Digest, 4/23/2023: Just Break Up with the Clintons Already
the eighty-eighth digest post
If you missed it, here’s my piece for New York on the myth of the practical major.
This Week’s Posts
Monday, April 17th - A Conversation About Crime
Very real issues about crime explored in a jokey faux-dialogue because I’m sick to death of the paucity of seriousness in the conversation so why be serious myself?
Wednesday, April 19th - Most People Aren’t Funny
And that’s OK!
Friday, April 21st - Yes, We Have to Deal with the World as It Really Is - All of Us, All of It (inadvertently not subscriber-only because I’m a dumbass)
You can’t shield people from reality, not on a long enough timescale, not with anti-LGBTQ book bans, not with trigger warnings.
From the Archives
Me in 2016 on why campus activists need to work bottom-up, not top-down, for the New Republic
Song of the Week
Just to reach you! Just to reach you! Oh, and I will reach you, ohhhhhh
Non-Garbage Online Reading
It takes some guts to dive back into the “I went on a cruise ship and boy did I not have a good time” genre, in upper-middle-brow essay writing, but Lauren Oyler’s recent venture in Harper’s is funny and deft. Afraid I can’t get you past the paywall.
Book Recommendation
Of Boys and Men, Richard Reeves, 2022
This is a qualified recommendation, as this book is one of a particular kind of nonfiction book that can be both useful and boring - the one big thing book. These are books where the author essentially has one main argument to make and keeps making it over the course of the text, assembling evidence to buttress a single point. These books can be informative and at times entertaining, but can develop a deadening quality over time. (I have great admiration for Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century but by the end of reading it I was holding on for dear life.) Of Boys and Men is that kind of book, mostly, but it has the advantage of being the right length and of moving at a good pace. The basic point, that it’s now men who require (in effect if not in name) affirmative action, is convincing and important, though always attenuated by ongoing domination of many elite spaces by men. Can’t say the solutions chapter is particularly plausible, but the idea of starting boys in school a year later has real merit.
Comment of the Week
My YA novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, is one of the most challenged and banned books of the last 20 years. According to the American Library Association, my novel was the most banned and challenged book in the United States in the decade 2010-2019. So I have more personal experience with the right wing's vilification of books and writers than just about everybody. But I'm also highly aware of the way the left censors and silences writers. And a lot of this silencing and censoring happens before a book is even published, with sensitivity readers who demand changes based on ever-shifting moral standards and definitions of "triggers" and, more dangerously, by creating an environment where writers silence and censor themselves because they fear professional and personal excommunication. As I've written elsewhere, the right wing are censorship vikings and the left wing are censorship ninjas. -Sherman Alexie
JUST TO REACH YOU! JUST TO REACH YOU!
The conversation about crime post followed closely by Friday's one hit home as I recently had a similar A/B discussion with an educator who thought that we shouldn't have any such thing as a curriculum in school, kids should learn what's interesting and relevant to them, and be able to opt out of material that triggers them.
But of course, there should be a list of important topics that we have to teach absolutely everyone like queer rights and black rights and anti-colonialism, and of course a white kid opting out of learning about slavery because they don't see how it's relevant to them or claim it's triggering shouldn't be allowed.
Oh, Freddie. I'm disappointed you speak well of that hack. The past two years have produced such utter garbage of advocacy pretending to be research--most notoriously, Emily Hanford--but Richard Reeves is even better at selling stories than Hanford is.
I'm not going to write a lot on this, because I should write my own review, but in short:
1. Boys are doing fine on test scores. They aren't doing fine on grades. Reeves talks about how emphasis on grades were changed because girls were doing poorly on tests, and boys just couldn't adjust to the new world that was tailored for girls who couldn't adjust. I mean, my god, you don't see the problem there?
2. The gap is overwhelmingly caused by black and Hispanic boys. We're going to hold back all boys because black and Hispanic boys do badly? Wait til the white and Asian parents hear about this. And Reeves' dishonesty in barely mentioning the race issue is dishonest, but lord knows the reviewers failing to mention it are just as bad.
3. Everyone should laugh at any moron who argues that valedictorians or law school review or any status based on grades is mostly girls. Does anyone remember the Boston Globe story of a couple years ago in which they profiled all the valedictorians and how they did, which was really badly? Boston being Boston, most of the valedictorians were black girls, except for the Hispanic girls who were in ELL only schools, and the few wealthy schools where the valedictorian was probably Asian (and probably not a girl).
This is such a fucking stupid argument, and the only reason it does well is because no one wants to point out this simple flaw: Who's doing better in life, valedictorian girls of any race but probably black or Hispanic with 4.2 GPAs from AP classes whose tests they didn't take or failed and 600 SAT scores, or boys of any race, color, or creed with a 3.2 GPA, four AP tests passed with a 4 or 5 and a 1300 SAT?
4. To the extent that girls and boys of equal achievement in test scores are choosing to or not to go to college, part of this is explained by the fact that most pink collar jobs go through college, and most blue collar jobs do not. Secretaries have largely worthless business admin BAs. Manicurists have cosmetology AAs. Boys become plumbers or join the military.
So the handclasping about girls with college degrees not having marriageable men is--again, excepting blacks--bullshit. Secretaries are marrying staff sergeants. Manicurists are marrying plumbers.
The book is a farce and a lie and the reason no one in the respectable press points this out is because no one wants to talk about points 1 and 2. Emphasizing grades over test scores might have started to be about girls, but it became about race. The entire industry of college admissions was inverted and perverted because of these two points.
As for his solutions: holding back students should obviously be done by achievement, not gender. In fact, holding students back by gender would *instantly* be thrown out by the courts. So why are you, Freddie, and everyone else talking about the idea's merit?
Why not point out that an easier way to do this is to just hold kids back based on their readiness? Answer: because holding kids back on readiness would result in *looking* like kids were being held back by race. They *wouldn't* be, of course. It would be a legitimate mechanism that would catch any white or Asian kids who weren't ready. But it would result in a huge chunk of black and Hispanic kids being held back.
So here's the insanity: respectable people are saying with apparently seriousness that forcing boys to start a year earlier is a good idea, while never mentioning that we could use test scores and only hold back the kids who need it, because the first proposal involves a total fiction that boys aren't doing well and allows people to pretend it's a gender issue. The second proposal involves reality, which everyone wants to ignore and hopes it goes away.