Fox Lies!

This is quite funny:

Two Smart Things I Read in the Current Issue of Dissent

Michael Kazin on what the decline of unions has meant for the white working class:

"Of all the groups needed to forge a winning progressive coalition, white working-class people are the only ones who lack sturdy institutions that promote egalitarian ends. African Americans have the churches, the NAACP, and other groups, both formal and informal. Latinos have organizations, both secular and religious, that defend immigrant rights and push for greater power in the larger society and culture. Middle- and upper-class liberals have universities and friendly media, from the Times and NPR to such Web sites as the Huffington Post and Daily Kos. Lesbians and gay men have the Human Rights Campaign, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and a variety of local and regional networks...[In the absence of unions] white working-class men and women need new kinds of institutions that can speak to their discontents and offer compelling alternatives to the politics of anger and nostalgia...Don't mourn, organize."

And Joanne Barkan on the narrow vision (and specious claims) of education reformers:

"To justify their campaign, ed reformers [like Bill Gates] repeat, mantra-like, that U.S. students are trailing far behind their peers in other nations, that U.S. public schools are failing. The claims are specious. Two of the three major international tests...break down student scores according to the poverty rate in each school...Students in U.S. schools where the poverty rate was less than 10 percent ranked first in reading, first in science, and third in math...But as the poverty rate rose higher, students ranked lower...Twenty percent of all U.S. schools have poverty rates over 75 percent. The average ranking of American schools reflect this. The problem is not public schools; it is poverty. And as dozens of studies have shown, the gap in cognitive, physical, and social development between children in poverty and middle-class children is set by age three."
           

Behaving Badly

              
"When [people] are confronted with difficulties, I think they deal with them amazingly well. I was struck by that in the war. People get cross, but then very quickly they would devise something -- they are extremely inventive. I'm sure people are at their best when times are hard. And then if you give people everything, they start behaving very badly. 

Quite a pity."

The English philosopher Mary Midgley, in conversation with Sheila Heti.
               

Trailer for Marry or Burn

                
A lovely trailer for my friend Valerie's collection of short stories, Marry or Burn:



    
                    

White on Shields

          
Curtis White provides intelligent perspective on David Shields' Reality Hunger.