…some things…aren’t exactly a surprise…not least when they’re warming over the recent past while the present is entirely too hot & bothered for anyone to be comfortable with the way it looks

Israel marks year since Hamas attack as fighting rages on multiple fronts [BBC]

…&…it’s always tempting to try to figure out who to pin that on

“In the Middle East, we clearly see a failure of policy,” Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland who admires Biden’s foreign policy in other respects, told me. “And I think it’s ultimately rooted in the Biden administration’s unwillingness to effectively use American influence to achieve the president’s stated goals.”

“The problem we have here is the pattern,” Van Hollen added. “The pattern is that Prime Minister Netanyahu ignores the United States and he gets rewarded for it.”

Jan Eliasson, a former Swedish foreign minister and senior U.N. official, lamented, “It is painful to witness the continuous humiliation of the U.S. president and government by Netanyahu.”

As someone who knows and admires Biden, who has seen his empathy, who greatly respects his foreign policy team, who regards his diplomacy in East Asia as masterful, I am pained to write this column. But a year after the Oct. 7 terror attacks, Biden’s Middle East policy appears to be a practical and moral failure. It could be a political failure as well, potentially hurting Vice President Kamala Harris in Michigan — and everywhere if a war with Iran lifts gas prices at the pump.

So what went wrong? How could a leader so intent on peace have presided over expanding war?

It wasn’t a failure of vision or of hard work. Biden concocted a grand plan for a multipart deal that would deliver a cease-fire in Gaza, normalization of Saudi-Israeli relations, a path to a Palestinian state and a stronger Saudi-American relationship that would freeze China out of the region. But Biden was unwilling to forcefully use his leverage to get there, so Netanyahu ran rings around the president.

In the process, Netanyahu miraculously rehabilitated himself in Israeli politics, with a new poll suggesting that he is on track to be re-elected.

“We are winning,” Netanyahu said in an address to the United Nations last month. He now has Iran in his sights, declaring a few days later, “When Iran is finally free, and that moment will come a lot sooner than people think, everything will be different.”

Biden Sought Peace but Facilitated War [NYT]

…&…I know I’ve been away for a bit…but it’s not like I had to abide by some monastic vow of silence for the duration…so I’m not here to go completely off the rails just because I’ve got a backlog of stuff I want to yell from a precarious perch on a soapbox that might have seen better days to the point where I’m trying to argue there isn’t a fundamental utility to simply knowing what page the world seems to be on, however batshit the nonsense printed on the thing seems to be…but…ugh…the shit is sisyphean

“They stole the FEMA money just like they stole it from a bank,” Trump charged, referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, adding in the additional falsehood that Vice President Kamala Harris wants illegal immigrants to vote for her. As we have explained many times before, this would be against the law and there is no evidence to support this claim.

Trump’s claims have been echoed by his supporters, such as billionaire Elon Musk. But Trump is completely wrong.

…or…I guess…in the interests of stricter accuracy in classical allusion…augean

Even though Trump was once president, he still appears to have little clue about the appropriations process. What’s even richer is that when he was president, he did exactly what he claims Biden did — take money from FEMA’s disaster fund to fund migrant programs at the southern border.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/04/no-biden-didnt-take-fema-relief-money-use-migrants-trump-did/

…I don’t know about you lot…but I’m long past the point where it feels like if ockham were about he’d be up all night every night stropping that razor of his from the overuse it’s getting on the daily cutting every statement coming out of one spigot of miswrought crap at odds with reality down to…so, projection?

he fumed in a Truth Social post after the former Wyoming rep’s remarks. “The people of Wyoming are really smart! She is a low IQ War Hawk that, as a member of the J6 Unselect Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs, ILLEGALLY DESTROYED & DELETED all documents, information, and evidence.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/liz-cheneys-speech-seriously-hurt-donald-trumps-feelings

…so…it feels…some would argue at least somewhat on purpose…like there isn’t really anything new we’re hearing about the vast amount of shit for which there should have been consequences we’ve yet to see…particularly where the progress we’re watching is for the bits that still haven’t been whittled all the way down to nothing by a judicial branch that’s more by way of a blunt instrument is concerned

…I get it…we’ve heard it all before…too many times

Trump’s lies are not errors. They are part of a well-documented strategy to overturn democracy by using modern media to create a false political world. Voters begin to base their political decisions on that fake image, rather than on reality, and are manipulated into giving up control of their government to an authoritarian.

Russian political theorists who were key to the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin after the collapse of the Soviet Union called this manipulation “political technology.”

…a bit of rock tied to a stick is technically a technology…sorry…got distracted for a minute there

Essentially, they perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.

This system made sense in former Soviet republics, where it enabled leaders to avoid the censorship that voters would recoil from by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out.

But it has also worked in the United States, where right-wing leaders have used it to divide the American people and spread disinformation. While “misinformation” is simply false information—which we all spread innocently and correct with accurate information—“disinformation” is a deliberate lie to convince people of things that are not true.

Before the 2016 presidential election, Russian operatives working for Putin set out to tear the U.S. apart and thus undermine the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) they see as stopping the resurrection of Imperial Russia. They called for provoking “instability and separatism within the borders of the United States… encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts,… [and] support[ing] isolationist tendencies in American politics.”

…how did the banner read that time dubya was on the deck of that carrier…ended in “accomplished”, I seem to recall…oh, never mind

But they were not the only ones operating in this disinformation sphere. In 2014, then–Breitbart chief executive Steve Bannon explained to a right-wing Catholic group meeting at the Vatican that he believed traditional western civilization was fighting a war for survival. To win, current western-style civilizations must be completely reconfigured to put a few wealthy white Christian male leaders in charge to direct and protect subordinates.

In that year, Bannon set out to dismantle the administrative state that was leveling the playing field among Americans and push Christian nationalism. With the help of funding from Republican megadonors Robert and Rebecca Mercer, he launched Cambridge Analytica, a company designed to develop profiles of individuals that would enable advertisers to group them for targeted advertising. Before the 2016 election, the company captured information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission or knowledge, enabling it to flood the platform with targeted disinformation.

Bannon became the chief executive officer of Trump’s 2016 campaign. He then served as chief strategist and senior counselor for the first eight months of Trump’s term, during which he worked to put MAGAs in power across the administration and across the country.

“The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told a reporter in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.” Keeping listeners constantly trying to defend what is real from what is not destroys their ability to make sense of the world. Many people turn to a strongman who promises to create order. Others will get so exhausted they simply give up. As scholar of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt noted, authoritarians use this technique to destabilize a population.

…nobody *wants* to think about bannon…not even steve, I expect…so I won’t start banging on for the upteenth time about quite how much homework mueller’s lot left for people to revise from for an exam it seems like we never took & most people couldn’t be arsed to study for in the first place

…uhhh…again

…sorry…it’s just that…it keeps coming up?

Challenging that lie, as Harris and Obama did, challenged all those that came afterward, including the lie that Trump had been the true winner of the 2020 presidential election. Thanks to the October 2 filing by special counsel Jack Smith, we know that Trump was in almost daily communication with Bannon as he pushed that lie.

Scholars of authoritarianism call a lie of such magnitude a “Big Lie,” a key propaganda tool associated with Nazi Germany. It is a lie so huge that no one can believe it is false. If leaders repeat it enough times, refusing to admit that it is a lie, people come to think it is the truth because surely no one would make up anything so outrageous.

In his autobiography Mein Kampf, or “My Struggle,” Adolf Hitler wrote that people were more likely to believe a giant lie than a little one because they were willing to tell small lies in their own lives but “would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.” Since they could not conceive of telling “colossal untruths…they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” He went on: “Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”

The U.S. Office of Strategic Services had picked up on Hitler’s manipulation of his followers when it described Hitler’s psychological profile. It said, “His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”

…I mean…at this point the MAGA platform isn’t even the only one that’s largely…if not entirely…comprised of the illusory truth effect…it’s literally the most substative element they have if you get to the bones of any part of the zombie elephant in the room

Now, though, their lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene show that they are completely committed to disinformation. As Will Bunch noted today in the Philadelphia Inquirer, when Vance lied again at the vice presidential debate about the legal status of the Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and complained when moderator Margaret Brennan corrected him, he gave up the whole game. “Margaret,” Vance said, “the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check.” He continued to argue until the moderators cut his microphone.

Bunch points out that MAGA Republicans insist on the right to lie, considering any fact-checking “censorship,” a position to which Vance pivoted when Minnesota governor Tim Walz asked him if Trump won the 2020 election.

Just as Russian political theorists advocated to overturn democracy, MAGA Republicans have created an alternative political reality, aided in large part by the disinformation spread on social media by X owner and Trump supporter Elon Musk.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-6-2024

…sigh

…also not going off on a whole thing that runs for days & starts with 4-chan before weaving through jack “it’s not pink – it’s salmon” psobiec & that little livestream of his from the place with no basement that the other guy turned up with a rifle to liberate kids from a few days later…meanders around through the dismally small number of degrees of seperation between your musks & thiels & bannons & just a book away…your rees-moggs…& the whole westminster circus complete with the biggest clown of all boris “please don’t forget about me” johnson…he of the new book…about how he would have won the last election…& nearly scuba dived to @farscythe’s yard to heist a bunch of vaccines because he was so good at doing covid…& also there’s this bridge he’d let you have for an absolute song…the tune is nothing if not overplayed at this point

How Elon Musk and X Became the Biggest Purveyors of Online Misinformation [rolling stone]

…I dunno about *the* biggest…it’s a competitve field & he’s only johnny-come-lately

Exported gas emits far more greenhouse gas emissions than coal, despite fossil-fuel industry claims it is a cleaner alternative, according to a major new research paper that challenges the controversial yet rapid expansion of gas exports from the US to Europe and Asia.

Coal is the dirtiest of fossil fuels when combusted for energy, with oil and gas producers for years promoting cleaner-burning gas as a “bridge” fuel and even a “climate solution” amid a glut of new liquefied natural gas (or LNG) terminals, primarily in the US.

But the research, which itself has become enmeshed in a political argument in the US, has concluded that LNG is 33% worse in terms of planet-heating emissions over a 20-year period compared with coal.

“The idea that coal is worse for the climate is mistaken – LNG has a larger greenhouse gas footprint than any other fuel,” said Robert Howarth, an environmental scientist at Cornell University and author of the new paper.

“To think we should be shipping around this gas as a climate solution is just plain wrong. It’s greenwashing from oil and gas companies that has severely underestimated the emissions from this type of energy.”

Drilling, moving, cooling and shipping gas from one country to another uses so much energy that the actual final burning of gas in people’s homes and businesses only accounts for about a third of the total emissions from this process, the research finds.

The large resulting emissions mean there is “no need for LNG as an interim energy source”, the paper says, adding that “ending the use of LNG should be a global priority”.

The peer-reviewed research, published on Thursday in the Energy Science & Engineering journal, challenges the rationale for a huge surge in LNG facilities along the US Gulf coast, in order to send gas in huge tankers to overseas markets. The US is the world’s leading LNG exporter, followed by Australia and Qatar.

Previous government and industry estimates have assumed that LNG is considerably lower emitting than coal, offering the promise that it could replace it in countries such as China, as well as aiding European allies menaced by the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, a major gas producer.

“US LNG exports can help accelerate environmental progress across the globe, enabling nations to transition to cleaner natural gas to reduce emissions and address the global risks of climate change,” Dustin Meyer, director of market development at the American Petroleum Institute, has said.

But scientists have determined that LNG expansion is not compatible with the world avoiding dangerous global heating, with researchers finding in recent years the leakage of methane, a primary component of gas and a potent planet-heating agent, from drilling operations is far higher than official estimates.

Howarth’s paper finds that as much as 3.5% of the gas delivered to customers leaks to the atmosphere unburned, much more than previously assumed. Methane is about 80 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, even though it persists for less time in the atmosphere, and scientists have warned that rising global methane emissions risk blowing apart agreed-upon climate goals.

…as patterns go

Howarth’s paper has caused something of a firestorm before its publication, with a draft of the study highlighted by climate campaigners such as Bill McKibben to the extent it was reportedly a factor in a decision earlier this year by the Biden administration to pause all new export permits for LNG projects.

This pause has enraged the oil and gas industry – prompting lawsuits – and its political allies. Last month, four congressional Republicans wrote to the US energy department demanding correspondence between it and Howarth over what they called his “flawed” and “erroneous” study.

…or…hell…the increasingly large swathes of the world that are literally on fire & how much of “our” emmission allowances those might be giving the eminent domain treatment

Howarth said the result of this unusual scrutiny was “more peer review than I’ve ever had before”, with five rounds of review being conducted by eight other scientists. Howarth said: “I don’t consider the criticism valid at all – it feels like a political job.”

Howarth said the US has a “huge choice” to make in the presidential election, with Donald Trump vowing to undo Biden’s pause on his first day back in the White House to allow a raft of new LNG projects. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, has backed away from a previous plan to ban fracking but has promised action on the climate crisis.

More than 125 climate, environmental and health scientists wrote to the Biden administration last month to defend Howarth’s research and urge a continuation of the pause on LNG exports.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/04/exported-liquefied-natural-gas-coal-study

…actually…or metaphorically

[…] if Donald Trump, rightwing courts, gerrymandered state legislatures and an extreme Republican caucus in the US House of Representatives create constitutional chaos over the certification of this presidential election, two men cleared the path.

The single-minded determination of Leonard Leo built a conservative supermajority on the US supreme court and stacked lower and state courts with Republican ideologues that have pushed the nation to the right via the least accountable branch of government.

Chris Jankowski masterminded the partisan gerrymanders that tilted state legislatures and congressional delegations across the south and the purple midwest toward extreme Republicans, ended Barack Obama’s second term before it started, and rendered elections in Wisconsin and North Carolina all but meaningless over the last decade and a half.

Leo and Jankowski understood, separately, that the courts and state legislatures were undervalued and often undefended targets for a deliberate strategy aimed at capturing important levers of power that sometimes float under the radar. They could be Moneyball-ed, to borrow the term Michael Lewis used in his book about how the Oakland A’s made an end-run around large-market teams by understanding value that their opponents overlooked.

What Leo and Jankowski built separately would soon reinforce the other’s creation (with, of course, crucial assists from chief justice John Roberts), tightening the knots around meaningful elections, pushing policy to the extreme right and making it nearly impossible for voters to do anything about it.

Leo’s relentless focus on turning the judiciary Republican, first identifying and fast-tracking conservative jurists through his various roles at the Federalist Society, then coordinating the often eight-figure efforts to secure their confirmation on the US supreme court, helped conservatives to unpopular court-imposed victories on voting rights, abortion restrictions, gun access and gutting the regulatory state that would not have been won through the political process.

As I revealed in my book Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count, Jankowski pioneered Redmap, short for the Redistricting Majority Project. That 2010 strategy, coordinated when he worked at the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC), flipped state legislative chambers in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Alabama, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Indiana, Tennessee and several other states just ahead of the decennial redistricting. Then, with complete control of those processes, as well in Florida, Georgia, Texas and elsewhere, the RSLC helped draw some of the most extreme partisan gerrymanders in history, locking in huge Republican advantages in state legislatures and congressional delegations.
[…]
Meanwhile, as Republicans drew themselves giant edges in the US House and state chambers, and packed Democrats into fewer seats they won with bigger majorities, low-turnout, base-driven Republican primaries became the key races to win, producing a new generation of lawmakers fixated on solutions for “voter fraud”.

This grim result is a US supreme court that has been captured by conservatives, which has delivered a decade of anti-democracy decisions that have advantaged the Republican party in elections, as well as an audacious plan to gerrymander Republicans into power in state legislatures nationwide and helped produce ever-more-extreme caucuses eager to adapt draconian voter restrictions in the name of stopping fraud that they cannot prove exist. The Roberts court has blessed this as well.

Call it the Shelby county-Redmap two-step. The US supreme court’s decisions in Shelby county and other crucial Voting Rights Act (VRA) cases first ended preclearance – the VRA’s enforcement mechanism, which for nearly 50 years prevented lawmakers in states with the worst track records on voting rights from changing the rules without prior approval. Then the court handed lawmakers wide latitude to enact voting restrictions – even those with a demonstrated partisan edge or disproportionate impact on racial minorities – just as long lawmakers said that they believed they were battling fraud.

If voters wanted to toss out lawmakers who force citizens to endure harder processes to make their voices heard, well, the politicians and Leo’s rightwing judges had that covered too. Arizona, Georgia, Alabama and Texas – states that the Voting Rights Act has required to pre-approve the equity of legislative maps – were suddenly liberated by the US supreme court to gerrymander themselves into safe districts..

Then, in 2019’s disastrous Rucho v Common Cause, Roberts closed off appealing to federal courts to help fix partisan gerrymanders and suggested, apparently with a straight face, that voters still had the power to fix this through the ordinary political process, or by passing a law through Congress. Just like that, time and again, whether on voting rights or reproductive rights, the court would issue a ruling that benefited the Republican party, while telling citizens to fix it through a political process that the court helped engineer against them.
[…]
a close win for Trump in Arizona or Georgia – where fewer than 11,000 and 12,000 votes, respectively, made the difference in 2020 – could easily be attributed to aggressive new voting restrictions that target minority communities, passed by gerrymandered legislatures freed from preclearance after Shelby. And if certification runs aground in the US House, where a majority of the Republican caucus voted against certifying free and fair results from Pennsylvania and Arizona in 2020, one big reason will be the new breed of extremist lawmaker elected to Congress from districts gerrymandered to be wildly uncompetitive.

This would be the ultimate proof of concept for the right’s judicial capture and gerrymandering schemes: tilted legislatures, newly liberated by the courts, tipping the presidency back to a supreme court supermajority packed with three justices who proved their conservative bona fides working on Bush v Gore in 2000.

Moneyball did not last forever. Big-market teams caught on to Oakland’s methods. But whether or not this election ends with a Bush v Gore redux, this anti-democratic moment is here to stay. It has proven nearly impossible to defeat because Leo remains a step ahead of hapless Democrats, and because the unfair after-effects of hijacked courts and hijacked legislatures have proven so long-lasting. Then, when the supreme court shuttered federal courts to redistricting cases, state supreme courts became the last bulwark. So Leo and the RSLC have worked together to identify, fund and elect conservative justices in crucial states in part to protect the tilted maps.

Now they’ve combined forces: Jankowski brokered the $1.6bn bequest that built Leo’s latest dark money operation, the Marble Freedom Trust. Last month, Leo said he’d spend as much as $1bn to “crush liberal dominance where it’s most insidious”, in the worlds of media and culture.

If Redmap cost just $30m to execute, if it cost upwards of $17m to keep a seat warm for Neil Gorsuch before confirming him after Trump took office, just imagine what they might bankroll now. Installing a conservative supermajority in the nation’s impoverished newsrooms, buying once-trusted brands and remaking them in their ideological image, could be both a bargain and a finishing masterstroke in their push for the radical right’s ongoing push for an enduring minority rule.

If the right strews constitutional chaos over the certification of this presidential election, two people will have cleared the path [Guardian]

…&…no…it’s not really the most harrowing…or even necessarily the most consequential…of the available sources of existential nightmare on offer

How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war [Guardian]

…seemingly none of which make even a lick of sense that’s as easy to grasp as the soul-wrenching horror of the stark realities involved unless you’ve boned up on the relevant skeletons in some historically extensive closets on more sides than you might have thought for longer than it’s easy to make space for even in the bigger pictures we generally try to look at every now & again for the sake of perspective in dizzying times

…& whether you stretch the term technology to include the cutting edges of the stone age or stretch it as far as it’ll go the other way

How artificial intelligence is changing the reports US police write [Guardian]

…we’ve all got our inate bias(es)…even when they’re obvious enough that even we can see the things…so…apologies again for endlessly spinning these broken records of mine

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.

…& obviously it’s not lost on me that there’s likely never been a time when there weren’t teachers telling students who didn’t want to do the work that it was only themselves they were cheating

In 1979, Martha Maxwell, an influential literacy scholar, wrote, “Every generation, at some point, discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as professors expect.” Dames, who studies the history of the novel, acknowledged the longevity of the complaint. “Part of me is always tempted to be very skeptical about the idea that this is something new,” he said.

…but I’m not honestly sure that’s ever really been true…& not in the sense this gets into pretty soon about how psychologists are opining that in the age of the smartphone “being bored has become unnatural.”

And yet, “I think there is a phenomenon that we’re noticing that I’m also hesitant to ignore.” Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences. Many had discussed the change at faculty meetings and in conversations with fellow instructors. Anthony Grafton, a Princeton historian, said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. There are always students who “read insightfully and easily and write beautifully,” he said, “but they are now more exceptions.” Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.

…being bored & reading are not parallel lines that obligingly meet on my mental horizon for one…but for another…I’m not a fan of minority rule…on more or less general principles…but it’s a bit of a problem for me if the only people who’ve read up on what “general principles” means when the rubber hits the road are…well…a minority…which is sort of broadly how we wound up with polictics as a way of doing things in the first place as the whole thing is sort of about arriving at a minority who can be relied upon to do all the boring stuff nobody has time for that unfortunately needs to be kept on top of or all the things we demand remain availble on demand continue to be available in a timely & convenient manner…or at the bare minimum that we don’t all end up dying slowly under the rubble of what used to be a populated area…aren’t looking like material for a case against the concept of the nation state for breach of the social contract…in a way that’s annoyingly hard to avoid sounding like a page out of jacob’s dad’s book about modern day freebooting “kings among men” playing “we are as gods” while eden smoulders in the backdrop…whilst at the same time trying to forestall the whole thing getting infected by the syphilitic recurrence of bad-faith actors & their petty tyrannies…yadda yadda…here we go again…I know

But middle- and high-school kids appear to be encountering fewer and fewer books in the classroom as well. For more than two decades, new educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and standardized tests. Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea—mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests. Antero Garcia, a Stanford education professor, is completing his term as vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English and previously taught at a public school in Los Angeles. He told me that the new guidelines were intended to help students make clear arguments and synthesize texts. But “in doing so, we’ve sacrificed young people’s ability to grapple with long-form texts in general.”

Mike Szkolka, a teacher and an administrator who has spent almost two decades in Boston and New York schools, told me that excerpts have replaced books across grade levels. “There’s no testing skill that can be related to … Can you sit down and read Tolstoy? ” he said. And if a skill is not easily measured, instructors and district leaders have little incentive to teach it. Carol Jago, a literacy expert who crisscrosses the country helping teachers design curricula, says that educators tell her they’ve stopped teaching the novels they’ve long revered, such as My Ántonia and Great Expectations. The pandemic, which scrambled syllabi and moved coursework online, accelerated the shift away from teaching complete works.
[…]
Private schools, which produce a disproportionate share of elite college students, seem to have been slower to shift away from reading complete volumes—leading to what Dames describes as a disconcerting reading-skills gap among incoming freshmen. But private schools are not immune to the trend. At the prep school that I graduated from five years ago, I took a Jane Austen course my senior year. I read only a single Austen novel.

…I mean…c’mon…it’s not just me at this point, right?

…I’m here for jokes about how all her books are the same & if she’d had a word processor & access to the find & replace function for proper nouns she’d have more titles than mills & boone…but…FFS…that’s because there aren’t that many & I read all of them so it’s interesting to me that the only one that originally didn’t follow the formula got sent back by the publishers with a request to change the ending…which she re-wrote to have someone duly write the letter that traditionally clears up all the misunderstandings so that (as a card labelled “austen spoilers” I saw the other day put it) “everyone gets married”…but that’s not as useful a thing to be interested in those books about as the incisive social commentary she managed to smuggle into the things or the historical context that marks that part out as (while by no means singular) a remarkable feat of rhetorical dexterity on her part

…you can make those jokes based on nothing but the cliff notes…or the chatbot summary search engine overview as the case may increasingly be…but that’s just playacting, even if the difference is intangible enough not to matter to…apparently…way more people than the other side of that see-saw can boast

The issue that Dames and other professors have observed is distinct from the problem at community colleges and nonselective universities, where some students arrive with literacy and comprehension deficits that can leave them unable to complete collegiate courses. High-achieving students at exclusive schools like Columbia can decode words and sentences. But they struggle to muster the attention or ambition required to immerse themselves in a substantial text.

Faced with this predicament, many college professors feel they have no choice but to assign less reading and lower their expectations. Victoria Kahn, who has taught literature at UC Berkeley since 1997, used to assign 200 pages each week. Now she assigns less than half of that. “I don’t do the whole Iliad. I assign books of The Iliad. I hope that some of them will read the whole thing,” Kahn told me. “It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Iliad,’ because they’re not going to do it.”

…it is…in a great many senses…an artifact of privilege to be able to afford oneself the time required to read extensively…even if for some of us it’s all we can do for quite significant chunks of aggregated time that more sensible (or just luckier) people use for this thing called sleeping…but…even back in keats’ day…the whole point about chapman’s homer was that it was…to torture yet another hapless analogy in a cruel & unusual sort of a way…analogous to the internet…the difference wasn’t the knowledge…it was to whom it was available on a first-hand basis that allowed for familiarity…among other things

But it’s not clear that instructors can foster a love of reading by thinning out the syllabus. Some experts I spoke with attributed the decline of book reading to a shift in values rather than in skill sets. Students can still read books, they argue—they’re just choosing not to. Students today are far more concerned about their job prospects than they were in the past. Every year, they tell Howley that, despite enjoying what they learned in Lit Hum, they plan to instead get a degree in something more useful for their career.

…trust me…I get it…the standing joke on my degree course was that it mainly qualified you to think deep thoughts about unemployment…which at this point I’ve begun to wish had been true of oxbridge PPE courses of approximately the same era…& I’m not out here trying to be diogenes just to get to spend more time reading things that make me incredulous…the scenery alone makes walden more enticing &…I don’t think there’s broadband at the lake…so…maybe one day…when kindle lets me buy books in the app again or whatever other miracles the future may yet bestow upon my undeserving self…but…alas for all of us I dare say…not today…give or take a satan or two…great or otherwise

Whether through atrophy or apathy, a generation of students is reading fewer books. They might read more as they age—older adults are the most voracious readers—but the data are not encouraging. The American Time Use Survey shows that the overall pool of people who read books for pleasure has shrunk over the past two decades. A couple of professors told me that their students see reading books as akin to listening to vinyl records—something that a small subculture may still enjoy, but that’s mostly a relic of an earlier time.

…I’m comfortable being a relic of my time, when you get right down to it…I don’t claim it was (or is) a better time…but it’s mine…so it comes with the territory…on account of…being the territory in just about every meaningful way…other people’s though…that’s kind of where the whole reading bit enters the picture if you’re me

The economic survival of the publishing industry requires an audience willing and able to spend time with an extended piece of writing. But as readers of a literary magazine will surely appreciate, more than a venerable industry is at stake. Books can cultivate a sophisticated form of empathy, transporting a reader into the mind of someone who lived hundreds of years ago, or a person who lives in a radically different context from the reader’s own. “A lot of contemporary ideas of empathy are built on identification, identity politics,” Kahn, the Berkeley professor, said. “Reading is more complicated than that, so it enlarges your sympathies.”

Yet such benefits require staying with a character through their journey; they cannot be approximated by reading a five- or even 30-page excerpt. According to the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, so-called deep reading—sustained immersion in a text—stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not.

To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school. [The Atlantic]

…so…I know…you probably covered this while I was away & I’m late to the party & picking up the most long-winded dog-end since last time the tail wagged us all

Read the Special Counsel’s Newly Unsealed Evidence Against Trump [NYT]

…&…I may not be top of the leaderboard for reading the room…but I’m not suggesting anyone look at the atlantic or the NYT as their guiding star & expect to avoid obstacles while out for a pleasure cruise…at night…through eel-infested waters…as was the fashion at the time

…but…honestly…if you do

…I’d be genuinely surprised if you don’t at some point stop & think to yourself…there’s a not-quite-but-sort-of-literally-literal mountain of evidence of why this guy is the poster-child for the sort of thing that a whole lot of people probably ought to locked somewhere where they can’t fuck everyone’s shit up from for the rest of their natural lives just so we have an even break at trying not to all die needlessly at some point in the increasingly foreseeable future…& at this point the parts of the parts of it that were on their way to being adjudicated but aren’t any more outweigh the ones that still are…so…it’s easy to catch yourself thinking what’s left after what the man himself referred to as “the big one” got tossed into a mangrove swamp he supposedly drained donkey’s years ago by some handy bit of skirt that knows how to keep her eye on the main chance or however he’d probably put it before having another go at comparing himself favorably to a fictional serial killer with an overactive imagination or whatever we’re doing this week…so there can’t be much left

…but that’s ignoring the part where what’s left is a bigger molehill than a lot of things that loom like peaks in the historical record everyone & his dog is out there trying to pre-emtively draft through the power of suggestion as though they can bootstrap their way to achieveing an insurrection that supplants reality with their own

…anyway…before I get to the part that’s at least fun to listen to…if listening is more your bag…the podcast andrew mcabe is doing with allison gill (the mueller she wrote lady) about stuff involving jack smith is about two episodes deep in an audiobook version, more or less, where they’ve helpfully dropped in names of people who fit the description so the whole thing sounds less disjointed…based on having…errr…done the reading…in so far as they consulted the output of people who specifically did a bunch of reading for that express purpose & then made that available to anyone who might be interested

JACK: A Special Counsel Podcast

…like…this being a half-hour late

…or…you know…remembering to say “hello” or mention in passing that your company was missed, even if you might currently be thinking mine was a wonderful advertisment for the principle of increased fondness through absence being up there with cleanliness in the next-to-godliness stakes

…so…anyway…how’s tricks on your end, then?