This photo collection is a pretty astonishing look at the implications of poverty and environmental degradation all over the world. It’s certainly not cheerful weekend viewing, but something worth taking a look at.
In effect, such declarations helped lay the cultural groundwork for the New Deal, providing the ideological infrastructure for the new governmental institutions created during the ’30s. It is not yet clear whether the current economic disaster will produce anything like the profound transformation that shook the U.S. during the Great Depression. Our own crises of belief are likely just beginning. If we are fortunate, however, we will have a generation of artists and intellectuals like those of the 1930s to help us imagine our way past confusion.
He attributes those complaints to his students’ sense of entitlement.
“I tell my classes that if they just do what they are supposed todo and meet the standard requirements, that they will earn a C,” hesaid. “That is the default grade. They see the default grade as an A.”
Mark Edmunson, in the New York Times:
…In what’s called the civilized world, the
great enemy of knowledge isn’t ignorance, though ignorance will do in a
pinch. The great enemy of knowledge is knowingness. It’s the feeling
encouraged by TV and movies and the Internet that you’re on top of
things and in charge. You’re hip and always know what’s up. Cool — James Dean-style
cool — was once the sign of the rebel. But the tables have turned:
conformity and cool have merged. The cool character now is the knowing
one; even when he’s unconventional, he’s never surprising — and most of
all, he’s never surprised. Good teachers, by contrast, are constantly
fighting against knowingness by asking questions, creating
difficulties, raising perplexities.
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.” –Stephen Dunn