It’s Wednesday! I meant to do this link roundup yesterday, but ended up recording a podcast instead (we interviewed Tom O’Grady, Greens candidate for Townsville, about what it’s like to do leftist politics in the deep north - coming soon to a podcast platform near you) so here we are.
Speaking of podcasts, last week we did a podcast on academia, feat. UNSW researcher and all-around good egg Jeremiah Brown! Matt and I talked with Jeremiah about our experiences of the university system, what it’s like to work and study in the neoliberal university, and what it means to have so much of the left captured by the ethos and culture of academia. Also: why podcasts are objectively better than journal articles.
As a follow-up, I really recommend this piece in the New York Times Magazine (you may have to do the ol’ lightning-fast command-A command-C before the paywall pops up) about the corporatism of American universities and how it is infecting campus culture, particularly when it comes to sexual politics and the ‘culture of complaint’ surrounding such matters. “When your environment so deeply resembles a Fortune 500 company,” writes Fredrik de Boer, “it makes sense to take every complaint straight to H.R.”
“Critics of campus political culture almost always misidentify where the problems arise: not from passionate student activists, though like all activists, they can sometimes be misguided, but from corporatism, the corporatism that has come to infect the soul of the American university … Rather than painting student activists as censors — trying to dictate who has the right to say what and when — we should instead see them as trapped in a corporate architecture of managing offense. Have you ever been to corporate sexual harassment training? If you have, you may have been struck by how little such events have to do with preventing sexual harassment as a matter of moral necessity and how much they have to do with protecting whatever institution is mandating it.”
And now, some more French content! (These link roundups have not been captured by Big France, I promise.) This one is about the resurgence of the French Socialist Party, in alliance with the Greens.
Why 2020 is the worst year ever for fossil fuels. “Back in March,” writes Angus Hervey, “that it was too early to impose narrative on this pandemic, that all of our carefully constructed heuristics had fallen apart overnight, and that it didn’t make sense to evaluate the raw, noisy data until more time had passed. Five months in, it’s probably time give it another go.”
I know we have posted a wide variety of The Romance of American Communism-related links in previous link roundups, but here is one more: Ari M. Brostoff on Vivian Gornick and the ‘family romance’ of communism in America. (Incidentally, I am reading Romance right now, and going very slowly in an effort to preserve both my tender emotions and the gloriously pleasurable experience of reading it.)
Until next week!
Photo by Dan Hodgkins on Unsplash