Reviews and News:
George Saunders wins the Man Booker Prize for Lincoln in the Bardo. He is the second American in two years to win the award.
“Tour guides may tell you that a pin dropping can be heard in every seat of the ancient theatre of Epidaurus – but scientists disagree.”
Why the medieval trial by ordeal worked.
The worst classical music record covers: “Peter and Christopher Whorf, design gurus for Westminster Gold, created a long line of once-seen-never-forgotten album covers in the 1970s.”
The central argument of Nancy MacLean’s National Book Award-nominated Democracy in Chains is built on a typo.
Heather Mac Donald: “The mania to achieve racial and gender equity in the hard sciences and tech will hurt American competitiveness.”
Essay of the Day:
In the latest issue of the print magazine, Christine Rosen takes a closer look at the attitudes of younger Americans towards capitalism:
“Capitalism has long been a bugbear of the young, and flirtations with socialism and communism are nothing new. Before World War I, radicals like John Reed, Max Eastman, and Randolph Bourne gathered in Greenwich Village and promoted alternatives to capitalism in such publications as the Masses. The counterculture of the 1960s took it as a given that capitalism was the enemy. But eventually, most anticapitalists come to terms with the free market. It is part of middle age. Max Eastman ended up with a well-paying gig at Reader’s Digest. More recently, ’60s counterculture enthusiasts John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, and Steve Jobs, of Apple, became hippie capitalists (and very rich).
“Will Millennials (people born between 1980 and 1994) and their successors—the so-called iGen (1995 to 2012)—follow suit? Their skepticism of the free market seems more widespread than in previous generations. In 2016, Harvard University surveyed people between the ages of 18 and 29 and found that more than half (51 percent) did not support capitalism. They aren’t averse to socialism, either. A 2015 Reason-Rupe poll found that 58 percent approved of socialism—up from a 2011 Pew poll that found 49 percent of young Americans had a positive view of it. The support for septuagenarian socialist Bernie Sanders among the young during the 2016 presidential election surprised many people over the age of 40, but as one young Sandernista wrote in Time: ‘When a disheveled old white dude comes along and says our society is rigged for the rich, perpetual warfare is not the answer, and people of color should not be slaughtered by the police—and then asks for our help and a few dollars to bring about a revolution—you’re damn right we’re going to stand with him.’
“It’s not clear, however, that this generation knows what socialism actually is. Another Reason-Rupe survey noted a far lower level of support for state control of the economy than for socialism among the young (only 32 percent said a ‘government-managed economy’ was a good thing), even though such control is one of the pillars of a socialist system.”
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“Millennials appear just as stymied by capitalism. Many of the younger folks I spoke to noted that they had been taught little about our political and economic system in either high school or college. Dent says his high school teachers never mentioned capitalism, but they did mention socialism. ‘It was presented as just another political system, an acceptable alternative to democracy,’ he recalls.
“Pop culture is happily tapping into this youthful anxiety: The makers of global cuteness juggernaut Hello Kitty recently introduced a new character, a female red panda with anger management issues named Aggretsuko, who, the New York Times reported, explores ‘the fallout of global capitalism.’ According to the Times, ‘In her narratives, she is the commodity, and the joy of the consumer has given way to the anxieties of the consumed.’ Another new character, Gudetama, a ‘gender-ambiguous egg yolk,’ also suffers capitalist angst; it mirrors ‘the people in modern society who despair amid economic hard times,’ according to the company.
“So what do iGenners think capitalism should be? Something meaningful, judging by the labels they embrace to qualify the term. Something ‘sustainable’ and ‘mindful’ and ‘conscious’ and ‘cooperative.’”
Photos: Trakoscan Castle
Poem: Moira Egan, “Maurice Utrillo Nu, Assis sur un Divan (1895)”
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