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      Welcome to the Metaverse: The Peril and Potential of Governance

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      The final chapter of Don DeLillo’s epic 1997 novel “Underworld” has proven a prescient warning of the dangers of the digitized life and culture into which we’ve communally plunged headfirst. Yet no sentiment, no open question posed in his 800-page opus rings as ominously, or remains as unsettling today, as this: “Is cyberspace a thing within the world or is it the other way around? Which contains the other, and how can you tell for sure?”

      Facebook Rebrands Itself After a Fictional Dystopia

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      Regrettably, people’s opinions on the metaverse currently depend on whether they view owning and operating a “digital self” through the lens of dystopia (“The Matrix”) or harmless fun (“Fortnite”). It is additionally unfortunate that an innovative space as dynamic and potentially revolutionary as the metaverse has become, in the public’s imagination, the intellectual property of one company.

      But the fact that future users so readily associate the metaverse with Facebook is a temporary result of PR and a wave of talent migration, and will be replaced by firsthand experiences gained through our exposure to the metaverse itself, and not a single firm’s vision for it.

      Meta Power

      So, what does this all mean? How will the metaverse shape the way we do business, the way we live our lives, the way we govern ourselves? Who owns the metaverse? Why do we need it? Who will be in charge?

      Taking a lead from this stellar primer, if we simply replace the word “metaverse” with the word “internet” wherever we see it, all of a sudden, its application and significance become easier to grasp. It also becomes clear that Facebook’s rebranding as Meta is not as much a reference to the creation of the metaverse but more in line with the company’s desire to become this new territory’s most enthusiastic homesteaders. Facebook is not so much creating the metaverse as it is hoping — like every other firm and government should hope — that it won’t be left behind in this new world.

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      As far as the metaverse’s impact, its political implications might end up being its least transformative. In the United States, for instance, the digitization of political campaigning has carved a meandering path to the present that is too simplistically summed up thus: Howard Dean crawled so that Barack Obama could walk so that Donald Trump could run so that Joe Biden could drop us all off at No Malarkey Station.

      Where this train goes next, both in the United States and globally, will be a function of individual candidates’ goals, and the all-seeing eye of algorithm-driven voter outreach. But the bottom line is that there will be campaign advertisements in the metaverse because, well, there are campaign advertisements everywhere, all the time.

      More interesting to consider is how leaders will engage the metaverse once in power. Encouragingly, from the governmental side, capabilities and opportunities abound to redefine the manner in which citizens reach their representatives and participate in their own governance. Early public sector adopters of metaversal development have but scratched the surface of these possibilities.

      For starters, the tiny island nation of Barbados has staked out the first metaversal embassy. This openness to embracing technology and a renewed focus on citizen interaction evidenced in this move are laudable and demonstrate the metaverse’s democratic value as a means for increased transparency in government and truly borderless global engagement. Though novel, Barbados’ digital embassy is no gimmick. You can be sure that additional diplomatic missions will soon follow suit in establishing their presence in the metaverse and will perhaps wish they had thought to do so earlier.

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      Another happy marriage of innovation and democracy is underway in South Korea. Its capital city has taken the mission of digitizing democracy a step further by setting the ambitious goal of creating a Metaverse Seoul by 2023 for the express purpose of transforming its citizenry’s access to municipal government. Things like virtual public hearings, a virtually accessible mayor’s office, virtual tourism, virtual conventions, markets and events will all be on the table as one of the world’s most economically and culturally rich metropolises opens its digital doors to all who wish to step inside.

      Digital Twinning

      Any time technology is employed in the service of empowering people and holding governments more accountable, such advancements should be celebrated. The metaverse can and must become a vehicle for freedom. It need not provide a tired, easy analog to Don DeLillo’s ominous underworld.

      But then there’s China. While some of its cities and state-run firms are making plans to embrace what functionality is afforded via metaversal innovation, there can be no question that the government in Beijing will have a tremendous say in what development, access and behavior is and isn’t permitted in any Chinese iterations of the metaverse. It is hard to imagine, for instance, certain digital assets, products or symbols making their way past the same level of censorship beneath which China already blankets its corner of cyberspace.

      Yet China’s most intriguing metaverse-related trend involves the spike in interest in digital property ownership occurring while its real-world real estate market continues to sputter. Such a considerable reallocation of resources away from physical assets into digital ones mirrors the increasing popularity of cryptocurrency as a safe haven from the risk of inflation. Call it a technological inevitability or a societal symptom of COVID-fueled pessimism, but the digital world now appears (to some) to present fewer risks and more forward-looking stability than the physical.   

      Unique Insights from 2,500+ Contributors in 90+ Countries

      China may be an extreme example, but the need to balance transparency, openness and prosperity with safety and control will exist for all governments in the metaverse just as it does in non-virtual reality. Real-world governmental issues will not find easy answers in the metaverse, but they might find useful twins. And as is the case in the industry, the digital twinning of democracy will give its willing practitioners the chance to experiment, to struggle, to build and rebuild, and to fail fast and often enough to eventually get some things right.

      Championing commendable applications of this new technology in government and business will position the metaverse as a useful thing within the real world, something that enriches real lives, that serves real people — not the other way around.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Top 10 books about US presidents | Claude A Clegg III

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      Top 10 books about US presidentsFrom the anguish of Lincoln to the showbiz of Reagan and Obama’s introspection, these books show the power and helplessness of America’s commanders-in-chief The US presidency was supposed to be something different, something novel, compared with the fossilised monarchical rule that it supplanted after the American revolution. Born of Enlightenment theory, settler colonialism and 18th-century warfare, the US constitution gave the chief executive primarily an enforcement role, with the authority to lead armed forces in the event of foreign encroachment or domestic unrest but stripped of the capacity to legislate or issue judicial decisions. The architects of the new republic meant for the president to preside over a citizenry well-endowed with rights, not to rule over cowed subjects.Chief executives from George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan have been sorely tested by both the responsibilities and the limitations of the country’s highest, loneliest office. Through civil war, economic catastrophes, foreign misadventures, social upheavals and plagues, the presidency has endured, but it – and the 45 men who have occupied the job – has been moulded and often humbled by the promise and perils of the office.Is the US presidency – indeed, American democracy – equal to the dire challenges of the 21st century? One could certainly argue that it isn’t, based on the ongoing bungling of the Covid-19 response, the horrifying (and presidentially inspired) insurrection of 6 January 2021 and the glacially slow and fickle efforts to address everything from climate change to widening social inequality. If the founding fathers meant to circumscribe the power of the presidency out of a well-founded fear of kingly abuses, then they would surely comprehend the creeping threat that authoritarianism and political extremism present to the US system of government today. Nevertheless, they probably could not have guessed that the hard lessons that they had learned about the fragility of democracy would be so fiercely resisted or blithely ignored more than two centuries after they beseeched a patrician general from the Virginia countryside to preside over their fledgling experiment in government by the people.Of the many works that I have found useful in thinking about the history of the US presidency and for writing my newest book, The Black President: Hope and Fury in the Age of Obama, these 10 have been among the most helpful. They are a mix of biographies, memoirs and reportage which, taken together, represent some of the best writings by and about the small group of powerful people who have occupied the White House.1. Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar (2017)Dunbar’s important book is less a biography of George Washington, Martha Washington, or Ona Judge, the runaway enslaved woman whom the first couple made such extraordinary efforts to recapture, than a look into the power and privilege of a slaveholding elite forcing its way through a new republic rhetorically committed to liberty. The relentless pursuit of Judge by the Washingtons after her bold flight from the new US capital in Philadelphia is expertly told by Dunbar.2. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed (2008)This history of overlapping, intertwined families vivifies the world around Thomas Jefferson, the third US president, while skilfully making more legible the travails and aspirations of the enslaved people on his storied estate at Monticello. The decades-long relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings, one of the Black women he owned and who bore several of his children, occupies the core of the book, but Gordon-Reed manages to craft a complicated and often contradictory history that extends far beyond the tangle of race, gender, and status that marked the Jeffersons and the Hemingses’ commingled journey through US history.3. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin (2005)This book follows the intersecting biographical tributaries of the powerful, ambitious men whom Abraham Lincoln, the nation’s 16th president, was able to steer toward the rushing river of his own turbulent civil war presidency. Lincoln as political strategist and savvy tactician is the frame that Goodwin points up most dramatically. But the book also succeeds at conveying Lincoln as a beleaguered and empathic head of state whose mettle is tried time and again by those around him and news from the battlefield.4. Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S Grant (1885-1886)Rightly considered by many historians and literary critics as among the best of presidential autobiographies, this book was completed a generation after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox as Grant succumbed to a slow strangulation by throat cancer in the 1880s. The memoirs provide a vantage point on the nation’s bloodiest and most defining conflict that only a soldier elemental to the war and its aftermath could offer.5. Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris (2001)As the best biographical volume on America’s 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt, Morris’s book draws bold-coloured portraits of outsized historical figures, with equally knowing shades of nuance and frailty. Morris has the contextual eye of the historian and sets scenes that are alive and convincing. He also conveys mood and meaning as well as any novelist.6. Franklin D Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 by William Leuchtenburg (1963)Dated, frayed, and surpassed by newer research and more eloquent storytellers, Leuchtenburg’s volume on the first two presidential terms of Franklin Roosevelt still stands the test of time as a scholarly, well-researched, and jargon-free narration of arguably the most consequential presidency of the 20th century. It is the tale of the rise of the liberal welfare state against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the gathering clouds of world war. Leuchtenburg tells the story well and sets the standard for future researchers.7. The Making of the President, 1960 by Theodore White (1961)White’s fascinating chronicle of the 1960 presidential race is the starting point of quality, book-length journalistic coverage of modern American politics. Writing in the moment, White had an eye for discerning the essential character of men such as John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon who sought the country’s highest office, even as the media ecosystem of his day made such discernment more difficult to achieve.8. Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years by Haynes Johnson (1991)Johnson captures the zeitgeist of the 1980s by juxtaposing the countervailing forces of American optimism – or the desperate need of many Americans to again believe in their scandal-wracked government – against the greed, corruption, militarism and debt that threatened to unmask the soothing myths of American exceptionalism. At the centre of Johnson’s story is a self-made man, an actor by training and temperament who through force of will, theatrics – and a good dose of luck – led the country through domestic and external perils whose ramifications are still being felt today.Top 10 books about the Roman empire | Greg WoolfRead more9. Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama (1995)Of Obama’s autobiographical writings, this one provides the best understanding of his origins and burgeoning sense of self. His early and more frank ruminations on race are present here, and the book is not encumbered by the exigencies of political campaigning. At once a memoir, travelogue and deeply introspec­tive meditation, it is a fluent self-study of his efforts to reconcile himself with his eclectic lineage and to discover his place and pur­pose in the world.10. Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin (2010)The essential volume on the 2008 presidential primaries and general election. Heilemann and Halperin had generous access to many of the historical players – including Barack Obama, John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin – and their staffs. It is a fast-paced, even breathless read, and anyone who paid even casual attention at the time to the historic events chronicled here will recognise its richly drawn characters, plotlines and twists of fate.
      The Black President: Hope and Fury in the Age of Obama by Claude A Clegg III is published by Johns Hopkins University Press. To help the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from the Guardian bookshop. Delivery charges may apply.
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      The Next Civil War and How Civil Wars Start reviews – US nightmare scenarios

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      The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche; How Civil Wars Start by Barbara F Walter – review How far will America’s disintegration into irreconcilable factions go? Two authors gaze into the near future of a failed state, at times enjoying their doomsday prophecies a little too muchZonked on patriotic zeal, Americans believe that their country is an exception to all historical rules. The land of the free, however, is currently hurtling towards a predetermined, apparently unavoidable crack-up. Its governmental institutions are paralysed, and a constitution devised for an agrarian society in the 18th century obstructs reform; its citizens, outnumbered by the guns they tote, have split into armed, antagonistic tribes. Given these conditions, the riot at the Capitol last January may have been the rehearsal for an imminent civil war.Looking down at this hot mess from chilly Toronto, the Canadian novelist and essayist Stephen Marche grimly predicts: “The United States is coming to an end.” Such a declaration could only be made by an outsider. To Americans, the idea of civil war remains unthinkable, the words unspeakable: at his inauguration Biden vowed to end “this uncivil war”, which implied that the only missiles being exchanged were harmlessly verbal. As Marche sees it, the impending war will be a continuation of the earlier one between Union and Confederacy, which broke off in 1865 without closing the gap between races, regions and economic prospects. To these human-made iniquities Marche adds the intemperance of nature: New York is likely to be inundated by a forthcoming hurricane, and Californian forests are already burning. In 1776 the founding fathers envisaged an egalitarian renewal of humanity. Now the decline of the US warns that the anthropocene era may be doomed. Marche, doubting that the walls erected by Fortress America can keep out refugees, the poor and the rising oceans, suspects that this is “how a species goes extinct”.The Next Civil War is fatalistic yet somehow elated as Marche vividly imagines the “incredibly intense events” that lie ahead. He has done the required historical research and conducted interviews with officials and academic experts, but he can’t resist elaborating scenarios for conflagration and collapse which he offers as examples of “the genre of future civil war fantasy”. One of these, narrated with sour amusement, concerns an explosive dispute in a western state where local protesters, riled up by a wily, cynical sheriff, do battle with federal bureaucrats who have closed down an unsafe bridge. Another, which resembles the plot of the disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, follows an evacuee from flooded Brooklyn who pauses to reflect that a sunken highway looks “almost beautiful”. A third “thought experiment” tracks a nerdy loner who guns down the US president in a Jamba Juice outlet, after which a commentator solemnly describes the motive of misfits like this as a “desire for transcendence”.As Marche says, “the power of spectacle is driving American politics”, and his “cultural scripts” turn terror into lurid entertainment. He takes his cue from movies such as Independence Day or Olympus Has Fallen, which stage the apocalypse as an adventure ride; the difference is that this time no superhero flies or rides in to rescue the republic. Marche awards “iconic status” to the atrocities of 9/11 but mocks the agitators in his own fable about the bridge as “ludicrous fanatics” who seem to be dressed for Halloween or a rock festival: is he daring them to do better? There is a tempting, titillating danger to this, because sooner or later such prophecies will be fulfilled in action. Marche may be enjoying his novelistic nightmares a little too much, possibly even smirking from the safety of Canada as the US dismembers itself.The next US civil war is already here – we just refuse to see itRead moreA similarly excited anticipation of the end briefly disrupts Barbara Walter’s study, How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them. Walter teaches political science in San Diego, and she writes with dutiful academic sobriety as she compares her disintegrating country to failing states in the Balkans and the Middle East. She studies graphs, fiddles with data sets and deploys nonsensical jargon, classifying the US as an “anocracy” because it is midway between democracy and autocracy. But her droning lecture flares into life when she, like Marche, sets herself to imagine what an American civil war would look like. Projected ahead to 2028, the result resembles a hyped-up Hollywood pitch, with the synchronised detonation of dirty bombs in state legislatures, a botched presidential assassination bid, freelance militias patrolling the streets, and – worst of all! – assaults on big-box stores. Like Marche, Walter is aware that political warriors need the support of a “mythic narrative”, and she notices that some of the insurrectionists at the Capitol carried Bibles: in the absence of a sacred text, will the garbled synopsis of a disaster movie do just as well? After these dramatic flurries, Walter calms down as she suggests ways of averting conflict. Most of her proposals require constitutional change, which she must know will never happen or will come too late; she also recommends reintroducing the study of civics in American schools, as if those pious courses in communal engagement could be an antidote to civil war.Walter admits that following the last election, when Trump refused to concede defeat, she and her husband considered emigrating. They flicked through their flotilla of available passports – Swiss, German and Hungarian as well as American and Canadian – and decided on driving north to cross the border into British Columbia. Ultimately they chose to remain in California, as Walter announces after ritually reciting the national creed and thanking the US for “the gift to pursue our dreams”. Marche concludes his book with a more guarded tribute to the perhaps naive American “faith in human nature” and the constitution’s risky “openness to difference”. He then explains why he is glad to live in Toronto: Canadians, he says, “talk placidly and exchange endless nothings” rather than bragging, ranting and abusing each other like their southern neighbours, and they only have the weather’s “cold snaps” to contend with, not incendiary social convulsions. In times such as ours, to be snugly domiciled in a boring country is surely the best bet. The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future by Stephen Marche is published by Simon & Schuster (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may applyTopicsPolitics booksObserver book of the weekUS politicsThe far rightreviewsReuse this content More

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      Chasing History review: Carl Bernstein’s pre-Watergate world

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      Chasing History review: Carl Bernstein’s pre-Watergate worldBefore he helped bring down Richard Nixon, the reporter grew up in a school of hard knocks. His memoir is a treasure Few reporters are synonymous with their craft. Bob Woodward of the Washington Post is one, his former partner, Carl Bernstein, another. Together, they broke open the Watergate scandal, helped send a president’s minions to prison and made Richard Nixon the only man to resign the office. On the big screen, Robert Redford played Woodward. Bernstein got Dustin Hoffman.These days, Bernstein is a CNN analyst and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Chasing History, his sixth book, is a warm and inviting read.Now 77, he writes with the benefit of hindsight and the luxury of self-imposed deadlines. His prose is dry and reflective even as it draws in the reader. This is his look back and valedictory, with a fitting subtitle: “A Kid in the Newsroom.”He describes life before the Post, in pages marked with politics – and haberdashery.“I needed a suit.” So the book begins. Shortly thereafter: “My mother and father, in the early 1950s, had taken me with them to join the sit-ins at Woodward & Lothrop to desegregate its tea room.”“Woodies”, a department store, closed in 1995. In the 50s, rather than testify before the House Un-American Affairs Committee, Bernstein’s mother invoked her right against self-incrimination. His father suffered for past membership in the Communist party. The FBI of J Edgar Hoover was an unwelcome presence in the Bernsteins’ lives.Still in high school, Bernstein worked as a part-time copy boy for the Washington Star. “Now that I’d covered the inauguration of JFK, Mr Adelman’s chemistry class interested me even less,” he confesses.He barely scraped out of high school, flunked out of the University of Maryland and lost his deferment from the Vietnam draft. He found a spot in a national guard unit, removing the possibility of deployment and combat. Chasing History also includes a copy of Bernstein’s college transcript, which advertises a sea of Fs and the capitalized notation: “ACADEMICALLY DISMISSED 1-27-65.”On the other hand, before he was old enough to vote, Bernstein had covered or reported more than most journalists do in a lifetime. The 1960 presidential election, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Kennedy assassination, desegregation and Martin Luther King’s March on Washington. All were part of his remit.The integration of DC’s barber shops, a race-fueled brawl at a high school football game, the death of a newspaper vendor. In a nation in upheaval, all captured Bernstein’s attention.He is one of the last of his breed, a national reporter without a degree. Chasing History reminds us that by the mid-1960s, newsrooms were no longer dominated by working-class inflections. Carbon paper, hot lead typesetting, ink-stained fingers and smocks would also give way, to computers and digitization.The Ivy League emerged as a training ground of choice. Television would outpace print. Rough edges would be smoothed and polished, a premium placed on facts. Hard-knocks, not so much.“A big generational change was occurring in the journalism trade,” Bernstein writes. “Editors wanted college graduates now. My view was that you might be better prepared by graduating from horticultural school than from Yale or Princeton.”The kicker: “At least that way you could write the gardening column.”Emphasis on the word “might”, though. Woodward went to Yale. To this day, they count each other as friends.Chasing History is more about gratitude than grievance. For 10 pages, Bernstein recalls the names of his “young friends”, their “remarkable paths”, his intersection with those who would emerge as “historical footnotes” and his “teachers and mentors”.Lance Morrow, formerly of Time and the Wall Street Journal, makes it on to the dedication page. They were housemates and worked at the Star. Later, their careers flourished. Morrow, according to Bernstein, “occupies a unique place in the journalism of our time” and has been an “incomparable joy” in the author’s life.Likewise, Ben Stein – and his appearance as an economics teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, in 1986 – earns more than a passing shoutout. The fact Stein and his father served in the Nixon administration did not dent Bernstein’s fondness. They grew up nextdoor to each other in the DC suburbs. In junior high, the boys founded a “lox-and-bagel/Sunday New York Times delivery service”. The two see each other yearly.Bernstein also pays his respects to David Broder, the late dean of the political press corps. On 23 November 1962, as a copy boy, Bernstein took dictation from Broder, who was in Dallas that fateful Friday afternoon. Years later, Broder provided a useful tip that helped shape the path and coverage of “Woodstein’s” Watergate reporting.One mentor of particular note was George Porter, a Star bureau chief to whom Bernstein refers respectfully as Mr Porter and who regularly gave Bernstein a ride to the office. During the Democratic primaries in 1964, Porter dispatched Bernstein to cover George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor. Wallace never had a chance but his candidacy was newsworthy. Think Donald Trump, prototype.Why the US media ignored Murdoch’s brazen bid to hijack the presidency | Carl BernsteinRead moreLyndon Johnson, a Democrat, was in the White House but Wallace got nearly 30% in Indiana. When Wallace turned to Maryland, Bernstein was there on the ground.It was the first time he’d “seen a demagogue inflame the emotions of American citizens who I’d thought were familiar to me”.Wallace lost but netted 40% and a majority of white votes. In defeat, he blamed Black voters, except he chose a word that began with “N”, and an “incompetent press”, for failing to recognize his appeal. The church, labor unions, Ted Kennedy and “every other Democratic senator from the north” were also subjects of Wallace’s scorn.Chasing History is part-autobiography, part-history lesson. Amid continued turbulence, Bernstein’s memoirs are more than mere reminiscence.
      Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom is published in the US by Henry Holt & Company
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      Profusely Illustrated review: Edward Sorel and all the golden ages of New York magazines

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      Profusely Illustrated review: Edward Sorel and all the golden ages of New York magazines A memoir by a man who has drawn caricatures for the greatest editors is a treasure trove of the American mid-century modernAt 92, Edward Sorel is the grand old man of New York magazines. For 60 years, his blistering caricatures have lit up the pages of Harper’s, the Atlantic, Esquire, Time, Rolling Stone and the Nation. He is especially revered for his work in Clay Felker’s New York in the late 60s and for work in the New Yorker under Tina Brown and David Remnick.A life in cartoons: Edward SorelRead moreHe has also worked for slightly less august titles, like Penthouse, Screw and Ramparts.He is one of the foundational New Yorkers. Like Leonard Bernstein or E B White, Sorel absorbs the rhythms of the rambunctious city, using them to create an exaggerated, beguiling mirror of all he has experienced.A very abbreviated list of his memories includes the Great Depression, Hitler and Mussolini, the Red Scare, Joe McCarthy, Lee Harvey Oswald, both Bushes, Clinton, Obama and Trump.His memoir begins with a political frame. Like the unreconstructed lefty he is – he voted for Ralph Nader twice – he announces that he will show how the crimes of the previous 12 presidents made possible the catastrophe of Donald Trump.He gives the CIA and the military industrial complex all the shame they deserve for an unending parade of coups and wars – from Iran, Guatemala and Chile to Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. But he promises “these exposés will be brief”, so “it will only hurt for a few minutes”. On that he keeps his word.What gives Profusely Illustrated its charm and its power – besides 177 spectacular illustrations – are Sorel’s tales of New York, beginning with a childhood spent in a fifth-floor walk-up in the Bronx with a father he despised and a mother he adored.Sorel spares no one, especially his “stupid, insensitive, grouchy, mean-spirited, fault-finding, racist” father, who he dreamed of pushing in front of a subway train when he was only eight or nine.“When I grew older, I realized how wrong that would have been,” Sorel writes.“The motorman would have seen me.”The first riddle that tortured him was why his amazing mother married his revolting father. She explained that a few months after her arrival in New York from Romania, at 16, she started work in a factory that made women’s hats. When one of the hat blockers noticed on her first day that she hadn’t left for lunch, he loaned her the nickel she needed. Later, the same blocker told her he would kill himself if she didn’t marry him. So that was that.During a prolonged childhood illness that confined him to his bed, Ed started making drawings on cardboard that came back with shirts from a Chinese laundry. When he went back to school, the drawings were admired by his teacher at PS90, who told his mother young Ed had talent. She enrolled him in a Saturday art class at the other end of the city, the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and then another at the Little Red School House, at the bottom of Manhattan.At Little Red, thanks to the generosity of one Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, all the students were given a wooden box containing oil paints, brushes, turpentine and an enamel palette.It was Ed’s “to keep so I could paint at home” – and it changed his life.He gained admission to the highly competitive High School of Music and Art, and then to tuition-free art school at Cooper Union. But his teachers did nothing but delay his success: the fashion for abstraction was so intense, he wasn’t allowed to do the realistic work he loved.The Bronx boy who had been Eddie Schwartz was transformed after he discovered Julien Sorel, hero of Stendhal’s novel The Red and the Black. Julien was “a sensitive young peasant who hated his father, was appalled by the corruption of the clergy in 19th-century France, and was catnip to every woman he encountered”.Five years later, Eddie changed his name to Sorel.With Seymour Chast he founded Push Pin Studios, which after Milton Glaser joined, became the hottest design studio in New York. Sorel didn’t last long but when Glaser founded New York magazine with Felker a few years later, Sorel got the perfect outlet for his increasingly powerful caricatures.His book’s pleasures include interactions with all the most important magazine editors of the second half of the last century, including George Lois, art director of Esquire in its heyday under Harold Hayes.Gay Talese had written what would become a very famous profile, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold. The crooner had refused to pose for the cover, after Lois told him he wanted a close up with a cigarette in his mouth and a gaggle of sycophants eagerly trying to light it.Lois asked Sorel for an illustration. It was an assignment that would give him “more visibility than I had ever had before”. He panicked and his first effort was a failure. But with only one night left, his “adrenalin somehow made my hand turn out a terrific drawing of Frank Sinatra”. It launched Sorel’s career. The original now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.Gay Talese: ‘Most journalists are voyeurs. Of course they are’Read moreThe Village Voice, New York’s original counterculture newspaper, gave him a weekly spot. Sorel inked a memorable portrait of the New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal as a tank shooting a too-liberal columnist, Sydney Schanberg, after Schanberg was fired for attacking the news department from the op-ed page.Tina Brown chose Sorel to do her first New Yorker cover. When Woody Allen and Mia Farrow split up, Sorel imagined a Woody & Mia Analysts Convention.If you’re looking for a bird’s eye view of the glory days of magazine journalism, illustrated with drawings guaranteed to make you nostalgic for great battles of years gone by, Profusely Illustrated is perfect. When you’re done, you’ll be ready to rewatch Mad Men all over again.
      Profusely Illustrated is published in the US by Knopf
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      Republican school bill mocked for claim Frederick Douglass debated Lincoln

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      Republican school bill mocked for claim Frederick Douglass debated LincolnVirginia bill banning teaching of ‘divisive concepts’ confused black civil rights campaigner with white senator Stephen Douglas A Republican bill to ban the teaching of “divisive concepts” in schools in Virginia ran into ridicule when among historical events deemed suitable for study, it described a nonexistent debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.David Blight on Frederick Douglass: ‘I call him beautifully human’Read moreLincoln did engage in a series of historic debates hinged on the issue of slavery, in the Illinois Senate campaign of 1858. But he did so against Stephen Douglas, a senator who had ties to slavery – not against Frederick Douglass, the great campaigner for the abolition of slavery who was once enslaved himself.The Virginia bill was sponsored by Wren Williams, a freshman Republican sent to the state capital, Richmond, in a tumultuous November election.Identifying “divisive concepts” including racism and sexism, the bill demanded the teaching of “the fundamental moral, political and intellectual foundations of the American experiment in self-government”.In part, this was to be achieved with a focus on “founding documents” including “the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the Federalist Papers, including Essays 10 and 51, excerpts from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, the first debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, and the writings of the Founding Fathers of the United States”.The teaching of history has become a divisive concept in states across the US, as rightwing activists have spread alarm about the teaching of race issues. In November, the winning candidate for governor in Virginia, the Republican Glenn Youngkin, made it a wedge issue in his win over the Democrat, Terry McAuliffe.Youngkin successfully seized upon critical race theory, an academic discipline that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society – but which is not taught in Virginia schools.Why Frederick Douglass’s struggle for justice is relevant in the Trump era | Ibram X KendiRead moreNor, it turned out, will Williams’s bill be enforced in Virginia courts. As the Washington Post reported, “by Friday morning, Frederick Douglass was trending on Twitter, and the bill had been withdrawn”.Online, ridicule was swift. “New rule,” wrote Steve Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor. “If you don’t know the difference between Frederick Douglass and Stephen Douglas, you don’t get to tell anyone else what to teach.”Many were also happy to point out that Douglass has caused embarrassment for Republicans before. In 2017, Donald Trump at least gave the impression he thought the great campaigner was alive.“Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognised more and more, I notice,” the former president said.On Friday, Sidney Blumenthal, a Guardian contributor and Lincoln biographer, said: “Lincoln did not debate Frederick Douglass. Historians may search for the video, but they will not find it.”Blumenthal also pointed out that Lincoln and Douglass did meet three times when Lincoln was president, from 1861 to 1865 and through a civil war that ended with slavery abolished.How did Republicans turn critical race theory into a winning electoral issue?Read moreTheir conversations included a discussion about inequality in pay between Black and white soldiers, upon which Lincoln ultimately acted, and Confederate abuse of Black prisoners. There was also a famous meeting after Lincoln’s second inauguration, in 1865, when Lincoln greeted Douglas at the White House as a friend.Blumenthal also offered a way in which students in Virginia and elsewhere might use Douglass’s life and work to examine divisions today.Speaking a day after two centrist Democratic senators sank Joe Biden’s push for voting rights reform, Blumenthal said: “Frederick Douglass’s great cause became that of voting rights.“If there is any debate that is going on now, it is not between Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. It is between Frederick Douglass and all the Republican senators who refuse to support voting rights – and Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema too.”TopicsBooksFrederick DouglassAbraham LincolnAmerican civil warHistory booksVirginiaUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      in World Politics

      Amy Wax and the Breakdown of America’s Intellectual Culture

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      Since October 2017, we have featured The Daily Devil’s Dictionary that appeared five times a week. In 2022, it will appear on a weekly basis on Wednesdays. We will shortly be announcing a new collaborative feature that extends our approach to deconstructing the language of the media.

      Besides the Eiffel Tower and foie gras, France is known for having produced an intellectual class that, over the centuries, from Diderot’s Encylopédie to Derrida’s critical theory, has successfully exported its products to the rest of the world.

      France’s intellectual history demonstrates that alongside traditional social classes, a nation may cultivate something called the intellectual class, a loose network of people who collectively produce ideas about society that are no longer restricted to the traditional categories of philosophy, science and literature. Prominent intellectuals merge all three in their quest to interpret the complexity of the world and human history.

      Justice in the US Is an Art Form

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      French intellectuals are perceived as floating freely in the media landscape. American intellectuals, in contrast, tend to be tethered to universities or think tanks. They publish and sometimes appear in the media, but with a serious disadvantage, having to compete in shaping public discourse with far more influential media personalities such as Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson or even Tucker Carlson.

      A stale historical cliché compares Europe with ancient Greece and the US with the Roman Empire. Rome and the US both produced a vibrant and distinct popular culture, with a taste for gaudy spectacle and superficial entertainment. But in Roman times, plebeian culture co-existed with a patrician culture cultivated by Rome’s ruling class. Modern democracy roundly rejects the very idea of a ruling class. Commercialism has turned out to be the great equalizer. Everyone in America is expected to share the same culture of movies, TV and popular music. The same applies to popular ideas, whether political, scientific or economic.

      Amy Wax is a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who is not shy about expressing her ideas, notably her updated version of class differences. She is convinced that what she calls “bourgeois culture” replaced Rome’s patrician culture in the US but is in danger of extinction. Wax believes everyone in the US, including recent immigrants, should share that culture. Anyone who resists should be excluded. She also thinks that race and ethnicity are reliable indicators of the capacity of immigrants to conform.

      As a young woman, Wax paced the halls and absorbed the wisdom spouted in lectures at Yale, Oxford, Harvard and Columbia University. Along the way, she amassed the kind of elite educational experience that identifies her as a distinguished exemplar of the modern intellectual class. With such impeccable credentials, it is fair to assume that she is not only well-informed but has learned the fine art of responsible thinking, a quality the media attributes to such luminaries.

      Embed from Getty Images

      So could it have come about that such a distinguished thinker and ranking member of the intellectual class should now be accused of sharing the kind of white supremacist attitude Hillary Clinton (Wellesley, Yale) famously attributed to the “basket of deplorables”? The intellectual class in the US uniformly and loudly rejects all forms of racism. If Wax expresses ideas that echo racist theses, it would indicate that she is betraying her own intellectual class. Appropriately, her university acknowledged her betrayal when it condemned her “xenophobic and white supremacist” discourse.

      In a podcast in late December, Wax went beyond her previously expressed belief that the US would “be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.” On that earlier occasion, she specifically targeted blacks, whom she categorizes as intellectually inferior. This time, she took aim at Asians, whose reputation for academic excellence and scientific achievement most people admire. She justified her attack in these terms: “As long as most Asians support Democrats and help to advance their positions, I think the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration.”

      When the host of the podcast, Professor Glenn Loury, questioned her logic, she evoked “the danger of the dominance of an Asian elite in this country” who may “change the culture.” Wax’s fear of domination by a foreign race and her defense of white civilization could hardly convince Loury, who is black. Loury countered that the Asians Wax wants to exclude are “creating value” and “enlivening the society.”

      “How do we lose from that?” he asks. In response, Wax offered her own rhetorical question: “Does the spirit of liberty beat in their breast?”

      This week’s Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Spirit of liberty:

      America’s supreme civic virtue that consists of pursuing self-interested goals and conducting aggressive assaults against whatever one finds annoying

      Contextual Note

      Wax offered her own definition of the spirit of liberty, which she identified as the virtue associated with “people who are mistrustful of centralized concentrations of authority who have a kind of ‘don’t tread on me’ attitude, who are focused … on our freedoms, on our liberties, on sort of small- scale personal responsibility who are non-conformist in good ways.”

      Apart from the fact that Wax is attributing a cultural attitude to “Asians” (more than half of humanity), her idea of liberty reflects feelings associated with aggressive, nationalistic historical memes (for example, “don’t tread on me”) rather than the kind of political concept we might expect from a serious intellectual. In his 1859 essay “On Liberty,” John Stuart Mill defined it as the “protection against the tyranny of political rulers,” analyzing it in terms of the individual’s relationship with authority, not as a “spirit” or attitude. But Mill was English and, unlike Americans, the English are disinclined to celebrate attitude.

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      Wax, who is Jewish, paradoxically complained that Jews “have a lot to answer for … numerically through their predominance.” She derides their “susceptibility to the idealistic, pie-in-the-sky socialist ideas.” When Loury accuses her of appealing to a stereotype, she objects that there’s nothing wrong with stereotyping when it is used correctly.” Just as Wax approves of non-conformity “in good ways” she condones “correct” stereotyping. She believes herself to be the arbiter of what’s good and correct.

      Historical Note

      Wax shares with Fox News host Tucker Carlson a sense of legitimate domination of what she calls “the tradition of the legacy population,” identified as the traditional white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) majority. Wax aligns with cultural nationalists like Samuel Huntington, whose book “Who Are We: America’s Great Debate?” — following his famous “The Clash of Civilizations: And the Remaking of the World Order” — preached for the reaffirmation of the political and moral values transmitted by the WASP founders of American culture 400 years ago.

      The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs of Harvard University sums up the components of the Puritans’ culture: “the English language, Protestant values, individualism, religious commitment, and respect for law.” The culture’s admirers routinely forget that their respect for law might mean disrespecting the law of the indigenous populations of the land they chose to occupy. Enforcing that respect sometimes translated as genocidal campaigns conducted in the name of that law. It also embraced slavery based on racial criteria.

      Wax’s up-to-date WASP culture, which she prefers to call “bourgeois culture,” no longer requires genocide or slavery to prevail. Her defense of a largely imaginary legacy culture has nevertheless led her to embrace a racist view of humanity. While decrying the multicultural “wokism” that she believes now dominates academic culture, she appears to believe 19th-century France rather than the Yankee Revolution sets the standard to live up to.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Wax is right to lament the very real breakdown in America’s intellectual culture. The trendy woke moralizing so prevalent in American academia deserves the criticism she levels at it. Both her attitude and that of woke scholars derive from the same puritanical tradition that insists on imposing its understanding of morality on everyone else.

      Wax’s choice of “bourgeois culture” as the desirable alternative to wokism seems curious. Bourgeois culture is identified with the mores of a dominating urban upper-middle class that emerged in 19th century France that projected the image of a vulgar version of the aristocracy. It produced a culture specific to France, very different from the democratic culture of the United States at the time.

      This highlights another difference. Whereas the French intellectual class, even when indulging in its traditional disputes, tends to agree on the meaning of the terms it fabricates, American intellectuals routinely bandy about terms they never seek to define or understand and use them to punish their enemies. That is what Wax has done with bourgeois culture and, in so doing, she has declared multiple races and ethnicities her enemies. 

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary. After four years of daily appearances, Fair Observer’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary moves to a weekly format.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Five great reads: smart supermarkets, Biden’s first year and a gaming empire built by children

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      Five great reads: smart supermarkets, Biden’s first year and a gaming empire built by childrenGuardian Australia’s daily round-up of compelling reads as selected by lifestyle editor Alyx Gorman Grab a piece of fruit and a beverage of your preference and settle in for Five Great Reads: your morning tea wrap of great writing, curiosity and usefulness, lovingly selected by me – Alyx Gorman, Guardian Australia’s lifestyle editor (cold brew and blueberries, in case you’re wondering).If you’d rather be reading the news as it unfolds, hop over to our live blog; and if you just want a quick hit of something other than Covid, read about this badger that discovered a trove of 209 Roman coins in Spain.If you’re reading this on our website and fancy getting it in your inbox instead, you can sign up to receive Five Great Reads as an email by popping your address in the box above. Go on, do it!Now, on to the rest of the reads.1. Big-name writers on Biden’s first yearFour leading American authors – SA Cosby, Richard Ford, Margo Jefferson and Joyce Carol Oates – share their thoughts on Biden’s leadership through 12 months of political polarisation and the pandemic.Notable quote: “The other day, someone was talking about the DW Winnicott idea of the good enough mother,” writes Pulitzer-prize winning critic and author Margo Jefferson. “She’s not a saint, she has her own problems, but she’s good enough for the child to grow up reasonably well. With Joe Biden, it’s a case of the good enough president.”How long will it take me to read? About 10 minutes.2. The rise of the sentient supermarketWell, OK they’re not really sentient, but they’re smart. AI-powered shops in the UK, Scandinavia and the US could spell the end of the grocery store as we know it.The bit that’s good for you: You never have to queue again.The bit that’s good for the supermarket: These stores have no shoplifting (and very few staff).The bit that’s a Black Mirror episode: All this is achieved by thousands of cameras tracking shoppers’ every move, and sending the bill to their phone as they walk out.How long will it take me to read? About five minutes.3. A video game empire built on child labourRoblox – a platform which allows people to not only play games, but build and make money from them – is the most valuable video game company in the world. “It is an empire built on the sale of virtual boots and hats,” Simon Parkins writes. “And considering that almost half of its users are aged 13 or under, the creativity and labour of children.”Notable quote: “It began to have a negative effect on my mental health,” says Regan Green, who spent two years working as a developer on a Sonic the Hedgehog Roblox game. “I was constantly trying to find ways to improve the project, but [the game’s creator] always wanted more out of me and I became incredibly burned out.”Yeah, but everyone is burning out at the moment. Did I mention that he was working on the game between the ages of 12 and 14?Oh. Then: “The pressure caused me to break.”4. Hanya Yanagihara on her new novel and America’s brattinessThe A Little Life author’s new book To Paradise – a work of alternative history that spans three centuries – has already been called “as good as War and Peace” (by fellow author Edmund White). Here Yanagihara talks about the book and the American ideals it explores and critiques.Yanagihara on writing very big books, while holding down a very fancy job (as editor of T Magazine): “I’m not the smartest or hardest-working or most educated person, but I am the best at time management.”I guess I need to get better at time management then. Same.So how long will it take me to read this? Five well-managed minutes.5. Exercising with a heart conditionThe latest in our How to Move series tackles fitness with a difficult ticker.Notable quote: “The importance of exercise is to increase the efficiency of the muscles to de-load the heart,” says exercise physiologist Bridget Nash. “A strong muscle is an efficient muscle.”TopicsAustralia newsFive Great ReadsUS politicsGamesfeaturesReuse this content More