Archives: briefs

Learned last night, courtesy of social-platform feed and a 2-min. CBS news bit from a couple of years ago, below, of the curious fact of the survival deep into the 21st century of grandchildren of John Tyler, single-term U.S. president in the first half of the 1840s. As of this summer, according to Wikipedia, the last of these grandchildren remains with us. His brother died last year, age 95.

Under Tyler, John C. Calhoun — about whose large unwholesome presence in the national life I posted brief items in March and May — held the second top-level federal appointment of his political career, as Secretary of State.

Anyhow, nice occasion for dwelling on something frequently on my mind, expressed in longer posts e.g. last October and in January: our tendency to think of events a century or two removed from the current moment as more distant than probably they really ought to be perceived. Here you have the whole timeframe of existence of the U.S. as a state, from the year after ratification took effect right to present, described in three-lifespan generational sequence within a single family.

Sometime earlier this year the YouTube algorithm plied me with an item from a channel devoted (mostly) to a two-years-running series of short presentations stepping through Jewish history, survey-style, by Sam Aronow, a youngish American-Israeli. I got hooked with the middle ages (Muslim Iberia particularly) and have since listened to all the entries added so far, just jumping around in the timeline a bit according to whim. The pieces get better (which is partly to say longer, the longest at nearly half an hour now) as he’s built the series.

Aronow’s merely whetted my appetite, I guess. Waiting for his next to drop, not long ago, I got to looking for something else in similar vein and was happy to find a channel maintained by an historian at what looks like the top of the arc of a very productive career, Henry Abramson, featuring (alongside other series and a lot of one-offs) a series he names ‘Jewish History Lab,’ covering much the same ground Aronow’s does. In this case, I’ve started at number one and am working through them in order.

Differences between the two men’s perspectives are good for some reflection. Aronow is non-religious and regards Israel, his adopted home, with some ambivalence; he’s moved evidently by fascination with the breadth and peculiar connective-tissue tenacity in a collective Jewish experience diversely realized across centuries and continents. He’s an advocate speaking from strong sense of ethnic identity, certainly, but one conscious, at the same time, of inviting viewers along on a personal journey without clear destination. I find that appealing. Abramson is more straightforwardly a believer, it seems fair to say, as both a religious person and someone committed, from the position of North-American-diaspora and academic-profession security, to an idea of the importance of a somewhat linearly unfolding story of Jewish culture and thought. For me this feels familiar and accessible, which reflects perhaps my relative closeness to Abramson generationally as much as the conservatism of my background.

Both combine passionateness for their subject with caution, a pluralist sensitivity to the difficulties taking it up in public dialogue in our era of shaky Western-Christian world dominance entails.

My phone is a 6-year-old iPhone SE. Battery has been iffy for a while, in recent months acutely so. Not that occasion to be very far from home is common for me these days, but this worry that I’d have to regret being out with no way to charge the thing after a few hours’ sustained use was overdue for being dispelled.

I don’t want — and even if I did, right now couldn’t well afford — to replace the phone. Options naturally include taking it to a local repair operation. I am curious about the market in these services, really, and wouldn’t mind an excuse to become better acquainted. My default path is to tackle a problem like this with my own hands if I can, though, and in this case I did that.

I’ve gone to iFixit for help with issues with my Macs (memory upgrades, say, back when that was still a thing you could do with an Apple product) in past. Don’t recall that I’ve needed to do anything to a phone before. I have to say that I appreciate how developed iFixit’s resources are for somebody in my situation.

Right to Repair has been building steam. It’s a hot topic of the moment — lots of recent published items addressing it. The current White House wants to be associated with it. Better late than never, they say.

American and Colómbian figurative painter, teacher, and Instagram and YouTube personality Nicolás Uribe, in a recent video performance of a painting of comic book bad guy the Joker:

I have to be honest with you guys, I love painting, and I’m completely attached to traditional painting history, but whenever I have the chance to just — not put that to the side, because I think that all of art, all of painting, all of comic books, all of illustration is just one big history, if you really think about it, if you let it be, it’s just one big thing and it’s an amazing place where you can just gather so much information, and you can collect so much knowledge and inspiration, that — whenever I feel that I can tap into the things that I loved when I was a little kid, and that are obviously things that have remained to be true — even though I’m not a comic book artist, even though I’m not an illustrator anymore . . . — when I can combine all the things that I love about the history that I have with these fantastical characters and with amazing visual storytelling and images and illustration: if I can combine all of that into doing paintings like this — oh, I adore this, I think it’s a blessing, I think these are the moments where this doesn’t feel like a job . . . .

(It is a job, feel like it or no. But that’s another conversation.)

It’s a pleasure to listen to Uribe dilate on the various subjects painting leads him to. Watch the whole thing, below, if you have time, or play from the timestamp I’ve set it to start at to hear just the bit transcribed above.

For a barrier-free immersion in what for a large (western) segment of today’s visually-literate media consumers stands as the most resonant chunk of that ‘one big history,’ Manchester UK cartoonist and YouTuber Pete Beard offers hours and hours of material confined, nominally, to the not very cleanly delineable category of illustration, but inevitably folding in all sorts of ‘fine’ and ‘design’ visual arts history as well along the way. As historiography his accounts often leave something to be desired individually, but that’s by no means to suggest that Beard fails in his mission to inform. Unless you’re already a period expert, merely encountering all these contemporaneous ‘golden age’ figures together, many of their once well-known names now long fallen out of currency, will have some intensifying effect on your feeling for the decades of Europe’s over-stretched, warring global dominance and high-industrial-age media-culture profusion. (Beard’s a good deal more relaxing than is Uribe, happily, to listen to at length.)

A significant chunk of my working life this year, since spring, has been devoted to a modest publishing project called Ownership Matters, a biweekly email newsletter and corresponding website ‘for the founders and funders of the emerging solidarity economy.’ I’m in the role of ‘Design / Content Manager’ (a title I gave myself first in connection with Solidarity Hall, from which in some respects, adjacently rather than subordinately, this new project is a development). At some point, I expect, I’ll have more to say about it here. Enough for now to note that it seems to be a project with solid prospects. I’m hopeful for and about it.

CJR’s latest episode of its podcast The Kicker is a conversation with Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose 1619 Project at the NYT two years ago has been such an enduring occasion for foolish right-wing tantrum-throwing and abuse. Appreciating her thoughts here, addressing decisions she made in response to a big-donor-backed push to deny her tenure at UNC this spring, as I continue to ruminate on problems of organizing and re-ordering / re-centering.

This moment felt like a moment that I could — when people were trying to diminish me — that I could come into my power in a very particular way. That, instead of using whatever power I have to force my way into an institution, I could actually use that power in a way that builds up institutions that already exist to support people like me and students who are like I was. And to send, really, a message. You know, I would be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that reading all of the things that Walter Hussman, the wealthy donor who I think obviously had some influence over what happened with my tenure situation, was saying about the type of journalism I do, what he considers the right way to do journalism — which I’ve long disavowed. It helped me understand that maybe my role was more than just teaching kids in a predominantly white school journalism in a classroom; that there needed to be a larger push-back and a larger effort to weigh in on the values of our profession and what should be our higher calling in this moment.

Someone told me, ‘It seems like the most powerful message you could have sent was to go to Duke.’ I actually think that would have been less of a powerful message, and the most powerful message is to say: At some point we have to stop deriving — as Black Americans, as members of marginalized groups — we have to stop deriving our power from these institutions.

The story of Birobidzhan resonates for Gessen because, born in Moscow in 1967, she grew up in a Soviet Union in which this dream had long been immolated and Jewishness was only a negative signifier — the school she could not attend, the job she could never have, the experience, she says, of ‘non-belonging.’ When her family decided to try and emigrate in the 1970s, she was thrust back into the same thinking about Jewish options that dominated the lives of Dubnow and Bergelson. There was Israel, an ideologically pure choice that appealed to her twelve-year-old self, and the West, which offered the possibility of normalcy, of no longer identifying as different, disappearing, and which appealed to her parents.

What she no longer had, the option that does not exist today, is Birobidzhan. The actual place, the experiment, was a mess. And on a visit in 2009, Gessen found that its Jewish character had long ago been trampled out of existence. Birobidzhan clearly teaches us not to count on dictators for autonomy. What they give, they can take away. It is a lesson that contains in it the rationale for Zionism, and a pretty convincing one.

Gessen doesn’t arrive at this conclusion herself, probably because, like many Jews, she prefers to inhabit a kind of Birobidzhan of the mind — a Jewish identity that resembles nationalism but with an allegiance not to flag or army but to culture and language, not to religion as faith but as the bearer of a long written tradition of thought and disputation and storytelling.

‘Prefers to inhabit a Birobidzhan of the mind,’ Gessen says in the talk in the video below, might be the highest compliment anyone’s ever paid them.

I’ve been (re-)listening to Timothy Snyder’s many recorded lectures on the Bloodlands and Black Earth themes / theses a good deal since posting the longer item here in May, and that’s led me to listening to Gessen as well.

Currently mid-way into the book (in audio format, via Scribd), put out by Schocken in 2016.

Something further — see brief item of March 30 — on John C. Calhoun, that peculiar(ly important) figure of the seven short decades between establishment of the U.S. as a nation and the conflict between South and North, known here as the Civil War, that redefined it.

To be clear, this is an episode much more about the twentieth century than the nineteenth, as you’d expect of Know Your Enemy. But it illuminates helpfully Calhoun’s significance as a theorist and shaper of American modernity.

A comment left this morning by my friend Laura on the last of these brief-item posts has had me revisiting two summer-of-COVID episodes of the Digiday podcast today, interviews with The Dispatch CEO Steve Hayes and Defector operations VP Jasper Wang — separately on the show to talk about their quite differently politics-oriented internet-based publications’ remarkably similar business schemes.

I’ve given a good deal more attention to Defector than to The Dispatch in the past year or so. But there’s no denying that the latter’s case lends the former’s a degree of the vividness and weight it has for me and (I suppose) many others right now, both of them read as phenomena of the moment’s ‘great media unbundling.’

It’s an especially curious thing to hear Hayes speaking, without trace of irony, from the position of a smaller market player concerned to protect the work he’s become invested in from destructive forces hyperconcentration in the financial order generates. Digiday host Morrissey’s repetitions of the expression notwithstanding, Hayes and crew are in no meaningful way ‘small-c conservatives.’ In respect to policy, these guys are simple ideologues of unrestrained capital. They share with a Paul Ryan the dream of a world where everything outside the bounds of an arbitrarily-conceived, always unstable space of ‘the private’ is reducible to commodity — ideal that a recently rising, no less dangerous modern U.S. right has taken, with good justification, to attacking as ‘dead consensus’ American conservatism. (Conflict much on my mind these days.)

Without quite acknowledging the trend they’re part of, these same embattled (for branding purposes, at least) Reagan-Thatcher-gospel believers are building something of a cooperative media enterprise together. It sure is interesting.

‘The impressive thing is the range of conversations he maintains, the catbird-seat view of a diverse and sometimes precipitously-changing small industry with outsize cultural impact. People do just like to talk to him, plainly enough, but I think he enjoys the wide respect and gets to pull so much story together, working alone, in large part because he’s built the thing out in a manifestly serious way. Not just being a swell fellow that’s earned all that trust. Anyway, for my part, this is what I’d love to hear him have occasion to talk about — building that up (and where he thinks he might go with it, insofar as the question applies).’

That’s from my note to Simon Owens suggesting that he invite David Harper, the guy who runs online comics journal SKTCHD and hosts linked weekly podcast Off Panel, to be a guest on his (previously mentioned) podcast The Business of Content.

Well, connection was made, and I indeed got to hear them have that chat. This was a couple of weeks ago, in fact; I’ve just been too busy to get in a post about it here.

There’s a degree of purely private satisfaction for me in listening to them talk, naturally. But it’s good to have a glimpse of Harper’s project through Owens’ viewfinder. Harper is maybe a little unusual as subject for Owens’ journalism — certainly not among the bigger media-pond fish he tackles, anyway. The total media marketplace in our digital age, though, obviously includes an awful lot of strictly organically-conceived and -grown, personality-driven ‘niche’ work that may well only ever amount to modest businesses. Harper’s is what I’d call a sweet example (as also in many respects is Owens’, for that matter). I know I’m far from alone in finding this layer of market ecosystem fascinating matter.