November 2011
1 post
It's the politics, stupid; or, is it?
From Sunil Khilnani’s “Why India is at a crossroads,” published today at the BBC website:
For India’s founders, political freedom was their great prize.
Yet decades on, what that freedom has delivered measures up poorly for many.
For India’s business elites eager to compete with China, for the middle classes fed up with corruption, for radicalisant intellectuals,...
October 2011
4 posts
9-9-9; or Crazy-Crazy-Crazy
Ezra Klein points to an analysis of Herman Cain’s preposterous 9-9-9 tax plan by the Tax Policy Center. From his take on their take:
They found that the proposal would raise taxes on 84 percent of households — and, broadly speaking, those 84 percent of households would be the bottom 84 percent. A family in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution can expect their tax bill to...
Decisions, Decisions
About as accurate a summation as I think you’re going to find regarding Obama’s fundraising vs. grassroots predicament going into next year’s election, from Robert Johnson, in the pages of the New York Review of Books:
President Obama, like all elected officials, has to deal with the two currencies of electoral politics: money and votes. He plans to raise $1 billion, and much...
Field Trip
This afternoon, I’ve asked my introduction to sociology students at BMCC to join me at #occupywallstreet for a little field trip. We’ll be covering stratification, inequality, and political economy over the next few weeks, and I thought it’d be a great place to start the conversation. In advance, I’ve asked them to consider the following questions:
Who is there at...
September 2011
7 posts
Beats from #occupywallstreet
“Why are people occupying Wall Street? Why has the occupation – despite the...”
– David Graeber, “Occupy Wall Street Rediscovers the Radical Imagination”
Up with Obama
Amid the bickering over Obama’s real and perceived faults, Bill Keller in an op-ed published today in the Times helps define the stakes in the upcoming 2012 elections:
Against Obama we have a cast of Republicans who talk about the federal government with a contempt that must have Madison and Hamilton spinning in their coffins. The G.O.P. campaign sounds like a contest for the Barry...
Bike-Sharing in NYC
Story here. Now, if only we can get the NYPD to properly regulate the bike lanes. Presumably, bike shares are for people without bikes, or for people who ride bikes irregularly, and who wants to bike in the city when there’s no space to do so, or if the space allocated for them is taken up by parked cars, vans, and trucks—many of which are owned and operated by the NYPD itself? For all...
July 2011
5 posts
Mumbaikars' Spirit: Apathy?
From a New Yorker blog post by Naresh Fernandes:
It suddenly became clear this morning that the sentiment many had identified as the Mumbai spirit was probably epic apathy all along. And, really, who could blame the residents of this city of just over twelve million for being too exhausted to think about anything other than their gruelling daily routines? Behind the sparkling Bollywood...
Klosterman on The Wire
In making a case for Breaking Bad as the best show of the past decade, Chuck Klosterman offers fans of The Wire a reality check:
There’s never been a more obstinate fan base than that of The Wire; it’s a secular cult that refuses to accept any argument that doesn’t classify The Wire as the greatest artistic endeavor in television history. It’s almost as if these people...
Oops!
Has it really been three months and two days since I last posted here? My, it does seem so. Now recommitting myself for the umpteenth time to keeping this space updated. You’ve been warned.
Reforming the reformers
Paul Tough gets tough (pun intended; cute, no?) on education reformers. The best lines come near the end:
The reformers’ policy goals are, in most cases, quite worthy. Yes, contracts should be renegotiated so that the best teachers are given incentives to teach in the poorest schools, and yes, school systems should extend the school day and school year for low-income students, as many...
April 2011
1 post
March 2011
1 post
Sean Parker: Poser, "douchebarge," take your pick
A few choice quotes from a recently published Financial Times interview with Napster founder and ex-president of Facebook Sean Parker:
Since he disputes his portrayal in the film, I ask him about what drives him and how he defines his job. “Solving specific problems is what drives me. I am not interested in having a career. I never have been,” he says. “This in no way resembles a career. I...
February 2011
6 posts
“Religion is not a rational enterprise. Its metaphysical claims cannot be proven;...”
– Ian Buruma, Taming the Gods (2010)
Egypt and the Dialectic of Freedom
From the introduction to Maxine Greene’s Dialectic of Freedom:
The aim is to find (or create) an authentic public space, that is, one in which diverse human beings can appear before one another as, to quote Hannah Arendt, “the best they know how to be.” Such a space requires the provision of opportunities for the articulation of multiple perspectives in multiple idioms, out of...
Flirting with Revolution: Day 18
I joke, but in a way it’s kind of true: This is my first revolution. I’ve “seen” others on television, read about them in newspapers and magazines: Iran in 2009, Ukraine’s “orange” revolution in 2004, and others going back to the Berlin Wall in 1989. But this is the first time I’ve followed events from day one, and followed them so closely. At home,...
Mean City, USA
As reported in this week’s print edition of the Economist, the number of people living below the poverty line in Florida’s Sarasota-Bradenton metropolitan region increased from 9.2% in 2007 to 13.7% in 2009. A remarkable jump, to say the least. Joining the ranks of the homeless are former professionals such as Angie Sammann, a one-time loan officer at a bank, who now lives in the...
January 2011
5 posts
On Despots and Lattes
The protests in Egypt are inspiring. Change really does seem to be in the air. And this time, it’s for real. But it’s all got me thinking, why are there are no such protests in the America? People are struggling. Unemployment is now inching up to ten percent. The poverty rate is near sixteen percent. Meanwhile, profits on Wall Street are near or above where they were two years ago when...
In Search of Interactions Across a Divide: The...
Popular and scholarly representations of so-called slum communities and neighborhoods tend to depict life in these spaces as somehow cut off from the regular happenings across the city and even the world. Such a “two worlds” approach to poverty and inequality in cities is simplistic at best, and in the case of life in and around the residential complex of “Building” in...
Just think about it!
That subject line and the following was forwarded to me from a friend in India who had it forward to her. Maybe you’ll do the same.
We live in a nation where Rice is Rs.40/- per kg and Sim Card is free.
Pizza reaches home faster than Ambulance and Police.
Car loan @ 5% but education loan @ 12%.
Students with 45% get in elite institutions through quota ...
December 2010
5 posts
Beautiful Losers: What's the Matter with...
It’s that time again, isn’t it—and, really, when is it not?—when liberals of all stripes and hews gather round the table and ask themselves that perennial question: How’d it all go so wrong? Two years ago Barack Obama swept into office riding the “Yes, we can!” wave. Well, the tide has turned: “No, we can’t!” “Don’t Ask,...
November 2010
12 posts
The Disasters Non-Decision Decisions Can Make:...
George Packer, master critic and writer, dissects Bush’s Decision Points. The last paragraph from the review:
Bush ends “Decision Points” with the sanguine thought that history’s verdict on his Presidency will come only after his death. During his years in office, two wars turned into needless disasters, and the freedom agenda created such deep cynicism around the world that the word...
Reading Taibbi
Wandered into the Strand just before closing tonight and picked up Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia. First chapter on Palin and the Tea Party, and he ain’t holding any punches:
In the new American ghetto, the nightmare engine is bubble economics, a kind of high-tech casino scam that kills neighborhoods just like dope does, only the product is credit, not crack or heroin. It concentrates...
Jay-Z: Rap Scholar
In his new book, Decoded, Jay-Z offers one of the more compelling analyses of class and inequality I’ve read in a while (full excerpt available here; NPR interview and transcript here):
One of the reasons inequality gets so deep in this country is that everyone wants to be rich. That’s the American ideal. Poor people don’t like talking about poverty because even though they...
Pity the Turkey
All but a negligible number of the 45 million turkeys that find their way out to our Thanksgiving tables were unhealthy, unhappy, and—this is a radical understatement—unloved. If people come to different conclusions about a turkey’s place on the Thanksgiving table, at least we can all agree on those three things.
Compelling words from Jonathan Safran Foer, in Eating Animals....
Class Acts
Warrants for an interactional approach to class analysis, from Randall Collins, in Interaction Ritual Chains:
My argument is that micro-situational data has conceptual priority. This is not to say that macro-data means nothing; but amassing statistics and survey data does not convey an accurate picture of social reality unless they are interpreted in the context of their microsituational...
Orwell on the Laboring Poor
In the spirit of yesterday’s post—and really, in the spirit of my whole academic focus at this point in time—here’s a passage from George Orwell’s excellent Down and Out in Paris and London.
The moral is, never be sorry for a waiter. Sometimes when you sit in a restaurant, still stuffing yourself half an hour after closing time, you feel that the tired waiter at...
Mukesh Ambani: Role Model
According to the New York Times, Mukesh Ambani’s fortune is worth $27 billion. Fitting, I suppose, given that his $1 billion new home in Mumbai is 27 floors—filled with nine elevators, a fifty-seat theater, a spa, and a grand ballroom. Number of residents? Five. Perverse? Well, yes, in a manner of speaking. Nearby resident Sushala Pawar suggests another manner of speaking, however,...
Remembrance Day
Ten years ago today—November 11, 2000—I was shuttling through London’s Heathrow on my way to a flight back to Vancouver, Canada. I was with my parents and sister. At precisely 11 a.m. every single person in a sea of thousands stopped. No talking, no shuffling of the feet. For a period of one minute, total silence. And just as fast as people stopped, they picked up the pace of...
Tony Judt: Zinging from the Dead
The late Tony Judt gets some space at the New York Times op-ed page to ruminate on what makes New York great. It’s all been said before, by Judt and others, and will be said again, I’m sure. It’s Judt’s parting shot to the old intellectual elite of New York—many of whom are still kicking around—that I find most fascinating, and fascinating because it’s...
October 2010
6 posts
The Trouble with NGOs: A Center-Right Take
Philippe Legrain, author of Open World: The Truth about Globalisation, is not a fan of activist NGOs:
A few community schemes here and there are fine, but a cabal of self-selected campaigners and self-interested companies should not be in the business of setting social standards—that should be for elected parliaments. ‘Change the world: burn your Nikes!’ is a catchy slogan. But...
