Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Trump's war on transgender people

This seems exactly right:

Hannah Arendt, who fled Germany in 1933, later wrote that long before Jews, Roma, gays, Communists and others could be herded into death camps, they had to be “denationalized” — excluded from the society that guaranteed their legal rights. Enlightenment thinkers had posited that just by virtue of existing, each person has inalienable rights. Arendt, however, observed that the “right to have rights” could be guaranteed only by a political community. Without a state to claim them as their own, people have no laws, no courts and no political mechanisms for protecting rights....

A country that has pushed one group out of its political community will eventually push out others. The Trump administration’s barrage of attacks on trans people can seem haphazard, but as elements of a denationalization project, they fall into place. In his Inaugural Address and one of his first executive orders, President Trump asserted that only two sexes exist: male and female, established at conception and immutable. Trans people, in other words, do not exist. Executive orders aimed at banning any mention of transgender people in schools, banning trans athletes from women’s sports, ordering a stop to gender-affirming medical care for people under 19 and barring trans people from serving in the military followed.

The State Department stopped issuing passports with the “X” gender marker and began issuing passports consistent with the sex the applicant was assigned at birth, even if the person had legally changed gender....

Last month, despite the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling that trans and nonbinary people are protected from workplace discrimination, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission started dropping lawsuits it had brought on their behalf.

The rights the Trump administration is taking away from trans people are relatively new. Only in the past few decades, for example, have clear legal procedures existed for changing the gender marker on identity documents, and only in the past few years have federal and some state authorities made the process fairly easy. But before transgender, gender-nonconforming and intersex people were recognized as a group — or groups — of people who had rights, many could blend in, fly below the radar. Now, in their new rightlessness, they are exposed.

 

 

"The singularity is bullshit"

An interview with Oxford's Michael Wooldridge on the history of AI.

(Thanks to Tanmay Khale for the pointer.)

J.D. Vance vs. the Pope

Philosopher Steven Hales comments.

Trump's surprisingly sane position on nuclear weapons

In the midst of the disaster his Administration produces every week, at least there's this.

Cruelty is not the point; subjugation and silencing is

An interesting interview with political theorist Corey Robin about Trump, Musk, McCarthyism and more.

The political economy of immigration

Not the paranoid propaganda, but the reality.

More on the monster child's obsession with Canada

Suitably cutting, especially about those pathetic American media ideologists who treat this grotesque display seriously.

(Thanks to Evan Thompson for the pointer.)

Trump's war on Canada: Canadians are not amused

Quite understandably:

(Thanks to Paul Russell for the pointer.)

 

The sociologist Randall Collins on Elon Musk's personality and management style and its relevance to the present

Interesting read.

(Thanks to Howard Berman for the pointer.)

The real threat to Canada? America is falling apart

Probably right.

(Thanks to Charles Bakker for the pointer.)

In defiance of Trump's persecution of transgender people...

...Michigan's largest healthcare provider resumes treating them.

Ontario's "Trumpian" premier punches back at the US

Amusing and apt.  Doug Ford, like Trump, is a street brawler without any scruples, which may be what the situation calls for.

Life expectancy in the U.S. and educational attainment (a fairly good proxy for economic class)

What one would have expected:  the "educated" live longer.

"Colonialism and Fascism"

Videos of Jason Stanley's lecture course at the Kyvi School of Economics on this topic are now available online here.

"China, Feminism, and the Legacy of Confucius"

Philosopher Sor-hoon Tan comments.  This seems to me an optimistic take, but perhaps it's right.

The wildfire catastrophe in Los Angeles

MOVING TO FRON FROM JANUARY 9--SEE ESP. THE VERY INFORMATIVE COMMENT FROM PHILOSOPHER CHRIS HITCHCOCK, BELOW--MORE COMMENTS WELCOME

Good luck to readers in the Los Angeles area; from the media reports, it looks very frightening indeed.  Comments are open for anyone who wants to post information or updates.

Trump is not even President yet, and he's threatening military force against Greenland and Panama...

...and economic coercion against Canada.  We're in for four years of this childish imbecile!  The threats against Canada prompted these striking observations from philosopher Rachel Barney (at the University of Toronto), which she kindly gave permission to share here:

Trump is now promising to use 'economic force, not military' to annex Canada. In response to a question from a reporter which treated those as perfectly sane, normal alternative plans a President might have.

I overcame a revulsion of many years standing and for the first time clicked on the link and heard his voice. And it's by no means the demented word salad I'd expected. All the economic grievances are familiar rightwing talking points, and the underlying theory is just what many on both sides have thought since before Confederation, that the border is just an economic impediment and union the rational, mutually beneficial option. And I have zero doubt that a US government which sought to do so, and didn't mind its own people being collateral damage, could inflict so much damage that a lot of Canadians would change their preferences fast and cry uncle. We're not Finland, never have been.

 

There's no legal or constitutional path forward to annexation, but with a bit of brutality it would be easy to create enough of an internal constituency for a US military action to be colorable as 'aid to the oppressed Albertans' or enforcement of some forcibly imposed trade deal, or emergency help or whatever. The Conservative political leadership would stampede each other for quisling roles. In short it's absolutely a doable project, and I would imagine that saner people than Trump have been looking at water resource projections and gaming out scenarios for years.

It is really really bad that so many Canadians are still being blithe about this (looking at you, Toronto Star, and your creepy new owners). We need to get past the denial stage stat. The most obvious practical response is to rally round some Liberal leadership candidate who gets it, and has what it takes to lead a kind of National Patriotic Front of all but the right. I would rejoin the Party for that.

Curious to hear from Canadian readers what they make of this latest craziness, and whether they agree with Professor Barney's assessment.  Signed comments (full name, valid email address [which will not appear]) will be strongly preferred.

Jimmy Carter: his "private virtues were public vices"

An intelligent assessment of his life and career:  he was the Democrat who initiated the retreat from the New Deal consensus, one then destroyed by Reagan.

The risks of neurotechnology

Philosopher Karina Vold and colleagues comment.

What should be done?

Adolph Reed comments in the wake of the electoral disaster:

To the extent that the totality of politics, including among those who see themselves as the “left” or even advocates of a working-class agenda, has reduced to winning this election or preparing to win the next one, there’s no impetus to break with what passes for “sophisticated” political understanding that people like Kornacki, Ezra Klein, et al. peddle and the others who seek to join and follow them in that breathless, oh-so-serious Conversation swallow and regurgitate. And this isn’t to suggest that we need to disengage from electoral politics. We must engage; the everyday world and its concrete challenges don’t go away just because we want to transcend them. And we have to relate to that domain through the Dems, not consider it a platform for “Here I stand; I can do no other” performances of individual righteousness. We have to face up to the fact—finally—that all we can expect from Dem success is kicking the can of confrontation with fascism down the road for four years. But for that approach to make sense someone, and only the labor-left can lead it or maybe even do it, has to spend another four years between elections organizing a real constituency for a different way of talking and thinking about and doing politics. To put it bluntly, we won’t be able to face up to the fascist juggernaut without working to build an actual popular constituency for a different, openly working-class-based politics.

Luigi Mangione, the suspected killer of the UnitedHealthCare CEO

The right-wing media (starting, I believe, with the New York Post) has dubbed him an "anti-capitalist," despite no evidence of that.  Before his Goodreads page went private, you could see that on his list of books he'd read were drivel by Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, and that on his list of books he was planning on reading soon was Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged--pretty standard fare for a bright young "tech" person.  As one NYT opinion writer, Michelle Goldberg, observed, Mangione is no "leftist; he appears to have had pretty typical heterodox podcast guy politics."  (His "manifesto" makes clear that this is specifically about the health insurance industry, not capitalism.)  Goldberg made some other apt observations about what this whole incident has revealed:

A huge number of people feel — with good reason — that they’ve been personally injured by the insurance industry, and by coverage decisions that seem highly arbitrary, impenetrable and unfair. So people feel like Mangione’s avenged them....

Whenever I’ve had a health scare, or am waiting for the results of routine tests like mammograms, I tend to be as panicked about all the potential paperwork as about, you know, dying. And the thing is, these companies are purely extractive. Relative to a single-payer system, they create no value whatsoever....

I think the reaction to the assassination shows there is a political opportunity for anyone who can harness all this free-floating fury toward the health care industry and plutocracy more broadly. Right now it has nowhere productive to go.

If only Clinton and the Democratic Party hadn't sabotaged Bernie Sanders in 2016....

UPDATE:  As Walter Benn Michaels points out to me, Goldberg herself, at the time, was part of the pro-Clinton Sanders smear marchine, for example.  What we now know, of course, is that tens of thousands of Demcratic Sanders voters from the primaries flipped to Trump in the general.  We also know (vide Achen & Bartels) that at the end of the day most voters vote for their party's candidate (witness Trump and Republicans), regardless of their views (or, in  Trump's case, conduct).  That means the whole fight is over issues that are genuinely salient to "flippable" voters, like bread-and-butter economics and healthcare:  on those issues, Clinton was very weak (and an obvious fake), while Sanders was a winner.

Nobel Laureates opposed to the ignoramus RFK Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services

Of course they're opposed.  It would have been better if they had limited the signatories to those in relevant sciences, rather than including Nobel Laureates in physics and recipients of the fake Nobel Prize in economics..

The therapeutic power of placebos?

Philosopher Dien Ho comments.  Curious what those knowledgeable about this topic make of this.

Whoever murdered the CEO of UnitedHealth in midtown Manhattan the other day...

...has brought out into the open how much people hate health insurance companies, many of which are extremely predatory and exploitative.  The Facebook post announcing the CEO's death (murder) has some 50,000 "laugh" emojis on it.  That's pretty gross, of course, but it is also telling about how deeply people resent being denied coverage for their medical problems, which is what insurers do a lot (UnitedHealth has a particularly bad reputation).   The immediate effect of this assassination will be an increase in security for CEOs but perhaps it will even have an effect on the public discourse about healthcare in the benighted states of America.

UPDATE:  Wow!

The three most alarming Trump Cabinet picks (so far)

Two obvious ones have gotten much attention:  Pete Hegseth for Defense Secretary, and Kash Patel for FBI Director.  Both evince a fascistic or authoritarian temperament and ambitions.  Putting either in charge of people with guns and authorized violence would be very dangerous in the extreme.  Ironically, as of this writing, Hegseth seems likely to be rejected not for being a Christian nationalist and authoritarian, but for being a sexist and a drunk.  I'll take that if that's the reason.  That may allow attention to shift to Patel, who is quite unhinged.

At least as dangerous, but in a different way, is the prospect of an ignoramus like RFK Jr. becoming Secretary of Health & Human Services.  Public health is the kind of social good it's easy to take for granted, until it's gone.  RFK will accelerate declining uptake for vaccines, and promises to direct research funding away from infection diseases--God forbid there's another pandemic.  Fortunately--at least for those in civilized states--the states still set legal requirements for mandatory vaccinations, but even if Illinois has 21st-century public health policies, it will be a problem if neighboring Missouri or Iowa do not.  Viruses don't respect state lines.

Unless the U.S. is very lucky, the next four years could see massive outbreaks of infectious disease, with no coherent federal response; political arrests and prosecutions (maybe murders?); and a politicized military occupying Democratic cities in search of immigrants and "preserving law and order."

Australia bans social media for those under 16

We can now run a natural experiment and see if rates of depression and anxiety change in young people there.

An amusing polemic about the academy by an ex-academic whose specialty is...

...pissing on academia.  Some of it, admittedly, is self-serving and stupid, but some of it has enough truth in it to be amusing.  For example:

Over the last 10 years or so, a cultural revolution has been imposed on this country from the top down. Its ideas originated in the academy, and it’s been carried out of the academy by elite-educated activists and journalists and academics. (As has been said, we’re all on campus now.) Its agenda includes decriminalization or nonprosecution of property and drug crimes and, ultimately, the abolition of police and prisons; open borders, effectively if not explicitly; the suppression of speech that is judged to be harmful to disadvantaged groups; “affirmative” care for gender-dysphoric youth (puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones followed, in some cases, by mastectomies) and the inclusion of natal males in girls’ and women’s sports; and the replacement of equality by equity — of equal opportunity for individuals by equal outcomes for designated demographic groups — as the goal of social policy.

It insists that the state is evil, that the nuclear family is evil, that something called “whiteness” is evil, that the sex binary, which is core to human biology, is a social construct. It is responsible for the DEI regimes, the training and minders and guidelines, that have blighted American workplaces, including academic ones. It has promulgated an ever-shifting array of rebarbative neologisms whose purpose often seems to be no more than its own enforcement: POC (now BIPOC), AAPI (now AANHPI), LGBTQ (now LGBTQIA2S+), “pregnant people,” “menstruators,” “front hole,” “chest feeding,” and, yes, “Latinx.” It is joyless, vengeful, and tyrannical. It is purist and totalistic. It demands affirmative, continuous, and enthusiastic consent.

Clearly some truth to this, though this stuff is mostly confined to the feebler parts of the humanities and social sciences [sic], plus of course the schools of education and social work, and the various "studies" programs.  It has made inroads, sadly, into philosophy over the quarter-century, as we have had occasion to document on many occasions.

Historian Mazower on European fascism and its aftermath...

...and how that history marks an important difference between the U.S. and Europe.  Historians like Timothy Snyder have given the profession a bad reputation in many intellectual circles with their crude simplifications; Professor Mazower's nuanced analysis should help redeem that reputation!

 

If you are staying on Twitter/X, why?

Philosopher Jc Beall raised a question which I also wonder about:  "It would be very interesting to know whether any philosophers are staying on Twitter and -- this is what I'm curious about -- *why*."  So readers who use social media, if you're staying with X, what are your reasons?  This is asked out of genuine curiosity; I can imagine reasons, but would like to hear what philosophers are thinking.

 

Political theorist Paul Sagar on adjusting to severe paralysis after a climbing accident

A gripping read about a horrible situation.

Steven Walt on Chomsky and U.S. foreign policy

Mostly laudatory, as one would expect from a realist.  On the other hand, a standing weakness of internationa relations realism is its failure to investigate the "elite" who decide the nation's "interest."  Chomsky can be right about the role the capitalist elite in America play in defining the nation's interests, while a different elite determined Soviet foreign policy.  Walt's piece is, in any case, worth a read.

The psychology of "the woke"

Not implausible, via Kenan Malik's review of a new book by Musa al-Gharbi:

[T]he language of social justice – “wokeness” if you will – is not about social justice at all but acts rather as an ideological glue binding together a section of the elite that want to keep climbing the ladder of privilege but don’t want to see themselves as part of the elite....

The key to understanding wokeness, Al-Gharbi insists, is the struggles of “symbolic capitalists” – “professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstraction”. In other words, writers and academics, artists and lawyers, museum curators and tech professionals. It is a social stratum that attempts to entrench itself within the elite, elbowing out others already there, by using the language of social justice to gain status and accrue “cultural capital”. Theirs is a struggle within the elite presented as a struggle against the elite on behalf of the poor and the dispossessed.

This is not simply cynicism or hypocrisy, Al-Gharbi argues. Symbolic capitalists have constructed myths about their social roles that allow them genuinely to believe in fairness and equity while entrenching inequality and injustice, myths that have been accepted by many social institutions and power-brokers. The consequence is that the language of social justice has helped “legitimize and obscure inequalities”, allowing sections of the elite to “reinforce their elite status… often at the expense of those who are genuinely vulnerable, marginalized and disadvantaged”.

Robert Paul Wolff on the election

He correctly puts the emphasis on class politics.

Blast from the past: election post-mortems from 2020

Here and here are perhaps interesting.  I'll no doubt have more to say when I'm awake (this is pre-scheduled).

Wenar on "effective [sic] altruism" and his critics

Philosopher Leif Wenar wades into the fray again, responding in part to critics of his earlier piece.  I'm sympathetic to much that Professor Wenar says, although it touches only indirectly on the main difficulty, namely, that "effective [sic] altruism" really only concerns "altruistic actions with fairly immediate and measurable short-term effects," which is not the same as making people better off, regardless of one's motive.  (Wenar's criticism of the unintended effects of aid on non-recipients is relevant to this issue, but it's just the tip of an iceberg of consequences that are never considered by members of the church.)

Why are Democrats having such a "hard time beating Trump"?

That's the question posed by the official publication of the prudent wing of the ruling class, i.e., The New York Times.  I'll return to the NYT article in a moment, but a rather different answer is found in this paper that philosopher Gordon Barnes called to my attention:  globalization has been good for both the prudent and imprudent wings of the ruling class; it has not been so good for millions of working class people in the U.S.

But back to the NYT:

The Democrats’ challenge appears to be part of a broader trend of political struggles for ruling parties across the developed world. Voters appear eager for change when they get the chance. The ruling parties in Britain, Germany, Italy, Australia and most recently Japan all faced electoral setbacks or lost power. Mr. Trump himself lost four years ago. France and Canada might well join the list.

"Roadmap to the official count in the 2024 Election"

A useful resource from NYU's Brennan Center.  Of all the grotesque deformations of politics and national life since Trump came on the scene, the idea that there is a problem with election integrity may be the most outrageous and the most dangerous.

Meanwhile, as this NYT guide makes clear, we may not know the outcome of the election until the end of the week, if we're lucky!

"Computers plainly can't think"

Philosopher Alva Noe comments; an excerpt:

[T]here is another origin of our impulse to concede mind to devices of our own invention, and this is what I focus on here: the tendency of some scientists to take for granted what can only be described as a wildly simplistic picture of human and animal cognitive life. They rely unchecked on one-sided, indeed, milquetoast conceptions of human activity, skill and cognitive accomplishment. The surreptitious substitution (to use a phrase of Edmund Husserl’s) of this thin gruel version of the mind at work – a substitution that I hope to convince you traces back to Alan Turing and the very origins of AI – is the decisive move in the conjuring trick.

What scientists seem to have forgotten is that the human animal is a creature of disturbance. Or as the mid-20th-century philosopher of biology Hans Jonas wrote: ‘Irritability is the germ, and as it were the atom, of having a world…’ With us there is always, so to speak, a pebble in the shoe. And this is what moves us, turns us, orients us to reorient ourselves, to do things differently, so that we might carry on. It is irritation and disorientation that is the source of our concern. In the absence of disturbance, there is nothing: no language, no games, no goals, no tasks, no world, no care, and so, yes, no consciousness....

Reasons for pessimism, reasons for optimism

On the pessimism side, the familiar confusion of correlation with causation:

For many Donald Trump supporters, it is a simple matter of dollars and cents.

Late this summer, I left my home in New York City to talk to dozens of working-class people in the South, the Midwest and the West. I had no agenda except to hear what they were saying and try to understand the world from their point of view. I interviewed hairdressers and retired sawmill workers, bakers, truck drivers, laundromat managers, pit barbecue cooks, casino card dealers and even a former professional rodeo rider.

The most common term people used to describe the economy was “horrible.” A close second was, “It sucks"....

Everyone wanted better material conditions for themselves and their families, and everyone was struggling to obtain them. Some didn’t want to talk about politics. Others felt so ignored by politicians that they have disengaged from the process altogether. Everyone who offered an opinion was for Mr. Trump....

The worst inflation and the fastest rise in interest rates since the early 1980s — to well-off people, these are headlines. To working people, they are fundamental challenges to their daily lives. Working people worry much more about payday than they do Jan. 6.

Fair enough: But why turn to a lying, abusive billionaire to help them solve their economic problems? Their explanation is simple. Times were good when Trump was president. Now eggs cost nearly three times what they did four years ago, the rate on a car loan is more than 50 percent higher, and some companies are cutting hours. Mr. Trump, they think, is the candidate to turn things around.

NYT columnist David French confirms the Achen & Bartels theory of democracy

French, an evangelical Christian and a "Never Trump" Republican, writes:

Community is more powerful than ideology. If you came of age politically during the Reagan Revolution, you thought of the Republican Party as fundamentally and essentially ideological. We were the party of limited government, social conservatism and a strong national defense, and these ideological lines were ruthlessly enforced. Even after Reagan left office, ideological heresy against Reaganism was punished with the dreaded label “RINO” — Republican in name only....The story we told ourselves behind closed doors was the story we told in public — the Republican Party was a party of ideas and those ideas defined the party....

Trump has changed the equation entirely. He’s a big-government, isolationist libertine who — despite nominating half the justices who helped overturn Roe — has made the G.O.P. platform more pro-choice than it’s been in almost 50 years. Not only has he not been punished for this ideological transformation, but devotion to him is the new Republican loyalty test.

 

Don’t think for a moment this is because he won an intelligent ideological argument. When he gained a critical mass of support, millions of Republicans faced a stark choice: ideology or community?

 

....I thought ideology defined the community, but the community existed regardless of the ideology, and breaking with the community was the far graver sin.

 

And so Republicans could cling to their ideas and face the wrath of their neighbors, or they could conform, keep their friends and comfort themselves with the notion that no matter what Trump did or said, at least he wasn’t a Democrat.

Here's how philosophers can make a difference beyond voting: work a phone bank!

Philosopher Colin Marshall has some interesting anecdotes and great advice.

Others with phone bank experience are welcome to add their own suggestions.

AI is "dumber than a cat"

MOVING TO FRONT FROM OCTOBER 16--LOTS OF COMMENTS WORTH READING!  VERY INSTRUCTIVE!

So says this "AI pioneer," Yann LeCun:  "LeCun thinks that today’s AI models, while useful, are far from rivaling the intelligence of our pets, let alone us. When I ask whether we should be afraid that AIs will soon grow so powerful that they pose a hazard to us, he quips: 'You’re going to have to pardon my French, but that’s complete B.S.'"

What say you informed readers?  (Post a comment with a full name and valid email address. And don't post unless you know something about these issues:  I'd like to be educated!)

If the monster child wins....

...this will be why.  From economic historian Adam Tooze:  "If we focus only on food and energy, the price shock of 2021-2 was worse than that in 1973. It is second only to the Iran-crisis shock of 1979, the crisis that put paid to what little chance Jimmy Carter had of reelection in 1980."  The only hope is that it was 2021-22, and not 2023-24.  But still...

Here's a good reason to ignore the polls...

...from Ezra Klein at the NYT:

Back in 2016, Harry Enten, then at FiveThirtyEight, calculated the final polling error in every presidential election between 1968 and 2012. On average, the polls missed by two percentage points. In 2016, an American Association for Public Opinion Research postmortem found that the average error of the national polls was 2.2 points, but the polls of individual states were off by 5.1 points. In 2020, the national polls were off by 4.5 points and the state-level polls missed, again, by 5.1 points....

As of Oct. 10, The New York Times’s polling average had Kamala Harris leading Trump by three points nationally. That’s tight, but the seven swing states are tighter: Neither candidate is leading by more than two points in any of them.

Imagine the polls perform better in 2024 than they did in either 2016 or 2020: They’re off, remarkably, by merely two points in the swing states. Huzzah! That would be consistent with Harris winning every swing state. It would also be consistent with Trump winning every swing state. This is not some outlandish scenario. According to Nate Silver’s election model, the most likely electoral outcome “is Harris sweeping all seven swing states. And the next most likely is Trump sweeping all seven.”

Which is all to say: The polls can’t tell you the way in which they’re going to be wrong, nor by how much. But that’s what matters now.

Given what's at stake, this is quite insane, but that's where we are in this benighted country.

Intellectual humility is sometimes (often?) not a virtue

Interesting and sensible piece by philosopher Rachel Fraser.  (Intellectual humility, of course, is always a virtue for the ignorant.)  

(Unrelated to the articles main themes, I was, nonetheless, struck by this example at the start and what it tells us about the conservative nature of Anglophone philosophy:  "Suppose you want to be a better person. (Lots of us do.) How might you go about it? You might try to become more generous and commit to donating more of your income to charity."  Why not:  "You might stop working on Wall Street and devote your life to revolution" or, more modestly, "You might stop supporting Republicans and Democrats, and devote your time and money to socialist causes?")

October 7 atrocities, one year later

Here's what I wrote one year ago.  I was right, sadly, that Netanyahu's reponse would be "brutal."  I did not anticipate how many would end up dead or maimed in the aftermath.  I never would have imagined there would still be hostages a year later.   Netanyahu's original failure on October 7 has now been compounded by the failure to prioritize freeing hostages, the failure to secure peace for Israel, and the failure to treat the Palestinians in Gaza (and elsewhere) as human beings.

Do your undergraduates have trouble reading whole books?

From The Atlantic:

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

Curious to hear from undergraduate teachers what their experience has been and whether this article rings true.

(Thanks to Chris Williams for the pointer.)

 

 

"Careerism is ruining college"

This essay by a recent Penn graduate is an example of "confusing cause and effect" that is very common, especially in the media.

When I pictured myself in college, I envisioned potluck picnics and late nights listening to Taylor Swift, overanalyzing class crushes. Maybe even joining a Quidditch team.

I never daydreamed about hiding in the library bathroom, crying because I had just been rejected from an undergraduate law journal.

The recently publicized tensions on college campuses, particularly those in the heavily scrutinized Ivy League, are among many forces at play for students today. But there’s another that has not yet captivated the news cycle.

It’s called pre-professional pressure: a prevailing culture that convinces many of us that only careers in fields such as computer programming, finance and consulting, preferably at blue-chip firms like Goldman Sachs, McKinsey or big tech companies, can secure us worthwhile futures. It is an inescapable part of the current college experience, like tailgating or surviving on stale dining hall food. It not only steers our life choices; it also permeates daily life and negatively affects our mental health.

On academic predictions of the future

Sociologist Randall Collins looks back at some unsuccessful ones, and offers reflections on why and how they went so wrong.  Quite interesting.

(Thanks to Howard Berman for the pointer.)

Corrupt mayors, New York City style

As a native of NYC, I've been following with some bemusement the travails of the eccentric and now indicted current Mayor, Eric Adams; it brought to mind an earlier, and far more corrupt, NYC Mayor, William O'Dwyer, who was saved by President Truman.  I doubt President Biden, or a President Harris, will come to Mayor Adams's rescue.