Cultureplaces

Quillette Published on  December 7, 2017       written by  Patrick Lee Miller Buying textbooks, writing syllabi, and putting on armor. This is how many students and teachers prepared to return to campus this past fall. The last few years have witnessed an intensifying war for the soul of the university, with many minor skirmishes, and several pitched battles. The most dramatic was last spring at Evergreen State, shortly before the end of the spring semester. 1  Perhaps the most dramatic since then have been at Reed College and Wilfrid Laurier University. 2 There is no shortage of examples, filling periodicals left and right. Wherever it next explodes, this war promises more ferocity, causing more casualties—careers, programs, ideals. What’s at stake? According to Michael Aaron, writing after the battle at Evergreen, the campus war is symptomatic of a broader clash of three worldviews contesting the future of our culture: traditionalism, modernism...

http://freebeacon.com/culture/law-professors-condemned-racist-praising-americas-1950s-bourgeois-culture/amp/ Two law professors have been condemned by University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) students, alumni, and faculty as bigots engaging in "racist and white supremacist discourse," after they wrote a nostalgic op-ed praising America's 1950s "bourgeois culture." UPenn Professor Amy Wax and University of San Diego's Lawrence Alexander were slammed by a group of 54 UPenn doctoral students and alumni as "promoting hate and bigotry under the guise of ‘intellectual debate'" in their piece titled, "Paying the price for breakdown of the country's bourgeois culture,"  published  earlier this month by the  Philadelphia Inquirer . In it, they argued the "[1950s] culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need fo...

BY  RYAN BORT   ON 8/8/17 Newsweek A new study from Penn State University posits that cultural forces, not biological ones, may be responsible for crime among teens. Criminologists at the university studied the relationship between crime and age in Taiwan, finding that involvement in crime peaks in one's late 20s and early 30s. This differs from trends in Western countries like the U.S., where the culture is more individualistic than it is in Taiwan, where teenagers place less emphasis on having fun and are more likely to behave similarly to adults. "Whatever the biological, or neurobiological, factors that might contribute to criminal behavior, culture and social structure apparently play as great, or greater role," said Yunmei Lu, one of the study's co-authors.

By Susannah Rigg 26 July 2017 http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20170725-the-confusing-way-mexicans-tell-time?ocid=ww.social.link.facebook When I first stepped foot on Mexican soil, I spoke relatively good Spanish. I was by no means fluent, but I could hold a conversation. So when I asked a local ice-cream seller in downtown Guadalajara when he expected a new delivery of chocolate ice cream, and he said ‘ ahorita ’, which directly translates to ‘right now’, I took him at his word, believing that its arrival was imminent. I sat near his shop and waited, my Englishness making me feel it would be rude to leave. Half an hour passed and still no ice cream arrived, so I timidly wandered back to the shop and asked again about the chocolate ice cream. “Ahorita,” he told me again, dragging out the ‘i’ ‒ “Ahoriiiiita”. His face was a mix of confusion and maybe even embarrassment.  The author learned that ‘ahorita’ shouldn’t be taken literally while waiting for ice crea...

David Brooks     New York Times     July 11, 2017 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/opinion/how-we-are-ruining-america.html?mcubz=0 Over the past generation, members of the college-educated class have become amazingly good at making sure their children retain their privileged status. They have also become devastatingly good at making sure the children of other classes have limited chances to join their ranks. How they’ve managed to do the first task — giving their own children a leg up — is pretty obvious. It’s the pediacracy, stupid. Over the past few decades, upper-middle-class Americans have embraced behavior codes that put cultivating successful children at the center of life. As soon as they get money, they turn it into investments in their kids. Upper-middle-class moms have the means and the maternity leaves to breast-feed their babies at much higher rates than high school-educated moms, and for much longer periods. Upper-middle-cl...

Brian Boutwell  The Spectator  June 14, 2017 https://life.spectator.co.uk/2017/06/do-parents-really-matter/ Parenting does not have a large impact on how children turn out. An incendiary claim, to be sure, but if you can bear with me until the close of this article I think I might be able to persuade you — or at the very least chip away at your certainty about parental influence. First, what if later today the phone were to ring and the voice at the other end informed you that you have an identical twin. You would have lived your entire life up to that point not realising that you had a clone. The bearer of this news says arrangements have been made to reunite you with your long-lost sibling. In something of a daze, you assent, realising as you hang up that you’ve just agreed to meet a perfect stranger. There was a time when separating identical twins at birth, while infrequent, did happen thanks to the harsh nature of adoption systems. One of the people who hel...

"Noting that two-thirds of young people in many of Western Europe’s major cities are of foreign origin, the authors of  Super-Diversity: A New Perspective on Integration   slammed  politicians’ calls for newcomers to assimilate, stating: 'If there is no longer an ethnic majority group, everyone will have to adapt to everyone else. Diversity will become the new norm.'

by Kenan Malek Op Ed Writer New York Times June 14, 2017 Seventy years ago, racist radio stations refused to play “race music” for a white audience. Today, antiracist activists insist that white painters should not portray black subjects. To appropriate a phrase from a culture not my own: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. In Canada last month, three editors lost their jobs after making such a defense. The controversy began when Hal Niedzviecki, editor of Write, the magazine of the Canadian Writers’ Union, penned an editorial defending the right of white authors to create characters from minority or indigenous backgrounds. Within days, a  social media backlash  forced him to resign. The Writers’ Union issued an apology for an article that its Equity Task Force claimed “re-entrenches the deeply racist assumptions” held about art. Another editor, Jonathan Kay, of The Walrus magazine, was also  compelled to step down  after tweeting his support ...

April 30, 2017 And then there is the cultural impact of mass immigration, which the Party of Davos, living in a post-national world, celebrates as a vision of the global future. Neo-reactionaries beg to differ. They get a little vague here — tiptoeing awkwardly around the question of race. A nation, they believe, is not just a random group of people within an arbitrary set of borders. It’s a product of a certain history and the repository of a distinctive culture. A citizen should be educated to understand that country’s history and take pride in its culture and traditions. Honed and modulated over time, this national culture gives crucial legitimacy to the American political system by producing citizens acclimated to the tolerance, self-government, and other civic values that democracy needs if it is to function. And so [National Security Council's Michael] Anton, who gives America’s long history of successful integration of immigrants short shrift, worries about the influx of w...

An unorthodox professor explains the ‘new religion’ that drives the intolerance and violence at places like Middlebury and Berkeley. By BARI WEISS Updated March 31, 2017 7:27 p.m. ET Wall Street Journal 505  COMMENTS New York When a mob at Vermont’s Middlebury College shut down a speech by social scientist Charles Murray a few weeks ago, most of us saw it as another instance of campus illiberalism. Jonathan Haidt saw something more—a ritual carried out by adherents of what he calls a “new religion,” an auto-da-fé against a heretic for a violation of orthodoxy. “The great majority of college students want to learn. They’re perfectly reasonable, and they’re uncomfortable with a lot of what’s going on,” Mr. Haidt, a psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, tells me during a recent visit to his office. “But on each campus there are some true believers who have reoriented their lives around the fight again...

Book Party  Review A new book argues that accusing people of unearned advantages does nothing to address inequality -- and may only make things worse. By  Carlos Lozada   March 23 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2017/03/23/the-last-thing-on-privilege-youll-ever-need-to-read/?utm_term=.3f6450c0f480 (Washington Post illustration) THE PERILS OF ‘PRIVILEGE': Why Injustice Can’t Be Solved by  Accusing Others of Advantage by Phoebe Maltz Bovy St. Martin’s Press. 324 pp. $26.99 Someone needs to book Phoebe Maltz Bovy on one of those television shows featuring people who have the most awful jobs in America, because she has just completed a project so soul-crushing that I can’t imagine anyone ever doing it again, certainly not voluntarily. She has scoured the Internet for every overwrought think piece and self-indulgent personal essay about privilege — and has read all ...

Review of "We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation" by Jeff Chang By  Carlos Lozada   September 29, 2016   (iStock) WE GON’ BE ALRIGHT: Notes on Race and Resegregation By Jeff Chang Picador. 192 pp. $16. Grade Point newsletter News and issues affecting higher education. Sign up The copious books confronting this moment in America’s racial politics — a mix of reporting and meditations on President Obama, on Black Lives Matter, on police violence and mass incarceration — can be roughly divided into two broad categories. There are the My Story works, deeply personal accounts in which the authors draw on their own lives to illuminate their arguments, often in self-conscious reference or emulation of notable activist voices of the past; and the Our Story versions, works of history and big-picture analysis, more academic in inspiration but no less ambitious in their ends. Jeff Chang’s book on the culture wars and resegregat...

Journal of Criminal Justice Volume 49 , March–April 2017, Pages 22–31 It's nature and nurture: Integrating biology and genetics into the social learning theory of criminal behavior Bryanna Fox ,    Show more http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2017.01.003 Get rights and content Highlights • Major advances in genetics and biology show that many human behaviors are impacted by factors other than social influences. • Criminology has not incorporated these genetic and biological influences into any mainstream criminological theories. • This article proposes unifying nature and nurture by integrating biological factors and social learning into a single theory.

Excerpt from the conclusion written by Charles Murray, AEI.2009 We have reviewed overwhelming evidence that genetic and hormonal differences between males and females are major causes of sex differences in 258 THE SCIENCE ON WOMEN AND SCIENCE behavior. These include differences in social behaviors in infants, play behaviors, interests, activities, educational and vocational goals, choices of occupations, patterns of cognitive abilities, and the frequency of extreme giftedness in spatial, mechanical, and mathematical ability. The dominance of female doctoral students in the life and human sciences and of male doctoral students in the inorganic sciences and engineering is consistent with and predictable by sex differences in interests and ability patterns. The greater social interest and ability of females than males is evident in infancy. The differing play activities and interests of boys and girls share similarities with sex differences in the play behaviors of nonhuman primates. Int...

Victor David Hanson nails it again in this podcast

We’ve taken in far too many people and we’re letting them down badly – especially the children Tove Lifvendahl For a British boy to be killed by a grenade attack anywhere is appalling, but for it to happen in a suburb of Gothenburg should shatter a few illusions about Sweden. Last week’s murder of eight-year-old Yuusuf Warsame fits a pattern that Swedes have come slowly to recognise over the years. He was from Birmingham, visiting relatives, and was caught up in what Swedish police believe is a gang war within the Somali community. Last year, a four-year-old girl was killed by a car bomb outside Gothenburg, another apparent victim of gang violence. Fraser Nelson and Ivar Arpi discuss the Swedish model for migration on this week’s Spectator podcast: For years, Sweden has regarded itself as a ‘humanitarian superpower’ — making its mark on the world not by fighting wars but by offering shelter to war’s victims. Refugees have arrived here in extraordinary numbers. Ove...

Pol itics, the late Andrew Breitbart remarked, is downstream of culture. In other words, the nature of a society’s culture influences the nature of its politics. So if you care about politics—those communal arrangements that, in Aristotle’s summary, conduce to the good for man—you will also care about culture. W ha t should we think about the state of our culture? Should we be happy about the state of those institutions that we have entrusted to preserve and transmit the cultural aspirations of our society? H um an beings are creatures who exist in perpetual tension between what they are and what they would be. Which means that the answer to that second question will always be No. The imperfection, the longing, that is at the heart of the human condition bequeaths us perpetual dissatisfaction. Still, there are differences to be noted, distinctions to be made, and it is clear that some eras enjoy a healthier, more vibrant cultural life than others. When we look around at the ins...