Brian Sholis » Miscellaneous

Arizona Politics, Considered Twice

brian — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 23:42:45 +0000

By coincidence I’ve just read two sharp analyses of Arizona politics in separate publications. At The New Inquiry, Alex Aums and James Broulard discuss the #OccupyWallStreet-influenced protests in Phoenix, and meditate in the process upon geography, demography, and “symbolic politics.” Meanwhile, in a recent issue of the London Review of Books, Jeremy Harding reports on the state’s transformation into a “militarized desert principality.” His thoughtful presentation of first-person accounts from both sides of the border is well worth the time it takes to read his 11,000-word essay.

Simon Kuper’s Soccer Men

brian — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 14:11:36 +0000

In a recent interview with the New York Times, journalist Simon Kuper, coauthor of the acclaimed 2009 book Soccernomics, claims that he thinks “people are almost as interesting as numbers.” His new collection of soccer profiles, titled Soccer Men, gave me a chance to test that claim; having done so, I think the emphasis in his statement should be placed on the word almost. To read my review of the book, head to Bookforum.com. “Kuper’s admiring portraits of an earlier generation of great talkers—from Johann Cruijff to Lothar Matthaüs to Jorge Valdano—reveal that his irritation with today’s players is due as much to broader developments in the game as it is to their individual traits.”

Bright Colors in the News

brian — Sun, 15 May 2011 14:48:37 +0000

Police shoot water cannons as Jammu Kashmir state government employees shout anti government slogans during a protest outside the civil secretariat in Srinagar, India, May, 5, 2008. (Dar Yasin/AP)

The use of bright colors has entered the news in two unexpected ways this week. On Friday, Time’s Lightbox blog reported on the use of pink dye in the water cannons the government uses to fight political protesters in Uganda. The report included a stunning-looking—if dispiriting to think about—slide show demonstrating how the dyes, in a rainbow of colors, have been used elsewhere in recent decades. Today’s New York Times includes a story about the riotous colors—a “scourge” of tastelessness, according to some—used in the rebuilding of Baghdad. A slideshow accompanies the report.

Pied La Biche

brian — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 13:18:41 +0000

This summer I caught World Cup fever, which has morphed into an obsession with European soccer. I’ve been watching a game or two a week, as well as watching highlights from dozens of others and reading blogs and newspapers’ sports sections. There are a handful of intersections between the sport and contemporary art—another of my interests—most notably Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s 2006 film Zidane: A 21st-century Portrait. Now I’ve come across Pied La Biche, an artists’ collective that has riffed on soccer several times. Their video Refait re-creates, on the streets of Villeurbanne, France, the final fifteen minutes of the 1982 World Cup match between France and Spain. The group has also realized artist Asger Jorn’s 1964 proposal for a three-sided football match, which was played in Vénissieux, France, in October 2009 during the Lyon Biennale. Learn more about the group at their French-language website. (Via soccer blog From a Left Wing. Also, if you’re wondering, I’m rooting for Arsenal.)

“Beyond Critical Thinking”

brian — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 03:21:30 +0000

“The skill at unmasking error, or simple intellectual one-upmanship, is not completely without value, but we should be wary of creating a class of self-satisfied debunkers or, to use a currently fashionable word on campuses, people who like to ‘trouble’ ideas.” So says Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University, whose reviews in Bookforum I have always enjoyed. (See here, here, here, here, here, and here.) Roth continues: “Our students may become too good at showing how things don’t make sense. [...] If we humanities professors saw ourselves more often as explorers of the normative than as critics of normativity, we would have a better chance to reconnect our intellectual work to broader currents in public culture.” To read the rest of the essay, which is published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, click here. For those interested in reading even more, he also maintains a blog and writes for the Huffington Post.

Judt and Ebert

brian — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 22:13:04 +0000

Many people have commented upon Tony Judt’s eloquent and acutely observant description of the “progressive imprisonment without parole” that is life with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, from which he suffers. The first of a series of short essays, on the subject of getting through the night, is in the January 14 issue of the NYRB. Judt has also been profiled recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I’ve just come across Roger Ebert’s perceptive and unsentimental description of being unable to eat or drink, published on his blog. Both are very much worth reading; each demonstrates a deeply admirable force of will and humbles those of us, myself included, who are blessed with relative good health.

David Blumenthal and James A. Morone, The Heart of Power

brian — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 12:00:24 +0000

I’ve just finished David Blumenthal and James A. Morone’s The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office (University of California Press), which discusses eleven presidents’ encounters with illness alongside their attempts to influence health care policy. Blumenthal, professor of medicine and health policy at Harvard Medical School and an adviser to Barack Obama, and Morone, a professor and chair of political science at Brown, are certainly up to this task, and the book is a pretty good, if sometimes repetitious, read. Particularly engaging are chapters on the Democrats who dreamed of national health insurance, from FDR and Harry Truman to JFK and Lyndon Johnson. The chapter on Johnson draws on newly released archival material to present a “secret history of Medicare” that counters the popular narrative granting credit for the program to Senator Wilbur Mills. It turns out that LBJ, master manipulator of Congress that he was, was in on Mills’s “surprise” packaging of three separate bills—the ones that became Medicare Part A, Medicare Part B, and Medicaid—all along, graciously working behind the scenes to clear the path for the senator to dramatically reverse his longstanding anti–health insurance stance (and even following this narrative line in his autobiography).

I’m neither a health care expert nor a scholar of Johnson, so I can’t assess how fresh this “secret history” really is. Yet the book, published by the University of California Press, is obviously aimed at a broad audience, ostensibly offering ballast to anyone debating health care in 2009 and 2010. The final chapter goes so far as to offer “eight rules for the Heart of Power,” among them “passion,” “speed,” “hush the economists,” “go public,” and “manage Congress.” Curiously, though, it seems that Sam Tanenhaus, editor of both the New York Times Book Review and the Times’s Week in Review section, is among the only editors to have responded to the book. I guess the vicissitudes of book publicity will always escape me: I would imagine that powerhouse academic authors plus reputable academic press plus hot-button topic would equal widespread review attention. But despite the fact that The Heart of Power was featured on the cover of the NYTBR, where it was reviewed by former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, and was the prompt for an article in the Week in Review, there’s not much else out there. (I canvassed the web and Lexis-Nexis.) Here’s an interview with Morone on Open Source, a radio program based at Brown. These pieces came out in September, so perhaps others are on their way. For what it’s worth, Reich’s assessment of the book, and his description of Obama’s action on the authors’ lessons, seems to me insightful and fair. Here are his thoughts on the latter topic:

The book was written before President Obama began his push for universal health care, but he seems to have anticipated many of its lessons. He’s moved as quickly on the issue as this terrible economy has let him, and he has outlined his goals but left most details to Congress. Nor has he been too rattled by naysaying economists (although the cost estimates of the Congressional Budget Office set him back). The question remains whether, in the months ahead, he can knock Congressional heads together to clinch a meaningful deal, and overcome those who inevitably feed public fears about a “government takeover” of health care and of budget-busting future expenditures. “The Heart of Power” suggests that the odds are not in his favor.

Letters of Note

brian — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 19:39:20 +0000

Those who remember with some fondness Today in Letters, the blog I published briefly in 2007, will appreciate Letters of Note, edited by Shaun Usher. The author describes it as a “blog-based archive of fascinating correspondence, complete with scans and transcripts of the original missives.” Since I began following the site a few weeks ago, it has presented letters from Billy the Kid, Margaret Thatcher, American Revolutionary War General William Howe, and many others. The scans make each entry; it’s fascinating to ponder the material details of each letter, from paper choice (or letterhead design) to handwriting.

Fall 2009 New York Events Calendar

brian — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:39:20 +0000

The new season is upon us. Each August I spend some time compiling a large list of art and academic events in and around New York City, which I use and share with a few others. After sending my autumn calendar to some friends I realized that some readers of this site might enjoy it as well. Right-click here to download the calendar in iCal format, which is now compatible with many other calendar programs, including, I believe, Google Calendar. The file contains a few hundred events, many of which are free, ranging from art openings to book readings to dance performances to academic conferences. It is comprehensive—there’s an event for nearly every day between now and the middle of December—but by no means complete. (For example, the excellent Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia has not yet posted its autumn schedule.) While I tried to be as accurate as possible when copying down the events I found, please check my information against what you can find on the web. Other useful resources include Platform for Pedagogy, Artcards.cc, ArtCat, and the Spare Times column published each Friday in the New York Times. I hope someone out there finds this useful.

Eli Thorkelson/Decasia

brian — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 23:20:21 +0000

Just came across the blog decasia: critique of academic culture, which is run by Eli Thorkelson, a graduate student in cultural anthropology at the University of Chicago. His subject? The anthropology of universities. There are many fascinating posts about higher education: “Against the concept of academic politics“; “Reading as an ethnographic tactic“; “The failed fantasy of pure meritocracy.” Be sure to poke around in the archives, among his academic papers, and the website for a collaborative project about graduate socialization in anthropology. From the introduction to the latter: “Our hope is to promote greater reflexive attention to our own social world; to explore the contradictions between our ethics and our practices; and to look into how graduate education could be improved.”