The Faculty Lounge

Introducing Naming Gotham

Thank you Dan and Bridget for inviting me to step into the Faculty Lounge.  I am going to be blogging about my new book Naming Gotham: The Villains, Rogues, and Heroes Behind New York Place Names. One writing truth that I learned (relearned?) writing is that book publishers are serious about word limits. Unlike a law review article where the word limit is more of a suggestion, my publisher gave me a hard upper limit for words in the book. I ran out of space long before I ran out of words. So, I have taken to blogging because there are more stories I want to tell.

First let me introduce the project.  Then in subsequent blog posts, I will share some of the stories and details that I had to cut from the book because of space constraints.

About Naming Gotham

Each day, millions of people “take” the Major Deegan, the Hutchinson Expressway, the Outerbridge Crossing, and the Holland Tunnel. Few travelers remember that, before these names became an urban shorthand for congestion, they were actual people. This quirky New York City history uses the naming of New York City’s roads, bridges, and civic institutions as a unique window into urban social structure and the City’s ever-changing inhabitants. The lives of Revolutionary War heroes, robber barons and Tammany Hall politicos introduce readers to the outsized roles that power politics, corruption, and the slave economy played and continue to play in New York City.

The names in this book tell only a small sliver of the City’s story. To date, New York City has chosen to commemorate mostly white men. In a city as diverse as New York, that fact is telling. It reflects the historical balance of power in the City—both in terms of who had the power to name things and who got to define what counts as history. As I was researching and writing this book, that began to change. Most significantly, the Shirley Chisholm State Park, named after the first Black woman elected to Congress, opened in 2019. This shift in who the City memorializes reflects the changing narrative that New Yorkers tell themselves about their city. It remains to be seen how this changing story will translate into the policies the City adopts for its schools, its roads, and its neighborhoods.

Here is the short (very funny) book trailer that artist and writer Jeff LaGreca made for Naming Gotham. 

 

The Truth About Hamilton. It's Not Just For The Richy-Rich.

I don't want to spend more time on the Pence controversy itself, but it seems like someone ought to take on the stupid claims that Hamilton is the passion of "a crowd of wealthy, out-of-touch Manhattan liberals (who can afford $849 tickets)."  Apparently, these critics haven't taken a look at the large swath of America (check your kids' music streams - I may be talking to you) who have never seen Hamilton, will never see Hamilton, and who adore it.  

For most Hamilton fans, it's all about the soundtrack.  (And those impressive Billboard numbers don't account for the fact that our kids don't even buy albums anymore.)  The soundtrack is a gateway to the story of the show, plus Lin-Manuel Miranda and Leslie Odom and all the backstories, and In The Heights.  And shoot - the soundtrack is GOOD and it delivers much of the artistic message quite well, thank you.  

You can have whatever view you want of L'Affaire Pence.  But let's call out this BS about Hamilton being an artifact of the richy-rich.  You can essentially access the soundtrack for free; millions upon millions of people are enjoying it.  I'm not saying that Hamilton is a People's Show - I'm imagine most of the audience is at least middle class - but the fact that so many people are writing and tweeting about the Pence controversy, and even know what Hamilton is,  tells you Hamilton is hardly exhibit A for The Bubble. 

My New Poetry Book Was Featured in its First Review

I’m excited to announce that my new poetry book—The Body’s Alphabet--published by Headmistress Press this summer, was featured in its first review.  Poet and editor Rebecca Valley wrote an insightful review for the blog Drizzle Review.  She describes the book as being about betweenness and as embodying a complicated sense of time—of moving forward while looking back. 

Including poems written over most of the past two decades, the book explores the body’s physical and spiritual journeys, often focusing on human vulnerability and the need for belonging.  It uses childhood loneliness, bisexuality, and discontinuity with nature as lenses.  Poet D.A. Powell describes The Body’s Alphabet as being “built on a precarious and often tender journey through homes no longer available to return to” and calls the book “a blessed space . . . : a home for the wayward soul.”  

Some of the poems touch on law and my career as a practicing attorney (none of the poems about teaching made it in).  For example, “swimming through history” compares two river systems—the Truckee and the Skagit—and describes the awe and sense of unworthiness that one can sometimes have as an attorney trying—on behalf of a client--to protect the natural functions of a river system.  More subtly, “nature essay” examines the absurdity and hubris of human claims to private property vis-à-vis animals. 

The book is available from Headmistress Press, Amazon, Powell's, and my website, as well as in a some bookstores and libraries. 

Big Victory for Google and Fair Use in Google Books Litigation

Yesterday, the Second U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the lower court decision in the ongoing litigation between the Authors Guild and Google Books, holding that the Google Books Project does not violate copyright law and that Google's digital copying of the books is fair use. Story here. Full text of the decision here.

The Lighter Side of Academia ....

Earlier this week, Julie Schumacher became the first woman to win the Thurber prize for humor writing for her epistolary academic spoof, Dear Committee Members. The book is well worth a read for the structure as well as the story and also for a good laugh. The entire story is told through a series of recommendation letters written by a somewhat jaded creative writing professor.

This year was also a first in that the three finalists for the prize were all women. Full story here.

Formal Poetry Contest Based on Scalia's 2015 Disssents

I can't vouch for this organization, but the challenge they pose sounds super fun.

 

More information is available at:  http://poetrybusinessmanager.com/1st-annual-scalia-dissents-formal-poetry-contest/

Memoir, Fiction and the Vanishing Truth: A Complement to Steve Lubet’s Posts on the Peculiar Case of Alice Goffman

We all owe thanks to our new Lounge Colleague Steve Lubet for his exceptionally interesting and thoughtful string of comments here and elsewhere on Alice Goffman’s On the Run, an “immersive” sociological study of an impoverished Philadelphia neighborhood.  (See here (Lubet’s original book review in The New Republic), here (Goffman’s reply), here and here (Lubet’s response to Goffman’s reply), here (UCLA sociologist’s Jack Katz’s comments), and here (Lubet’s rejoinder to Katz).)  I’d like to offer another perspective on the Goffman book that may provide a useful complement to those expressed so far.

This additional perspective arises out of what I agree with Lubet is the striking and disturbing inconsistency between Goffman's original presentation in her book of her actions and motivations on the night she drove around with her armed friend Mike looking for their mutual friend Chuck’s killer in the hope of exacting revenge, and her later restatement of the same events after Lubet had pointed out that, as Goffman had originally portrayed her own conduct and intentions, she had not only committed a felony, but had endangered human lives.  (Neither of these practices, it is fair to say, is or ought to be a common feature of sociological fieldwork, “immersive” or not.  That may not be a very limiting constraint, but even if it were, I would hope that it could command a broad consensus.)

Specifically, Goffman relates in her book that, Mike having earlier affirmed that “somebody gon’ die regardless,” she volunteered to drive Mike around one night in search of their friend’s killer “because, like Mike . . . , I wanted Chuck’s killer to die.”  Goffman says she waited in the car with the motor running, “ready to speed off as soon as Mike ran back and got inside,” as Mike got out with his gun to go after someone he thought might be the killer (it turned out he wasn’t).  After Lubet raised serious and legitimate questions about what the hell an assistant professor of sociology was doing engaging in conduct that appeared to comprise a conspiracy to commit attempted murder, Goffman posted an explanatory response on the Internet asserting that “I had good reason to believe that this night would not end in violence or injury”; and that “Talk of retribution was just that: Talk.”  As Lubet explains in more detail, you can shuck and jive all you want, but the “before” and “after” versions of Goffman's story can't realistically be reconciled.  The discrepancy raises important and serious questions about which narrative more accurately presents Goffman's actual actions and intentions.  As Lubet points out in one of his posts, we don't know, and that in turn raises troubling issues about the reliability of Goffman’s entire book. 

That prompted me to think about the uncomfortable (and unwelcome) erosion of the distinction between memoir and fiction, which Lubet’s commentary began to persuade me might be traced to, or at least compared with, developments in social science research implicated here.  It is my superficial understanding that, as originally conceived, sociological and anthropological ethnography was an observational science in which the investigator as dispassionately and “objectively” as possible described the behavior of a culture's members, and through observation and interview inferred their beliefs and motivations.  (Readers should supplement or correct this understanding in the Comments if it’s incomplete or wrong; I freely disclaim any depth of expertise.)  “Immersive” study allowed the investigator to step into and become to some degree a part of a culture or its practices:  Instead of depicting Yaqui Indians engaging in ritual ingestion of hallucinogens, describing their gestures, words and post-hoc recounting of their experiences, Carlos Castaneda actually takes peyote with his brujo, Don Juan, and tells us what he saw and felt.  (Castaneda’s first three books were part of his undergraduate and graduate studies in anthropology at UCLA.)  More generally, “immersive” observation allows the investigator to observe her own feelings and reactions as well as describe those of the subject population, and hopefully thus gain additional understanding and perspective on the culture being investigated that is meaningful, and meaningfully different from dispassionate “objective” observation.

But whether you're watching from the outside or the inside, there will inevitably be questions about the integrity or verisimilitude of your portrayal.  Margaret Mead's seminal and deeply influential 1928 study of Samoan culture, for example, has become a battleground over whether she got many important features right, and if not, why not.  I don’t know that anyone has accused Dr. Mead of fictionalizing or embellishing, but you don’t have to.  The problem is that any observed portrait of a culture necessarily simplifies it to make it accessible as an object for study and understanding.  And it necessarily does so by emphasizing certain details and omitting or downplaying others; finding patterns in some concatenations of circumstance but not in others; and so on.  Ironically, observation becomes characterized not by its accuracies, but by its inevitable inaccuracies—what the observer necessarily simplified, or emphasized, or left out to render us an observation that is more meaningful, organized, and accessible than the impossibly messy and inaccessible mass of countless human details the observer was watching and trying to describe.

And once you concede that your observations are necessarily inaccurate and incomplete, it is a much shorter and seemingly easier step to consciously and deliberately tailoring your observations to your conceptions in the service of the deeper "truth" that you have "found" embedded out there.  Carlos Castaneda admitted to narrative license in his work “to heighten some dramatic sequences,” while at the same time insisting that his stories were absolutely true to life.  Challenged about discrepancies in a Time magazine interview, he said, “To ask me to verify my life by giving you my statistics . . . is like using science to validate sorcery. It robs the world of its magic and makes milestones out of us all.”  Boy, is that ever a long strange trip from Emile Durkheim’s imperative of observational objectivity less than a hundred years before.  (I use Castaneda as an example here because he was so prominent in popular culture—his books were widely read in nonacademic circles, and he was featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1973.  By publishing her study as a general-interest trade book, Goffman apparently aspires to similar popular notice and influence.)

Ethnographic observation, especially the “immersive” kind, is really a memoir of sorts.  And it would be fair to say that the slide from motivated perception to self-deception to outright misrepresentation in some corners of ethnography saw parallel development in the literary memoir and, a bit later, even journalism.  The 1990s and early 2000s brought us James Frey and his Oprah-endorsed memoir of recovery, A Million Little Pieces, significant parts of which turned out to be made up; Stephen Glass, who repeatedly fabricated sources and incidents in The New Republic and elsewhere to substantiate his perspectives on modern culture, and then manufactured fake reporter's notes and otherwise confabulated to try and cover it up, and Jayson Blair, who plagiarized and invented sources for his reporting in the New York Times.  All of these people, and others like them, were using contrived "facts” to paint a picture they believed was ultimately accurate in some real and important sense, just as Castaneda’s narrative license created stories he felt were true to life (if not literally true) and consistent with the purposes of his ethnographic studies.  This entire concept is brilliantly illustrated in Stephen Colbert’s notion of “truthiness”—made-up “facts” presented as reality because they demonstrate something important the speaker earnestly and sincerely believes to be true.

Given the discrepancies between Goffman’s “before” and “after” stories, it may be that she is just reacting to the shock of recognizing the moral and mortal danger in conduct that felt perfectly natural to her at the time and accurately mirrored the thoughts and feelings of the study subjects who had become her friends.  But it may be that Goffman fits uncomfortably into the unfortunate if narrow tradition of ethnographer as fabulist.  Was her stint at the wheel that night a focused and premeditated mission of revenge or, as she now insists, just participation in a ritual of grieving that threatened no one?  How much of each version of the story, factually and emotionally, actually happened?  Can she even tell anymore?  The only thing that seems clear on the current state of the record is that both stories—asserted with equal certitude by the same observer—cannot comfortably coexist in the same reality.  Something’s gotta give. 

If you think about it, good fiction is just a skillful narration of invented facts resembling some of the ones we live with that, one way or another, illustrates truths about our culture or condition.  Really good fiction may illustrate such truths more evocatively or indelibly than the accidental vagaries of reality.  But that doesn’t mean that there’s no difference between reality and fiction.  And it certainly doesn’t mean that you’re right to claim something fictional really happened in the service of a deeper "truth" you earnestly believe.

--Bernie

The Perfect Weekend

Sometimes we get lucky and everything lines up. This weekend was like that. I spent Friday and Saturday at my favorite I.P. conference sponsored by Franklin Pierce/UNH. Today, was a concert at Symphony Hall with Itzhak Perlman. What can you say but “aahh.”

The Geography of Legal Thought

Each year I spend the first few minutes of my Civ Pro class, as I expect so many other profs must do, showing my students the death cage match from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. The battle between the “man with no name” and the baby-faced giant, all to decide who really owns a vehicle, sets up a lively discussion about procedural justice and modes of dispute resolution.

The second day I turn away from no-holds-barred adversarial battles and towards topics that are less traditional for Civ Pro classes. For reasons that at first clearly perplex my students, we take our second day in Civ Pro to discuss a book called The Geography of Thought, written by a psychology professor named Richard Nisbett. The book collects the results of decades of research by Nisbett and others, in which experiments are run on the cognitive styles of different cultures. In particular, he contrasts the cognitive style of east Asians – such as my students – with the cognitive styles of Europeans and Americans, such as myself.

The first interesting thing about Nisbett’s results is that cognitive differences are notable in very early childhood. They are in no way genetic – Chinese Americans, for example, test as Americans after a generation or two – but they are sufficiently deeply rooted in cultures that they show up before philosophies or dogmas can be taught with any sophistication.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

Digital Photography Review asks: who owns a viral monkey selfie? Some interesting observations in the comments, including the suggestion that the moneky in question was the camera owner's agent.

Gary Rosin

Success and the Roles of Quality and Chance

On NPR today, “Morning Edition” ran a fascinating story on the role of chance in success and failure. Is the Mona Lisa much beloved because it truly is exceptional or because of factors other than artistic quality? According to nicely-designed research by Matthew Sagalnick and colleagues, chance plays a much bigger role than most people would suspect. Their results indicate that “after you meet a basic standard of quality, what becomes a huge hit and what doesn't is essentially a matter of chance.”

This should not be surprising. Movie producers, television executives, and book publishers are notoriously ineffective at sorting the likely to succeed from the unlikely to succeed. Thus, multiple publishers rejected the first Harry Potter book, and the Beatles “struggled to get a record deal.” People often favor a particular piece of art, music, or literature simply because other people favor it.

There is no reason to think that studies would come to a different conclusion for academic research. One wonders whether law review editors, book publishers, tenure committees, and other evaluators will give these findings the weight they deserve, especially since current practices tend to reinforce rather than counterbalance elements of chance.

In honor of all who survived the Faculty Recruitment Conference this past weekend

Here's one of my favorite Gary Soto poems, "Job Interview."  Originally published in A Natural Man (Chronicle Books1999), the poem is also available online at http://enespanol.tripod.com/sottopoem1.htm.  Enjoy!

 

Job Interview

 

Why do you feel qualified? Mr. Blue Blazer asked.

And I looked out the skyscraper window.

Far below, a man struggled with a shopping cart,

One wheel stuck, his cargo of tin and glass jingling.

 

Sir, answer us, Mr. Suede-patches-at-the-elbow asked.

I stood up and peeked further down,

Pigeons flattened in the gutter,

Their feathers fossils for my own flight.

 

It says here you’re an artist, Ms. Perfume inquired.

I gazed at my belt, lynch for the last day of the month.

I considered my fingernails,

Claws that hugged a tree for the love of its roots,

And swallowed my spit, a poor-man’s breakfast.

 

The chairs squeaked,

The fish in the lighted salt tank circled,

A fish that I had been eyeing

Since I stepped into office.

I’m qualified because…I started.

 

Mr. Patches leaned forward, head like a chunk of cheese.

Ms. Perfume jangled her bracelets.

Mr. Blazer swabbed his front teeth with a sour tongue.

 

…because I could eat that fist in that tank there

With a butter sauce, I finished.

 

Out on the street with my portfolio of wrong answers,

I turned in a circle and thought, What next?

Hurrying away, nearly running from the gravity

Of a San Francisco hill,

I was every dark penny that rolled away,

But still hopeful of running into the glittery crowd

Of nickels and dimes.

Malcolm Gladwell is a Bullshitter

In the Frankfurtian sense of bullshit, that is. Or so it appears. Malcolm Gladwell is often hailed as bringing the insights of social science to the masses. But most social scientists (and many others) have long known that Gladwell plays fast and loose with that science. He cherry picks data (often discussing studies with splashy findings while failing to acknowledge other—often larger, more recent—studies that failed to replicate the beguiling counter-intuitive finding). He fails to acknowledge the limitations of the studies with which he captivates his audience (such as their embarrassingly small sample sizes). And so on.

But failing to do the science justice does not, all by itself, make Gladwell a bullshitter. He might earnestly believe in the truth of what he says—say, in Outliers, about becoming an “expert” in any competition by spending 10,000 hours practicing the relevant skill—but simply lack the competence to carefully assess and communicate the literature. Or he might just as earnestly believe that the 10,000-hour rule he popularized is false, and aim to mislead his readers (for whatever reason).

For Frankfurt, neither scenario implicates bullshit. Instead, for him, the “essence of bullshit” is a “lack of connection to a concern with truth,” an “indifference to how things really are.” Whether someone is a bullshitter or not, then, depends not on any correspondence of their statements to objective truths but, rather, on the speaker’s state of mind. In several remarkable recent interviews—analyzed in this Slate article*—Gladwell talks about his writing (and live “performances”) in ways that suggest that he is primarily concerned with telling a good (read: captivating) story, and not especially concerned with the scientific truth of those stories. In other words, Gladwell is a bullshitter.

The only question, now, is whether his audience knows they’re being bullshitted.

* Disclosure: the Slate article is written by my husband. I wouldn’t link to his work, however, if I didn’t share his deep loathing for bullshit, whether in popular writing or (ahem) academia. Nor would I do so if I didn’t think that the Gladwell problem is related to (if distinct from) similar questions closer to home, such as when an academic may pursue advocacy that selects data and arguments in the service of a preselected conclusion and when, instead, an academic’s writing should come with an “implied warranty of scholarly integrity.”

Of Twerkers and Twerkees: An Open Letter to Robin Thicke’s Mother

[This post falls squarely in the “[pop] culture” portion of TFL’s “law, culture, and academia” mandate. Regular programming will resume in due course.]

Hi Gloria. Can I call you Gloria? I understand that you were displeased by the duet performed by your son and Miley Cyrus (as you know, your boy shows up at the 3:00 mark) at the MTV VMA awards Sunday evening.

Specifically, you said:

I was not expecting her to be putting her butt that close to my son. The problem is now I can never unsee it. . . . Him? Loved it! I love that suit, the black and white suit. I don’t understand what Miley Cyrus is trying to do. I just don’t understand. I think she’s misbegotten in this attempt of hers. And I think it was not beneficial.

Gloria, I’m confused about your confusion. I mean, look, the whole obscenity concern trolling thing isn’t my bag. VMA has been doing this for years, and if you wanted to see something else, well, that’s what they have C-SPAN for. But hey, you’re certainly free to know it when you see it. Obscenity, that is.

What I don’t get is why you see it in Cyrus but not in your own son.

To be fair, it’s not just you. All the commenters I’ve seen, from Sean Hannity (“outrageous,” “downright raunchy,” and “inappropriate” for a role model) and Bill O’Reilly (“she’s a troubled young lady” and “out of control”) to Camille Paglia (whose focus is on the philistine rather than the obscene nature of the routine) have reserved their criticism for Cyrus.

A mommy blogger’s open letter to her daughter, warning her not to follow in Cyrus’s footsteps, has gone semi-viral. But not a single Mommy blogger has warned her son against following in your son’s footsteps.

To no one's surprise, Bill O’Reilly blames Cyrus’s twerking on “bad parenting,” and after Miley’s father, country singer Billy Ray Cyrus, defended his daughter, O’Reilly asked whether he should be “shunned.” Even Brooke Shields, who played mom to Cyrus’s Hannah Montana, felt the need to weigh in and demand answers: “I was Hannah Montana’s mother. I do not approve. Where did I go wrong? I just want to know who’s advising her, and why it’s necessary?” (By contrast, Shields remains “shocked” by the controversy over her own performance in the infamous “You wanna know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” ad campaign, which she shot when she was just fifteen years old (Cyrus is twenty), and which was banned by CBS.)

And yet no one blames you, Gloria, for raising a son whose music and videos are—in addition to being just as "obscene" as Cyrus’s (and just as arguably misappropriating of black culture and glorifying of drugs)—kinda rapey. Following the VMA hoopla, Cyrus's father canceled a scheduled interview with Piers Morgan at the last minute. But free from the burden of having to defend your parenting and your child, you can grant media interviews in which you accept the condolences of a shamed nation and join the #MileyGate pile on. It’s all a little reminiscent of Justin Timberlake, whose image was only barely and very temporarily tarnished by the “wardrobe malfunction” of Janet Jackson (remember her?), which he, too, apparently helped orchestrate. I don’t personally care about either Cyrus’s butt or Janet’s nipple, Gloria. But I am annoyed by the double standard involved in criticizing the female but not the male co-venturers in these manufactured controversies—the twerkers but not the twerkees, if you will—which is why I'm writing. (More after the jump.)

Poem by Jupiter Hammon Discovered

A poem about slavery written by the country's first published African-American writer, Jupiter Hammon, who was himself a slave, has been discovered by a University of Texas at Arlington doctoral student.  The poem criticizes slavery and pleads with God to end it.  More information is available here.

 

Forthcoming Issue Law & Literature of University of Toronto Quarterly

An exciting special issue on law and literature is forthcoming from University of Toronto Quarterly.  The issue, due out in August, is being edited by Greig Henderson (Dept. of English, University of Toronto), Cheryl Suzack (Departments of English and Aboriginal Studies, University of Toronto), and Simon Stern (Dept. of English and Faculty of Law, University of Toronto).  As far as I know, all of the pieces were invited submissions. A fuller description of the issue is available here.

The articles are as follows:

Elizabeth S. Anker (English Dept. at Cornell):  “In the Shadowlands of Sovereignty: The Politics of Enclosure in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel”

Mark Antaki (Faculty of Law at McGill):  “Genre, Critique and Human Rights”

Dale Barleben (Dept. of English at John Jay College, CUNY):  “Law’s Empire Writes Back: Legal Positivism and Literary Rejoinder in Wilde’s De Profundis”

Todd Butler (Dept. of English at Washington State University):  "Victim Impact Statements, New Media Technologies, and the Classical Rhetoric of Sincerity”

Gregg Crane (English Dept. at Michigan):  “The Hard Case: Billy Budd and the Judgment Intuitive”

Ann E. Tweedy (Hamline Law):  “How Allotment-Era Literature Can Inform Current Controversies About Tribal Jurisdiction and Reservation Diminishment” 

Nicole M. Wright (Postdoctoral Scholar at Chicago):  “‘A More Exact Purity’: Legal Authority and Conspicuous Amalgamation in Eighteenth-Century English Law Guides and the Oxford Law Lectures of Sir Robert Chambers and Samuel Johnson.”

My piece responds to the Supreme Court's practice of justifying denials of tribal jurisdiction over non-members in current cases based on the presumed expectations of non-Indian settlers during the allotment-era that reservations would disappear (thus eliminating any possibility of tribal jurisdiction).  In a recent piece in the Seattle University Law Review, I examined historical newspaper articles from the allotment era that addressed the opening of Sioux reservations in South Dakota.  I argued that, because many of these articles revealed injustices to tribes in the takings of their lands, settlers who read the articles--or who were privy to the information in them-- could not have formed justifiable expectations that the reservations would disappear.  In this new piece, I examine some works of allotment-era literature set in South Dakota and nearby areas to see if these works similarly provide notice of such injustices.  The results in the case of the literature are more mixed, but some works--particularly those of Zitkala-Sa and Doane Robinson--provide notice of the injustices inherent in land takings.

The Chicagoan: An Amazing Knock-Off Of The New Yorker

Once in a while you discover a nugget of culture that makes you double-take.  So it is with the publication, The Chicagoan - a spittin' image knock-off of the New Yorker that published in the 1920's and 1930's.  The University of Chicago library has digitized the entire collection - God bless 'em - and you can view issues here.

Thanks are apparently due to Emeritus Professor Neil Harris who discovered old issues in the U of C library stacks back in the 1980's and subsequently published the book The Chicagoa: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age.

The New Yorker carttons and columns, and the slightly altered Topics of the Town - you just don't see the appropriation of another magazine's entire guts every day.  It makes Us and People look like different genres!

For people who like looking through old stuff, and especially people with ties to Chicago or a passion for that era, I present to you hours and hours of entertainment.  

The Perils of Living in a College Town

North Carolina’s Research Triangle is a glorious place to live.  Besides the benefits of three major research institutions within a half-hour of each other (UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke and NC State), it’s warm, green, diverse, friendly and overflowing with great food and culture. 

But living in a college town can have its dangers.  This week’s police blotter in Chapel Hill reports that a developer building a small residential enclave near my neighborhood has had the development’s new street sign stolen off the pole three times since January.  The new street:  Road Less Traveled.  For those who took the Road Less Traveled, I want to know:  Did it make all the difference?

This is what happens when people read.  Poetry corrupts; good poetry corrupts creatively. 

--Bernie

Kafka and the study of the law

Via Adam Kotsko, translater of Giorgio Agamben's more recent work, and author of a new piece in the LA Review of Books on reading that work-

The law firm Harris and Greenwell has a library of law and humanities texts on their web site that is definitely worth checking out, including this gem from Kafka:

The New Attorney

 

 

Jefferson's Fragments

    It is a virtual commonplace of legal theory and the history of legal and political thought today that Jefferson is not to be counted among its great subjects. With the notable exception of Sanford Levinson, constitutional theorists and historians of legal thought today generally pass by Jefferson’s comment to Madison that “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living” as at best an overly idealistic road wisely not taken. David Strauss and Jed Rubenfeld treat Jefferson as a fundamentally unrealistic and anti-historical thinker (by Rubenfeld’s lights, akin to Nietzsche, which is telling), while Stephen Holmes dismisses Jefferson as simply an “anti-constitutionalist.” David Konig, the leading historian of Jefferson’s legal career and the editor (along with Michael Zuckert) of his legal commonplace book, argues that Jefferson’s stance is that of a speculative philosopher which had to be subsequently reigned in by his more judicious friend and collaborator. Hannah Arendt noted Jefferson’s ward republic idea as a precious gem forgotten by both American politics and the revolutionary tradition, and Jennifer Nedelsky and Richard Matthews (among others) have noted Jefferson’s radical theory of property rights in his extended dialogue with Madison, but those are the apparent limits of Jefferson’s identity as a legal thinker. Paul Finkelman writes about he impact of Jefferson on American constitutional law, but that impact is felt through his subsequent political career.

    What many of Jefferson’s critics on this front have in common is a feeling that Jefferson’s idea was simply ahistorical- an example of what Michael Oakeshott calls political rationalism at its worst. Robert Tsai has an appraisal of Jefferson’s idea and the project of legal revolution, but he suggests Jefferson is ultimately inadequate here because it requires us to imagine ourselves stepping out of our context and the assemblage of law and history that brought us to it. Similarly, Kunal Parker views Jefferson and Paine as exhibiting a revolutionary theory of the timelessness of consent. I just don’t see it that way at all. What is Jefferson doing hunting down manuscript copies of the colonial laws of Virginia and the records of the Virginia Company if he thinks he is conveniently stepping out of the thickness (or the need for) historical representation? What about his concern for the writing and rewriting of legal text so apparent in his plans for councils to go over proposed amendments to the state constitution, or his wish, again, expressed to Madison, for a plebiscite to make suggestions before approving the US Constitution? And what flippant anti-historical idealist composes the Manual for Parliamentary Practice?

     I see Jefferson as first and foremost a practically engaged theorist of the politics of historical representation, and he distilled that theorizing into an understanding of the ideal citizen as essentially a user of inherited materials- land, yes, property, yes, but also of law and of language. In that sense, Jeb Rubenfeld’s linking of Jefferson and Nietzsche is apt, but precisely because Jefferson, at his best, thought basically historically, or genealogically and counter-genealogically, or even archaeologically, about law and politics.

     Somewhat (and I emphasize the somewhat) in the spirit of Corey Robin’s recent separate posts on Jefferson as a racial thinker and Nietzsche as the closeted inspiration for neoliberal economic theory, we could, anachronistically, say that Jefferson’s thinking about the use and disadvantages of history for life and his vision of a transformative human subject was capable of both radically democratic and reactionary, violent implications. Unlike Nietzsche the philologist and philosopher, Jefferson the man of action, slaveowner, and proponent of continental empire had a direct hand in realizing some of those implications himself. In the final analysis (if there is such a thing), Jefferson’s career is incomprehensible without understanding it as a project of constituting and protecting the racial, gendered, and geographic boundaries of a potent ideological vision of the true and ideal citizen.

    But problematizing and forgetting are two very different things. In our current moment, it might just be that the memory of Jefferson’s conjoined concepts of law as use and of the citizen as a particular kind of reader can appear in a new light. The historical practice appropriate here is one not just of recovery but of active recollection. If Jefferson if of any use, it is to teach us that that is where our political thinking can begin again. 

    I want to thank Al Brophy and Dan Filler for letting me chime in here at the Lounge for the past month or so- I have been and always shall be a regular reader of this great blog. 

Science, Art, Policy, and the Importance of Good Science Communication

Recently, several media outlets, including NPR, the New York Times, and Big Think, have covered the story of Ph.D. student in Electronic Arts Heather Dewey-Hagborg, who makes 3-D "masks," or "portraits," of the faces of unknown individuals using the DNA they unwittingly discard on such things as cigarette butts and chewing gum. The media coverage has conjured an Orwellian dystopia for readers (check out the first few comments on the NPR piece for a sample). The artist herself apparently shares these concerns. In addition to her upcoming exihibit, Stranger Visions, she will be leading policy discussions on the implications of her art. She's also working with the Delaware medical examiner's office to try to identify the remains of a 20-year-old body.

The problem? As I commented over at Bill of Health, based on what she's said about her methods, they do not allow her to predict someone's face with anything but the crudest of guesses.

Matthew Herper of Forbes took my criticisms and those of others directly to the artist. I confess that her response does not make me feel any better. Even if you're "only" engaging in art, it seems to me that when that art has an obvious science policy message — indeed, one that you invite — you have some obligation to be clear about how "speculative," as she puts it, your art is. But when you decide to move from the world of art into the world of science, and to start leading policy discussions based on your speculative art and working with forensic examiners? Then you really have a strong duty to be very clear about what your work does and does not mean. Among other things, you should take care when talking to the media, and correct the media if they get it wrong. (This is, of course, a lesson that applies to all scholars, including legal scholars, not only to scientists.)

Yesterday, the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium, an international consortium that pools and conducts social science research on existing genome-wide association study (GWAS) data, and on whose Advisory Board I sit, published (online ahead of print) the results of its first study in Science. That paper — "GWAS of 126,559 Individuals Identifies Genetic Variants Associated with Educational Attainment" (plus supplemental data) — like much human genetics research, has the potential to be misinterpreted in the lay, policy, and even science worlds. That's why, in addition to taking care to accurately describe the results in the paper itself, including announcing the small effect sizes of the replicated SNPs in the abstract, being willing to talk to the media (many scientists are not), and engaging in increasingly important "post-publication peer review" conversations on Twitter (yes, really) and elsewhere — we put together this FAQ of what the study does — and, just as important, does not — show. So far, our efforts have been rewarded with responsible journalism that helps keep the study's limits in the foreground. Perhaps Dewey-Hagborg should consider issuing a similar FAQ with her speculative art.

[Adapted from a post and comments at Bill of Health]