Cultureplaces

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...