Harvard University Press Blog

The Lecture: Bringing to India the Best and Brightest on Ideas and Issues That Matter

 

HarperCollins and Harvard University Press have a new collaboration– The Lecture, a series of talks by writers and thinkers from around the world brought to Indian audiences. 

  The inaugural lecture –‘Vivekananda, Guru to the World’– by Professor Ruth Harris will take place at Delhi’s iconic India Habitat Centre's Stein Auditorium, on Friday January 27, 2023, 7.00 p.m.  The lecture will be based on Professor Harris’s definitive biography of Vivekananda, the Indian monk who shaped the intellectual and spiritual history of both East and West. Professor Harris is Senior Research Fellow at All Soul’s College, University of Oxford; Fellow of the British Academy; and Professor of European History at the University of Oxford. 

In her book, published by Harvard University Press, Professor Harris offers an arresting biography, showing how Vivekananda’s thought spawned a global anticolonial movement and became a touchstone of Hindu nationalist politics a century after his death. The iconic monk emerges as a counterargument to Orientalist critiques, which interpret East–West interactions as primarily instances of Western borrowing. As Vivekananda demonstrates, we must not underestimate Eastern agency in the global circulation of ideas. 

  George Andreou, Director, Harvard University Press, remarked, ‘We are thrilled at the opportunity to bring Ruth Harris’s important book to a wider audience in India and to expand our critical partnership with HarperCollins.’ 

Speaking on the initiative, Ananth Padmanabhan, Chief Executive Officer, HarperCollins, said, ‘At HarperCollins we believe in the transformative power of words and as a publisher, through our books, we have endeavored to create a platform for ideas that spark conversations. We are delighted to partner with Harvard University Press, and begin this new series where we will host talks by some of the world’s brightest minds writing about people, ideas and issues that matter.’ 

On the Bicentennial of the Greek Revolution

Greek Independence Day is celebrated on March 25th, observing the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821, which ultimately led to independence for Greece from the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Since independence, particular attention has been paid by the Greek people to the 50th, 100th, and 150th anniversaries of this revolutionary war. With the 200th anniversary approaching, it seems like an apt time to learn more about the legacy of each significant anniversary, and how the celebrations have come to represent different ways of celebrating Greek statehood. Below is an excerpt adapted from the chapter “Anniversaries” by Gonda Van Steen in The Greek Revolution: A Critical Dictionary edited by Paschalis M. Kitromilides and Constantinos Tsoukalas (being published on March 25).

In anticipation of the bicentennial of Greece’s independence, it may prove helpful to study the earlier celebrations, their main themes and agendas, the “imaginary nation” to which they appealed, and some of the images and reports they left behind. We expect to find the years 1871, 1921, and 1971 as the key anniversary dates, but we are immediately struck by an important exception: the grand celebrations of the centenary of 1921 were “postponed” due to political and military circumstances. Besides, the Greeks looked forward with great anticipation to a more wide-ranging series of events that was scheduled for 1930, the centenary of the year in which the Greek state was formed. Thus, past and present, and even the unknown but projected future, affected the making of the anniversaries of Greece as a product of a revolution and as a nation. Also, the various anniversaries offer up a potent reminder that, on each occasion, the nation’s process of becoming was yet to be completed. The year 1871 preceded the Balkan Wars (1912–1913) and the ensuing territorial gains by a few (turbulent) decades. The crisis of 1921–1922 signaled a reduction in the Greek territorial expanse and an even greater blow to Greek political and cultural self-confidence. The year 1971, which fell about halfway through the dictatorship period of 1967–1974, was used by the military regime to affirm “revolution” and “independence,” but by the anti-dictatorship opposition to question the extent to which the long-suffering state had been genuinely sovereign and democratic.

The productive but also troubled realm of Greek historical celebrations and of mass pageants has, for decades now, been central to the formation of Greek identity. For the greater purpose of instilling national sensibilities, the Greek state has put itself on display on the occasion of landmark anniversaries. The performative dimensions of anniversary parades, with their typical sequences of heroic episodes through the canonical ages of Hellenic civilization, had to model proper ideals and modes of conduct for Greece’s young people, especially. Three major events have marked the nation’s celebration history of the outbreak of the War of Independence in 1821. The domestic political culture and ideology of the three major anniversary dates—namely 1871, 1921 / 1930, and 1971—could hardly have been more different. Nonetheless, the execution as well as the objective of these jubilees of the past converged as they resorted to classicizing statues and mass pageantry to mark the Greek state’s public and formal use of history. Surveying these anniversaries has proven to be a fruitful exercise in anticipation of a critical evaluation of the bicentenary of the year 2021.

The Greeks of the three anniversaries of the revolution had not yet reached a consensus about how to present recent Greek history, but many had come to realize that the true interest of the national past lay in how it constituted and conditioned the future. Their monuments and festivals served the national interest and also the goal of political cohesion; they projected the idea of progress along a historical and cultural continuum, and they posited a survival, revival, or even resurrection of a Greek patriotic ethos. The sustained continuity model that linked the past to the present was, undoubtedly, engaged in national mythmaking. Also, this model kept suggesting a paradoxical kind of parthenogenesis of Greek culture, as if Greek culture moved forward in a controlled vacuum, from one military victory to the next, and was only ever driven by male leaders. The last jubilee of 1971, in particular, marked an intense era in Greek politics and culture when truth, authority, Greek history, destiny, and collective identity were the subjects of a public standoff that played out in the old venues. Perhaps for the last time, this jubilee tried to solidify a national master narrative that reasserted the political and socioeconomic status quo. In hindsight, it failed to once more crystallize the national myth. Let us hope that the bicentennial celebrations of 2021 will build on a critical reception of the past jubilees and will prove to be meaningfully different.

New Year Poetry Playlist

Over the last several months, we’ve admired the creative ways in which colleagues across disciplines have preserved a spirit of community and collaboration in virtual classrooms, at-home offices, the “halls” of online conferences, and elsewhere. In anticipation of attending this week’s virtual MLA conference, HUP Editors Emily Silk and Joseph Pomp decided to put together a virtual collaboration of their own.

Missing the opportunity to swap reading recommendations with friends and colleagues in person at MLA, they invited several HUP authors of recent and forthcoming books to contribute to a “poetry playlist” for 2021. In thoughtful responses gathered below, some spoke of long-time favorites, others of recent discoveries, still others of poems that felt particularly resonant in this new year. Amidst the bustle of Zoom conferencing, we hope that you may find a few recommendations that speak to you, too; where possible, we have included a link to a publicly available text or audio recording of each poem.

 

“I was introduced to Brenda Shaughnessy’s work at a reading a few years ago and was drawn to the openness and warmth of her humor. When I tracked down her books—the most recent ones are So Much Synth and The Octopus Museum—I was struck by how the humor mixes with feelings of fury and helplessness and self-recrimination. That tonal range and her wild range of subjects have stuck with me; they seem right for 2021.”

—Calista McRae, coeditor of The Selected Letters of John Berryman

 

“Since March 2020, when the poem was read at the end of a televised news report on the unfolding pandemic by the national broadcaster in Ireland (RTE), Derek Mahon’s poem ‘Everything Is Going to be All Right’ has been widely quoted in the Irish and international media. As with all great poems, even if readers already know it, the poem is worth reading again, and especially as we begin the New Year 2021. Mahon passed away in October 2020, leaving behind an amazing body of work that includes some of the best poems written in the English language over the last half century, including ‘In Carrowdore Churchyard’ and ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford.’ Often complex in their philosophical and cultural allusiveness and depth, his poems can also be mischievous and fun. Mahon is willing to record all that can be seen by the ‘watchful heart’ but his poems also celebrate ‘the hidden source’ that is the basis for all great art.”  (Listen to Derek Mahon read “Everything Is Going to be All Right.")

—Philip Coleman, coeditor of The Selected Letters of John Berryman

 

“Arguably one of the most luminous, Black feminist affirmations of survival and euphoric resistance in contemporary poetry, Lucille Clifton’s ‘won’t you celebrate with me’ is a wondrous work of conviction and resolute determination. We all want to be with her on that ‘bridge between starshine and clay’ looking out across the vista of what’s ahead in 2021 and drinking up Clifton’s insistence on recognizing the miracle of her pure existence. Anything from Tracy K. Smith’s remarkable Life on Mars would seemingly be suitable for this moment in which we find ourselves, but ‘Everything That Ever Was’ especially sums up the feeling of cosmic enormity that remains especially palpable right now. In the whirlwind of catastrophic loss and urgent, necessary, everyday hope, Smith’s declaration that ‘…everything / That ever was still is, somewhere, / Floating near the surface, nursing / Its hunger for you and me…’ is a powerful reminder of the forces and the debris of life that constitute who we are, ‘the largeness we can’t see,’ as she puts it in the title of another one of her poems. Heavy words that capture the bigness of this universe, they encourage humility and reverence for the universe that we inhabit. Having just watched Sylvie’s Love, Eugene Ashe’s gorgeous African American homage to the golden age of cinematic melodrama, I’ve been drawn back to repeat listenings of Nancy Wilson and Cannonball Adderly’s classic 1962 album. Wilson was a masterful song stylist, one of the very best of the modern era, and her stirring, sophisticated, and intelligent love songs with alto saxophonist Adderly are some of the best sonic articulations of epic and exquisitely realized intimacy, the ability for romance to be all-encompassing, sweeping, immersive. What could be more necessary now than our ability to get swept up with one another as we face an uncertain future?”

—Daphne A. Brooks, author of Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (forthcoming, February 2021)

 

“The contemporary volume of poetry that I recommend most strongly is The Red List by my colleague Stephen Cushman. The Red List is a long poem that runs the length of a volume. The trigger for this magnificent work is the mental illness of the poet’s dear son. Cushman charts his and his boy’s sorrows and sufferings and their hopes for renovation and renewal in memorable, sometimes soul-piercing lines. It’s also a calendrical poem and explores the turnings of the season with exemplary grace. It’s a real achievement and deserves the widest audience.

—Mark Edmundson, author of Song of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy (forthcoming, April 2021)

 

“I have two recommendations that speak to our historical moment beautifully. First, if readers have not already read it, I would recommend Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. As an allegory against totalitarianism, it is one of the most moving and beautifully crafted books of poetry I have read in years. The second is Alice Quinn’s anthology, Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic. Taking its title from Pablo Neruda’s ‘Keeping Quiet,’ the book gathers a diverse group of poets and forms that speak to our isolation and our almost unbearable yearning for human connection. The great variety of responses to the pandemic not only salves the pain we are collectively feeling but also reveals the breath of imaginative ingenuity in American poetry.”

—Robert Bernard Hass, coeditor of The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 3: 1929-1936 (forthcoming, April 2021)

 

“As a momentary stay against our current confusions, I recommend reading a poem by Robert Frost called ‘The Onset.’ How often in 2020 have we found ourselves where the first stanza leaves us, alone and despairing. But as the calendar turns, so may our fortunes, if we—like Frost—hold to a belief that a better community and world is always possible.”

—Donald Sheehy, coeditor of The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 3: 1929-1936 (forthcoming, April 2021)

 

“Seventeenth-century India saw the revival of an ancient genre—collections of 700 poems on love and other themes linking this world and eternity. The Hindi poet Biharilal (born c. 1600) composed one of the best known of these collections. In my new translation for the Murty Classical Library of India, his pithy, often aphoristic couplets overflow into three lines. Though subjected to many a long commentary, these short poems require little work on the part of an English reader with a taste for delicately poised sentiment and economy of wording. ‘Leaving me, he bears my joys away; / to summer days and winter nights / his parting gives long leases on my heart.’”

—Rupert Snell, translator of Biharilal’s Poems from the Satsai

 

“H. Leivick (born Leivick Halpern, 1888–1962) was an American Yiddish poet whose sensitivity to sound and language equaled his belief in repairing a fractured world. Born in the Belarusian shtetl of Igumen, Leivick was sentenced to a tsarist labor camp in Siberia for revolutionary activity, escaped to the US, and made his living there as a wallpaper hanger while becoming one of the world’s most respected Yiddish modernists. Over the course of his life, he wrote about topics ranging from Sacco and Vanzetti to the possibility of forgiveness. His knowledge of Jewish texts found its way into his avowedly secular verse, helping him to seek meaning in a particularly dark time.”

—Amelia Glaser, author of Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine

(Listen to Glaser read and discuss Leivick's poem ‘Mem Haamekim’ on Hevruta: A Podcast from the San Diego Jewish Academy.)

 

“Thomas Hood’s terrifying ‘Dream of Eugene Aram’ left traces on Oscar Wilde’s late poem ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol.’ But it’s another narrative poem by Hood, his comical ‘Miss Kilmansegg and her Precious Leg,’ that we ought to be reading in the dog days of the Trump regime, as the first family packs its Gucci bags and heads to Mar-A-Lago. The hilarious story of the spoilt daughter of a property tycoon, who, following an alarming accident, insists on being fitted with a solid gold prosthetic limb, Hood’s poem is a biting satire of the corrupt moneyed elite of his day. First published in 1840, five years before Hood’s death, it is best read alongside Thomas Seccombe’s witty—and oft-reproduced—illustrations of 1870.”

—Nicholas Frankel, editor of The Short Stories of Oscar Wilde: An Annotated Selection

 

“In his newest collection, Topsy-Turvy, Charles Bernstein includes a translation of Virgil’s Eclogues, III, the poetry match between Damoetas and Menalcas. The poem is titled ‘Echologs’ and pitches a wonderful homology between the Latin and American dialects aimed at a new turn, one that not just keeps the poetry fresh, but lets history remade freshen our own responses and habits of reading. What we thought we knew becomes new and what we had forgotten or not known gets worked into our responses and imaginations. The Arts and Letters pamphlet by Bernstein and Richard Tuttle, also called Echologs, includes following the translation a palimpsest of previous translations from the Loeb edition to David Ferry.

—Paul A. Bové, author of Love’s Shadow

(Listen to a 2015 recording at Bowery Poetry of Charles Bernstein introducing and reading “Echologs” on PennSound.)

Michael Sandel and Chinese Philosophy

Harvard’s Michael Sandel is an unusually prominent thinker in North America and Europe, but in China he’s a verifiable celebrity, inspiring what New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos describes as “near religious devotion.” On one recent trip, the border guard checking passports told Sandel that he was one of his heroes. Scalpers around the country make huge profits selling tickets to his talks. He is a regular on state television, and China Newsweek selected him as 2011’s “most influential foreign figure.”

Part of Sandel’s fame in China is surely due to the engaging style of his lectures, which rely heavily on interactions with the audience. Other factors include the rarity of public discussions of morality in China, where market reforms and exponential economic growth have left a “moral vacuum” in their wake, along with a thirst for alternatives to communist and market-based systems of thought. It’s also helpful that Sandel’s ideas, with their communitarian inflections, echo traditional Chinese teachings about private and public ethics.

Those echoes and connections are the focus of a new volume of essays on the ways in which the ideas that Sandel offers intersect with, resemble, and differ from Confucian and Daoist thought. Encountering China: Michael Sandel and Chinese Philosophy collects nearly a dozen original pieces from leading scholars who tease out how the affinities between Sandel’s work and the major Chinese traditions help audiences to confront questions of utmost significance in Chinese public life: What is the role of the individual to the family, and of the family to the community? What is the relationship between the virtue of a social institution and the virtue of those who lead it? What is the significance of individual liberty if the common good is based in shared values? How does one celebrate human diversity while cultivating a strong sense of community?

“China is now in search of a public philosophy beyond GDP,” Sandel writes in his reply to the volume’s contributors. “As in so much else, China’s success or failure in this quest will matter greatly for its own future and for the rest of the world.” Abiding by the pluralist conception of the common good which Sandel has always defended, the contributors to this collection provide access to and encourage participation in the spiritual and moral debates that have begun to permeate life in the world’s newest superpower.

This Friday, February 2nd, Sandel will mark the publication of Encountering China by joining Joseph C. W. Chan, Chaibong Hahm, Tatsuo Inoue, and Hongmei Qu for a roundtable discussion chaired by Elizabeth Perry, Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute. Organized by the Harvard-Yenching Institute and co-sponsored with the Asia Center, the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, and the Korea Institute, the event is open to the public and takes place at 3pm in the Tsai Auditorium at Harvard’s Center for Government and International Studies.

Not So Dismal After All

“Not so dismal,” ran the headline in The Economist. Early every summer, the city of Trento in the Italian Alps hosts a four-day festival of economics that punctures the idea that economics has to be a “dismal science.” Banners of famous economists hang over the medieval and Renaissance streets, huge orange tents host temporary bookstores, politicians (this year the Prime Ministers of Italy and France) rub shoulders with journalists, and a gigantic screen broadcasts lectures to crowds in the square outside the cathedral—a necessity considering the overflow from the packed palazzos, theaters and public buildings that host the free talks.

HUP was well represented at this year’s festival, which ran from May 29th through June 2nd. Tony Atkinson (pictured on the banner above) talked to a full house on the subject of his book, Inequality: What Can Be Done?, Julia Cagé spoke about her forthcoming book on the economics of the media, and Thomas Piketty (on screen below) not only spoke on Capital in the Twenty-First Century, but was featured in “The Factory of Inequality,” a theatrical event that combined readings from Balzac and Austen with accordion music and charts from Piketty’s book.

Haunted Reflections: Walter Benjamin in San Francisco

Having spent decades now helping to bring the vast and varied writings of Walter Benjamin to readers of English, we’re very excited to be joining City Lights and others in spending this week considering Benjamin’s life and ideas. “Haunted Reflections: Walter Benjamin in San Francisco” aims to take Benjamin’s work as “a lens through which to observe the sweeping socio-political changes that have enwrapped both the Bay Area and the globe,” by engaging with Benjamin’s ideas via lectures, roundtables, installations, and film screenings.

Among many others, Haunted Reflections features the participation of Howard Eiland, Michael Jennings, and Lindsay Waters, our Executive Editor for the Humanities. Eiland and Jennings have been critical to our Benjamin project, which, as Waters shared with the City Lights blog, can be traced back to his graduate school exposure to Benjamin by Paul de Man and Hannah Arendt. Eiland and Jennings have most recently expanded our Benjamin offerings with the publication of Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, the first full critical biography of Benjamin in any language. The pair adapted a brief introduction to Benjamin’s life and work from the book, which can be read in full online.

Haunted Reflections begins this evening at City Lights, with “Angel of History at the Gates of the West,” a “skeleton key” to Benjamin’s life and work, featuring Eiland, Jennings, and Waters, and moderated by Paul Yamazaki, chief book buyer at City Lights. The week’s events are presented by City Lights in conjunction with the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Goethe Institut San Francisco, the Program in Critical Theory at University of California Berkeley, The Mechanics’ Institute Library, the San Francisco Art Institute, and HUP.

A Conversation on the Racial History of the American Criminal Justice System

Tonight the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture hosts a discussion titled “Racial History of the American Criminal Justice System.” The evening features Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness in conversation with Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Schomburg Center Director and author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. The event will be streamed live this evening at 6:30 via the player embedded here. 

 [Update: player now runs an archived recording of the live talk]

 

 

Upon his assumption of the Directorship in 2011, we asked Muhammad about his plans for the Schomburg Center. He explained that widening accessibility to the Center’s resources and programming was key to its mission:

Open access to ideas is fundamental to democracy and to what we do. As a public research library we want as many people as possible to be inspired by and learn from the collection in the infinite number of ways human beings express and communicate knowledge.

[...]

I am deeply concerned about the twin evils of anti-intellectualism and historical illiteracy that are apparent in many college classrooms and are most visible in our current political culture. In this climate, African American history and Black Studies are especially vulnerable. Given the breadth and depth of our holdings, and our mission to promote learning about and the interpretation of history and culture, the Center is well positioned to lead the way in promoting historical literacy. Two areas are especially important: national engagement and youth outreach. We will rebrand the Schomburg as a center for applied historical research. We want to develop mechanisms for our researchers to translate their work for public and media consumption, particularly when their expertise can shed light on topics of the day.

The live-streaming of events like this evening’s is one such mechanism. Visit the Schomburg Center’s YouTube channel for footage of the myriad lectures and conversations that make the Center’s programming so vital.

Greil Marcus on The Collaboration

On January 23rd the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco hosted Ben Urwand, author of The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler, in conversation with Greil Marcus. During the event (which you can watch in full via the video below), Urwand presented on his research, discussed the book with Marcus, and took questions from the audience.

Marcus—whom we’ve also published several times—began the evening by addressing the controversy surrounding the book, which documents major Hollywood studios accepting direction from German authorities for a longer period and to a much greater extent than previously known.

We’ll pick things up with Marcus addressing the persistent calls for HUP to withdraw the book:

This book has been attacked because it is sensationalistic; because it’s one-sided; because it’s exaggerated. Well this is quite remarkable. Nobody asks that a book be withdrawn because it’s sensationalistic or exaggerated. The argument has also been made that, “Well, everybody knew this was going on. You could find it in Variety. There’s nothing new here.” You know, traffic accident, nothing to see, move along, move along. “But if there is anything new here it’s not important.” It’s like the argument that people made for generations about the Rosenbergs: “They didn’t give anything to the Soviet Union. And if they did it wasn’t anything important. It didn’t have any effect.”

Marcus went on to situate the response to Urwand’s book within a history of Jewish authors discussing Jewish matters and being met by outcry:

The campaign—and it has been among various people an organized campaign—against The Collaboration has been of such virulence and so hysterical, and with accusations that verge on the criminal, that it recalls other instances where Jewish authors have delved into forbidden material, and have come back with stories that a lot of people want to hear, and a lot of people don’t. When Hannah Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem, and she argued that members of the Jewish councils in Eastern Europe worked with the Nazis to facilitate transport of Jews from the ghettoes to concentration camps, in hopes that the people they were supposedly representing would get better treatment, and that they would get better treatment. This was a small part of Hannah Arendt’s book, but it was an explosive argument. She was attacked by not only people in the press, but attacked my colleagues, attacked by lifelong friends. She was shunned. Her classes at the New School in New York were taken away from her. When Philip Roth published Portnoy’s Complaint, Gershom Scholem, the great Israeli historian, compared it to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Which I think no one has done of The Collaboration yet.

  

Honoring the Work of Patricia Williams

This Friday, Columbia Law School’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Law will host a day-long symposium honoring the work of Patricia Williams, the school’s James L. Dohr Professor of Law. Each year the symposium honors a senior scholar who has made outstanding contributions to the field of gender and sexuality law, and Williams now joins past honorees Martha Nussbaum, Judith Butler, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Upon granting her one of its fellowships (the so-called “genius grant”) in 2000, the MacArthur Foundation recognized Williams for having created “a new form of legal writing and scholarship that integrates personal narrative, critical and literary theory, traditional legal doctrine, and empirical and sociological research.”

We’ve twice published books by Williams, including her first, 1991’s The Alchemy of Race and Rights. From its very first lines, Alchemy announced itself as a deeply personal work, braver and far more vulnerable than most anything else on a university press’s law list:

Since subject position is everything in my analysis of the law, you deserve to know that it’s a bad morning. I am very depressed. It always takes a while to sort out what’s wrong, but it usually starts with some kind of perfectly irrational thought such as: I hate being a lawyer.

That very incongruence—the disconnect between Williams’ writing and the impersonal analysis that would generally be expected from the work of a law professor—reflects the ideas of the book itself, run through with defiance of society’s need to limit by categorization.

In the book’s opening essay Williams recalls being pressed by her sister to explain what the then-in-progress Alchemy would be about. Her reply:

I am interested in the way in which legal language flattens and confines in absolutes the complexity of meaning inherent in any given problem; I am trying to challenge the usual limits of commercial discourse by using an intentionally double-voiced and relational, rather than a traditionally legal black-letter, vocabulary. For example, I am a commercial lawyer as well as a teacher of contract and property law. I am also black and female, a status that one of my former employers described as being “at oxymoronic odds” with that of the commercial lawyer. While I certainly took issue with that particular characterization, it is true that my attempts to write in my own voice have placed me in the center of a snarl of social tensions and crossed boundaries. On the one hand, my writing has been staked out as the exclusive interdisciplinary property of constitutional law, contract, African-American history, feminist jurisprudence, political science, and rhetoric. At the same time, my work has been described as a “sophisticated frontal assault” on laissez-faire’s most sacred sanctums, as “new-age performance art,” and as “anecdotal individualism.” In other words, to speak as black female, and commercial lawyer has rendered me simultaneously universal, trendy, and marginal. I think, moreover, that there is a paradigm at work, in the persistent perceptions of me as inherent contradiction: a paradigm of larger social perceptions that divide public from private, black from white, dispossessed from legitimate. This realization, while extremely personal, inevitably informs my writing on a professional level.

Her willingness to confront rather than conform to that “snarl of social tensions and crossed boundaries” gave the book a deep resonance while also establishing an interdisciplinary approach that became a model for generations of scholars. Alondra Nelson, of Columbia’s Department of Sociology and Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and a moderator of one of the symposium’s panels, recalled for us the book’s influence on her as an undergraduate: “As an aspiring academic, I was captivated by this book that featured its fearless black feminist author on the cover; she was a mentor from afar. I was forever transformed by the book’s equal measures of poetry and prose, erudition and plain-spokenness, wit and candidness.”

On a Desert Island, with Soup

Heard the one about the physicist, the chemist, and the economist on a desert island? If you work here you have; it’s been our favorite joke this year.

Goes like this:

A physicist, a chemist, and an economist are stranded on a desert island. One can only imagine what sort of play date went awry to land them there. Anyway, they’re hungry. Like, desert island hungry. And then a can of soup washes ashore. Progresso Reduced Sodium Chicken Noodle, let’s say. Which is perfect, because the physicist can’t have much salt, and the chemist doesn’t eat red meat.

But, famished as they are, our three professionals have no way to open the can. So they put their brains to the problem. The physicist says “We could drop it from the top of that tree over there until it breaks open.” And the chemist says “We could build a fire and sit the can in the flames until it bursts open.”

Those two squabble a bit, until the economist says “No, no, no. Come on, guys, you’d lose most of the soup. Let’s just assume a can opener.”

GET IT?

You can’t just assume a can opener and have it appear, obviously. But economists regularly rely on analogous assumptions of conditions that don’t actually exist in the real world. This is one of the fundamental ways in which economics differs from the hard sciences, even though economists often seek to present their views with the certainty of, say, a physicist or chemist.

In The Assumptions Economists Make, Jonathan Schlefer digs into this manner of assumption-based economic modeling that leads opposing economists to come to drastically different conclusions. It’s kind of like an outsider’s guide to economic thought, meant to help us understand just how ideologically determined an economist’s work can sometimes be, and also how shockingly wrong, as we all learned the hard way when the bottom fell out of the economy in 2008.

To Schlefer, it’s his own position outside the field that helps him to explain its workings:

Be warned: as a card-carrying political scientist, I may entertain a certain smoldering envy toward the imperialistic powers of the social sciences—namely, university economics departments. But my outsider’s perspective has its uses, since I am duly startled by features of the economics landscape that economists barely notice, so inured have they become to them. Moreover, I’m curious about economics. You need curiosity to write about anything you might criticize, because otherwise you never spend the energy and thought to figure out what it says in the first place. And sometimes when you figure out what it says, criticisms you thought you had evaporate, strengthen, or otherwise change.