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Update to "Mean Bastards as Culture Heroes"
Jesse Lemisch August 5, 2010
A note on "Mean Bastards": This short piece, posted after the death of George Steinbrenner, has received a kind of confirmation in Ellen DeGeneres walking out on her five year contract worth tens of millions with "American Idol." I had criticized Simon Cowell (a former AI judge) along with Steinbrenner, Trump, etc.
| Lois Weiner | August 1, 2010 |
President Obama’s speech to the Urban League about education July 29 didn’t cover any new ground, but there were some shifts worth noting. He tweaked his administration’s rhetorical stance towards teachers and teacher unions, adopting a less combative stance than his and Arne Duncan’s support for firing teachers in a “failing” Rhode Island school.
Hacker and Dreifus’s Higher Education? A Neocon Screed
Jesse Lemisch July 27, 2010
I admire Claudia Dreifus’s interviews with scientists in the New York Times Tuesday Science section, and particularly her attention to women in science, and I know of her honorable history in the left and feminism. So I befriended her on Facebook. There she publicized her book, with Andrew Hacker, Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing our Kids – and What we Can Do About It, to be published by Times Books/Henry Holt on August 3.
Mean Bastards as Culture Heroes
Jesse Lemisch July 14, 2010
All day long, and on into a second day, here in New York, the media have been full of George Steinbrenner. He’s always been a Mean Bastard -- even in the Seinfeld version -- and that’s how he is memorialized: a Mean Bastard and a Winner. Sometimes he’s represented as a Mean-Bastard-with-a Heart-of-Gold-who-Gave-Money-to-Good-Causes. It would seem paradoxical to be deep in grief over a man universally acknowledged to be a Mean Bastard.
Metal Workers & Miners Unions Consider Merger
Dan La Botz June 28, 2010
Unions Representing Workers in Canada, Mexico qnd U.S. Explore Merger:
Would Create International Union of One Million Metal Workers and Miners
The United Steelworkers (USW), which represents 850,000 workers in Canada, the Caribbean and the United States, and the National Union of Miners and Metal Workers (SNTMMRM), known as the Mineros, which represents 180,000 workers in Mexico, have announced plans to explore uniting into one international union. The agreement to begin exploration of a merger was signed on June 21.
| Summer 2010 | Vol:XIII-1 | Whole #: 49 |
Race and the Obama Era
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
It has been more than a year since Barack Obama was inaugurated as the first African- American president of the United States. Despite the obvious historic significance of his election, Obama’s actions to date make it very doubtful that his presidency will alleviate the persisting conditions of racism, discrimination, and general inequality that continue to shape the experience of most African-Americans in the United States.
| Summer 2010 | Vol:XIII-1 | Whole #: 49 |
Obama's Foreign Policy: The View from Canada
Derrick O'Keefe
Canadian author Margaret Atwood famously described the border between our country and the United States as the world’s longest “one-way mirror.”
| Winter 2004 | Vol:IX-4 | Whole #: 36 |
You've Been Well Cared For
Betty Reid Mandell
I was sitting in the homeless unit of the Grove Hall Department of Transitional Assistance (welfare department) chatting with some women. One was living in a homeless shelter in Saugus, a town on the north shore of Massachusetts; the other was applying for shelter. They were ashamed to be here. They said that they had worked and held responsible jobs. Life had dealt them raw blows. One had to leave her job because of an injury to her spine that seemed to require endless treatment, and she did not know when she could return to work.
| Winter 2004 | Vol:IX-4 | Whole #: 36 |
Stephen Jay Gould: An Appreciation
Clive Bradley
Stephen Jay Gould, the palaeontologist and science writer who died last year, wrote -- brilliantly -- on a bewildering series of subjects, but he is perhaps best known for his contribution to four: general evolutionary theory; the sociobiology debate; the relationship between science and religion; and the study (or critique of it) of intelligence testing.
| Winter 2004 | Vol:IX-4 | Whole #: 36 |
Affirmative Action -- 2003
Reginald Wilson
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