bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Untimely Sacrifices
Authors: Funahashi Daena Aki
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores timeliness as a condition that requires a certain form of giving in, of opening oneself up to a concept of the times—of self-erasure. Specifically, the chapter asks what such an approach to belonging in time exposes concerning the place of the egological subject. Different economic regimes come with their own brand of pathogenic fatigue. In this way, emergent fatigue categories and how they render particular relationalities problematic within set time and place become key analytics. Through exploring the particular stakes of timely exchange, the chapter focuses on what forms of relationality and exchange are enabled expression at the expense of others.
March 22, 2020
Authors: Douglas Angela E.
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses the author's dilemma of whether to restock their bird feeders. House sparrows lack prudence in their eating habits, very different from the author's regular customers, the chickadees, the tufted titmice, the downy woodpeckers, and the juncos, and the occasional visitors, the Carolina wrens, the house finches, and the red-bellied woodpeckers. The author describes their estate, presenting a tour of the backyard and the trees that are planted there. These trees include the red maple, a black walnut, and a group of Norway spruce and Scotch pine. A week after the refill of the bird feeders, the suet holder is empty and the seed holder nearly so, courtesy of the house sparrows and a pileated woodpecker.
April 19, 2020
Authors: Douglas Angela E.
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses a bush that came into flower in the author's backyard: the spicebush, Lindera benzoin. The name sounds as if it should be exotic, but it is a native. In early spring before its leaves develop, the spicebush is covered in little clusters of lemon-yellow flowers. The spicebush can be seen in the woods and in backyards all over Ithaca. The chapter then explains why Lindera benzoin is called a spicebush. The spicebush is closely related to the famous sassafras tree, and the root of the sassafras is used to flavor homemade root beers and the gumbo dishes in New Orleans. The author also reflects on the title of the letter, exploring how, in many ways, the neighborhood of Fall Creek defines the self-image of Ithacans.
April 26, 2020
Authors: Douglas Angela E.
Published: September 2023

This chapter details a week of winter dregs and describes the gray squirrels that became the author's regular gardening companion. Other regular visitors to the author's backyard include the American red, the flying squirrel, and the fox squirrel. Ithaca has not always been a welcoming place for gray squirrels. Anna Comstock's Handbook of Nature Study, written in Ithaca (1911), has five pages on the American red squirrel, including suggestions for student lessons. Comstock does mention black squirrels, which she explains were common when she was a child but had since been exterminated by shotgun-wielding hunters. The author was convinced that these black squirrels were a melanic population of the gray squirrel.
May 17, 2020
Authors: Douglas Angela E.
Published: September 2023

This chapter highlights the start of summer in the author's backyard. It begins by describing the juncos, which occupy most of the continent, but they are mainly migratory, overwintering in the US and breeding in Canada. The author then recounts how the crab apple tree in front of the house has bloomed and a female Baltimore oriole visited, working the flowers for nectar. By Thursday, a regular summer visitor was back: the catbird, which is a little smaller than the British blackbird and a kind of mockingbird. Friday was the day that the house wren arrived. The house wren is a little larger than the winter wren. And the winter wren is just one of nine species in the US, including five in New York State. Other visitors to the author's backyard include the Nashville warbler and the ruby-throated hummingbird.
May 24, 2020
Authors: Douglas Angela E.
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses two mammals that visited the author's backyard: the chipmunk and the woodchuck. It begins by recounting the author's arrival in the US in August of 2008, during which she learned about the work ethic in the country. Chipmunks are everywhere, living in backyards and parks, and especially in the forest, where they run around in the leaf litter and onto fallen logs. Altogether, chipmunks tend to stay on or near the ground, perhaps close to one of the many entrances to the complicated burrows they dig into sloping ground. One reason why the author loves chipmunks is that they do not do any real damage. That cannot be said for the woodchuck as they munched on the meadow violets. The author then mentions the visit of the cottontail rabbit and a pair of robins. The robin nest building attracted the attention of the blue jays coming in from above and the squirrels coming up from below the crab apple tree.
June 21, 2020
Authors: Douglas Angela E.
Published: September 2023

This chapter identifies the American trees in the author's backyard. The maple next to the deck is a red maple, Acer rubrum, because its perfectly maple-shaped leaves are small, and it has the telltale bright red flowers of a red maple in the early spring. However, the man who trimmed the maple called it a silver maple. Apparently the two species hybridize, and the hybrids are called “Freeman” maples. Meanwhile, a tree that the author shares with her neighbor is one of the nine common maple tree species in New York, Acer negundo to be precise. The author mentions the sycamore in front of the house, which is the American sycamore, Platanus occidentalis, a relative of the London plane tree.
July 19, 2020
Authors: Douglas Angela E.
Published: September 2023

This chapter details the sounds heard in the author's backyard during a summer in Ithaca. Whether the blue jay is on its own or in a gang, whether at rest on a branch of the black walnut or flying from the box elder to the maple, there is the endless clamor of jay screams. In addition, the author's neighbor were doing a major renovation of their house. As they leave their house vacant for the remodeling, a gang of workmen arrives who are as melodious and introverted as the blue jays. This disruption seems to have deterred the black cat that terrorized the chipmunks. The author also mentions the patch of daylilies next to the forsythia. Daylilies, or Hemerocallis fulva for the purists, have an entry in the wildflower guide to the US Northeast because, although they are garden plants from Japan and China, they have escaped big-time.
July 26, 2020
Authors: Douglas Angela E.
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on the butterflies in the author's backyard, explaining how blue jays vomit after feeding on a monarch butterfly, which contains toxins stored from milkweed plants eaten by the caterpillar. The author was urged to “save our monarchs” and was bombarded with advice about how to protect these beautiful butterflies. The main solution advocated to every citizen is to grow milkweeds in their backyard. Although it is often claimed that the declines are caused by a dearth of milkweed food plants in the summer, some people doubt this and prefer to wring their hands about degradation of the overwintering sites and troubles during migration. The author then mentions other butterflies, including the viceroy butterfly and the spicebush swallowtail.
August 23, 2020
Authors: Douglas Angela E.
Published: September 2023

This chapter recounts how the author spotted a very mature caterpillar of the black swallowtail butterfly on one of the wild carrot plants under the maple tree in her backyard. Wild carrot is such a pretty plant with delicate, dissected leaves and lacy white flower heads, but the caterpillar had munched its way through all the leaves and many of the flowers. Meanwhile, the nighttime slugs munched on the flowers of the squash plant and the ants loved the flowers of the nearby cucumber plant. The author explains how leaf miners love the pilewort, but the biggest munchers in her backyard are the crickets. They like foliage of all sorts, but they are also happy to take a mouthful out of fruit, crunch the odd seed, and even feast on other insects when they get a chance.
September 6, 2020
Authors: Douglas Angela E.
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses how it is easier to mark the events of the start of summer than the end of summer in Ithaca. Taking down the hummingbird feeder will be a marker for the end of summer. An earlier marker is removing the Japanese beetle trap from the washing line. Meanwhile, the last marker of summer's end will be taking down the washing line altogether. The author then describes how green their backyard was during the Labor Day weekend. The yard was ringed by luxuriantly leafy trees, and the back lawn was wonderfully green despite the dry summer. They have lots of clover and dandelion plants, nimblewill, plantain, and ragweed. Ragweed is a native North American plant that has made the reverse invasion to roadsides and waste ground in the UK. The author also mentions the sighting of a silver-spotted skipper butterfly.
September 27, 2020
Authors: Douglas Angela E.
Published: September 2023

This chapter assesses the consequences of the “War of the Seasons” for the author's backyard. The week started with summer trees in the cold, and it ended with the start of fall colors in summer weather. The black walnut, usually the first to “go,” was a fifty-fifty mix of green and lemon yellow, while the maple already has a bronzed tinge, and the box elder, unkindly referred to in most tree books as a trash tree, was starting to sport those dull, blotchy brown leaves that are usually associated with mid-October. The author then describes how the late-season flowers kept going, including the goldenrods and the daisy flowers. Another big change to the author's backyard is the coming end of the work on the house of their eastern neighbors. Their neighbors were due to return next week, and the human blue jays and all their noisy equipment have been at full throttle all week.
October 4, 2020
Authors: Douglas Angela E.
Published: September 2023

This chapter illustrates the autumnal activity in the author's backyard. While trimming the privet hedge on the west border of the yard, they discovered three bird nests. Apart from their interest in the newly discovered bird nests, the main preoccupation of the gray squirrels has been to forage for fruits and nuts. The pickings in the backyard have been middling that year. The serviceberry, despite its wonderful flowers in April, has produced not a single berry. Meanwhile, the black walnut has had few fruit. Squirrels collected the fallen nuts and were also perfectly willing to harvest them before they fall. The chipmunks has also been very busy; they collected all manner of seeds, nuts, and fruits, including the late crop of wild strawberries.
October 18, 2020
Authors: Douglas Angela E.
Published: September 2023

This chapter recounts how the author replaced the hummingbird feeder in her backyard with the winter birdseed feeder. The first visitor to the feeder was a squirrel, followed by an American goldfinch. The American goldfinch is a similar size to the European goldfinch but has very different plumage. In the summer, the male is canary yellow with a black topknot and lots of black on the wings, and the female has a yellowish breast. In winter, they join the club of “little brown jobs,” distinguished from other LBJs only by their total lack of markings on their beige head, back, or breast. Another visitor to the winter birdseed feeder is the chipmunk.
December 20, 2020
Authors: Douglas Angela E.
Published: September 2023

This chapter recounts how a blanket of snow covered the author's backyard. It started snowing early Wednesday afternoon and kept at it, with a few brief interludes, till mid-Thursday morning. The BBC website headlines reported about tens of millions of people in US snowstorm, and how a record-breaking blizzard slams the Northeast. Inevitably, Ithacans saw it differently. On the day of the record-breaking blizzard, the headline of the free online news service, the Ithaca Voice, was all about a mysterious monolith that has appeared, as if from nowhere, in McDaniels Park. The author then details how she and her neighbors had to dig their way to the road, while the snowplow cleared the road. Sidewalk clearing is not the responsibility of the local public authorities. Indeed, residents are required to clear the snow from sidewalks within twenty-four hours of snowfall or get fined, although this regulation does not appear to be enforced as fiercely as car parking violations.
January 3, 2021
Authors: Douglas Angela E.
Published: September 2023

This chapter begins by describing how the Ithaca College, built on South Hill at about a thousand feet elevation, can be seen from the author's backyard. It then details how a Virginia opossum visited the backyard. The Virginia opossum, Didelphis virginiana, is found all along the eastern part of North America. They arrived there courtesy of the Great American Interchange, 2.7 million years ago. The author also mentions the long tradition of “opossum hunting” in the US. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation declared that the entire state was open for opossum hunting between October 25, 2020, and February 15, 2021, apart from Long Island, where hunting started a week later.
January 24, 2021
Authors: Douglas Angela E.
Published: September 2023

This chapter begins by describing Ithaca theater and Ithacan plays to illustrate the differences between summer and winter in the author's backyard. It then highlights the red squirrel. The center of its universe is the row of Norway spruce running from the southeast corner of the author's yard along the boundary between their southern and southeastern neighbors. The American red squirrel is not the same species as the European red squirrel. The European red squirrel is actually a close relative of the American gray squirrel. To be more specific, the gray and European red are both Sciurus, and the American red is Tamiasciurus.
January 31, 2021
Authors: Douglas Angela E.
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on winter in the author's backyard in Ithaca, New York. It particularly looks at the Japanese beetles and the cicadas. The Japanese beetles spend most of their twelve-to-thirteen-month lifespan adopting a low profile as grubs in cold soil. They die if they freeze, and they do not make any good antifreeze, so their sole winter task is to adjust their depth as the temperatures slowly shift. The cicadas are also safe underground and, just like the beetle grubs, they adjust their depth by temperature. However, not all insects overwinter in the soil. The author then highlights the goldenrod gall fly, Eurosta solidaginis.
February 14, 2021
Authors: Douglas Angela E.
Published: September 2023

This chapter begins by describing the routine of the Carolina wren in the author's backyard throughout the winter. Almost invariably, a single wren comes to the bird feeder, always from the privet hedge border with the western neighbor. It feeds adeptly on the suet block, regularly repositioning itself from top to side to bottom, and angling its incredibly flexible neck as it pecks. It also enjoys any breadcrumbs that the author puts out onto the snow-covered deck. That week, aside from feeding, the Carolina wren has also broken into a song on several days. Several other birds have also found new voice, including the cardinals. Another big event in the author's backyard has been the American robins, which are mostly males.
February 28, 2021
Authors: Douglas Angela E.
Published: September 2023

This chapter reflects on the foraging activity of the white-tailed deer. Throughout most of the year, the local deer forage between dusk and dawn, but recently they have been out and about throughout the day. Indeed, the author has seen a deer foraging on the steep south-facing bank at the front of a house down the road. Unmistakably, they are feeding on the neighbor's periwinkle, which is more widely known as vinca in the US. Periwinkle is planted very extensively as ground cover because it is toxic to deer. However, the deer must have decided that it is better to suffer the side effects of the vinca alkaloids than to go hungry. Meanwhile, the author's backyard has all sorts of winter food for the deer, including the buds of the viburnum bush and the lower branches of the redbud.
Education’s War on Poverty in the 1960s
Authors: Shelton Jon
Published: September 2023

This chapter notes that the very notion of human capital, though more widely accepted than a decade before, was still controversial because many thinkers still connected the concept to chattel slavery. It introduces Gary Becker and Theodore Schultz, the thinkers who most influenced American policymakers during the period of reform called the Great Society in the 1960s. While both economists advocated for investment in human capital, the chapter elaborates on key differences in their thought, particularly around who should finance the investment. Both Schultz and Becker agreed, however, that after World War II, economists had misunderstood the huge productivity growth in the United States. By focusing only on physical capital, corporate investment, and labor, the chapter underlines that most economists had failed to understand that advances in human capital—including healthcare, migration in pursuit of better employment, and most prominently, education and job training—were instrumental in the broad postwar economic affluence of the United States. Analyzing the increase in education as human capital, the chapter uncovers how Schultz and Becker elided the broader power dynamics that existed in society and fantasized that every worker was not working on someone else's terms but was an entrepreneur who invested in him- or herself.
“At Risk”
Authors: Shelton Jon
Published: September 2023

This chapter recounts how Ronald Reagan began his political career in California. It notes that Reagan's campaign consciously sought to take on the public sector, framing social goods like public education as taking from productive taxpayers. The chapter also looks at how Reagan tapped into the heightened prominence of Gary Becker and Milton Friedman's conservative version of the education myth, which touted the importance of education but sought to privatize investment as much as possible. The chapter examines how his larger goal to significantly curtail federal influence in education by abolishing the federal Department of Education failed. The growing importance of the education myth had become too politically entrenched by then. The chapter shows that conservative Republicans led by Reagan cut federal education spending, but by the 1980s, even Reagan could not arrest the trajectory of the education myth. The chapter then analyzes how a growing consensus around the importance of education to ensure American economic competitiveness led even many moderate Republicans, like the president's own education secretary Terrel Bell, to push for greater investment. The report Bell commissioned, as the chapter reveals, further propelled the myth by making exaggerated claims about the supposed problems with the American education system and why those problems were limiting the livelihoods of new generations of workers.
Things Fall Apart
Authors: Shelton Jon
Published: September 2023

This chapter highlights the first significant political manifestations of the revolt against the education myth. It shows how the failure of Barack Obama to make good on his promises on economic security helped empower a new wave of Republicans, like Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin, who exploited the grievances of many voters with a Democratic Party that seemed only to cater to professionals. Drawing on a path blazed by his two political heroes—Ronald Reagan and Tommy Thompson—the chapter notes that Walker trained the resentment on public employees, especially those who worked in public education. The chapter examines how Walker channeled the discontent of rural Wisconsinites, who by that time, harbored deep resentment against their urban counterparts, equating them to unearned economic prosperity, government resources, and public-sector work. Exploiting the growing resentment against the professional class and Democratic policies around trade that had made nonprofessional-class jobs like manufacturing much less secure, the chapter emphasizes that Walker undertook a scorched earth attack on public-sector unions and the University of Wisconsin System, asserting that unionized professionals took from blue-collar workers. This effort opened the way for Walker and other reactionary Republicans to further harm all workers.
Exchange Ideologies
Authors: Anderson Paul
Published: September 2023

This book documents the social world of Aleppo's traders before the destruction of the city, exploring changing conceptions of commerce in Syria. Syria's traders have been seen as embodying a timeless culture of “the bazaar,” or an ahistorical Islamic culture of trade. Other accounts portray them as venal figures, motivated only by profit, and commerce as a purely instrumental pursuit. Rejecting both approaches, the book traces the diverse social structures, and notions of language, through which Aleppo's merchants understood and construed commerce and the figure of the merchant during a period of economic liberalization in the 2000s. Rather than seeing these social structures and representations as expressions of a timeless bazaar culture, or as shaped only by Islamic tradition, the book relates them to processes of politically managed economic liberalization and the Syrian regime's attempts to ensure its own survival in the midst of change. In doing so, the book provides an account of economic liberalization in Syria as a social and cultural process as much as a political and economic one.
Affective Economies of Sincerity and Economic Liberalization in Aleppo
Authors: Anderson Paul
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on the diverse relations that merchants fashioned between sincerity, Islam, and Aleppine identity. It notes how merchants claiming sincerity with their customers could be framed as an Islamic virtue. In Aleppo, Islam and commerce intertwined in an economic cosmology of grace. The chapter highlights how affect and morality are keys to understanding how changes in global capital flows were inscribed within the merchants of Aleppo. It explains how the market exchange was organized through discourses of sincerity into new imaginative and affective geographies in a period of economic liberalization. Moreover, the concept of urban heritage gained new significance as circuits of capital and commodities developed between Syria and the Caucasus during the 1990s.
The Codevelopment of Tourism in Colonial Mozambique
Authors: Cleveland Todd
Published: September 2023

This chapter reconstructs the history of tourism in colonial Mozambique via extended examinations of these interconnected “alluring opportunities” and the ways that they changed over time, leading up to independence in 1975. It considers the daily experiences of guides, trackers, service staff, and other workers in the genesis and development of this sector. The chapter also constitutes the initial academic engagement with these workers, who shaped an industry that grew in both economic and political importance to Portugal as international pressure to relinquish its colonial empire increased throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s. It then weaves together accounts of foreign tourists' experiences in this Portuguese territory and the lived experiences of indigenous laborers who facilitated and serviced these visits. The chapter emphasizes the interdependence of these otherwise disparate populations while also underlining the vital contributions that both groups made to the development of tourism in colonial Mozambique.
Postcolonial Legacies of Colonial-era Tourism
Authors: Cleveland Todd
Published: September 2023

This chapter evaluates both the immediate plight and enduring legacy of Mozambique's tourist industry as the colony transitioned to independence in 1975, subsequently endured a devastating civil conflict (1976–1992), and, more recently, has begun anew to attract large numbers of tourists. It traces these important continuities and connections through the aftermath of independence, on into the years well beyond this political divide. Although Africans active in the industry during the colonial era often seamlessly replaced departing European supervisors, the chapter underlines that tourism in Mozambique contracted considerably during the ensuing hostilities. The chapter follows how many Africans returned to the rebounding industry. It also argues that many of these individuals transmitted occupational knowledge and skills to their children, such that, for example, sons of former chefs are now serving in that same capacity, often at the same establishments. As the chapter underscores, this remarkable legacy, rooted in the colonial period, is likely to persist, as livelihood opportunities within the industry continue to expand in contemporary Mozambique.
Introduction
Authors: Dorsey M. Girard
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses the origins of chemical warfare and World War II. It provides an overview of the experiences of the World War II Western Allies with gas. Gas became a powerful weapon that influenced behavior in World War II. However, the boundaries shifted as the growing brutality of the war and the concomitant desensitization of leaders and the public became one of the key factors that eroded gas restraints. The chapter cites how the Geneva Gas Protocol set the Western Allies on the courses they followed for the next twenty-five years, detailing how Britain felt compelled to sign the treaty or risk international condemnation.
Chain, Tool, Shield
Authors: Dorsey M. Girard
Published: September 2023

This chapter highlights the role of an international treaty in chemical weapons arms control before World War II. While the Geneva Gas Protocol of 1925 governed international law regarding chemical warfare during World War II, multiple efforts, like the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, restricted and even prohibited the wartime use of gas after World War I. For Britain, treaties were a tool and a chain even if they were treated nominally as a shield due to public opinion and political pressure. The chapter elaborates on the effort of international attempts to formulate an international gas law that inspired trust in the interwar period. It also notes how gas protocols affected the United States and Canada.
Is There Any Hope?
Authors: Dorsey M. Girard
Published: September 2023

This chapter looks into the defensive preparations against the expected gas war. In Britain, domestic efforts were multifaceted, involving pressure by the press and public as well as planning and persuasion at the government level. The government wanted to protect lay people from a rain of chemical weapons. The chapter details the domestic preparation in various homelands, such as gas masks and businesses participating in commercial efforts to develop and provide anti-gas measures. It explains how Western Allies repeatedly tried to avoid a gas war through international diplomatic and legal efforts and engaged to varying extents in preparations to face gas attacks in the interwar period.
From Jewish Privilege to Judaic Supremacy
Authors: Shafir Gershon
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on the one state solution of the Religious Zionists. It explains how the halakhic one state model is best understood as an integral part of the progression from laying claim to portions of Palestine through secular Jewish privilege. Jewish immigrants constructed themselves as sovereignty-carrying settlers and eo ipso Palestinians as natives outside the moral universe of political rights. Moreover, Judaic supremacy renders Palestinian Arabs invisible or at least easy to ignore and has become the orthodoxy of Religious Zionists. The chapter highlights how the pastoral power of the Judaic supremacy proponents penetrates and shapes the Israeli state's sovereign power by creating a new Jewish universe of legitimate possibilities for rendering Palestinians invisible in a one state reality.
Citizenship as a Mobility Regime
Authors: Berda Yael
Published: September 2023

This chapter looks into the notion of citizenship as a mobility regime. It cites how political membership determines the ability to move freely in the territory of the state, which references the limits of mobility in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip. Colonial and imperial histories of state-making underscore the role of mobility in the determination of boundaries and political memberships as part of the making of modern states and their efforts to consolidate identity. Moreover, mobility was used to facilitate economic extraction, and crush uprisings and inter-communal conflict. The chapter notes the extent of the racialized regime of mobility and the legacy of British colonial emergency laws through the bureaucratic toolkits of the Israeli.
Lessons from How Nationalisms Evolve for a One State Reality
Authors: Shelef Nadav G.
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines the likelihood of nationalism evolving into a one state reality. It also considers the role of domestic politics in driving the transformation. Nationalist ideologies evolve and detail the kinds of denationalization that would need to occur to achieve peaceful coexistence in a one state reality. The chapter notes how histories of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism suggest that these kinds of denationalization are possible because some versions already occurred in the past. Since the prospects of denationalization are linked to the outcome of the domestic political fight between nationalist and denationalization projects, it is not clear that painful conflict in a single state reality will result in a better outcome than territorial surgery.
Kant and the Concept of Respect for Persons
Authors: Honig Bonnie
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores Immanuel Kant's theorization of politics and its role in sealing the rupture of modernity through his account of the practice of respect for persons. It notes that Kantian respect for persons expresses an admirable commitment to respect the integrity, rights, and individuality of individuated subjects. Moreover, Kantian respect simultaneously serves as a principle of distance or negative liberty and as part of a broad and complex set of moral and political practices that consolidate selves into moral and political subjects. The chapter details the reverence-respect, teleological-respect, and liberal respect for persons as per Kant's arguments. It highlights the immorality of violating the duties of teleological respect and liberal respect.
Nietzsche and the Recovery of Responsibility
Authors: Honig Bonnie
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores Friedrich Nietzsche's criticism of traditional moral values for their unethical qualities and his proposed recovery of responsibility. Nietzsche recovers each traditional virtue by restructuring and recasting them to counter Immanuel Kant's ideals. Meanwhile, Nietzsche argues that the only way to get past passive nihilism is to relentlessly uncover the remnants and shadows of god. The chapter introduces the concept of eternal recurrence, which provides a surefire test for resentment and the overman as a personification of the parts of the self resistant to the formation of responsible subjectivity. It cites virtù as the ethical perspective sometimes adopted by Nietzsche to unveil the cruelties of virtue's morality.
Arendt’s Accounts of Action and Authority
Authors: Honig Bonnie
Published: September 2023

This chapter covers Hannah Arendt's Nietzschean conception of the self as multiplicity and of identity. Arendt presents the bifurcations between the determinism of the natural body (in the private realm) and the freedom of the acting self (in the public realm) as attributes of individual selves. The chapter elaborates on the notion of promising and forgiveness as mechanisms that constrain action. Moreover, Arendt theorizes political authority as part of a broader conception of politics and political action that gives pride of place to virtuosity as self-display and to virtù as enmity toward (too much) order. The chapter also notes that the irresistibility of the law marks the closure of political space and the beginning of despotism, which correlates to Arendt's virtù theories of politics.
Rawls and the Remainders of Politics
Authors: Honig Bonnie
Published: September 2023

This chapter looks into the processes that produce the remainder of John Rawls's politics. Rawls's liberal theory of justice presents constitutional democracy that is sensitive to the predicaments of permanent minorities and the subversive effects of individual and class interests. Moreover, Rawls's ideal of institutional justice provides a standard to measure the real institutional arrangements of contemporary democratic societies and political cultures. The chapter elaborates on how the justification of punishment became grounds for retributive justice and distributive justice. The antecedence of criminality relieves the system of any responsibility for the production of criminal subjects and provides the practice of punishment with closure.
Renegotiating Positions: Beyond the Virtue- Virtù Opposition
Authors: Honig Bonnie
Published: September 2023

This concluding chapter details the virtue–virtù opposition. The perspective of virtù provides a lens that isolates and exaggerates certain features of politics and political thought. Moreover, virtue and virtù represent two impulses of political life that keep the contest going and free burdens of the contest. The chapter looks into Carol Gilligan's ethic of care to reference how the virtue–virtù opposition's usefulness becomes a lever of critique or its generative power becomes a force of constraint. It then highlights that human beings are always enabled by categories and forms of life against which individuals and communities invariably struggle to place.
Myself Must I Remake
Authors: Jackson Michael
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores the author's temperamental need to test the ideas he was encountering in philosophy, psychology, and anthropology against the empirical realities of everyday life. It talks about the author's work on the wharves or a building site, obligating him to explain himself to men who thought that going to school at his age suggested a reluctance to grow up. It also mentions how the constant switching between vita activa and vita contemplativa unsettled the author as he could not reconcile poetry and prose, or philosophical reflection and practical action. The chapter describes that the author's year included moving between Auckland and Wellington, falling in and out of love, knocking out screeds of bad fiction and poetry, and working as a ship's steward, a research librarian, and a proofreader. It mentions Bob Lowry, one of the great rogue elephants of the New Zealand literary and left-wing scene.
Heart of Darkness
Authors: Jackson Michael
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores the author's depressing realization that, no matter how far he traveled from home, his old self went with him, refusing to be sloughed off by the trick of changing his surroundings. The chapter talks about the author's fear of becoming one of Joseph Conrad's restive characters that drift from one remote island or port to another, no sooner arrived than departed. It also reviews the sadism of the Congo's colonial administrators under King Léopold of the Belgians and the shambles the Belgians had left after their precipitous and ignominious departure in 1960. The chapter looks at the author's disenchantment with the ideology of aid and development and his interest in how Africa could aid and develop him. It describes the author's piece called The Livingstone Falls, which conjures the thunderous and unnavigable stretch of water between the Stanley Pool and the lower reaches of the Congo.
Dankawali
Authors: Jackson Michael
Published: September 2023

This chapter highlights the author's interest in how Kuranko social consciousness permeated the natural environment so that the lifeworlds of djinn and certain totemic animals mirrored the human world in many ways. It details how the author received kola, which was the tree of life in the Garden of Eden and given to a stranger to incorporate them into the community and signify a desire for their wellbeing. It also explains how the principle of reciprocity governs relations between chiefs and djinn, informing relations between the living and the dead, rulers and commoners, and parents and children. The chapter mentions Nonkowa Kargbo, who recounted a story of the ominous effects of President Siaka Steven's shadow state in Sierra Leone. Nonkowa implied that people in positions of authority do not always exercise authority wisely or well, and underlings are sometimes driven to redress situations of inequity or injustice by underhand means.
Demon Boy Prosecutor
Authors: Siegel Martin J.
Published: September 2023

This chapter argues that prospects for graduates like Irving Robert Kaufman were bleak in 1931. It underlines that the Depression was in full swing, and he was an average student from an average school. And there was a deeper problem: the doors of many law offices were closed to Jewish applicants. As the chapter highlights, two out of every three Jewish lawyers in the city practiced alone, and those who could find jobs with existing firms were almost invariably hired by other Jews. The chapter follows how Kaufman found a clerkship with a Manhattan lawyer named Louis Rosenberg—no relation to the couple so central to his later life. Kaufman remained a clerk until he passed the bar exam and obtained his license in 1932. The chapter then examines how Kaufman began to think of higher things: to make a name for himself in the US Attorney's Office. The chapter emphasizes that the US Attorney in Manhattan was and remains the nation's second-most-important federal prosecutor, behind only the attorney general. The chapter then elaborates on Kaufman's work bringing down Musica, and describes how he'd unmasked the McKesson trickster. After only five years in government and at an age when most lawyers were just finding their sea legs, Kaufman had fashioned himself into the latest prosecutor-hero in a city that especially celebrated the type.
A Dream Come True
Authors: Siegel Martin J.
Published: September 2023

This chapter assesses Irving Robert Kaufman's departure from the government. It looks at how success in private practice helped burnish his résumé for the bench, noting that he would also need the patronage of political types, who were easier to court outside government. Above all, there was a growing family to provide for after he and Helen had had a son in 1939. The chapter first tracks how Kaufman joined a small firm with a rotating cast of more senior partners. It follows how he achieved his goal of establishing a successful and profitable law practice in very short order. Yet, a lucrative practice wasn't what Kaufman wanted. So even as he toiled at his office in an elegant skyscraper on Wall Street, he worked just as assiduously to lay the groundwork for what he'd coveted since first wandering into Mullett's Monstrosity. The chapter delves into Kaufman's volunteer assignment for the Association of the Bar of the City of New York in 1943. Volunteer work in the public interest was one way for Kaufman to advance his judicial ambitions, but he was also working a more time-honored angle: cultivating powerful patrons.
At Home on the Bench and Park Avenue
Authors: Siegel Martin J.
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses Irving Robert Kaufman's efficiency and strong command of the courtroom. It emphasizes that he briskly sliced through lawyers' arguments, stalling tactics, unpreparedness, and confusion to identify the roadblock, decide the key issue, and move the case. Another way to move the cases was to jawbone lawyers into settlements and plea agreements. While some judges see this as beyond their role or beneath their dignity, the chapter highlights that Kaufman was a master at it. It recounts that he dug into the facts and quickly saw the weak points that could frighten counsel and their clients into forgoing a trial. Kaufman's effectiveness and mastery of the courtroom had its drawbacks, though. The chapter reveals that he was quick—often too quick—to interject with his own questions to witnesses. This happened out loud more than he seems to have realized. There was also a sternness from the bench that, consciously or not, he may have fallen back on in part to compensate for his youth. The chapter analyzes how the obsession with efficiency governed life in Kaufman's chambers on the nineteenth floor of the courthouse even more than in his courtroom. A few months after taking the bench, Kaufman left the Upper West Side for an apartment on Park Avenue where he and Helen would live for the rest of their lives.
Beaten by the Harvards
Authors: Siegel Martin J.
Published: September 2023

This chapter assesses how the FBI's secret assurance undoubtedly bolstered Irving Robert Kaufman's certainty in the correctness of his cause as he battled critics for the next forty years. The chapter looks at how Kaufman's personal relationship with J. Edgar Hoover deepened, greased by a never-ending stream of flattery. It recounts how Kaufman also ran interference for Hoover, even when the director himself demurred. The chapter also discusses how the case moved from the court of public opinion back to Kaufman's actual courtroom in 1956, when Morton Sobell filed new motions to overturn his conviction based on how Mexican authorities had roughed him up and handed him over to the Feds. To put the lie to the idea that he'd condemned the Rosenbergs for their political beliefs instead of their spying, the chapter emphasizes that Kaufman gave several speeches highlighting the duty of the bar to represent communists despite their unpopularity. It analyzes how Kaufman urged modernization of law enforcement tactics, strict observance of defendants' constitutional rights, upholding free expression, and even the updating of commercial law as tools to rebut Soviet criticism of the American system.
Elevation and Descent
Authors: Siegel Martin J.
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on how the Kennedys approved Irving Robert Kaufman's nomination and announced it in September 1961. Kaufman's political work and resulting advancement had occurred under the wings of Truman favorites in the 1940s and, as the chapter stresses, he'd perfectly exemplified Truman's brand of anticommunist but progressive, statist liberalism while on the bench. After the Rosenberg trial, there was no questioning Kaufman's zeal toward communists. In more conventional criminal cases, the chapter reveals that he was thoroughly pro-government to the point of secretly conferring with prosecutors and doling out maximum sentences. Yet Kaufman also fully embraced his patrons' faith in government action to bring about social progress. Beyond using the power of his office to compel integration, the chapter narrates that he worked actively for the improvement of judicial administration and argued that the reforms he proposed were necessary to advance civil rights, ensure due process, and thereby demonstrate to the world that American justice was superior to its facsimile behind the Iron Curtain. The chapter investigates how political liberalism began to strike some more through the 1960s and 1970s as a cacophonous campaign for particularized individual rights or special interests than the effort to make government serve the broad American middle, as epitomized by Roosevelt's New Deal and Truman's Fair Deal.
Some Form of Justice
Authors: Siegel Martin J.
Published: September 2023

This chapter states that Irving Robert Kaufman's greatest liberal contribution began in the least likely place. Forty-six hundred miles from New York, in Ybycui, Paraguay, Dr. Joel Filártiga tended to the country's poorest peasants. Born to one of the old upper-class families, he spurned a comfortable practice in the capital for a makeshift clinic in the hinterland. There he treated Guarani-speaking cotton farmers whose grueling labor enriched plantation owners, shippers, bankers—everyone but themselves. Since 1954, Paraguay had been ruled by General Alfredo Stroessner, as brutal a dictator as ever produced by Latin America's strongman politics. The chapter investigates how Stroessner's cartoonishly evil regime systematically squashed civil liberties, exterminated indigenous tribes, ran drugs to the United States, and shielded Nazi war criminals. Over the years, the chapter stresses that Filártiga and Stroessner's dissent led inexorably to harassment, imprisonment, and finally torture. The typical Paraguayan response to this sort of outrage was silence, since protest only invited further brutality. But Filártiga had never been typical. The chapter emphasizes that Filártiga wanted justice, though, not vengeance, and with every court appearance and newspaper story, Caso Filártiga became a sensation in Paraguay.
Introduction
Authors: Krasny Marianne E.
Published: September 2023

This chapter notes that this book is for people who are seeking hope through wrestling with what individuals can realistically do to address the colossal climate crisis. As the chapter emphasizes, individual lifestyle actions—things we can do in our homes, on our way to work, and throughout our daily lives—are important, but we need to be informed about the actions we choose. Some actions, such as eating more plant-rich foods and reducing the amount of food we waste, curtail our greenhouse gas emissions a lot more than other actions, such as recycling. However, as this chapter argues, acting alone will not bring about the policy changes needed to transform our greenhouse-gas-gushing energy, transportation, and food systems. The chapter investigates how can we bring about structural or systemic change. It stresses that this entails connecting with others taking similar actions. It means supporting—through donations and volunteering—organizations whose members take collective action to advocate for equitable climate policies and production systems.
Volunteer
Authors: Krasny Marianne E.
Published: September 2023

This chapter notes that volunteering for a nonprofit organization whose goal is to influence climate policy makes sense for several reasons. The chapter first discusses how joining an organization enables you to expand your sphere of influence from lifestyle behaviors to climate policy on anything from wind farms to state regulations that ban food waste from landfills. Whether they are an informal online social media group or a registered nonprofit, the chapter highlights that groups and organizations inform their members about strategic actions. The chapter also explores how organizations can have impacts greater than the sum of the impacts of each member acting alone by informing and mobilizing members at critical times. It analyzes how working with a nonprofit organization can help bring about the structural changes that make these lifestyle behaviors easier for large numbers of citizens. It then examines how the diversity of climate groups creates myriad opportunities for volunteers to become involved in activities that reflect their interests and time constraints.