But for her words to rise to the level of an extraordinary ‘big lie,’ a vicious slander of abortion providers everywhere, it seems to me that something more than this kind of misdescription would need to be in play. If the scene in question literally did not exist, which is what the language of her critics consistently suggests — if Fiorina had conjured up a vision of an intact fetus with a working heart and twitching limbs having its brains harvested out of her hyperactive pro-life imagination — well, that would merit liberal shock and outrage. But she didn’t conjure or invent it: It’s very easy to figure out what scene she’s talking about, and the discrepancies between what’s in the documentary and her description aren’t wild or incredible or weird. There’s no fabrication here, in other words, and what Lithwick calls ‘the big lie about the kicking fetus and the brain harvesting’ is a basically-accurate summary of what the film actually shows. (A twitching, dying fetus? Check. A firsthand description of harvesting a brain from an intact fetus? Check again.)
— Ross Douthat. This kerfuffle has done more than anything ever has to convince me that many supporters of unrestricted abortion are simply and genuinely incapable of acknowledging what happens in an abortion.
Once upon a time, Wesleyan students would have responded through grassroots organizing, not through supplicating at the feet of administrators and committees, asking them to do their protesting for them. The radical students I remember from Wesleyan’s past had a do-it-yourself ethos, understanding that they could not expect to change structures by working within them. Today’s Wesleyan students could have reacted to the piece in question by writing a response in the Argus. They could have started their own radical newspaper. They could have leafleted, or invited speakers, or used any other means to respond with better, more enlightened speech. By going straight to authority, they have instead embraced establishment power and asked it to be part of a liberatory struggle. That is folly. Institutions like Wesleyan may be made up of radicals, but they are by their nature conservative entities; that’s the nature of self-protective institutions. I’m sure many Wesleyan activists are familiar with Audre Lorde’s wise advice that we will never tear down the master’s house with the master’s tools.
Freddie deBoer. The kids of helicopter parents assuming that it’s in the order of things that social problems are solved by the university’s assuming an in loco parentis role — because deference to parental authority, both in its literal form and in its various extensions, is what they have been indoctrinated into — this is today’s Stockholm Syndrome. “Be a better daddy, Daddy.”
The future Queen Elizabeth, age 19, writes to her half-brother King Edward VI shortly before his death in 1553. The power struggle following the death of the 15-year-old King would lead to the 9-day reign of Lady Jane Grey and her eventual beheading.
Some, or even all, of these challenges may be misguided, silly, or narrow-minded. But even if you’re firmly opposed to “banning books”—and I am!—it’s hard to argue that parents should have no right to weigh in on what their children read at school. There’s an enormous difference between parents saying a book shouldn’t appear on their kid’s required reading list and a citizen demanding that adults should have no access to a book at a public library. And it should shock no one that in a country of 300 million people, there are a few hundred cases each year in which someone objects to a particular book’s availability, especially to children.
And in the clear majority of cases, the challenge ends the way that Jackie Sims’ objection to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks ended. The school board already had a policy in place regarding sensitive instructional materials, and Sims’ son was provided with an alternate text. In media interviews, district officials seemed unmoved by Sims’ demands that no other students should have access to the book, either. (Sims has said she’ll keep appealing.) So in one corner were the media, the masses, the author, and the school board. In the other, one woman in East Tennessee. This Banned Books Week, instead of hand-wringing about a nonexistent wave of censorship, let’s celebrate the obvious: The books won.
Working and lower-middle-class children are less likely to participate in structured extracurricular activities than their more privileged peers while growing up (and when they do, they tend to participate in fewer of them). This hurts their job prospects in two ways. First, it affects the types of schools students attend. Elite universities weigh extracurricular activities heavily in admissions decisions. Given that these employers—which offer some of the highest-paying entry-level jobs in the country—recruit almost exclusively at top schools, many students who focus purely on their studies will be out of the game long before they ever apply to firms. Second, employers also use extracurricular activities, especially those that are driven by ‘passion’ rather than academic or professional interest and require large investments of time and money over many years, to screen résumés. But participation in these activities while in college or graduate school is not a luxury that all can afford, especially if someone needs to work long hours to pay the bills or take care of family members. Essentially, extracurriculars end up being a double filter on social class that disadvantages job applicants from more modest means both in entering the recruiting pipeline and succeeding within it.
Why are working class kids less likely to get elite jobs? They study too hard at college. - The Washington Post. How incredibly depressing. I was one of those kids: I worked 25-30 hours a week during term, and full-time on breaks, to pay for my own college education, which was (amazingly) still possible in those days. But I didn’t have to pay a price for it, in part because I chose graduate school instead of trying to get a high-paying job, but also in part because workplace priorities weren’t quite so indefensibly weird then.
I followed all the expert advice: at the moon’s perigee I rowed myself deep into the night and anchored even deeper in the Pacific’s heart. Beneath the earth’s umbra, I stopped believing in blood as a season of the moon, trained the iphone lens on the western blue and waited for moonset. I woke all but covered in worry and sea foam. Small black and white birds called out a nonsense verse in an island dialect. My boat listed, half-full of blooded water. I had been lulled into dreams of Illinois autumn where hunters and harvesters take the moon seriously as a version of gospel, where we stalk dinner through dark orange fields of corn wide as seascapes. I flailed for my phone, for oars and, finding nothing in my hands, filled them with red ocean and swam into the sky.
I can almost bring Yogi back in memory, up at the plate, powerfully round and thick and bearish in his work-smudged pinstripes, with his head (in a cap, not a helmet) tipped a little, as if to give him more height while he stares out at the pitcher. The pitch is up, out of the strike zone, but Berra slashes at it anyway—it’s up by his eyes, because the force of his swing has dropped him down—and he drives it distantly. He runs hard, startling you again with his speed and strength, and rounds first base at full speed, leaning sideways like a racing car, then pulls up in a shower of dirt and scrambles back to the bag. I’m on my feet, yelling and laughing with everyone else. Yogi, Yogi—there’s no one else like him. The laughter isn’t sweet; it’s all wonder.
