Imagine being Angela Davis in 1986 after six years of Reagan. Pop culture is Rambo, Top Gun. Could she picture the summer of 2020? What separates political visionaries from the rest of us is that she undoubtedly could.
Conversely, David Horowitz spent those decades writing what everyone regarded as unhinged far right screeds warning of the subversive influence of his former New Left compatriots as they marched through academia
He warned that radical professors that everyone saw as a loopy cranks in little regarded activist disciplines were going to upend our understanding of our history and identity as a nation
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Someone observed that @ebruenig is “politically left but culturally middle American”…one should underscore the extraordinary individual pertinacity required to put oneself through elite grooming institutions while remaining the latter
And of course that extraordinary effort invariably alters the underlying substrate thus preserved through it
There is a certain parasocial relationship to the self that proceeds the ability to project it so effortlessly to others
The story is the same everywhere, though the particulars vary. Where it hasn't happened yet, it will soon.
"Others, including prominent historians, acknowledge privately that the project is riddled with errors and omissions but refuse to say so publicly." opera-historica.com/pdfs/oph/2021/…
It seems to me the relevant question is which of these rival characterizations of the error that the NYT Mag clarified is correct.
Was the seeking of a correction mere pedantic nit-picking, or was the claim one that would have resulted in failure on a high school history paper?
What we know for sure is that the NYT consulted the historian Leslie Harris in the fact checking process. She told them the claim was false and should be omitted, and was ignored.
Any practice yielding normally distributed outcomes favoring the top few percent has inherent opposition from the rest… amazing standardized testing lasted this long wctv.tv/2021/09/14/flo…
Standardized tests are good and getting rid of them is bad -- my point is that there is always a constituency opposed to them by virtue of the fact that the results are normally distributed
Not all standardized tests are good in the way they are designed and implemented of course -- high stakes testing from the NCLB era did a lot to make people dislike it
Something so poignant about Mulholland Drive being the story of a failed actress’ descent into evil and madness that delivered a great and under-appreciated actress from obscurity and the brink of failure to much belated fame
I saw it in a theater with the woman who alerted me by email to an airplane striking the World Trade Center and it remains one of my vivid movie viewing experiences.
For some reason I can't quite fathom, I ghosted her soon afterward.
On repeated subsequent viewings, I think I consider it the best movie I've ever seen
“The movement was over. We were not going to be the generation that changed the world.”
Premature words.
Didn’t realize that one of the three people Kathy Boudin and Dave Gilbert killed was “a popular young black policeman named Waverly Brown.” (Gilbert was recently released from prison in one of Andrew Cuomo’s last acts in office.)
You are the first black policeman in your department.
You are killed by privileged white ultra-radicals from who purport to be fighting on behalf of your liberation.