The Roundup Top Ten for November 18, 2022
Crypto Collapse Shows No Lessons Learned From Enron Episodeby Gavin BenkeThe mythos embraced by both Jeff Skilling and Sam Bankman-Fried – that opaque and incomprehensible business practices signalled entrepreneurial genius – has only become more entrenched in the social media era. |
Monuments to the Unthinkableby Clint SmithGerman and European memorials to the Holocaust contrast starkly with an American memorial culture where the Confederate dead are revered, former slave plantations are tourist attractions, and state legislatures are seeking to ban the teaching of the nation's history in full. |
Why Direct Democracy is The Best Protection for Abortion Rightsby Rachel Rebouché and Mary ZieglerGiven the chance to vote directly on abortion rights, voters have been swayed by personal experience and shared stories to protect reproductive freedom and leave the choice in the hands of women, not politicians. |
A New AP Course Advances the Teaching of Race in American History (While the Right Seeks to Restrict It)by Michelle A. Purdy"The nation’s public schools have long been caught in a tug of war over whether they should be used to conserve or disrupt existing social arrangements." |
Immigrant Merchants and Law-and-Order Politics in Detroitby Kenneth AlyassThe Chaldean community of Detroit became a significant middleman-minority through the operation of small stores in working-class and majority-Black neighborhoods. As white flight and disinvestment created increasingly dire conditions, they also became a constituency for aggressive policing. |
Lunchtime in Italy: Work, Time and Civil Societyby Jonathan LevyThe Italian lunchtime insists that time be organized around communal rituals and sustenance, not work. Does the utter foreignness of this attitude in America help explain the current national derangement? |
Mike Davis Forced Readers to Embrace Specificityby Gabriel WinantThe recently deceased radical scholar never allowed the particularity of historical moments to disappear under theoretical abstraction, which made his work powerful and compelling. |
Mormon Support for Same-Sex Marriage isn't a Total Surpriseby Benjamin E. ParkA historian of the Latter Day Saints explains that the church has become more willing to tolerate general expansions of rights for LGBTQ Americans at the same time as it reserves the right to dictate sexual mores within its own ranks. |
Tenured Faculty are the 18% – What Will They Do for the 82?by Claire Potter"Go to any faculty meeting, and you will hear what the 18% really believes: that if contract and contingent faculty deserved tenure-stream positions, they would have them." |
When Christmas Started to Creepby Bill BlackThe story of "Christmas Creep" is not a linear encroachment of Yuletide on the rest of the calendar, and hinged on political decisions made during the Great Depression and World War II. |