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☆ Opinion | What I’d Assign to Today’s College Students
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-03 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

My weekend column used this season of campus protest as an opportunity to discuss the evolution of Columbia’s core curriculum, whose readings on contemporary politics, I argued, usefully distill the core of contemporary progressivism while leaving a great deal else by the wayside. I included some examples of ideas and writers that the present Columbia syllabus leaves out, but I wanted to give a little more attention to the question of what a supplement to the progressive approach would look like. If you were trying to bring a great-books program all the way up to the present and you wanted to widen the ideological aperture beyond Columbia’s progressive focus, what would you have your students read? One answer is that the very idea of being up-to-date is a mistake because readings oriented explicitly to the present are everywhere in education and the point of a core curriculum is to stand a little bit apart, to connect you to the riches of the past — riches that have been sifted in a way that just isn’t possible with the publications and arguments of the past few generations. I have some sympathy with this idea: If I were designing a core humanities program for high school students (not that I’ve ever thought about this or anything), my strong impulse would be to just hit “stop” at World War II or 1965 and decline to make any judgment on what will be remembered as the great books of the recent past and present.

Persons: ” Locations: Columbia

☆ San Francisco’s ‘Twitter Menace’ or True Believer? He Might Be Both.
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-29 | by ( Heather Knight | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Under cathedral ceilings and soaring stained glass windows, Garry Tan clutched a microphone as he greeted a crowd of political centrists, including San Francisco’s mayor, local prosecutors and police brass. “Welcome to the church of turning San Francisco around!” said Mr. Tan at a fund-raiser he was hosting for local Asian American female political candidates just days before the Super Tuesday elections this month. For a man evangelizing for change in San Francisco, owning a condo that used to be part of a church comes in handy. Last year, he scooped up the $3.95 million space near the city’s palm-tree-studded Dolores Park to hold events like this one — events he hopes will shift San Francisco from its idealistic progressivism toward nuts-and-bolts centrism. Mr. Tan’s day job is chief executive of Y Combinator, the accelerator for tech start-ups that has helped create household names including Airbnb, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart and Reddit.

Persons: Garry Tan clutched, ”, Tan, Y Organizations: Francisco’s Locations: San Francisco, Dolores, Francisco

☆ Shafiqah Hudson, Who Fought Trolls on Social Media, Dies at 46
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-05 | by ( Penelope Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Shafiqah Hudson was looking for a job in early June of 2014, toggling between Twitter and email, when she noticed an odd hashtag that was surging on the social media platform: #EndFathersDay. The posters claimed to be Black feminists, but they had laughable handles like @NayNayCan’tStop and @CisHate and @LatrineWatts; they declared they wanted to abolish Father’s Day because it was a symbol of patriarchy and oppression, among other inanities. They didn’t seem like real people, Ms. Hudson thought, but parodies of Black women, spouting ridiculous propositions. As Ms. Hudson told Forbes magazine in 2018, “Anybody with half the sense God gave a cold bowl of oatmeal could see that these weren’t feminist sentiments.”But the hashtag kept trending, roiling the Twitter community, and the conservative news media picked it up, citing it as an example of feminism gone seriously off the rails, and “a neat illustration of the cultural trajectory of progressivism,” as Dan McLaughlin, a senior writer at National Review, tweeted at the time. Tucker Carlson devoted an entire segment of his show to lampooning it.

Persons: Shafiqah Hudson, Hudson, ”, Dan McLaughlin, Tucker Carlson Organizations: Twitter, Forbes, National

☆ Opinion | Has Latin America Found Its Trump?
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-22 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

The election of Javier Milei, a wild-haired showboating weirdo with five cloned mastiffs and a habit of psychic communion with their departed pet of origin, as president of Argentina has inspired a lot of discussion about the true nature of right-wing populism in our age of general discontent. Milei has many of the signifiers of a Trumpian politics: the gonzo energy, the criticism of corrupt elites and the rants against the left, the support from social and religious conservatives. At the same time, on economic policy he is much more of a doctrinaire libertarian than a Trump-style mercantilist or populist, a more extreme version of Barry Goldwater and Paul Ryan rather than a defender of entitlement spending and tariffs. You can interpret the Trump-Milei divergence in several ways. Another reading is that, yes, the policy is somewhat negotiable but there are actually deep ideological affinities between right-wing economic nationalism and what might be called paleolibertarianism, despite their disagreement on specific issues.

Persons: Javier Milei, Milei, gonzo, Barry Goldwater, Paul Ryan, Trumpism, Ross Perot, Ron Paul Organizations: Peronist, Trump Locations: Argentina

☆ Opinion | Progressives Aren’t Liberal
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-16 | by ( Pamela Paul | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Remember when “liberal” was a dirty word? In a presidential primary debate in 2007, Hillary Clinton called herself instead a “modern progressive.” She avoided the term “liberal” again in 2016. But the way “liberal” is being used now is more confounding than ever. Never Trump conservatives tout their bona fides as liberals in the classical, 19th century sense of the word, in part to distinguish themselves from hard-right Trumpists. Others use “liberal” and “progressive” interchangeably, even as what progressivism means in practice today is often anything but liberal — or even progressive, for that matter.

Persons: ”, Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich’s, GOPAC, Hillary Clinton, Gallup pollsters, Trump

☆ Opinion | Conservative Thinkers Didn’t Create Trumpism
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-10 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

There is a story that professional ideamongers like to tell about political history that gives pride of place to their own work. It’s a story that usually begins with some small tribe of writers or intellectuals who come up with a set of theories that describe the world in a new way. This fall, I’ve been co-teaching a course at Yale University, the Crisis of Liberalism, which looks for the roots of today’s disturbances in long-running debates about the liberal order. And one of my thoughts is that both of them break, in different ways, with the familiar narrative about intellectuals and democracy I’ve just sketched. With wokeness, you have a movement in which the intelligentsia really matters but democratic politics much less so.

Persons: Reagan, Clinton’s, George W, Myron Magnet, Marvin Olasky, Barack Obama’s, I’ve, we’ve, progressivism, Obama Organizations: New, The Washington Monthly, The New, Yale University, American Locations: The New Republic

☆ Opinion | The Israel-Hamas War Will Reshape Western Politics
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-01 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +6 min

In that fairly distant past, the politics of Israel-Palestine broke down into alignments that were familiar and decades-old. On the pro-Israel side in the U.S. were three broad factions: Zionist Democrats, centrist and liberal; neoconservative hawks; and evangelical Christians. But 2023 may be remembered as the moment when Arab and Muslim discontent began to really matter inside Western countries as well. And the tacit alliance between this diaspora and a secular, feminist, gay-affirming Western progressivism — “Islamo-gauchisme” in the French phrase — raises big questions for both progressives and conservative Muslims about who is using whom, and how the Western left and Western Islam might ultimately co-evolve. This isn’t the George W. Bush-era version, with its world-bestriding confidence in American power and its hawkish grand strategy.

Persons: It’s, —, Pat Buchananite populists, Islamicization, Aris Roussinos, Emmanuel Macron’s, it’s, George W, Bush Organizations: Israel, Zionist Democrats, Democratic, Channel, Hamas, Likud Locations: Israel, Gaza, Palestine, U.S, Western Islam, Europe, British, Britain, progressivism

Purbasha Roy held her 9-year-old daughter’s hand and pointed toward the towering art installation: blooming pink buds symbolizing embryos, menstrual cups shaped to form a bouquet, fallopian tubes descending from corners of the ceiling. The work, part of a makeshift pavilion to worship the Hindu goddess Durga, was designed to break taboos in India about menstruation. And it had a clear target: A half-man, half-bull demon at Durga’s feet, an organizer explained to Ms. Roy and others, represented the “moral police” — India’s patriarchal society. The pavilion was one of hundreds, many politically pointed, that dotted Kolkata during a five-day festival called the Durga Puja, an event that brings this muggy, sleepy city alive each year as if jolted by a high-voltage current. Part Mardi Gras, part Christmas, the festival, which ended on Tuesday, is the most important religious celebration for Hindus in this part of eastern India.

Persons: Purbasha Roy, Durga, Roy, ” Locations: India, Kolkata

☆ Opinion | Why Big Money Can’t Easily Change Campus Politics
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-20 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +11 min

First, Jewish donors probably can’t win the identity politics game. But this strategy also has inherent limits, insofar as the free speech protected by campus administrators is only as diverse as the people who are speaking. Which brings us to the second point for would-be reshapers of the university: If you can’t influence faculty hiring and tenure, you may be wasting your money. Will the University of Pennsylvania miss the collection of major donors who’ve denounced the school in the past week? But not with the goal of using such student groups as a means of conflict with the administration or the faculty.

Persons: Jason Willick, specter, Willick, you’re, Donald Trump, there’s, Bernie, Sanders, they’re, who’ve, Leland Stanford ”, Rather, Michael Brendan Dougherty, Chris Caldwell, Anthony Grafton, Anthony Lane, Arthur Brooks, George Orwell, Zvi Mowshowitz, Keith Phipps, Martin Scorsese’s “, Foucault, — Maxi, ” Organizations: The Washington Post, Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, Big, Hillel, Penn, — Locations: The Washington, State, Israel, tokenism, Harvard, Poland, Foucault’s

☆ Opinion | ‘A Perfect Storm for the Ambitious, Extreme Ideologue’
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-20 | by ( Thomas B. Edsall | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +4 min

In this context, many partisan elites have political incentives to take, or at least refrain from pushing back on, relatively extreme partisan positions. Those I queried repeatedly cited the role of the two-party winner-take-all system in exacerbating polarization in this country. Iyengar cited two other “big differences between the U.S. and the other industrialized democracies”:The U.S. is the outlier, in the sense that we are the one case without a major public broadcaster. In other words, our democracy has always been contested and political polarization has often been intense. Foner shares the view that the two-party system fosters polarization, noting that “it may even be that the political system produces polarization, even though on many issues Americans may not be as divided as appears on the surface.”

Persons: ”, Malka, Shanto Iyengar, Iyengar, “, ” Eric Foner, —, Foner Organizations: Stanford, Coalition, U.S Locations: United States, Covid, U.S, ’, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Japan, Columbia

☆ Opinion | Is ‘Peak Woke’ Behind Us or Ahead?
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-16 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The attempts to use “woke capital” to effect progressive change have met strong resistance, and corporations are losing enthusiasm for a vanguard role. Meanwhile, there is more intellectual and political energy in anti-wokeness now, evident not just in backlash in red states but in this autumn’s roster of new books, which includes critiques of social justice ideology from the socialist left, the center left and the right. The Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action has created new legal roadblocks for Kendi-style progressivism. The mood in elite journalism is less ideologically committed and more skeptical and critical. These exemplify a different aftermath for “peak woke” — not the ideology’s retreat, but its consolidation and entrenchment.

Persons: Trump, Jack Dorsey, —, ”, “, Michael Powell’s, ” — Organizations: Antiracist Research, Boston University

☆ Opinion | A Progressive James Bond Is Proof of American Cultural Imperialism
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-06 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

(The cruelty and neglect at these schools was real but the specific claims about graves at the B.C. school have outrun the so-far scanty evidence.) The first is a general tendency of provincial leaders to go overboard in establishing their solidarity and identification with the elites of the imperial core. The second point is the role of secularization and de-Christianization, which are further advanced in the British Isles and Canada than in the United States. Then the third point is that smaller countries with smaller elites can find it easier to enforce ideological conformity than countries that are more sprawling and diverse.

Persons: Ed West, it’s, tastemakers, Aris Roussinos, ” Organizations: Canadian, “, British Isles, Christianity’s, Republican, Laurentian Locations: Canada, British Columbia, British, Ottawa, London, Rome, Europe, United States, Britain, America, Westminster

Laura Marqués has never been much interested in soccer. She doesn’t watch the Spanish league games or know the names of the players. She didn’t even watch the Spanish women’s team win the World Cup final this month. “We’ve been talking about soccer a lot this week,” Ms. Marqués, a 26-year-old lawyer, said as she walked in downtown Zaragoza with a friend. Some commentators have taken to calling it Spain’s #MeToo moment.

Persons: Laura Marqués, “ We’ve, ” Ms, Marqués, ”, “, Luis Rubiales, Jennifer Hermoso Organizations: Spanish, Spanish women’s Locations: Zaragoza, Spain

“Obviously, the little girls that are going to see Barbie, none of them are going to have any idea what those dashes mean,” Mr. Cruz told Fox News. “This is really designed for the eyes of the Chinese censors, and they’re trying to kiss up to the Chinese Communist Party because they want to make money selling the movie.”The response on the right is not a one-off. For a generation of conservative personalities, weaned on Andrew Breitbart’s much-cited observation that “politics is downstream of culture,” Hollywood and other ostensibly liberal bastions are to be confronted head-on, lest their leanings ensnare young voters without a fight. Recent years have provided ample evidence, some on the right say, for a “go woke, go broke” view that progressivism is bad business. (Of course, there is no way to trace exactly what determines any movie’s success or failure, and many observers adhere to the screenwriter William Goldman’s axiom: “Nobody knows anything.”)“Barbie” cannot be said to have gone broke.

Persons: Mr, Cruz, Andrew Breitbart’s, ensnare, ”, Mario, Halle Bailey, ’, William Goldman’s, Barbie, Rich Cromwell, ” Kyle Smith Organizations: Fox News, Chinese Communist Party, Mario Bros, Black, Wall Street

☆ Opinion | Why I’m Not a Liberal Catholic
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-23 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

An initial problem with liberal Catholicism, then, is that in the Francis era it has often ceased to make sense in light of itself. When suddenly invested with real power within the church, the liberal tendency has often betrayed its own core insights, trading longstanding arguments about the limits of ecclesiastical authority for a papal positivism that cheers the raw exercise of power as long as liberal ends are served. But as experienced today, in the battles of the Francis era, the liberal tendency doesn’t seem open to secular or liberal or non-Catholic arguments as much it seems to be steered, and therefore defined, by the demands of an increasingly post-Christian culture. Put another way, it’s perpetually difficult to distinguish the specifically Catholic aspect of the liberal Catholic program — meaning the thing that distinguishes its agenda from a generic post-Sexual Revolution progressivism, the things it wants to do that don’t all just converge on making the church more like a friendly secular N.G.O. Secular N.G.O.s can get things right, of course, and there’s nothing un-Catholic about arguing that the church should be more aligned with liberal opinion on specific policy issues — more publicly environmentalist, say, or more concerned about the rights of migrants.

Persons: Francis, papalism, we’re, — Organizations: Vatican Council, Catholic

☆ He Was a Revolutionary at the Birth of a Nation. Does Anyone Care?
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-14 | by ( Alex Traub | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

“Ma?” Mr. Khan called. Mr. Khan’s family had already held his funeral. Bangladeshi politics lost the secular progressivism of Mr. Khan’s poem and split into bitter divisions. Mr. Khan became a rebel again, only to find himself imprisoned and tortured. Years passed, and Mr. Khan became a well-connected businessman with the reputation of a war hero.

Persons: Khan, Mr, Khan’s, Rahman Locations: India, Pakistani, Bangladesh

☆ The ‘Gilded Age’ Myth, Then and Now
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-08 | by ( Phil Gramm | Amity Shlaes | ) www.wsj.com time to read: +1 min

Today the roles have reversed, with Democrats refusing to negotiate, preferring to smear the 'MAGA Republican' opposition as 'extreme.' Images: Zuma Press/AFP via Getty Images Composite: Mark KellyEverything old is new again, and blaming the rich for America’s woes is no exception. That era has been damned with a pejorative label: the Gilded Age. That thinking has re-emerged in the Democratic Party today, though this time it has its sights set on our economy’s tech giants. The wealth created by industrialization, modern finance and communication has reduced poverty, elevated material well-being and promoted general prosperity.

☆ Opinion | Why Joe Biden Needs a Primary Challenger
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-08 | by ( Peter Beinart | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

To understand why progressives should challenge Joe Biden in the upcoming Democratic presidential primary, remember what happened during the last one. Mr. Sanders’s supporters joined Mr. Biden’s allies in working groups that crafted a common agenda on the economy, education, health care, criminal justice, immigration and climate change. From those task forces came what Barack Obama called “the most progressive platform of any major-party nominee in history.” And that progressivism continued into Mr. Biden’s presidency. With rare exceptions, Mr. Biden hasn’t challenged the hawkish conventional wisdom that permeates Washington; he’s embodied it. America’s new cold war against Beijing may enjoy bipartisan support in Washington, but it doesn’t enjoy bipartisan support in the United States.

☆ Opinion | Why Journalists Have More Freedom Than Professors
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-05 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

The new cultural liberalism in the media reflects the views of senior staff members and is opposed by affinity groups and young employees. That’s important, because surveys consistently find that “woke” values are twice as prevalent among younger leftists than among older leftists. Over eight in 10 undergraduates at 150 leading U.S. colleges say speakers who say B.L.M. What’s more, seven in 10 think a professor who says something that students find offensive should be reported to their university. First, the media is, by definition, an outward-facing, audience-driven enterprise, dependent on some kind of mass market for its viability.

☆ Trump's plan to build 10 new American cites is a right-wing dream of 'trad havens for beautiful families,' the internet's favorite architecture critic says
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-23 | by ( Eliza Relman | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +8 min

Architecture critic Kate Wagner says Trump's plan to build "freedom cities" is nothing new. There's a whole eco-system of classical architecture proponents on Twitter with Roman statues as their avatars who decry modernism. The order made classical architecture — think columns, marble, symmetry — the preferred style for federal buildings. Wagner says Trump's embrace of classical architecture echoes the right-wing war on modernism that began in the 1980s. "For some reason, there also emerged alongside of those advocates a group of people who started to make statements that people neurologically prefer classical architecture."

☆ Florida Shows How to Combat Woke Indoctrination on Campus
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-09 | by ( Joshua Rauh | ) www.wsj.com time to read: +1 min

In the battle for open inquiry on campus, two factions have emerged on the side of free speech. The first camp consists of professors and administrators who consider themselves the true defenders of academic freedom. In the second camp, state legislators seek to restore academic freedom by outlawing advocacy of woke progressivism in schools. This camp views such ideological teaching as discriminatory and outside the bounds of taxpayer-funded education. A simmering conflict between these two camps has now burst into the open over Florida’s Stop W.O.K.E.

☆ The response to HBO's 'The Last of Us' shows homophobia is still a major issue in gaming
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-04 | by ( Travis Clark | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Homophobia has long been an issue in the gaming community and larger fandoms. HBO's series is based on the 2013 video game of the same name and is set 20 years after a fungal pandemic leaves the world in ruins. Sunday's episode, titled "Long, Long Time," depicts a gay romance between Bill, played by Nick Offerman, and Frank, played by Murray Bartlett. Echoes of "gamergate" could be seen in criticism against "The Last of Us Part II," the 2020 video game sequel, in which Ellie's sexuality is further explored. On Metacritic, it has a 5.8 user score, while the first game received a 9.2 user rating.

But add a candidate representing the Bernie Sanders wing of the party, Ro Khanna, and a living legend who got her start with the Black Panthers and would become the only Black woman in the Senate, Barbara Lee — now you're talking about a California Senate race for the ages. Reaching voters isn’t easy in California, with a population approaching 40 million and a land mass bigger than that of many countries. But the race will affect the future of the Democratic Party, both in California and beyond. “An appointment would be a way to make sure that this country has the essential voice of a Black woman,” Allison said. And I don’t see and I don’t understand why it isn’t happening.”Meanwhile, as Lee watches Feinstein, Bernieworld is watching Lee.

☆ The scarcity economy has made life harder on Americans. Some are calling for an 'abundance agenda' to make college, housing, and healthcare more affordable.
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-15 | by ( Jacob Zinkula | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +9 min

The costs of healthcare, housing, childcare, and college have soared in recent decades. Some say an "abundance agenda" is necessary to boost supply and bring down costs. In short, the abundance agenda works by increasing the supply of the things people need, and ultimately making essential goods and services less expensive for American families. But childcare, healthcare, college tuition, and housing costs, for instance, have risen 115%, 130%, 178%, and 80%, respectively, well above inflation. He thinks the abundance agenda — or something like it — will be something many politicians campaign on someday, which he says would be a win for all Americans.

☆ Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom faces Republican Brian Dahle in the California gubernatorial election
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-08 | by ( John L. Dorman | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

Gavin Newsom is seeking a 2nd term in office after beating back a recall election last year. Democrats have won every gubernatorial election in the Golden State since 2010. Gavin Newsom, who was elected to lead the Golden State in 2018 and easily won a recall election last year, is running for a 2nd term against Republican state Sen. Brian Dahle. After cruising to an easy victory in the recall, Newsom solidified his political standing both as governor and as a potential Democratic presidential aspirant in the years ahead. California's voting historyCalifornia has voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in every election since 1992.

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