [worse] thing.”

Though they said their lives have since changed for the better, Govinda said the experience will always be a part of them.

“In a way, it’s shaped us for who we are… I don’t know how we would’ve turned out if it had been something with the Turpins we went through,” Govinda said.

Govinda Angulo

Govinda Angulo, left, and two of his brothers are pictured together riding the train.

Reisenbichler said she watched as her sons overcame the hurdles of learning “how the everyday little details of a normal society are carried out.”

“They had to learn directions and how to go places and what subway lines went where and how to pay for a subway card and how to use the subway card. That was a really big thing, and just things like paying for food in the grocery store or going to buy a notebook … let alone preparing for job applications,” Reisenbichler said. “If you’ve never seen it and you’ve never dealt with it, it’s overwhelming. And I really have to give my children a lot of credit in how extremely well they’ve just handled everything, and just, you know, bounced through and they’ve just embraced all of the things that they’ve had to learn and catch up on, that people who are 10 years old already know normally in our society.”

“Some of the hardest adjustments I think mostly is having personal connections with other people because you feel you don’t,” Josef said. “Your own reality and our reality was so far removed.”

“In reality, we’re still adjusting,” Govinda said.

Today, many of the brothers have moved out of the apartment, and Oscar Angulo no longer lives there.

“My husband is no longer living at the apartment, and there was a big celebration for that. And I am still little by little continuing to work on a memoir of my life and my time with my children. And I’m also in the middle of working on some children’s books,” Reisenbichler said.

Both Josef and Govinda share an apartment with a friend.

When asked if they had a message for the Turpin siblings, Reisenbichler said, “I would like to say to the family that, don’t lose faith and don’t lose hope.”

“And however hard it will be, don’t be afraid to connect, to reach to people,” Govinda said.

via The Trump Debacle

[faithfulnews]

Reading Buttigieg

Reading Buttigieg

By James T. Kloppenberg

January 28, 2020

In 1972, I cast my first ballot in a presidential election, with pride and conviction, for George McGovern. To me and to many of his enthusiastic young supporters, McGovern embodied the once-vibrant progressive farm-labor tradition of the upper Midwest. His embrace of ideas championed by Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy four years earlier, his opposition to the war in Vietnam, and his support of proposals such as a guaranteed annual income and a dramatic increase in the estate tax endeared him to many student radicals—at least those who had not abandoned mainstream politics for other alternatives. McGovern of course was buried by Richard Nixon in one of the biggest landslides in U.S. history, winning less than 38 percent of the popular vote and losing the Electoral College 520 to 17. The bumper stickers that appeared when the Watergate scandal broke—“Don’t blame me, I’m from Massachusetts”—provided comic relief at a moment when American democracy seemed to many on the left mired in muck.

Like many members of my generation, I have been unable to forget the lesson I learned in 1972. In the eleven subsequent presidential elections, I have worried that no candidate I could support with pride and conviction could be elected to national office. I was anxious that even Barack Obama, whom many of us left-leaning Democrats admired for his character and his intelligence as much as for his political skills, might have trouble balancing his commitments to deliberation and compromise with the steps required to advance the core ideals of American democracy, autonomy, and equality. The same fears plague me now.

The contest for this year’s Democratic Party presidential nomination began promisingly enough. A raft of able and experienced candidates, including Obama’s vice president Joe Biden and U.S. senators Michael Bennet, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, and Bernie Sanders, offered the prospect of a lively and unpredictable race for the nomination. Like many overeducated people toward the left end of the political spectrum, I consider Elizabeth Warren, from my own state of Massachusetts, one of the strongest candidates in my lifetime. My enthusiasm for her, predictably, makes me uneasy. Following the disaster of 2016, the Democratic Party came into this electoral cycle with a battle-tested first team and a deep bench of veterans. Surely one of them would emerge to unite the party and counter the forces that propelled the least qualified and most dishonest candidate in American history into the White House.

But it hasn’t happened. Instead the race has remained inchoate. Even the New York Times editorial board couldn’t decide: it endorsed both the more progressive Warren and the more moderate Klobuchar, an option that will not be available to any voters. Granted, American democracy is a mess. Sophisticated gerrymandering, a 24/7 news cycle in which echo chambers and confirmation bias undercut the very idea of nonpartisan fact-finding, the declining engagement of an increasingly cynical and poorly informed electorate, and the infusion of enormous amounts of invisible money into public life all endanger the lifeblood of popular government, the integrity of our electoral politics. The president’s likely acquittal in his impeachment trial, despite overwhelming evidence demonstrating his corruption and obstruction of justice, shows how low the Republican Party has sunk into the swamp of hyper-partisanship.

Of course character assassination, misdirection, and simple skullduggery are as old as the 1790s, when party politics emerged in the new nation. Yet the depth, scope, and sheer number of President Trump’s lies (currently approaching 16,000, according to the Washington Post) is without precedent in U.S. history. So is the bewildering fidelity of the president’s supporters, who seem to have become oddly immune to his deceit, self-dealing, vulgarity, and venality. All the Democratic frontrunners have scrambled to demonstrate that they can win the crucial states that Hillary Clinton lost in 2016—and to distance themselves from each other. So far, none has been able to separate herself or himself decisively from the pack. Instead, the big surprise has been the meteoric rise of a formerly unknown newcomer, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who seemed to come out of nowhere.

Except that he did not. I have known Buttigieg since he was an undergraduate at Harvard. I taught Peter, as he was known then, in two classes during his senior year, 2003–2004. He was a frequent visitor to office hours, and seeing him two or three times a week during nine months meant that we became pretty well acquainted. We stayed in touch after he graduated. Although his transcript showed that I was one of the few Harvard professors to give him anything less than an A grade, he asked me to write one of the letters of recommendation for the Rhodes scholarship that took him to Oxford. A few years after he returned from England, I met with him, and with a couple dozen of his politically active peers, to talk about my book Reading Obama at a gathering he helped organize. When Buttigieg was elected mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and he returned to Cambridge for conferences at the Kennedy School of Government, we got together to discuss everything from the details of smart sewers and street paving to the intractable, perennial challenges of urban renewal and race relations in a once-prosperous city struggling with deindustrialization.

Since Buttigieg launched his campaign for the presidency last year, I have read or reread much of what he has written, at Harvard and since. Most notable is his excellent memoir Shortest Way Home, with its lyrical evocations of the Indiana landscape, its vivid account of military life in Afghanistan, its rollicking tales of campaign stops featuring Deep Fried Turkey Testicles and peanut-butter-and-bacon sandwiches dusted with powdered sugar, and its incisive analysis of the rewards and frustrations of life as mayor of a small city. I have spoken with a number of his friends, former classmates, and people active in his campaign. I had a very good meeting with him, after one of his recent fundraising events in Boston, about the experiences that have shaped his sensibility. I wanted to discuss with him the ideas that had mattered most to him, and to find out more about the relation between his religious faith and his political convictions. This article profiles the college student I got to know at Harvard and the budding political insurgent who, like many of his friends, was troubled by the acquiescence of the Democratic Party of Bill Clinton and after in the so-called Reagan Revolution of tax cuts and deregulation. I pay less attention to Buttigieg the savvy and agile presidential candidate. Because he has made himself available to countless audiences, readers with access to YouTube can view hundreds of videos of Mayor Pete giving stump speeches or participating in debates, doing television or radio interviews, and meeting in town halls with the curious and the skeptical, with adoring fans and hate-filled hecklers. Of the people I have spoken with who knew Peter twenty years ago, few expected he would be running for president in 2020. Fewer are surprised to see him performing so well.

  In high school, Buttigieg wrote a prize-winning essay on Bernie Sanders, whom he admired for the courage of his unconventional socialist convictions.

Both of Buttigieg’s parents taught at Notre Dame, so he grew up familiar with the strengths and the quirks of the academic world. Family friends say that as a boy Buttigieg was an articulate, pleasant conversationalist, as comfortable talking with grown-ups as playing with kids his own age. He excelled academically at St. Joseph High School in South Bend, graduating as senior class president and valedictorian. Along the way he wrote a prize-winning essay on Bernie Sanders, of all people, whom he admired for the courage of his unconventional socialist convictions and his willingness, at least at that stage of his career, to work with members of both major parties. The reward for that essay was a trip to Boston’s John F. Kennedy Library, where Buttigieg was introduced to Sen. Ted Kennedy.

Having grown up in the shadow of Notre Dame’s Golden Dome, Buttigieg was hardly overawed by the red-brick buildings of Harvard Yard or intimidated by Harvard’s professors. His parents, who moved from New Mexico State to Notre Dame before he was born, made sure he was immersed in books and ideas. His father, Joe Buttigieg, an ebullient Maltese immigrant, studied Joyce and Gramsci and taught English literature. His mother, Anne Montgomery, a native of southern Indiana, taught linguistics and nurtured her son’s fascination with languages. Given his family background, he entered Harvard just about as well prepared academically as classmates who had attended glossy prep schools.

Buttigieg never lacked confidence. After Ted Sorensen spoke at Harvard’s Institute of Politics (IOP) during Buttigieg’s freshman year, Buttigieg posed a challenging question to the man who had served as JFK’s chief speechwriter: If Kennedy had decided to bomb Cuba during the missile crisis, how would Sorensen have framed the speech necessary to explain that step? The topic of war became less abstract in Buttigieg’s sophomore year, when the 9/11 attacks brought Americans together—briefly, as it turned out—and George W. Bush took the nation to war in Afghanistan. Two years later, on the pretext that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction—a pretext that, it was later revealed, the Bush administration knew to be false—the United States went to war in Iraq.

By that time Buttigieg was already so deeply immersed in politics, both at the IOP and in the Harvard College Democrats, that his mother wondered if he was as committed to studying History and Literature, his declared concentration, as he was to the IOP. After Bush invaded Iraq, Buttigieg delivered a speech at a rally in front of Harvard’s Science Center explaining why he thought Americans should oppose the war. That speech persuaded more than a few of his fellow students, including Zachary Liscow, now a professor at Yale Law School, who remembers being impressed by Buttigieg’s sincerity as well as his eloquence. Like many of his fellow Harvard College Democrats, Buttigieg was troubled by the party’s apparent willingness to go along with Republican initiatives in domestic and foreign policy. When Sen. Ted Kennedy spoke at the IOP in 2003, Buttigieg challenged him by asking whether the Democrats had essentially become Republicans-lite or still offered a distinctive alternative to tax cuts and foreign wars. Kennedy’s evasive answer, coming as it did from one of the most progressive members of the party, could only have confirmed the premise of Buttigieg’s question.

In his junior and senior year, Buttigieg became more visible at Harvard, both because of articles he wrote for the student newspaper, the Crimson, and because he emerged as one of the central figures in the IOP. Together with his friends Previn Warren, now an attorney in New York and legal counsel in Buttigieg’s campaign, and Ganesh Sitaraman, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School, formerly counsel in Warren’s Senate office, and now an adviser in Warren’s campaign, Buttigieg spearheaded a drive to increase student input into decision-making at the IOP. In his first, jointly written article for the Crimson, Buttigieg urged his fellow students to view not only community service but also political engagement as a valuable form of extracurricular activity. Buttigieg himself had worked briefly in a shelter for battered women during the summer after his freshman year. But as was happening elsewhere, a rift was opening at Harvard between students committed to such work, or to tutoring students or volunteering at homeless shelters, on the one hand, and those committed to political action on the other. In the Crimson article Buttigieg expressed alarm at how few young people were voting, working in campaigns, or participating in demonstrations. “In a nation where a lifetime of honorable work in direct service could be wiped out by a single stroke of poor policy from an elected official or legislature, the absence of our generation’s voice from the political process is a hazardous reality for anyone committed to social progress, and a red flag for democracy itself.”

That commitment brought Buttigieg to my classes in his senior year. The course he took in the fall semester, Social Thought in Modern America, was described by the Crimson as “the toughest humanities class at the College, combining soul-crushingly dense and difficult material with a will-breaking workload.” In other words, it was a class for people like Pete, Previn Warren, their friend and fellow IOP stalwart Ilan Graff, and fifty-two other smart, intellectually ambitious students keen to study the relation between ideas and politics in post–Civil War U.S. history. Because the course involved a great deal of class discussion, and student demand exceeded the number of names I could learn—and I believe teachers should know their students—I limited enrollment. Instead of choosing the class by lottery, as many professors do in such circumstances, I preferred to decide who should enroll.

To inform my judgments, I required interested students to write an essay explaining why the course was important to their studies at Harvard and, if possible, to their plans afterward. I also required interested students to meet with me, after I had read their essays, to discuss their reasons in greater detail. Because the course involved three discussions a week—twice a week for half of the ninety-minute lecture meetings, and once in the smaller discussion sections run by graduate students—I wanted to know which students were willing to stay on top of the readings, write the required three essays, and prepare for midterm and final examinations that involved identifying passages from the readings as well as writing synthetic essays.

Tempting as it is to contest the Crimson’s characterization, the course was, and has remained, demanding. The readings in 2003, which averaged 250 pages a week, included works of philosophy, social and political theory, religion, literature, and cultural criticism. Writers included the usual suspects for a course in American intellectual history: William James, John Dewey, and W.E.B. Du Bois; William Graham Sumner, Edward Bellamy, and Louis Brandeis; Chief Joseph, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Black Elk; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Jane Addams; Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, and Walter Lippmann; Reinhold Niebuhr, John Courtney Murray, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and Malcolm X; Clement Greenberg, Allen Ginsburg, and Betty Friedan; Samuel Huntington, Daniel Bell, and Irving Kristol; Judith Butler, Robert Putnam, and Kwame Anthony Appiah; and others. Students wrote essays on topics such as the impact of science on post–Civil War culture; the role of ethnic diversity and racial differences in shaping twentieth-century American politics and ideas; varieties of American feminist thought; and the relation between pragmatist philosophy and democracy. In short, the course was not intended for those who, in the words of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat (himself a survivor of the course), were looking to “skate through” Harvard.

Why did Buttigieg want to take such a course? He was busy enough that year. To the surprise of many, he had been elected to a time-consuming office, president of the IOP Student Advisory Board. The position often goes to an openly ambitious political animal, of which Harvard has its share, rather than a fresh-faced, bookish, fledgling policy wonk such as Buttigieg. In his IOP post he faced the challenge of trying to implement the plans that he and his friends Previn Warren and Ganesh Sitaraman had proposed the year before. Buttigieg had committed to writing a column, “Liberal Art,” every two weeks for the Crimson. He was in the midst of writing his senior thesis, a study of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and the enduring legacy—in Vietnam and, at least implicitly, in Iraq—of what the seventeenth-century New England Puritans had described as their “errand in the wilderness.” He was also trying to figure out where his future lay.

He had already volunteered in the unsuccessful campaigns of Al Gore in 2000 and, two years later, those of Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate Robert Reich and Indiana congressional candidate Jill Thompson. But like many of his friends, Buttigieg was now looking for something beyond conventional, and increasingly tired, Democratic Party politics. The party needed to stand for something that could inspire commitment, something other than opposition to Reaganism. In the Crimson he observed how easy it was to criticize the bumbling, inarticulate Bush, but complained that none of the Democrats vying for the 2004 nomination had offered a “clearly articulated, positive vision for America.” Party leaders needed instead to emphasize the “sense of justice and mutual responsibility” offended by Republican tax cuts, not merely vent their outrage at the Bush administration.

In the essay explaining his reasons for wanting to take Social Thought, Buttigieg wrote that he had wanted to take the course as a sophomore but had been advised to wait. He now expected the course to “anchor” his interests in both history and literature and to help provide a framework for his senior thesis. In light of his career path, the final sentences of his essay are intriguing. “The importance of understanding American social thought also extends beyond my education itself and into my future plans. I seek to work in politics, and I am increasingly aware that part of my motivation to do so is the feeling that present political practice is at odds with the best American intellectual tradition.” While that awareness had “framed my thinking and arguments,” he wrote, “I need to develop a broader and more sophisticated understanding of the American theories that shaped, and were informed by,” our nation’s history. “Knowing the intellectual context of familiar events in political history is essential,” he concluded, “if I am to stand my ground convincingly and seriously in the political present.” My notes from my first conversation with him confirm my initial response to his essay: here was a student ready to think hard about links between yesterday and today. On the campaign trail, when Buttigieg differentiates positive freedom, or the freedom to act in order to realize one’s goals, from mere negative freedom, simple freedom from interference, he knows he is channeling the ideas of John Dewey.

Meeting with Buttigieg often through the semester, I was impressed by the depth of his commitment to politics. He was particularly interested in the ways in which progressive reform movements had been driven forward by people of deep religious faith. From the Social Gospel of the 1890s and 1900s through the New Deal and the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, many of the leaders and most of the foot soldiers had been inspired by their religious ideals. A central theme of the course was the rise—and perhaps, after 9/11, the fall—of what was frequently called “the culture of irony,” the late twentieth century’s postmodern skepticism about dogmas and distrust of eternal truths. In my lectures I emphasized the ways in which the founders of the American philosophy of pragmatism a century earlier had disclosed the contingency of ideas while continuing to embrace the ideals of democracy. The challenge of the twenty-first century, the challenge facing this generation of students, was to construct from the ashes left by the culture of irony, which seemed to disintegrate with the Twin Towers, their own democratic ideals.

That was the question that engaged Buttigieg more than any other. How could Americans unite politically when American culture was becoming increasingly polarized? Conservatives condemned ideas celebrated in university humanities departments. Radicals relished the triumph of perspectivalism over outdated forms of universalism, whether grounded in religious traditions or Enlightenment rationalism. How could that chasm be bridged?

  As an undergraduate Buttigieg wanted to renew the early twentieth-century American progressives’ dual commitments to ending corruption and revitalizing popular government.

I knew Buttigieg had grown up in South Bend, and I knew his parents taught at Notre Dame. I do not remember whether we talked about Catholicism. None of the former Harvard students I have talked with in recent months remember him as being particularly religious while he was an undergraduate. His mother, although a practicing Catholic, was not particularly “churchy,” as he put it to me in our recent conversation. His father was an atheist. Although Buttigieg was raised Catholic and educated in a Catholic high school, by the time he left for college he was already questioning the church. He was still attracted to what he called the “social justice” dimension of Catholicism, the preferential option for the poor proclaimed by the Catholic bishops in 1971. That commitment had prompted him to join, and later become president of, the St. Joseph High School chapter of Amnesty International. But by the time he arrived at Harvard, the church’s unyielding adherence to theological dogma and doctrines he considered outdated had begun to make him uneasy. At Harvard he drifted away. Occasionally Buttigieg attended services at Memorial Church, if only to hear the extraordinary sermons preached by Peter Gomes, but he seems to have kept his changing religious views pretty much to himself.

Buttigieg’s interest in reestablishing the link between religion and progressive politics, however, had grown stronger as a result of serving as a research assistant on two projects, one for pollster John Della Volpe and another for David King of the Kennedy School. He learned that Midwestern independents of his generation often took their political bearings from the religious traditions in which they were raised, as he had done himself. He was troubled that the Democratic Party had relinquished religion to America’s conservative evangelicals. Not only was that a serious strategic error, but it also helped explain the party’s lack of a positive, unifying direction. Although Buttigieg no longer considered himself Catholic, he remained “curious,” to use his word, about varieties of theology and religious experience. He worried that the prospects for progressive political mobilization were dimmed by the lack of any orientation toward clear goals grounded on solid moral convictions.

Like his Harvard friends Warren and Sitaraman, as an undergraduate Buttigieg wanted to renew the early twentieth-century American progressives’ dual commitments to ending corruption and revitalizing popular government. Conjuring up a positive moral vision, a new form for the shared religious commitments that had animated earlier champions of democracy, was the challenge facing his generation. To that end, Buttigieg also enrolled in another course of mine in the spring of his senior year, Democracy in Europe and America. At the time I was working on the book that became Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought, which has sparked controversy in part because of my emphasis on the role played by post-Reformation Christian ideals in the modern history of popular government. That was one of the central themes of my lectures. The readings in that class ranged even more broadly, from Thomas More, Montaigne, and the Puritans of England and New England through Locke and Rousseau, Jefferson and John Adams, Mary Wollstonecraft and Judith Sargent Murray, Kant and Burke, Madison and Tocqueville, Hegel and Marx, Grimké and Mill, Nietzsche and Jaurès, Weber and Dewey, and Schumpeter and Hayek, to works by more recent writers such as Fanon and Habermas. Although a number of undergraduates and graduate students, including Sitaraman, sat in on some of my lectures, Buttigieg was the only student that year to enroll in both courses. Either he was a glutton for punishment or he was genuinely committed to the study of politics and ideas.

In his 2003–04 Crimson columns, as uneven as the work of most undergraduate writers, Buttigieg’s running commentary on political developments eerily foreshadows our situation in 2019–20. He pointed out how Republicans since Newt Gingrich had shrewdly shanghaied the political vocabulary with terms such as “death tax” and “right to work” and how crucial was “the power of imagery,” the simplified, doctored, manufactured pictures, sound bites, and slogans fed to the public by visual and print media. After John Kerry had secured the Democratic nomination, Buttigieg observed that the Democrats so far had offered only “a complaint, not an argument.” They needed instead a compelling positive program to unite the nation. He listed several examples, including ways to end our dependence on fossil fuels, a national-service program, and a single-payer health-care system. Simply maligning the Bush administration would not suffice.

In his final column before commencement, Buttigieg implored Harvard students to cultivate compassion, “the human capacity to feel another’s suffering as one’s own”; strength, which he defined not as throwing your weight around as an individual or a nation but as “finishing what you start”; and morality, not confined to the domain of marital fidelity, as it had been redefined since the Clinton scandals, but in the broader sphere of civic and public life, where concern with it—as with compassion and strength—had all but vanished as a result of the Reagan revolution and the culture of greed it had encouraged.

By the end of their senior year, I had gotten to know Buttigieg, Warren, and Sitaraman well enough to join them and a couple of their friends for beers at Charlie’s, the IOP hangout across the street from Harvard’s Kennedy School. I do not remember exactly what topics we discussed. I do remember thinking that these students, smart, articulate, deeply committed to democratic politics and searching for new ideas, gave me reasons not to despair. In May of 2004, the Democratic Party remained torn between its fading progressives, such as Howard Dean, and its moderates, such as the eventual nominee Kerry. Democrats did seem committed only, as Buttigieg had put it to Ted Kennedy, “to being for whatever the Republicans are for, only less.” Given the party’s lack of a clear direction, the dispiriting prospect of George W. Bush’s reelection seemed a distinct possibility. Since I was impressed by these graduating seniors’ passion for politics, it is likely that we talked about what Max Weber called “politics as a vocation.” The very concept of a vocation, very much a part of growing up Catholic in the 1950s and ’60s, had gone out of fashion. I like to resurrect it whenever I can. When Buttigieg himself came back to Harvard in 2016 to talk with graduating seniors, he urged them to worry less about the titles they would hold in twenty years than about the roles they wanted to play. By the time he graduated, he recalled, he had already become aware that “fulfillment and purpose would come through service to others.”

  The divided perceptions of Buttigieg between younger and older left-leaning voters illustrates some of the mistrust and animosity that he has identified as one of the Democratic Party’s deepest problems.

After commencement, Buttigieg went to work for the presidential campaign of John Kerry, which gave him experience with four candidates in a row who came up short. Following a stint working in Washington, D.C., he packed up for Tunisia to continue his study of Arabic. When he decided to apply for a Rhodes scholarship, he asked me to write a letter of recommendation. Although surprised, I was happy to endorse his application even though, as I noted in the letter, his performance in my courses placed him only “in the middle of the pack.” Instead I detailed his work outside the classroom. I noted that his immersion in the IOP and his column for the Crimson, valuable as they might have been, “represented a gamble” for anyone thinking about graduate school, and that such work “reflected the depth of his commitment to political action.”

I concluded the letter with a judgment that still rings true to me. I will reproduce it here, at some length, precisely because it contrasts so strikingly with the numerous put-downs and dismissals that have accumulated in recent months, particularly from commentators on the left who consider Buttigieg a careerist not only too moderate in his politics but too slick for their taste:

I admire his talent, his agility, and his devotion to public service. At a time when so many equally capable recent Harvard graduates are off feathering their own nests, Peter is doing the thankless work of political organizing, not because he expects a reward but because he believes it is important. Many would describe his choice as quixotic, but I respect it. Peter unquestionably has the capacity to excel at Oxford and afterwards. He thinks clearly and writes beautifully. Beyond his obvious talent, he has a backbone. It is his strength of character, the depth of his democratic convictions, that will make him a forceful presence in American public life.

Buttigieg followed a well-worn path of Rhodes Scholars at Oxford, studying Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. The tutorials in politics went smoothly enough, but the rigors of analytic logic, contemporary moral philosophy, and neoclassical economics taxed even his considerable brainpower. Of particular value, he told me recently, were his tutorials on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and moral philosophy more generally. He noted especially the impact of John Rawls’s Theory of Justice. Rawls’s concept of the “arbitrariness of fortune” resonated especially with Buttigieg, as it did for Rawls himself, due to personal experience. In Rawls’s case it was the deaths of his two brothers from diseases they contracted from Rawls; in Buttigieg’s case the contrast between the misfortune endured by one of his childhood friends and the exceedingly good fortune he had enjoyed throughout his life. He was also drawn to the ideas of the philosophers Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel, whose concept of moral luck invites us to acknowledge the difficulty of assessing blame for actions over which individuals have no control.

Reading Robert Nozick’s defense of libertarian principles, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, while studying economics illuminated for Buttigieg the reasons why conservatives trust the market and distrust government, a valuable lesson for anyone on the political left. As Buttigieg explains it in Shortest Way Home, his course of study at Oxford, which required him to “master the basics of supply and demand, utility, preferences, auction theory, and market equilibrium,” left him admiring “the theoretical elegance of the free market under perfect conditions,” but it also allowed him to see how and why those perfect conditions “get skewed in the real world.” In Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, he was trying to tie together theory and practice.

The other important development during his Oxford years was Buttigieg’s return to religion. He told me he was put off by the intolerant “hard-edged atheism” he encountered at Oxford. He could not square such doctrinaire atheism, which he found as rigid as the dogmas of Catholicism that had repelled him, with his own experience. Whether it was the convincing arguments in the tradition of phenomenology, arguments made by Nagel and others (from William James onward) about how to make sense of the puzzling fact of one’s own consciousness, or the equal impossibility of convincingly proving or disproving God’s existence, Buttigieg came to realize that his own faith was more deeply rooted than he had thought. Attending Anglican services at Oxford convinced him that he was “liturgically conservative,” for aesthetic as well as spiritual reasons, even as he remained convinced that the Gospel message enjoins us to attend to society’s outcasts rather than celebrate or defend the wealthy and prosperous. His choice to affiliate with Anglicanism thus predated by a decade his coming out as gay. He returned to the United States in 2007 a Christian seeking a home. He found it with Fr. Brian Grantz of the Episcopal Cathedral of St. James in South Bend. Buttigieg has worshiped there ever since his return to his hometown after three years living in Chicago, working for McKinsey and Company.

Nothing about Buttigieg’s glittering résumé incenses his many critics on the left as much as his time with McKinsey, which is presented as obvious, irrefutable evidence that he is an unprincipled technocrat. In the forty years I have been teaching, I have known plenty of humanities or social-science students who decided—in at least one case on the advice of a respected parish priest—to explore the private sector in order to develop skills they could then put to use as they saw fit. In his memoir, Buttigieg explains he had been prepared for a career “in public service, inquiry, and the arts, not business. But I knew that I would have to understand business if I wanted to make myself useful in practice.” Because he “felt ignorant about how the private sector really worked,” McKinsey provided “a good training ground.” A few students I’ve known have stuck with consulting after their first three years, but most have gone in other directions. Some now work for foundations, others in politics, the law, or other professions. One, whom I know particularly well, put his McKinsey experience to use by establishing a secondary school in a township outside Johannesburg. Although McKinsey plunged Buttigieg into unfamiliar worlds, including the mysteries of grocery pricing, “working not for a cause but a client” soon proved unsatisfying because, as he puts it bluntly in his memoir, “I didn’t care.”

Now that the details of Buttigieg’s work with McKinsey have been released, the utter lack of authority he exercised and the unsurprisingly banal nature of his research projects has become apparent. As a result, the furor seems to have died down, at least for most people. Buttigieg volunteered in our conversation that one of the most valuable things he had learned from my classes was the contrast between Max Weber’s account of instrumental rationality—the means-ends reasoning that was threatening to eclipse a focus on morality or tradition—and John Dewey’s insistence on the value-laden nature of all decision making. At McKinsey Buttigieg learned the techniques of data analysis, an important tool for anyone in public life. But to dismiss him as a “whiz kid” akin to the best and brightest who took the United States into Vietnam is to misunderstand him. The young man who has written for twenty years about the folly of U.S. foreign crusades, about our unwitting walk into the “jaws of a trap” set for us by Al-Qaeda, about our “self-defeating” approach to terrorism, and about the need for the Democratic Party to offer a positive, social-democratic program knows the difference between means and ends. Buttigieg understands that it was precisely the Bush administration’s blindness to that difference, and to what we should have learned from earlier episodes of adventurism, that has kept us mired in Afghanistan and Iraq for nineteen years and counting.

In one of the most powerful passages in Shortest Way Home, Buttigieg points out that there is no formula for resolving the tradeoffs required in government. Data cannot yield answers to questions about who should suffer, and how much, when competing policies are debated. Questions of efficiency must be weighed against considerations of mercy. Although Buttigieg concedes how tempting it is for officials to treat all issues as mere “technical problems,” as Robert McNamara did in Vietnam, Buttigieg insists that it is a mistake. “Elected officials earn our keep by settling moral questions, ones where there is no way to make someone better off without making someone else worse off.” William James observed that in any ethical dilemma, “some part of the ideal is butchered.” It is rare for elected officials even to admit that problem, let alone call attention to it, as Buttigieg does in his account of the promise of artificial intelligence to replace “the human function we call judgment.”

The next time I encountered Buttigieg was in February 2010, when my book Reading Obama was in press. He and fellow Rhodes scholar Sabeel Rahman, another brilliant young law professor who is currently serving as president of the think tank Demos, together with Previn Warren, Ganesh Sitaraman, and about twenty other like-minded scholars and activists, invited me to a conference at Harvard Law School. They wanted to discuss Obama, and what he might mean for the future of the Democratic Party. It was not the first meeting of the group, nor was I the first guest to meet with them. In previous years they had welcomed, among others, the distinguished Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel, City Year founder Alan Khazei, and the young historian Angus Burgin, author of an outstanding book about the rise of the New Right, The Great Persuasion. I spent a fascinating morning with the group, explaining what I saw as the origins of Obama’s devotion to deliberation and bipartisanship. Those commitments were already under fire from the left; many around the table were unpersuaded by my argument. Obama seemed to them just another too-pliant Democrat, unable, as all Democrats in their lifetimes had been, to escape the neoliberal framework Reagan bequeathed to the nation. That afternoon, polymath Roberto Unger, back at Harvard Law School after serving in the government of his native Brazil, presented a riveting indictment of Obama and the Democratic Party. Buttigieg, and most of those in attendance, greeted Unger’s analysis with much greater enthusiasm.

Only a year later, having lost in his audacious bid to become Indiana State Treasurer in his first campaign for electoral office, Buttigieg became Mayor Pete. When he came back to Cambridge for meetings at the Kennedy School of Government, he was invigorated by the challenges he was wrestling with in South Bend. Formerly the home of powerhouses Studebaker and Bendix, as well as thriving businesses such as the Oliver Plow Company, the Folding Paper Box Company (the biggest in Indiana), and Birdsell Manufacturing, which proudly proclaimed itself the “largest makers of clover hullers in the world,” the city had fallen on very hard times. Now pothole repairs and snow removal, redesigning traffic patterns and building bicycle paths, were among the urgent issues for Mayor Pete. If those problems presented fewer intellectual challenges than philosophical debates about how we should understand freedom, they were problems he could tackle using the technocratic tools obtained at McKinsey. He seemed engaged, even energized, by such work.

But of course there were deeper, more intractable problems than fixing sewers and controlling floods. Within days of his inauguration he faced the crisis that has dogged him ever since. South Bend’s African American police chief was accused of tapping the phones of police officers. When the chief was under threat of indictment, Mayor Pete accepted his resignation. As he puts it in his memoir, in the circumstances “there was no good option,” and he has paid a price for the decision he made. Buttigieg’s major social initiative, rebuilding or restoring a thousand homes in a thousand days, received a lot of positive attention, but then it came under fire for failing to address the needs of the city’s poorest residents. Businesses returned to South Bend’s revived center, but they brought jobs for well-educated white-collar workers rather than the unemployed. All these criticisms are legitimate. Buttigieg has admitted that he made mistakes and did not accomplish everything he set out to do in his two terms as mayor. If he is to be held responsible for failing to solve the problems of race and poverty that have dogged the cities of America’s industrial heartland for decades, he should also be given credit for what he did accomplish. But if, as one of his predecessors told him, serving as mayor was the best job he ever had, one cannot help but wonder why Buttigieg decided to leave.

  Unlike the most strident of his critics on the left, Buttigieg understands that hatred and intransigence are not the cure for what ails American politics. They are the disease.

While Buttigieg has attracted enough support among certain Democratic constituencies to flirt with the lead in some early Iowa and New Hampshire polls, he has also drawn sharp criticism from other candidates and their followers. Some of that criticism, as well as some of that support, seems to me based on misperceptions of who Buttigieg is and what he wants to do. In this article I have tried to show the depth of his commitment to policies considerably more progressive than those proposed by most Democratic candidates since George McGovern. He is the only candidate who has spoken frankly about the constraints imposed by the Reagan revolution, constraints both political and intellectual, that limited the horizons of the Clinton and Obama presidencies. He has said emphatically and repeatedly that he believes we have come to the end of that era and must return to the social-democratic ideals and policies put in place between the New Deal and the Reagan revolution, the years when the economy grew, inequality shrank, and a generation of Americans ascended into the middle class.

For that reason I would not draw quite as bright a line between him and, say, Elizabeth Warren as most commentators, and Warren herself, have tended to do. On most issues they agree more than they disagree. Buttigieg readily admits that one of his most ambitious ideas, his plan for expanding (not packing) the Supreme Court to address the problem of rampant partisanship in judicial appointments, comes from his Harvard friend—and Warren adviser—Ganesh Sitaraman. (He quipped to E. J. Dionne, and to me, that he was sorry to have “lost the Ganesh primary” to Warren.) Further illustrating their similarities, Warren has recently altered one of her most controversial plans, her call for the immediate implementation of Medicare for All rather than a gradual transition. That shift aligns her more closely with Buttigieg on this crucial issue. Differences do remain. Should public universities be free for everyone, as Warren argues, or is Buttigieg right that those with ample resources should pay their own way? Scholars have shown that means-tested programs have proven more politically vulnerable than universal programs, and that is an important consideration. But is it clear which of their plans is more egalitarian—or more politically viable?

Buttigieg is the first openly gay candidate for the presidential nomination of a major party in the United States. That fact seems to matter less to many voters than most people had expected. Yet there are clearly people who would not vote for him for just that reason; opposition to LBGTQ rights remains as persistent as racism. Buttigieg also supports protecting women’s right to abortion, the Green New Deal, and increasing taxes on the wealthy to make possible expanded child care and other social programs. With such plans, Buttigieg might be expected to attract many young voters on the left. Yet he has been the target of sustained, often hyperbolic attacks, for a number of reasons.

Perhaps most obviously, Buttigieg represents a threat to the candidacies of Sanders and Warren, so it is no surprise that their loyalists have lashed out at him. He earned a degree magna cum laude from Harvard, a coveted First from Oxford, and worked at McKinsey, all of which can be perceived as making him an elitist incapable of understanding or attracting working-class voters. He volunteered to serve in the military in Afghanistan, so he can be caricatured as a hawk despite his persistent criticism of America’s unwarranted and repeated interventions. He fired a black police chief and has not yet demonstrated that he can attract support from African Americans beyond South Bend. If, skeptics ask, he still believes in the social-democratic principles he has endorsed for two decades, why is he using the language of “free choice,” long a conservative talking point, to distinguish his health care and college plans from those of Sanders and Warren? His careful positioning of his campaign in the lane between the Warren/Sanders left and the Biden/Klobuchar center makes his younger critics wonder whether his commitment to the ideals of equality and justice is as solid as his political instincts are shrewd. Given the strong field of Democratic candidates, many young leftists wonder why he chose not to remain in South Bend. If he is as committed to reenergizing public life at the local and state level as he says he is in Shortest Way Home, why not remain Mayor Pete, gain more experience, and then run for statewide or national office later? Finally, Buttigieg’s refusal to participate in what he calls the “oppression sweepstakes” earns him the ire of those incensed by the persistence of racial and gender hierarchies and fiercely committed, sometimes above all, to identity politics.

Instead Buttigieg has emphasized his Midwestern roots and his empathy for white, small-town and rural voters, many of whom turned to the Tea Party, or perhaps voted for Trump even after having voted for Obama. He understands that the lives of millions of Americans, whites as well as people of color, have been upended in recent decades. They are justifiably fed up with both parties’ empty promises. He calls for uniting Americans, as Obama did, rather than slicing the electorate into pieces that can be combined into a brittle coalition of particular interest groups with little or nothing in common. Unless Democrats can bring Americans together, he argues, they will be unable to regain control of local and state governments. Unless they can do that, winning the White House will make far less difference than our obsessive focus on it might suggest. While many Democrats seem to be looking down on frustrated rural and Rust Belt voters with “condescension bordering on contempt,” Buttigieg remains convinced from his experience in South Bend that “bedrock Democratic values around economic fairness and racial inclusion could resonate very well in the industrial Midwest, but not if they were presented by messengers who looked down on working and lower-middle-class Americans.”

As he has been saying since he was an undergraduate at Harvard, Buttigieg believes that the challenge facing Democrats is to engage with people across the nation, people with very different cultural values, by connecting the aspirations of our politics with “the richness of everyday life.” Otherwise the party might be able to satisfy self-righteous coastal elites, but it will continue to fail to generate majorities in diverse communities across the nation. It is paradoxical that the sharpest criticism Buttigieg has received has come from just those coastal elites, particularly members of his generation and younger, while his greatest strength has come from older voters, many of whom are tired of the familiar contenders and ready to welcome this likeable newcomer. The divided perceptions of Buttigieg between younger and older left-leaning voters itself illustrates some of the mistrust and animosity that he has identified as one of the Democratic Party’s deepest problems.

One of the striking features of Buttigieg’s hundreds of campaign appearances has been their consistency. He does not appear to worry about tailoring his appeal to any particular group; his message has been the same wherever he goes. His consistent emphasis on bringing together different American voters around a common agenda does not depend on demonizing others. Instead, he lays out his own vision of a nation committed less to individual success and unregulated free enterprise than to the values of compassion, strength, and morality that he articulated almost two decades ago and continues to cherish. Residual dissatisfaction with Obama, the belief that he squandered the few opportunities he enjoyed by wasting too much time and energy on conciliation, also helps explain the uneasiness of many young people on the left when they hear Buttigieg use that language rather than Warren’s or Sanders’s calls to battle.

Buttigieg laughed when he admitted to me that he did not expect, when he declared his candidacy, to be the “the religion guy.” His frequent invocations of his Christian faith strike me as sincere rather than strategic. When he discusses climate change, he talks about our duty to be stewards of God’s creation. When he discusses immigration and poverty, he invokes the Beatitudes. When he discusses gender and sexuality, he says his own orientation is not his choice but that of his creator. Everyone I have talked with agrees that nobody—by his own account even including Buttigieg himself—was aware he was gay until shortly before he came out during his campaign for reelection as mayor of South Bend. The cultural and legal changes that made his marriage as well as his reelection possible have been so rapid that we can forget he would have been ostracized at St. Joseph High School had he come out as a teenager in the 1990s. As far as I can tell, no one who knew him at Harvard or Oxford, including his male friends Sitaraman, Warren, Rahman, and Liscow, and his female friends such as my students Roxie Myhrum and Sandhya Ramadas, had any inkling of Buttigieg’s orientation. I saw only one reference to the subject in his Crimson columns: “public morality includes acknowledging the humanity and rights of homosexuals, though peddlers of hate invoke it to do the opposite.” Obama, Cory Booker, and Elizabeth Warren have also spoken frequently about the link between their Christian faith and their progressive politics, but no Democrat in recent decades has spoken about the connection more often, more forcefully, or in relation to as many particular issues as has Buttigieg.

The most durable goal of American democracy has always been the common good, not the rights of individuals or the good of particular segments of the population. Buttigieg shares that commitment. I find it odd that it infuriates so many Democrats, who do not share his belief in the possibility of constructing a shared public interest through democratic deliberation. Yet that ideal is deeply rooted in American history. When skeptics express their concern that a thirty-eight year old has the experience necessary for the presidency, I remind them that another champion of the idea of the common good, James Madison, was thirty-six years old in 1787, when he played a pivotal role at the Constitutional Convention and wrote his perennially influential essays in The Federalist. Youth does not necessarily mean immaturity, nor—as we see demonstrated every day by our president’s tweets, taunts, tantrums, boasts, and recklessness—does good judgment necessarily come with age.

Despite his considerable strengths, Buttigieg is of course highly unlikely to be elected president in 2020. But we could—and possibly will—do worse. Whatever the outcome, Buttigieg has shown sufficient strength to suggest that he will be a figure to reckon with for decades to come. As he is fond of pointing out, he will not reach the age of the current president (or, one might add, some of his rivals for the Democratic nomination), until well after 2050. Buttigieg’s intelligence, calm, quick wittedness, idealism, and hopefulness all remind me of Obama’s most notable characteristics. Unfortunately, any Democrat elected president in 2020 will almost certainly face a House of Representatives as polarized as the one that stymied Obama throughout his two terms in office and a Senate as stubbornly partisan as the one that now protects Donald Trump from the consequences of his corruption. Like Obama, though, and unlike the most strident of his critics on the left, who see Buttigieg as nothing more than a moderate who lacks convictions, he understands that hatred and intransigence are not the cure for what ails American politics. They are the disease.

Go to the article

[mostlysignssomeportents]

I Can't Breathe: Matt Taibbi's scorching book on the murder of Eric Garner and the system that let the killers get away with it

Matt Taibbi is one of the best political writers working in the USA today, someone who can use the small, novelistic details of individuals' lives illuminate the vast, systemic problems that poison our lives and shame our honor; his 2014 book The Divide conducts a wide-ranging inquiry into the impunity of corporate criminals and the kafkaesque injustices visited on the poor people they victimize; in I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street, Taibbi narrows his focus to the police murder of Eric Garner, a Staten Island fixture and father, and the system that put murderers in uniform in his path.

Taibbi opens the book with a masterful, novelistic account of the racial divide in Staten Island, the brutal impunity of the NYPD, the lives of the people they stalk, humiliate, beat, and frame. He introduces us to Tomkins Park, the neighborhood where Eric Garner was a fixture, selling untaxed cigarettes he brought in from out of state, and to Garner himself, a complicated, funny, bright, unlucky, likable man whose bad luck and bad choices had put him on that corner, selling smokes to keep his family fed, clothed and sheltered.

As Taibbi unravels the story of Garner, the circumstances that led to him being choked to death by a group of police officers who went on to terrorize Garner's friend for recording a video of the murder and releasing it, who faced no meaningful penalties -- and who, we learn, had long rapsheets for brutal, sadistic policing, he weaves the long history and diverse social and political circumstances that led to that moment.

Taibbi's book is part history lesson, part political science, part biography (of several people, not all of them very nice), part on-the-scene reporting, part lawsplainer. He ranges over statistical models for predictive policing, the realpolitik of New York, where Democrats and Republicans alike have been critical to turning the city into a laboratory for testing and refining racist policing, housing, incarceration, and harassment policies.

Taibbi is a synthesist, able to dig into the personal history of the fathers of "broken windows policing," of rival black activist groups, of Garner and his family, tell their stories, show where they fit in a much larger, systemic analysis of how the nuts-and-bolts of institutional racism and police impunity.

In building understanding, Taibbi is always explaining, but never excusing. Just because Taibbi explains how the quota systems and official stonewalling creates a hospitable climate for sadistic, murdering rapists -- just because he shows that ultimately, these bad cops are taking the rap for an even worse system -- it doesn't follow that he's asking us to shed a tear for the poor cops who choked Eric Garner to death on a city street.

Taibbi's analysis also ranges over the explosion of anti-police-violence demonstrations that occurred in the wake of the Garner killing, after the deaths of Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, and so many other black men and women who were murdered by police officers who nearly never, ever paid any consequences for it. He places the murder of Eric Garner in the context of the election of an openly white supremacist president, and the rage and outrage that followed that election.

All this makes for a book that's as riveting as any novel, and as educational as any manifesto. Like The Divide, it is essential reading that captures a moment that the whole nation is wrestling with, and whose consequences could not be more important to us all.

One note on Taibbi himself: a few months ago, he was embroiled in a scandal of his own when passages from  The eXile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia, a book he co-authored in 2000, were reprinted. The book is a memoir of Taibbi's tenure as a gonzo editor in post-Soviet Russia, co-written with his co-editor, Mark Ames, and it is a gross, tasteless -- and, it turns out, largely fictional -- tale.

The passages that made headlines were ones in which Taibbi and Ames detail subjecting female subordinates to cruel and degrading sexual harassment. When they broke, Taibbi explained that these passages had been written by Ames and were fictional. This struck many people as lame and not-very-credible excuses, but it appears they were true -- journalists who tracked down the co-workers in the book confirmed with them that none of the lurid, awful activities took place.

Which doesn't let Taibbi off the hook: his transgression isn't subjecting women to sexual violence and harassment: it's thinking that making up "gonzo" stories about this kind of thing was funny (rather than offensive and harmful in their own right), and co-signing his name to a published volume of these tales.

This isn't a good thing to have done, but it's also not in the same universe as committing actual sexual assaults. It definitely lowered my opinion of Taibbi, but I feel like making stupid, shitty "jokes" is ultimately a forgivable sin, and the kind of thing that Taibbi has made substantial amends for.

I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street [Matt Taibbi/Random House]

https://boingboing.net/2017/12/15/eric-garner-rip.html