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happymetalgirl · 5 years ago

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Slipknot - We Are Not Your Kind

Apart from the finally realizing release of Tool’s exasperatingly long-teased fifth album next month and arguably Rammstein’s ten-year-awaited self-titled album, Slipknot’s We Are Not Your Kind is and was always going to be 2019′s biggest metal release, and since its release its chart success has fulfilled that prophecy.

Every new Slipknot release is quite the momentous and fixating occasion for the metal community, both for fans of the band their detractors, and part of these new releases feeling like such a big occasion is because they don’t come often. Despite the band blowing up in no modest sense of the phrase at the turn of the millennium with the one-two punches of their iconic self-titled debut and its successor, Iowa, the band have only released four more albums (including this one) in the nearly two decades since their sophomore album in 2001. And despite the motifs of brotherhood the band make a notable part of their image, the tight-knittedness among the nine of them there always seems to be some kind of inner tension or circumstantial tumult surrounding the band and these releases that results in hiatuses and hold-ups that result in these long push-backs.

The band took a hiatus right after Iowa’s draining touring cycle and volatile recording process that nearly prevented them from getting their first Grammy with 2004′s Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses), after which they took another hiatus before the tense and disjointed recording of 2008′s All Hope Is Gone, which the band have since cited in hindsight as a low-point of moral for them. Bassist Paul Gray’s death after the album’s touring cycle understandably put the band’s future in doubt and, along with the departure of longtime and beloved drummer Joey Jordison, contributed to the six-year gap between All Hope Is Gone and .5: The Gray Chapter (this album’s predecessor), which I consider their best work since Iowa. And Remember when Jim Root said he didn’t want the next Slipknot album to take a long-ass time... back in 2015? Yet, here we are, nearly five years after album number five with album number six. And yet, Slipknot consistently remains one of metal’s most recognized figureheads and biggest touring acts. I mean, fucking Slayer opened for them the first time I saw them live.

As much as we can take their presence for granted at this point, Slipknot’s unprecedented ascent from the desolation of Iowa to worldwide stardom and maintenance of it with a lot of “despite” along the way is certainly spectacularly intriguing. And the band’s sustained high profile could be owed as much to the band’s magnificent balancing act of raw, death-flavored nu metal and anthemic alternative metal as it is to frontman Corey Taylor’s notorious charisma with the metal press and his ability to draw headlines and speak so widely and mostly eloquently to and for the metal community. Like if this genre had to elect a president for some reason and candidates had to campaign for it like any other presidency, Corey Taylor would easily be the most poised to demagogue his way into office, with Loudwire Fox-News-ing behind him the whole way there, and that hypothetical scenario is the only time I will liken Corey Taylor to Donald Trump because I know the former really does not like the latter. But again, Slipknot’s career has been an impressive balancing act of infectious melodies and tasty grooves with unbridled visceral aggression that unites both casual and deeply invested metal fans and that a lot of other bands see as the optimum career model in this day and age (often citing Slipknot as the last big metal band to get hugely culturally relevant outside metal). So with the twenty-year mark of the debut of heavy metal’s arguably last big figure, how does that band’s sixth record contribute to the preservation of their relevance?

Like just about every Slipknot album before it, We Are Not Your Kind came with its own contextual tempest, this time being percussionist Chris Fehn’s suing of the rest of the band for financial injustices just a week and a half after the album’s announcement and swift subsequent dismissal from the band, leaving only six of the nine members that recorded the band’s first four albums. As much as the band’s proclamations of camaraderie in the face of one internal conflict after another might seem unfounded, internal disputes and line-up metamorphoses are a common reality of most bands, and it’s not surprising that the nine members in a band twice the size of the average band in the genre get sick of each other and fall out in some way. They can’t all be Rammstein, but even that marriage has had its rough patches despite never suffering a line-up change. But the falling out with Chris Fehn is not like your usual “creative differences” or “time for a new chapter”. The allegations of unethical financial misconduct by his former bandmates of his lawsuit are seriously heavy and potentially quite damaging to Slipknot’s and that hypothetical metal president’s reputation. Yet it has been relatively quiet since Fehn’s departure, the potential juiciness of which would be undoubtedly squeezed by any surrounding press, which has led to a lot of speculation about the band perhaps trying to resolve this with Fehn quietly and diplomatically and about his yet-unidentified replacement perhaps not being a replacement at all. And I bring this up because of “All out Life”, the single that was released in late 2018 from which this album’s title is derived that I did not place on my year-end best songs list last year because it sure seemed like it was intended to be on an album. Despite being a truly ripping riff-fest featuring the album’s title as a lyric, “All out Life” was curiously left off the final track listing of We Are Not Your Kind, which led to speculations of it being left off for legal reasons in the face of this pending lawsuit (being that Fehn was featured on the track). Yet, the song made it onto the Japanese release of the album as a bonus track at the end, which leads me to explain how I’m going to be assessing this album. “All out Life” is a great, identifiably Slipknot track and the album is better with it, and while it’s not the most official part of the album, I’m listening to the album with it every time, and I’m including it as part of the album for all assessment purposes. It’s a song the feels like it was intended to be more of an opening statement right after a signature Slipknot intro track, and its sudden finish feels a little weird at the end of the album, but it works in its own way as a more abrupt closer more effectively than “Solway Firth” does as a not-so-grand finale. So, yeah, for the good of this album, I’m taking its differently-titled-not-included title track into account.

Okay! Wow! That’s a lot of context; let’s have a peaceful, uneventful album roll-out next time guys, even though I’m sure the seventh album being due to be released (by extrapolation of the pattern of its predecessors’ releases) during the Kanye presidency will inevitably come with some more gaffs, laughs, and way-too-long preambles, maybe stick it out for one more album, Clown, for me, so I don’t have to write another history paper. (Good God what am I going to do next month with Tool’s new album) OKAY! Enough! On to the fucking musical content of Slipknot’s sixth album.

Like I said, I really loved this album’s predecessor, .5: The Gray Chapter; the band were dialed in both compositionally and performatively all throughout the measuredly varied track listing, and the production was spot-on, with Corey sounding assertive and with Mick Thompson’s and Jim Root’s guitar tone to fucking die for. We Are Not Your Kind is a different story. It’s not a stylistically or procedurally radical departure or anything, and much of the production carries over from their last album. But there’s a certain twist to the band’s otherwise enrapturing X factor that feels like they’re trying to do something unnatural for them. And a lot of it stems from the odd bits of widely noted experimentation among the longer-on-average tracks across this album compared to previous albums. It’s not that the band haven’t incorporated diversions into industrial or eerie ambient tension-building territory in the past, but albums past have incorporated these non-exclusively-metal features in cohesive ways that contribute supportively to the albums’ flow, whereas here, the flow of certain songs and certain sections of the album feel disjointed as a result. Also contributing to the weird flow of the album is the distinct era-mimicking of certain songs (quite possibly unintentionally). The album’s opening song after the “Insert Coin” intro track (which might unfortunately be the most meager and least effective hype-building intro track of the band’s six albums) and lead single, “Unsainted”, feels quite like it’s 2019′s “Sulfur”, with the similarly alternating gruff alt. metal verses and soaring cleans on the melodic choruses and the bridge slowdown. Like “Sulfur”, I find the primary melody sufficiently anthemic, and even though I wish the band did more with the choir supplementation that kicks the melody off, I quite like the song. But then there are stylistically schizophrenic trajectory and flow disruptions not too long after, like the distinctly Vol. 3-type groove-banger, “Nero Forte”, whose pair of headbang-inducing nu metal beat and falsetto melody and the battle snare drum march at the bridge akin to “The Blister Exists” are certain calling cards to the band’s third album. Fans seem to have taken quite a liking to this song in particular, and I like the delicious nu metal riffage at the core of it, but I feel like the song is a bit repetitive as it goes on and still needs to do a little more across its run time to feel as fulfilling as it should be. I’m sure it’ll get the crowds moving though, and I sure appreciate that.

The album even presents even full-on callbacks to the fast-paced visceral vitriol of Iowa on “Red Flag” and the industrial nu metal creepiness of the debut on “Birth of the Cruel”. The pensive acoustic strumming and seething melodic guitar work of the interestingly emotionally progressive “A Liar’s Funeral” also feels somewhat lifted from the dynamic of the band’s previous album (which makes for a pretty bright highlight in my eyes). “Orphan” and “Not Long for This World” revel in the same thick, crunchy guitar tone, metallic percussion, loud-soft dynamics, emotive guitar melodies, and elevating chorus vocal melodies that made songs like “Nomadic”, “Sarcatrophe”, and “The One That Kills the Least” on The Gray Chapter so integral to its consistency, and “Critical Darling” feels like it pairs Iowa-reminiscent violent alternative metal verses with a Vol. 3-esque melodic chorus. Again, I quite like these songs. And on their own they are mostly well-composed and all fine and dandy, and I’m certainly not knocking Slipknot for sounding like themselves, but together the songs run like a compilation album with some rarities and scrapped tracks from the vault tossed in the mix as well. But getting past the weird flow of the album is not too high of a hurdle to clear, and once cleared, the album really is a confident, appetizing, and satiating exhibition of Slipknot’s time-tested talents that have put them at the level they are at.

The album has been noted as palpably experimental in comparison to previous efforts, which occurs in the album’s dark, muggy corners interspersed around the usual verse-chorus-verse-chorus structures at the foundation of the album: the ambient experimental bits that take the form of codas like the end of “Critical Darling” or interlude tracks like reverbed xylophone plinking of “What’s Next” and the incantation of “Death Because of Death”.

Despite its cliché title, the album’s most perplexing exercise of experimentation comes on the drawn-out, experimental, atmospheric melancholy of the song “My Pain”; it serves as a breather of sorts on kind of a take-it-or-leave-it basis. And the song “Spiders” I’m not really a fan of either; the repetitiveness of its harmonized chorus clashing with the intended spook of the song gets old kind of fast, which is too bad because I quite like the industrial sampling, the eerie piano plinking, and the weirdly effects-driven guitar solo around it. But honestly, that’s the lowest the album goes for me, and there are still positives to be taken from those songs, which is a testament to the band’s work on this record.

This album honestly took some time to grow on me after my first experiences with its weird flow left me perplexed. But once I got past the flow and familiar with the album enough to be able to focus more distinctly on the individual tracks, I was able to see it as a comprehensive display of the band’s full arsenal of abilities, a balancing act of Slipknot’s long-running balancing acts that still manages to make room for surprises (that the band might be able to expand upon in the future as they continue to carefully develop their sound) without sacrificing compositional or stylistic/aesthetic integrity. Again, the flow on this album is quite unlike any other Slipknot album, but it’s hardly enough to spoil the strong compositions from end to end. Despite my and many others’ high expectations for this album (and perhaps its high susceptibility to disappointment), I was pleasantly surprised with We Are Not Your Kind; and I think the band will be able to look back on this album positively in the years to come. Evidently, we should probably just let Slipknot take their time on the next one too because this one was worth the wait. And I know it’s probably the basic bitch thing to do to praise a Slipknot album like all the other mainstream metal critics probably are, but I can genuinely see why, and I’m not gonna slag an album just because its creators are extremely popular and it looks good for underground karma points. It’s apparently fun for jaded metal fans to shit on Slipknot for not playing 280 bpm blast beats or for using clean vocal melodies and emotive acoustic sections like a bunch of pussies, which is laughable. I mean if you don’t like what Slipknot strive for and it’s not your cup of tea, that’s chill, but if you’re talking shit because you think you’re special for liking a lesser known death metal band that plays faster and think Slipknot is shit because they aren’t doing what you want by not playing like your favorite techdeath band, that’s so tired, narrow-sighted, and embarrassing not just to you, but to the aforementioned chill people you embarrass by extension. If liking a Slipknot album like Loudwire and Metal Hammer probably do makes me a basic bitch, then buy me a pumpkin spice latte next month and send me a crop top with “live laugh love” on it in the form of a black metal logo.

Despite/10

#Slipknot #We Are Not Your Kind #WANYK #new music #new album #album review #alternative metal #nu metal #heavy metal #metal

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fitnesshealthyoga-blog · 6 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://fitnesshealthyoga.com/game-of-thrones-women-whats-next/

‘Game of Thrones’ Women: What’s Next?

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Don’t be pissed at the messenger, but we thought you should know, it’s time to let go of Game of Thrones. HBO’s smash series is about to come to a thundering end, and we suggest that you prepare yourselves. However, this doesn’t mean the ladies of Westeros will vanish from our lives forever. The women of GoT have some fantastic new roles already lined up. Here’s what’s next for the women of Game of Thrones.

Though GoT is inspired by the George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series and is generally beloved globally–the series has notoriously failed its women. During Season 8, Episode 4 –we all looked on in horror as Missandei (Nathalie Emmanuel), the only woman of color on the show was beheaded. (Shrugs in spoiler.) This isn’t the first time GoT has had some serious missteps with its female characters. From depictions of sexual violence to is glaring lack of diversity–Game of Thrones has broken many TV barriers while keeping women in a box.

Many women–including actress Jessica Chastain and director Ava DuVernay have slammed the series for its use of sexual violence as a character-building tool. Assessing Sansa’s (Sophie Turner) journey on the series, Chastain recently tweeted, “Rape is not a tool to make a character stronger. A woman doesn’t need to be victimized in order to become a butterfly.” She continued, “The #littlebird was always a Phoenix. Her prevailing strength is sole because of her. And her alone.”

After a near-decade-long journey on the series, for most of its leading ladies –the actresses are ready to embark on new (and hopefully more female-positive) projects. This is where we can find them next.

Image: Shutterstock.

Maisie Williams

Maisie Williams was just a preteen when Season 1 of Game of Thrones began. As Arya Stark, Williams’ character’s arc has been one of the most revolutionary on the series. As a little girl–Arya was a precocious little fighter, more at ease using swords with her brothers than learning to sew or wearing a dress. Over the past eight seasons, we’ve watched Arya blossom (out of necessity) into a bold killer who will do anything for her family. All hail the Night King Slayer!

Williams auditioned for GoT because she wanted the money to buy a new laptop, but it looks like she’s ready to make a career out of acting. X-Men fans can catch Williams in The New Mutants which will debut on Aug. 2. She also just wrapped filming for the ’90s set film adaptation of the comic book series, The Owners. The movie is also set to star Sylvester McCoy and Rita Tushingham.

Image: Shuttershock.

Sophie Turner

Like her on-screen sister, Sophie Turner had little acting experience before she stepped into Sansa Stark’s gown. When we first met the auburn-headed Stark–she was an exhausting and annoying little girl who was desperate to win the affections of a prince. Sansa did not live happily ever after. Instead, she was held captive by Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey), raped and tortured by Ramsay Bolton (Iwan Rheon) and manipulated by Petyr Baelish aka Littlefinger (Aidan Gillen). However, what Sansa did learn from all of her experiences was to play the game of thrones. As she told Littlefinger right before his execution, “I’m a slow learner, it’s true. But I learn.”

Though it’s a wrap for GoT, Turner is about to step into the shoes of another red-headed legend. She will reprise her role as Jean Grey in X-Men: Dark Phoenix which is set to drop June 7. The newlywed first played Jean in 2016’s X-Men Apocalypse. Following Dark Pheonix, Turner will star in Jouri Smit’s Heavy.

Image: Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock.

Gwendoline Christie

So, we’re never going to forgive GoT for leaving Brienne of Tarth aka Brienne the Stallion standing in her housecoat in the biting cold begging Jamie Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) to pick her over his evil ass twin sister. It really boils our blood just thinking about it. To beg a man who has THREE (maybe four) kids with his twin sister! The GoT writers tried it. However, that’s neither here nor there.

Before she slayed as Ser Brienne on GoT, Gwendoline Christie was slowly making a name for herself in the entertainment industry. However, she exploded in 2012 after her first appearance on GoT. She’s already starred in the Star Wars franchise and the critically acclaimed mini-series, Top of the Lake. After she lays down Brienne sword, you can catch the 6′ 3″ legend as Jane Murdstone in The Personal History of David Copperfield opposite Tilda Swinton. She will also appear in 2020’s The Friend with Dakota Johnson and Jason Seagal.

Photo: Getty Images

Emilia Clarke

Are y’all going to crumble when the Mother of Dragons dies? We aren’t. Admittedly we loved Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys Targaryen for the first several seasons of Game of Thrones, but lately, homegirl has been working our last nerve. She’s clearly showing signs that she has some real anger issues and her lust for power certainly isn’t helping. Still–we will give Khalessi credit for her journey to try and take back her family’s throne.

Though her character is no longer our fav, we absolutely adore Emilia Clarke. She’s already delighted us in several franchise films including Terminator Genisys and Solo: A Star Wars Story. She also gave us all the feels in the movie-adaptation of, Me Before You. Up next, Clarke probably won’t be riding any more dragons, but you can catch her in Above Suspicion which tells the story of the first ever conviction for the murder of an FBI agent and the rom-com, Last Christmas opposite Henry Golding and Emma Thompson. Both flicks will debut in Winter 2019.

Image: Danny Moloshok/Invision/AP/REX/Shutterstock.

Lena Headey

One way or another, Cersei Lannister is about to hang up her crown on Game of Thrones. Whether she wins the throne or Dany and Jon Snow take her out –Lena Headey who has played the sinister queen since Season 1 is ready to move on. Headey isn’t a stranger to film or TV. Her career stretches back into the ’90s. While filming GoT— the British-born actress did some extensive voice work as well.

Following GoT you can catch Headey in The Flood, Gunpowder Milkshake opposite Angela Bassett and Paul Giamatti, and the movie Crooks. Hopefully, she’ll ditch that tragic blonde cut though. And honestly, we don’t know how we feel about seeing Headey in pedestrian clothing. God forbid her character is courteous and friendly.

Image: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP/REX/Shutterstock.

Oh, Missandei, she had the best twist out in Westeros, and she and #BaeWorm were supposed to live out their days on some warm sandy beach somewhere away from the racists of Westeros. Nathalie Emmanuel’s days as Missandei may have come to an unsettling conclusion. However, Nathalie Emmanuel is just getting started. Before snagging a role on GoT back in Season 3–Emmanuel was known for her work on Hollyoaks. Since then she’s been in everything from The Fast and the Furious franchise to Maze Runner: The Death Curse.

Up next the vegan actress is saying farewell to HBO and hello to Hulu and Netflix. She is starring on two different forthcoming original series. You can spot her in Hulu’s Four Weddings and a Funeral written by Mindy Kaling. You can also see her in Netflix’s The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance which stars Helena Bonham Carter, Outlander’s Caitriona Balfe, Natalie Dormer as well as everyone else and their mama.

Image: Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP/REX/Shutterstock.

Carice van Houten

So… no one was that pressed when Melisandre took off her choker and withered away at the end of the Battle of Winterfell. We don’t know about you, but we’ve been ready to pull up on her since she burned Shireen Baratheon alive in Season 5. But we suppose we can’t hold that against Carice van Houten. She spoke to the New York Times about her character’s “timely” demise, “I was actually happy and quite sentimental when I read the script. I thought it could be a beautiful ending to this character.”

Like Lena Headey–van Houten has been a staple in entertainment since the ’90s. Post-GoT, she’ll be starring in Brian De Palma’s Domino opposite her former Game of Thrones co-star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as well as the thriller, Lost Girls and Love Hotels.

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#emilia clarke #entertainment #game of thrones #hbo #health insurance news usa #healthcare news usa #latest health news usa #maisie williams #tv + movies #Skin Care

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newyorktheater · 5 years ago

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Jordan Fisher, who made his Broadway debut as John Laurens/Philip Hamilton in Hamilton in 2016, is returning in the title role of “Dear Evan Hansen” for a 16-week engagement beginning January 28, 2020, succeeding Andrew Barth Feldman . “Evan Hansen is a 16-course meal for an actor. The complexity of this boy is akin to climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro.”

In its effort to sum up the decade culturally (33 Ways to Remember the 2010s), the New York Times gives a nod to the return of theater in the cultural conversation — not always directly.

Michael Paulson writes about “Hamilton” as a boon to a Broadway experiencing a cultural boom (“Even now, it sounds kind of implausible: a hip-hop musical about America’s first treasury secretary, peppered with rap battles over debt assumption and the Franco-American alliance. But when “Hamilton” opened at the decade’s midpoint, it was an instant sensation….”) Ben Brantley writes about the rise of immersive theater (“In a decade dominated by the illusions of virtual reality, theater put up a strong defense for the real thing. Around the globe, an ever-multiplying slew of immersive productions have been doing their damnedest to tempt audiences away from their screens and into the tactile here and now of three dimensions.”

Ironically Wesley Morris writes an essay entitled “Gay Culture Takes Center Stage” — center stage — illustrated with a picture of Billy Porter (who first became famous as the drag queen star of the Broadway musical “Kinky Boots”)– and does not mention any of the many examples from theater.

Top 10 New York Theater of the Decade

December Theater Openings

November Quiz

Holiday Gifts for Theater Lovers

The Week in New York Theater Reviews

Crystal Lucas-Perry as Zillah and Jonathan Hadary as Xillah (stand-in for playwright Tony Kushner)

Bright Room Called Day

Tony Kushner has taken the first play he wrote, which traced the rise of Nazism in Germany as a cri de coeur and a call to arms against what was happening to America during the Reagan era, and reworked it 34 years later for the Trump era – or, anyway, in the Trump era.

“A Bright Room Called Day” never really worked – as the playwright now acknowledges in the play itself. He has turned himself into a character. That meta-theatrical addition is one of the significant changes in a starry production at the Public Theater of this passionate and provocative play, but it in no way feels fixed. It is sprawling, awkwardly talky, and obvious — and now, also self-indulgent….Still, “A Bright Room Called Day” also offers a glimpse into Kushner’s high-wire act of intellectual theatricality that makes his later plays so thrilling.

Kristine Nielsen

The Young Man From Atlanta

“The Young Man from Atlanta,” about an aging couple whose only son has died young, is the wrong play by Horton Foote to revive –- it’s dated, and overrated…

The Week In New York Theater News

Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation, which closed this week at will reopen at Off-Broadway’s York Theatre

Evelyn Castillo sued Ambassador Theater Group in federal court over its policy blocking guests from bringing outside food into its theaters. She complained that the practice discriminates against individuals with diabetes, and violates the Americans with Disabilities Act. She wanted to purchase a ticket to watch Head Over Heels at the Hudson Theater. The court sided with the theater, buying its argument that it has a record of accommodating people with disabilities, and implying they would have done so had she contacted them. I must say the coverage of this lawsuit has not been even-handed — e.g. this article in Forbes: “Broadway Theater Stands Up to Serial Suer And Wins” — missing the opportunity to assess the state of accessibility on Broadway…which has come a long way, and has a long way to go.

“MJ” is not the only Michael Jackson musical in the works (although so far the only one scheduled for Broadway.) Johnny Depp is producing a new Michael Jackson musical, entitled “For The Glove of A Glove: An Unauthorized musical fable about the life of Michael Jackson, as told by his glove.”

“Fefu and Her Friends”has been extended through December 12 at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center.

Imma tell my kids this was The Blind Side pic.twitter.com/lAbc9D8KuP

— Jeremy O. Harris (@jeremyoharris) November 30, 2019

An audience member during a talkback at Slave Play raged that the play was racist against white people. Playwright Jeremy O. Harris didn’t shut her down, but he did mock her, referring to her as Talkback Tammy. “Rage,” Harris told the Washington Post, “is a necessary lubricant to discourse,”

Aleshea Harris’ fierce struggle with American racism

Playwright Aleshea Harris, who won the Obie Award in 2018 for Is God Is, “is part of a vanguard of young, African American playwrights boring into questions of race and history through humor, drama, absurdity and tragedy. Their works reveal how the legacy of slavery continues to twist through the American consciousness.”

“The Half-Life of Marie Curie” on stage at the Minetta Lane Theater

The cast records the play in the Audible studio

Audible, theater producers

Audible is commissioning dramatists to write plays for its global listener base and at the same time curating them for a narrower market of theatergoers.

“My wife is seriously smart about theater, and we go a couple of times a week,” Audible’s founder and chief executive, Donald Katz, said in an interview. “When I saw what was happening, that the next generation of plays was being written to an intimate aesthetic, I realized there was the capacity to customize the experience to the power and intimacy of the human voice.”

Rest In Peace

Director Marion McClinton, 65, nterpreter of August Wilson

Jonathan Miller , 85, director and humorist. He was introduced to American audiences when the British satirical revue Beyond the Fringe opened on Broadway, and went on to direct King Lear and Long Day’s Journey into Night on Broadway.

Valerie Taylor-Barnes, 88, dancer and founder of the Clive Barnes Awards

Robert F.X. Sillerman, 71 , investor, media executive, concert promoter owner of the Elvis Presley estate, and one of the producers of “The Producers,” the Broadway hit, written by his friend Mel Brooks

Jordan Fisher is Evan Hansen. Broadway is Back in the Cultural Conversation. Rage is Necessary. #Stageworthy News of the Week In its effort to sum up the decade culturally (33 Ways to Remember the 2010s…

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homedevises · 6 years ago

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Seven Moments To Remember From Tigris Euphrates Eden | tigris euphrates eden

Where is the Garden of Eden located? | CARM.org – tigris euphrates eden | tigris euphrates eden

Iraq’s history stretches far above its afflicted years beneath the aphorism of Saddam Hussein. Its Tigris and Euphrates rivers are affluent baptize bodies that provided for the actual centers of age-old civilization. But the country’s avant-garde conflicts acutely breakable these accustomed resources.

In 2004, Azzam Alwash founded Attributes Iraq, an NGO and tax-exempt alms committed to absorption Iraq’s environment, afterwards advertent that Hussein had drained the marshlands of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, depriving the aboriginal Marsh Arabs of their alimentation and stripping abroad the hideaways breadth rebels based their operations. Aback Iraq was not accustomed to advertise any oil, all of its architecture accessories was allocated to clarification marshes; so abundant so, almost 10% of the marshland’s aboriginal accommodation remained.

Alwash, 54, had larboard a acknowledged career as a accomplice in a geotechnical consultancy in Southern California to abetment in the rebuilding of Iraq. He had larboard the country in 1978 aback he was at university because he banned to accompany the Ba’ath party. He started his engineering apprenticeship all over afresh and acquired his civilian engineering undergraduate amount from California Accompaniment University at Fullerton and went on to get a Ph.D. in geotechnical engineering at the University of Southern California.

In 2006, Attributes Iraq appear the Aboriginal Acreage Guide to Birds of Iraq, which is one of the few Arabic-language acreage guides. He batten with Arabic Knowledge@Wharton about his efforts.

An edited archetype of the chat follows:

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: Attributes Iraq was started in 2004. Can you acquaint me why you absitively to alpha the alignment then?

Azzam Alwash: I originally went aback to Iraq beneath the advancement of a activity alleged Eden Again, in affiliation with The Iraq Foundation, which was to attending at the bearings of the marshes in southern Iraq. But afterwards spending a year in Iraq, I accustomed that not abandoned were the marshes the botheration but the ambiance in Iraq, added importantly, the baptize of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers which feeds the marshes. If I capital the marshes to be in acceptable shape, I bare to accomplish abiding that Iraq chock-full application the Tigris and Euphrates as accessible sewers. So the analytic band-aid was to actualize an ecology NGO. Of advance the added advantage was to accompany the political action but that’s not my cup of tea, as it were. So I started Attributes Iraq as a NGO to focus on the apology of the marshes, the cultural canning of Iraq and the aegis of the accustomed environment. Eight years later, I’m still at it.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: Can you allocution about the history of the alignment and how it’s evolved?

Alwash: I’m originally from southern Iraq. I grew up in and about the marshes. Aback in the 1990s aback I begin out the marshes were actuality broiled or had been broiled up already, I began abutting all-embracing efforts adjoin Saddam aggravating to point out that while anybody was attractive for weapons of accumulation abolition that was appropriate beneath everyone’s noses, actuality is Saddam depriving 12,000-year-old acculturation depriving the marshlands of water. Nobody was advantageous absorption to what I was adage until 9/11. Afresh anybody started advantageous absorption to what Saddam was accomplishing to Iraq. From there, it formed upstream. I had bodies analytic whether the marshes could be restored. I had bodies adage the Marsh Arabs didn’t appetite to appear back. Supposedly the bodies who were demography affliction of the marshes claimed that they didn’t appetite to go aback to the marshes because they absent the abilities bare to assignment on the marshes.

My actual aboriginal activity in June 2003 was to physically analyze whether the marshes can be restored. Fortunately for me, it turns out I didn’t accept to action the battle. In fact, the Marsh Arabs alternate and began to ample the marshes. So it was a aberration that bodies didn’t appetite the marshes restored. Furthermore, in six months, I began to see the marshes are bigger than Saddam Hussein, bigger than a anatomy of water, bigger than nature. Within six months, weeds were growing, birds were advancing back. I accustomed that attributes is actual able and will survive. It’s as simple as, “Let the baptize let aback in.”

Of course, baptize is an issue. Afterwards alive for about six to seven months, I began acquainted that a lot of carrion systems were not operating because of the war and sanctions. Abounding cities did not accept carrion systems. A lot of bodies were application the Tigris and Euphrates as accessible sewers and putting bad baptize into the marshes. The irony is if you appetite apple-pie water, you put it into the marshes. The marshes about-face out to be acceptable absorber amid the Tigris and Euphrates and the Gulf.

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Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: Attributes Iraq is one of the aboriginal organizations to abode the all-embracing ecology bloom of a rebuilding nation to accord with baptize scarcity, acceptable farming, abuse and ecology restoration. In the rebuilding of a nation, does the ambiance accept agitation application aerial priority?

Alwash: I’d be lying if I told you yes. Some bodies appearance my activities as that of a fool. Bodies are attractive for jobs. Bodies are afraid about security. And actuality I am annoying about the environment. I accumulate adage to people, “This cannot booty a additional seat.” We cannot delay for the war to be over. We cannot delay for the politicians to achieve their differences. Moreover, the Marsh Arabs use the ambiance for their livelihoods. It’s a new account to put them aback to assignment in the marshes because that gives them a livelihood. You don’t accept to anguish about them abutting the rebellion. It’s accurate the ambiance is absolutely low in the antecedence of the government of Iraq. But I’m not activity to crop to the assessment that we accept to wait. Each one of us works to advice the nation in whatever accommodation they have. I am not a fighter. I am not a politician. I’m a timberline hugger and a appreciative one at that. And that’s how I accept to advice the nation of Iraq.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: The Marsh Arabs use the ambiance for their livelihood?

Alwash: What you accept to accept is the marshes are the cradle of civilization. On the edges of the marshes is breadth organized agronomics started. The aboriginal cities were congenital about the edges of the marshes. We accept accoutrements of birds, pigs and wildlife agriculture the accustomed resources. From the reeds of these marshes, bodies congenital their houses and fed their baptize buffalo. From the lakes, they fished and never had to abjure and plan for the winters. The alternate floods were the antecedent of face-lifting for the grasslands. About the edges of the marshes were the grasslands, the aboriginal farms in the history of mankind. For 7,000 years, the Sumerians and Marsh Arabs did not charge fertilizers. The civic flood cycles anesthetized on the salts that accumulated from dehydration and anesthetized new layers assimilate the farmlands about the marshes. They allocution today about acceptable development. The Sumerians accept accomplished acceptable development for the aftermost 7,000 years.

When I say Iraq, bodies say war, bodies say oil, bodies say sand, bodies say Saddam, bodies say weapons of accumulation destruction. To me, Iraq is majestic mountains, admirable valleys, amnion from the Tigris and Euphrates and this astonishing Eden in southern Iraq that actual few bodies apperceive about. Not alike Iraqis. You accept to accept Iraqis built-in afterwards the 1970s accept never apparent the marshes because Iraq has been in a accompaniment of war aback the 1980s aback Iraq attacked Iran. So this treasure, this apple ancestry site, is alien to alike Iraqis.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: One of your best high-profile projects is the apology of the southern Iraqi marshlands, which abounding advisers accept was the armpit of the Garden of Eden and the birthplace of Abraham. Was that one of the aboriginal projects you began assignment on?

Alwash: According to Genesis, four rivers augment Eden. The marshes are fed by the Tigris and Euphrates but additionally by two baby rivers from the Iranian mountains. In actuality in the abstraction of Creation, Noah’s flood is mentioned in the tablets. The adventure of Adam and Eve is in actuality in the marshes. Some bodies brainstorm this is the description of Eden. Who knows?

I like to fool myself into cerebration that this is the description of Eden but my geologist accomplishments makes me accept that these marshes did not abide in Iraq until the end of the Ice Age, which was about 11,000 thousand years ago. Afore that, the sea akin was about 450 anxiety added that it is today. That would accomplish the marshes about Oman at the aperture of the Arabian Sea. So the breadth of the marshes changes depending on sea level. The celebrated sea akin changes so it depends on the [interpretation] of Eden in the Bible.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: As a child, you acclimated to accompany your father, a baptize engineer, about these marshlands. Can you acquaint me about the change in the landscape?

Alwash: To me, marshes accept actual balmy memories in my heart. My dad, as an irrigation engineer, was a actual alive man like I am today. He didn’t accept time for me. One of the few times I had with him to myself is aback we went into the marshes with him in these baby boats. The burghal I grew up was not on the marshes but on the bend of the desert. It was about an hour abroad from the marshes. So it was absolutely amazing for me, as a adolescent kid, to go to an absurd baptize world. Instead of roads, you had copse and canals. You accept aerial reeds. In the shade, you could see breadth the baptize was clear. I accept actual alive memories of me overlooking the abandon of the boat, seeing fish, big fish. Every now and then, we would go to wide, accessible lakes breadth we abashed the birds. It angry out my ancestor consistently took a hunting gun. He was actual big at hunting birds. I didn’t aces up a adulation of hunting but I did aces up a admiration for the marshes from him.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: Do the marshes not attending like that anymore?

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Alwash: It does in some places. There are portions of the marshes that are drier than any added arid you’ve apparent and there are portions that are as admirable as I bethink them. It’s not a adventure of complete success but it’s not a adventure of afterlife either. Rather it’s a adventure of a archetype ascent out of afterlife and destruction, boring but surely.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: Saddam Hussein drained the marshlands to almost 10% of its aboriginal baptize capacity. How did he do that?

Alwash: What remained was about 700 aboveboard kilometers about the bound amid Iraq and Iran. It could’ve broiled out because baptize was advancing in from Iran, at atomic at the time. It went bottomward from about 12,000 to 15,000 aboveboard kilometers to 700 aboveboard kilometers, about abundant that is. It was absolutely a adverse project. His engineers biconcave six above rivers, including the Tigris and Euphrates. He went advanced and congenital aerial embankments about the Tigris and Euphrates so that in accident of floods, the accommodation of rivers would be big abundant to handle whatever floods are advancing in.

At that time, Iraq wasn’t accustomed to advertise a distinct bead of oil amid 1990 and 1996. Literally all the architecture accessories in the country was acclimated to dry the marshes because they couldn’t advertise oil.

The acumen they gave at that time was for agronomical recovery, to balance the marshlands as if Iraq was bare of agronomical lands. Those of us who knew Iraq knew the marshes were a ambush for the resistance. For them it was a abhorrence that the West would use the marshes as a abode to account accessible rebellion. So he went about antibacterial the abode breadth the Marsh Arabs and the attrition could calmly adumbrate from the “Sherriff of Nottingham.” I alarm the marshes our Sherwood Forest because that’s breadth the rebels go to adumbrate from the “Sherriff of Baghdad.”

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: Some tribes had alternate to the breadth and began to acknowledgment the baptize to the breadth themselves. How did they do that? Is that from the ability of demography affliction of the acreage for accoutrements of years?

Alwash: Well, you don’t accept to go to academy to apperceive how to irrigate. You aloof accept to be a farmer. These guys apperceive the hydraulics of the breadth bigger than I do. It’s accurate the apology action has been ad hoc and afterwards absolutely a massive plan abaft the scenes. We’ve appropriate breadth break can be strategically placed to acquiesce as abundant baptize from the Tigris and Euphrates into the marshes.

Now the botheration is we don’t accept abundant baptize from the Tigris and Euphrates. Article that was accident accompanying aback dehydration up the marshes was Turkey boarded on article alleged the gap project, which is a alternation of 33-meter dams, and what I apprehend are 1,000 abate dams. What happened is these dams authority the accumulated accommodation of the breeze of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in bristles to six years. We accept a little bit added baptize during the summer than we did afore but the aeon of floods accept gone. For the abutting 200 years, these dams get abounding up with dirt. Marshes are actual and reeds can abound in acrid water. But the biodiversity of the marshes is activity to change, that’s for sure.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: Attributes Iraq is the abandoned Iraqi accomplice of Waterkeeper’s Alliance. How did you go about ambience up such partnerships?

Alwash: We accept to prove sustainability and we’ve been actuality eight years so that’s affidavit in it of itself. We accept to prove we’re a autonomous organization. I aloof larboard the CEO position to become admiral of the lath so that’s happening. We accept to be associates based and we are in actuality associates based so it wasn’t that difficult.

Iraq has the marshes and they’re one of the best important marshlands in the world. It’s a above comatose atom for afoot birds. The Alliance was accessible from that point of view. We allotment a accepted goal. We aloof accept to adapt our adjustment of operations to fit the all-embracing approach and we’re accomplishing that.

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Of advance alive with NGOs is difficult. Allotment is a above botheration at this point of time. Allotment from bounded sources is difficult to get. We’re abutting oil companies about that.

Some bodies accept started calling us the Ministry of Attributes Iraq. Nevertheless, fundraising is acceptable added and added difficult to be honest. Sources of allotment are drying. It’s aloof not aloof the bread-and-butter recession in the U.S. and now in Europe. The abandoned antecedent of funds seems to be baby grants actuality and there. For me it’s acceptable added difficult to accession funds for the beyond projects. As a consequence, we accept confused from scientific-based studies that crave a lot of fieldwork and costs to advancement assignment and grassroots operations that crave a little bit beneath allotment but crave added acuteness and added groundwork. For the accomplished two years, we’ve had a added alive drive to recruit members. It’s not a NGO apple because NGOs are a added contempo affair due to the aggression of Iraq.

We accept done demonstrations. We accept done art. We accept done festivals to brainwash bodies about the artificial accoutrements and the debris and pollutants activity into the water. We are planning a actual big activity breadth we are activity to trace the celebrated barter routes application the Tigris. The point is we point to the connectivity amid the Tigris as a barter avenue amid the mountains of Kurdistan and the Gulf.

We are planning a fleet abutting bounce from a apple ancestry armpit that is activity to be abysmal as a aftereffect of a dam actuality congenital by Turkey. We’ll be amphibian bottomward the river application some acceptable watercrafts and bridge the border.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: Can you acquaint me about your accommodation to go aback to Iraq afterwards accepting a acknowledged career as a geotechnical adviser in southern California?

Alwash: I’ve had a few crazy decisions in my life. One of those decisions was to leave Iraq aback my career as an architect was added or beneath made. I was the top apprentice out of 400 students. All I had to do was accompany the Ba’ath affair to accomplish my career and that was article I couldn’t do. So I larboard my engineering [education] amid through and started all over again.

I was activity to be an bookish so that’s why I got my Ph.D. I approved teaching but I hated it. I was apparently the lousiest abecedary ever. One summer I bare money so I absitively to administer my trade. And assumption what? I fell in adulation with the fieldwork. Of course, success is its own punishment.

The minute I started accomplishing that, they brought me into the office. Within two years, I became arch of the group. Within bristles years, I became partner. I accustomed the aberration amid affluent and poor is buying and actuality an employee. Afresh aback you accomplish abundant money, you admit the American dream is not what activity is all about. Accepting money, accepting a nice house, accepting the American dream is nice — I’m not activity to beating it — but spiritually it’s empty.

Then the marshes came about and I began audition about it. In 2003, I came to a point I bare to accomplish a above accommodation in my life. Do I act like the blow of the Iraqis and case at the Iraqis central Iraq and should I appear aback and do article about it?

That was a boxy decision. It took about two months for me to make. The accuracy is if not for my wife blame me and cogent me to get a anchor and I should be assured in myself. I accept never approved annihilation in my activity and failed. And if I abort in this, it’s OK. I could appear aback and be an engineer. The accuracy is if I hadn’t been a accomplice in Pacific Soils, I wouldn’t accept had abundant money to assure my ancestors in case article happens to me. So I went aback to Iraq with the abstraction that I was activity to assignment for a year or a year and a half. And afresh I would go aback to my activity in the United States.

Well, it turns out Iraq is addictive. It’s array of like California in 1849. I’m addicted of adage “It’s the Wild West except it’s the East.” Not abandoned am I complex in the apology of the marshes but additionally the aegis of Iraqi cultural heritage. I had a adventitious to be a founding affiliate of the American University in Baghdad. I’ve absolutely been complex in a alternation of once-in-a lifetime projects that no man and no being should accept the appropriate to expect, not abandoned get. I’m aloof afraid that the aftermost nine to ten years accept been abounding with once-in-a-lifetime projects that accept been fantastic.

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Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: What is the approaching of Attributes Iraq?

Alwash: We still accept allotment for the abutting brace of years. I accept set money abreast and invested for them. We accept set up a tax-exempt alms alleged Attributes Iraq Foundation to accession money from the Gates Foundation and places like that. We accept the fleet activity that we’re adopting money for. My job is overextension seeds. Eventually, those seeds become a bush. Every now and afresh it becomes a tree. So you never know.

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leviathangourmet · 6 years ago

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In The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff argue that well-intentioned adults are unwittingly harming young people by raising them in ways that implicitly convey three untruths:

The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.

The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.

The Untruth of Us vs. Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

In their telling, the spread of these untruths, especially in the middle and upper classes, helps to explain a spike in mental-health problems among young people and recent tumult on the campuses of highly selective colleges. But if parents and educators change course, they argue, they can raise happier, healthier kids who’ll turn into better citizens.

I liked the book, which has its origins in a 2015 cover story in this magazine. The updated thesis, when fleshed out across detailed chapters, struck me as clearly stated, logically argued, and plausibly true—and the proposed remedies struck me as highly unlikely to do harm.

“Whatever your identity, background, or political ideology,” the authors advise young people, “you will be happier, healthier, stronger, and more likely to succeed in pursuing your own goals” if you do three things:

Seek out challenges “rather than eliminating or avoiding everything that ‘feels unsafe.’”

Free yourself from cognitive distortions “rather than always trusting your initial feelings.”

Take a generous view of other people, and look for nuance, “rather than assuming the worst about people within a simplistic us-versus-them morality.”

They even include practical advice for conveying those lessons in child-rearing. How significant are the ills that they identify relative to all the others that confront higher education or young people generally? I don’t know. But their prescriptions seem sensible, low-cost, likely to help some, and unlikely to prevent other reformers from addressing other problems.

Some critics have praised their work. Thomas Chatterton Williams reviewedthe book favorably in The New York Times. Wesleyan University President Michael Roth’s Washington Post review seemed to endorse the book’s advice in its last paragraph.

Lots of folks who responded to the book more critically argued that it gave short shrift to the thing they regarded as the most pressing problem in society or on campus. Few challenged its core arguments, whatever they were worth.

But I wanted to hear from critics of their central thesis. That’s how I found myself reading Moira Weigel’s review in The Guardian, having seen folks on social media flagging it as a devastating takedown. “Moira Weigel eviscerates with ease ‘The Coddling of the American Mind,’” the biologist Stephen Currywrote. The sociologist Kate Cairns asserted that the review “systematically demolishes” the book, while another observer characterized the review as “an excellent shredding.”

Imagine my surprise when even that review contained a passage that appeared to grant the potential value of the advice at the book’s very core. Weigel wrote:

Despite the title, which suggests cultural or civilisational diagnosis, the checklists and worksheets distributed throughout this book make clear that its genre is self-help. The tips it contains may benefit upper middle class parents. They may benefit students from minority or working class backgrounds who arrive on elite campuses to find that, despite good intentions, those campuses have not fully prepared for them.

It’s the sort of passage that would usually appear in a positive review. It is no small thing to identify a problem that harms families from different economic classes and to offer tips that may help folks in each to help themselves.

But as it turns out, that passage is a brief aside, anomalous for its substantive assessment of the book’s thesis. The review’s first paragraph complains that the book doesn’t discuss financial hardship among college students (though the authors trace the mental-health trends that worry them back to high school and to the wealthiest families, not the ones struggling to pay tuition). An entire section complains that the book’s style “wants above all to be reasonable. Lukianoff and Haidt include adverb after adverb to telegraph how well they have thought things through.” Is it bad to want to be reasonable? Have they thought things through? The merits of such substantive questions are rarely Weigel’s focus, though. Many critiques are implied rather than stated, rendering them unfalsifiable.

The balance of the review is scathingly negative not in its arguments—a few pop up along the way, some concerning peripheral matters—but in its ad hominem attacks and other rhetoric disguised as argument as though its mere trappings confer heft. An argument can be strong or weak, civil or ill-mannered, calm or heated, edifying or misleading. Even the most frustrating arguments, though, offer readers more than the tropes pervading this frustrating review, and other journalistic work of the same genre: Let us call them Idioms of Non-Argument.

The Guardian review is a useful illustrative example in part because its entire mode is foreshadowed in the headline that announces the article:

The Coddling of the American Mind review – how elite US liberals have turned rightwards

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s book sets out to rescue students from ‘microaggressions’ and identity politics. But perhaps they merely resist change that might undermine them

That display copy says: Never mind the merits of the book’s thesis—what’s important here, fellow leftists, is where the authors fall on a left-right ideological spectrum and what psychological factors may be motivating them. What’s a truth proposition when there’s an ongoing culture war to fight?

What unfolds over the body of the review isn’t quite a character assassination of the authors so much as a series of premeditated assaults.

The book is utterly in keeping with the longtime professional interests of both authors, and closely tied to Greg Lukianoff’s personal experience using cognitive behavioral therapy to fight serious depression. But Weigel dismissively speculates that they wrote the book “perhaps, because an article that they published in The Atlantic went viral.” Is she implying that the subject doesn’t justify book-length treatment? Some other dig? Is the line merely included to convey contempt?

Both authors have long records of producing work that is intellectually honest; neither happens to be an ideological conservative. Yet over the course of the review, Weigel compares them not only to Allan Bloom, but also to Dinesh D’Souza, and then, using guilt-by-association tactics, to the alt-right:

Hints of elective affinities between elite liberalism and the “alt-right” have been evident for a while now. The famous essay that Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos wrote in 2016, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” cites Haidt approvingly. At one point Lukianoff and Haidt rehearse a narrative about Herbert Marcuse that has been a staple of white nationalist conspiracy theories about “cultural Marxism” for decades.

Nassim Taleb, whose book Antifragile Haidt and Lukianoff credit with one of their core beliefs and cite repeatedly as inspiration, is a fixture of the far right “manosphere” that gathers on Reddit/pol and returnofkings.com.

The commonality raises questions about the proximity of their enthusiasm for CBT to the vogue for “Stoic” self-help in the Red Pill community, founded on the principle that it is men, rather than women, who are oppressed by society. So, too, does it raise questions about the discipline of psychology – how cognitive and data-driven turns in that field formed Haidt and his colleagues Pinker and Jordan Peterson.

Are Haidt and Lukianoff correct or incorrect about Herbert Marcuse? Is Antifragile a good book? Is cognitive behavioral therapy a worthwhile approach? Is there wisdom to glean from the Stoics or the discipline of psychology? Weigel offers the reader no arguments of substance—just the Idioms of Non-Arguments that all of those things raise questions because ostensibly bad people are tenuously associated with each of them. God help Kevin Bacon if he’s ever the subject of a similarly crafted profile.

The apotheosis of Weigel’s vilification tactics comes a bit later. In the book, the authors recount what they regard as examples of “catastrophizing” on college campuses. But the authors also go out of their way to point out that today’s college students are sometimes behaving totally rationally when they perceive a threat to their physical safety. Among other examples, they flag an apparent rise in hate crimes, a college student’s online threat to “shoot every black person” at the University of Missouri soon after Dylann Storm Roof’s neo-Nazi murder spree, and the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia.

They write:

Students of color facing ongoing threats to their safety, and seeing frequent reports of threats elsewhere, are not new phenomena; the history of race in America is a history of discrimination and intimidation, intertwined with a history of progress. And yet, this new wave of racial intimidation may be particularly upsetting because of recent progress … The shock of Trump’s victory must have been particularly disillusioning for many black students and left-leaning women. Between the president’s repeated racial provocations and the increased visibility of neo-Nazis and their ilk, it became much more plausible than it had been in a long time that “white supremacy,” even using a narrow definition, was not just a relic of the distant past.

Judge for yourselves whether passages like that are fairly or unfairly characterized in the part of Weigel’s review where she likens the authors to a character in a recent Hollywood film, who kidnaps black people and steals their bodies:

Like Mark Lilla, Steven Pinker and Francis Fukuyama, who have all condemned identity politics in recent books, [Haidt and Lukianoff] are careful to distinguish themselves from the unwashed masses— those who also hate identity politics and supposedly brought us Donald Trump.

In fact, the data shows that it was precisely the better-off people in poor places, perhaps not so unlike these famous professors in the struggling academy, who elected Trump; but never mind. I believe that these pundits, like the white suburban Dad in the horror film Get Out, would have voted for Barack Obama a third time.

Cheap shots like that serve no purpose other than to prejudice readers, and bear not at all on the quality of the book’s ideas. (And not that it matters, but famous professors in the struggling academy are, contra the inapt analogy to better-off people in poor places, a demographic that surely voted overwhelmingly against Trump.)

Vilification and guilt by association are not the only Idioms of Non-Argument. Misrepresentation is another.

Consider the treatment of intersectionality in the book. The authors sketch the framework as it was articulated by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, now the director of the Center on Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at Columbia University, and they favorably quote an explanatory passage from Intersectionality by Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge.

The authors write:

Intersectionality is a theory based on several insights that we believe are valid and useful: power matters, members of groups sometimes act cruelly or unjustly to preserve their power, and people who are members of multiple identity groups can face various forms of disadvantage in ways that are often invisible to others. The point of using the terminology of “intersectionalism,” as Crenshaw said in her 2016 TED Talk, is that “where there’s no name for a problem, you can’t see a problem, and when you can’t see a problem, you pretty much can’t solve it.”

Only then do they add:

Our purpose here is not to critique the theory itself. It is, rather, to explore the effects that certain interpretations of intersectionality may now be having on college campuses. The human mind is prepared for tribalism, and these interpretations of intersectionality have the potential to turn tribalism way up. These interpretations of intersectionality teach people to see bipolar dimensions of privilege and oppression as ubiquitous in social interactions. It’s not just about employment or other opportunities, and it’s not just about race and gender.

Their argument is that while the originators of intersectionality and careful adherents of the theory offer important insights, some less nuanced interpretations are misleading students about reality by training them to see the world “in terms of intersecting bipolar axes where one end of each axis is marked privilege and the other is oppression.”

By way of illustration they cite teaching tools like this one:

They reason:

Since “privilege” is defined as the “power to dominate” and to cause “oppression,” these axes are inherently moral dimensions. The people on top are bad, and the people below the line are good. This sort of teaching seems likely to encode the Untruth of Us Versus Them directly into students’ cognitive schemas: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

Perhaps their reasoning is flawed or their concerns are not borne out by the facts. But how does Weigel distill that very carefully qualified argument?

For all their self-conscious reasonableness, and their promises that CBT can master negative emotion, Lukianoff and Haidt often seem slightly hurt. They argue that intersectionality theory divides people into good and bad. But the scholars they quote do not use this moral language; those scholars talk about privilege and power. Bad is how these men feel when someone suggests they have had it relatively easy – and that others have had to lose the game that was made for men like them to win.

Once again, there is a truth proposition, like Can CBT help master negative emotion? But rather than use the best available evidence to adjudicate something so plainly relevant to the book, Weigel casts doubt on the proposition in the reader’s mind by claiming that the authors “seem slightly hurt,” citing no particular passage, as if that should bear on our faith in cognitive behavioral therapy.

She then offers a misleading account of their beliefs about intersectionality—they are explicit that neither intersectional theory nor the scholars they quote commit the Us vs. Them fallacy—and concludes by asserting how they feel (which is to say, how her ideology tells her that they must surely feel) in a hypothetical situation that she made up.

Later, Weigel writes:

Predictably, Lukianoff and Haidt cite Martin Luther King as a spokesperson for “good” identity politics—the kind that focuses on common humanity rather than differences. But there was a reason the speech they quote was called “I Have a Dream” and addressed to people marching for jobs.

Keeping faith with the ideal that all humans are created equal means working to create conditions under which we might, in fact, thrive equally. In the absence of this commitment to making the dream come true, insisting that everyone must act as if we are already in the promised land can feel a lot like trolling.

“Can feel a lot like trolling” is dense with weasel words, but what’s more notable here is the clear implication that Haidt and Lukianoff insist “that everyone must act as if we are already in the promised land.”

Later, Weigel writes, “Enjoying the luxury of living free from discrimination and domination, they therefore insist that the crises moving young people to action are all in their heads.” No, they do not so insist! Lukianoff leads an organization—the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education—that constantly advocates on behalf of students facing unjust discrimination, and battles administrators who violate their civil rights. And their book explicitly states this about social-justice activism:

College students today are living in an extraordinary time, and many have developed an extraordinary passion for social justice. They are identifying and challenging injustices that have been well documented and unsuccessfully addressed for too long. In the 1960s, students fought for many causes that, from the vantage point of today, were clearly noble causes … Students today are fighting for many causes that we believe are noble, too, including ending racial injustices in the legal system and in encounters with the police; providing equal education and other opportunities for everyone, regardless of circumstances at birth; and extinguishing cultural habits that encourage or enable sexual harassment and gender inequalities. On these and many other issues, we think student protesters are on the “right side of history,” and we support their goals.

Despite that passage, Weigel goes on to write, “The authors cite the ‘folk wisdom’ ‘Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.’ They call this attitude ‘pragmatic.’ The prospect that a group of children might get together to build a new road themselves is not one they can countenance.”

The authors themselves, though, believe they are offering advice to young people that will make them more likely to succeed in building a new road.

That brings us to yet another Idiom of Non-Argument: reduction to privilege anxiety. Forget about counterarguments that address the merits of a proposition. Simply assert that its advocates fear losing their privileged status, and obviously acted in order to thwart the rise of marginalized people, and you will discredit their project without having to grapple with it at all.

Thus:

… the consensus that has ruled liberal institutions for the past two decades is cracking up. The media has made much of the leftward surge lifting Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But as this new left-liberalism gains strength, a growing number of white men who hold power in historically liberal institutions seem to be breaking right.

As more and more Americans, especially young Americans, express enthusiasm for democratic socialism, a new right-liberalism answers. Its emerging canon first defined itself in reaction to new social movements highlighting the structural or systemic elements of identity-based oppression. By deriding those movements as “clicktivism” or mere “hashtags,” right-liberal pundits also, implicitly, expressed frustration at how web platforms were breaking up their monopoly on discourse.

One wonders: What makes the book’s thesis right-leaning? How has Haidt or Lukianoff broken rightward? Does democratic socialism bear on their subject matter in any way? If Lukianoff is motivated by frustration at web platforms for breaking up an elite monopoly on discourse, why does the organization he leads fight to expand the ability of leftist college students and faculty members to post their views without punishment on blogs and social media? And what, precisely, is it about their claim that students are prone to catastrophizing that preserves privilege? A review operating in the mode of argument and ideas would grapple with such questions rather than begging or eliding them.

The Idioms of Non-Argument reward those adept at using book reviews as a chance to denigrate ideological adversaries, ascribing to them motives that fit their in-group’s preferred narrative. But they do little for readers.

The Guardian’s review is terribly unfair to The Coddling of the American Mind’s two authors, but that is of comparatively little consequence. If the book’s thesis is correct and its insights are actually adopted, it could help a lot of people; if it is incorrect in a way most people fail to appreciate, it could do harm or impede a search for better solutions. That’s why it would be valuable to have a rigorous critique from a skeptical reader. Put another way, testing the truth of its claims really matters.

But Weigel’s look at the book—perhaps the most prominent skeptical review it received—spent little time arguing about its actual claims. Instead, it focused on the attributes of its authors and how they might be invoked to reify the progressive left’s notions of what ostensibly motivated them to write, or who has the better overarching ideological narrative to advance. This is the problem with the Idioms of Non-Argument. They don’t leave us any closer to understanding.

#ideas #regressive left #authoritarian left #social justice #feminism #article #identity politics #progressivism #progressive left #archive

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