Cop-Watching in Austin

Another long-simmering piece of mine, about Austin cop-watcher Antonio Buehler, went live last week with Guernica, a magazine co-founded by Joel Whitney, a Columbia MFA classmate of mine. An excerpt:

Modern cop-watching is, as the [Black] Panthers were, a movement of the marginalized—the poor, the traumatized, the underemployed, the previously incarcerated, and the ranks of assorted others who don’t give a fuck. This is in part because the marginalized are far more likely to have had traumatic encounters with the police, which is one of the primary catalysts for engaging in cop-watching. It’s also because the marginalized often have less to lose, in the conventional sense, from being arrested, having their mug shots become public record, and spending days or weeks in jail and court. Stalking the police—filming them, provoking them, challenging them not to mistreat others, daring them to arrest you—endangers full-time jobs. It’s often very late-night work, which can disrupt family and professional life. It can threaten one’s social status, if there is status to be threatened. It’s also just emotionally grueling work, in which periods of intense confrontation alternate with much longer periods of boring nothingness.

White Folks

I had a long journey with this piece, which began as a talk I gave at the Clinton School in Little Rock, but it's finally out and I'm really happy with it. It's a review of White Folks: Race and Identity in Rural America, which is a really fantastic, and utterly obscure, book by education professor Timothy Lensmire. An excerpt from my review:

Perhaps the most dramatic example of internal conflict shows up in the tug of war Frank describes between his professional persona at the high school, and the role he plays when he’s with his buddies at their weekly poker games. In these “high” and “low” spaces, as Lensmire describes them, Frank encounters radically different incentive structures, and he reacts accordingly. At work Frank feels as though he has to carefully measure every word he says, on racially sensitive topics, for fear that if he says the wrong thing his co-workers, all of whom are white, may tag him as a racist. At the poker games, it’s the opposite. Racist talk is rewarded, and social opprobrium awaits the person who preaches caution. “Maybe I’m not a racist,” he tells Lensmire, “but in that subculture, I’ll go way out on a limb and say some pretty horrible things because I’m being rewarded by other people that are functioning in a subculture mentality.”

One result of this split, for Frank, is his sense that there is nowhere he can talk about race in ambivalent and inevitably clumsy ways. There’s no “middle place,” so to speak, where he can talk through his jumbled thoughts and impulses in order perhaps to arrive, over time, at a more integrated and coherent perspective. In the high spaces, the danger is that he’ll say the wrong thing and be shamed. In the low spaces, the danger is that he’ll shame his friends, if he dissents from their racism. In either case there’s anxiety, confusion, and a fear of shame and rejection.

Reviews in Washington Monthly and The New Republic + bonus conversation with my brother

I recently reviewed Mark Lilla's new book, The Once and Future Liberal, for Washington Monthly. An excerpt: 

As with so much else in The Once and Future Liberal, which is an infuriatingly self-defeating book, Lilla has a good point that is betrayed by its articulation, and is therefore unlikely to be heard or engaged by precisely those who most need to hear it. Who, after all, needs to be persuaded to think, speak, and act differently if the liberal zeitgeist is truly to shift? Who is it that creates and shifts new zeitgeists on the left? Activists, students, teachers, artists, intellectuals, visionaries. Yet the book, depending on the page and chapter, is too abstract for activists, too crusty for students and artists and visionaries, too intellectual for teachers, and too reductionist in its history and theory for intellectuals.

Really engaging any of those audiences, for an old liberal intellectual like Lilla, was going to be hard under the best of circumstances. It would have required that he be as strict with himself, in practicing empathy toward the left, as he wants the left to be in practicing empathy toward the center and right. The Once and Future Liberal doesn’t bear evidence of such an ethic. It seems written too much in haste, and with too much unprocessed emotion. It is too angry at times, too visibly calculating in its empathy at others.

More recently, I reviewed a new biography of Max Eastman for The New Republic (my debut in that august magazine). I write:

Sex, love, romance, and jealousy are not intrinsically uninteresting material. Great novels are made of such stuff. But Eastman’s love life, after a while, wasn’t interesting. It was repetitive and hollow. He liked seducing women. He enjoyed sex. He was good at it. Every so often, until the end, he would fall desperately in love with some fresh-faced younger woman. He would write lyrical letters to her and sometimes even mediocre poems, but he wouldn’t leave Eliena (or later, Yvette) for her. 

When he was young these affairs could be sexy and glamorous. As he aged, they came to seem sad and compulsive. “My love, I would give my soul to lie in your arms tonight,” he wrote to the 24-year-old Florence Deshon in 1917, when he was 34. Twelve years later, at the age of 46, he was making a version of the same speech to the 17-year-old painter Ione Robinson, a protégé of his second wife. A decade later, now 56, he wrote to the 18-year old Creigh Collins: “I want to sit all day in the big arm chair with your head warm between my knees, and poetry, poetry floating around me on your young voice as though thrushes carried its meaning to my ear.” A year later he impregnated his secretary, the 25-year-old Florence Norton. When she asked for his help in getting an abortion, “Max provided a doctor’s address but otherwise became ‘hysterical’ and essentially abandoned her.” While she was getting a “painful, nauseating abortion,” Eastman was at his house in Croton-on-Hudson, safely back in the orbit of his wife.  

My brother Mark and I recently co-authored a dialogue/review about Jeremy Dauber's new book Jewish Comedy: A Serious History. An excerpt:

We can’t answer, then, the question we really want to answer, which is whether Jews have always been funny, and if so, why? But I wonder if we can say something slightly different, less about humor and comedy per se than about the roles that Jews have played, at various times and places, within gentile cultures. And I’m going to refer, as you may have guessed I would sooner or later, to Leslie Fiedler’s great essay, “Master of Dreams: The Jew in the Gentile World.”

The argument is too complex to detail too fully here, but the important point is that Jews in the diaspora, for Fiedler, have compulsively, mostly unconsciously dedicated themselves to understanding their complex Jewish identities in exile, and also their relationship to the lands to which they’ve been exiled, in which they are minorities, often despised and oppressed minorities. The dialectic that results, between the Jewish alien and the culture that sees his as alien, ends up producing not just profound insight into the Jewish soul but into the depths of the alien culture as well. As Fiedler writes, “the Jewish Dreamer in Exile, thinking only of making his own dreams come true, ends by deciphering the alien dreams of that world as well.”

Ooh. Shiny.

This month's Washington Monthly features a review, by me, of Pankaj Mishra's Age of Anger: A History of the Present. This is my favorite part of it, I think:

You may not have seen the commercials for the new Google phone, the Pixel, but even if you haven’t seen them, you’ve seen them. Lots of silver and white and bright colors. Beautiful people of every age, race, and ethnicity in soft, brilliantly dyed natural fibers, to a soundtrack of power pop. A gleaming, seductive vision of a frictionless world in which vibrant landscapes morph into one another, people are running through many-colored effusions of Holi powder, and #technology is the handmaiden of connection and fulfillment. The Pixel ads could be ads for Lexus, Bose, Hulu, or any of the twelve other smartphones that do exactly the same things the Pixel does.

The commercials make me uneasy, as these sorts of ads almost always do—as, in fact, they’re designed to do. They are distillations, in the form of thirty- or sixty-second desire bombs, of the fantasy that with the right stuff we can all have material security, creative fulfillment, control over our destinies, a tribe of cool friends, and a sense of belonging and place in the world.

Mishra is general is a lovely and brilliant writer. The book didn't quite hold together, unfortunately. 

Two new pieces

I am a terrible updater of this site, as I knew I would be (see the caption to the right). 

Anyway, here are two recent pieces of mine (recent, that is, at this moment I'm posting this).

"Not Yet Falling Apart: Two thinkers on the left offer a guide to navigating the stormy seas of modernity" 

"A Pop Song In Clothes: How Tommy Hilfiger Captured and Lost the Zeitgeist"