NIMBYs, Ghosts, and Beauty

I’ll be logging off the interwebs for the next few weeks. I plan to resume these Water Dippers when I return in mid-July.

“Lookin’ Out Your Backdoor.” Bill Kauffman defends NIMBYs: “Say the powers-that-be determine to site something truly noxious—a radioactive waste dump, a halfway house for child molesters, a data center—in your neighborhood. (These almost inevitably will be government projects or enabled by corporate welfare and subsidies to developers.) You protest. Instead of meeting your sincere remonstrations with arguments, you will be sneeringly called a NIMBY—a Not in My Backyard obstructionist. This epithet can be disorienting. Not in My Backyard? Well, yeah—not in my backyard. What’s wrong with caring about my backyard?”

“Ghosts in the Field.” Brian Miller cuts hay in the same field he’s been mowing for twenty-six years: “To cut this field is to relive all the broken rakes, belts and chains come loose on the balers, exploding disc mowers, bearings melted into misshapen blobs, sickle bars broken, rivets replaced in the field—so many hay cuttings abandoned to aging and aged equipment failures. And to remember all those honest, caring, reliable neighbors.”

“The EdTech Backlash Is Here, and It’s Just Getting Started.” Nora De La Cour talks with educators in Los Angeles about the problems with screens in classrooms: “I-Ready has lately come under fire for a long list of problems, including a lack of evidence that it works and a federal lawsuit claiming that its private equity–backed parent company bypassed consent to harvest and transmit students’ personal data. But for Sunny, the main problem was a mind-numbing boredom. Paper-and-pencil test prep can feel boring, too, but there students can quickly check the right answer and move on. I-Ready, however, blocks users from clicking on anything until they sit through the slow audio question and accompanying animation — baking in the assumption, as one parent noted, that kids can’t read.” (Recommended by Dominic Garzonio.)

“My Club.” Amy Sohn describes what happened when BDS and antisemitism came to a food coop in New York: “Founded in 1973, the 17,000-member Park Slope Food Coop requires all members to work a two-hour, 45-minute shift every six weeks, in return for a 30-40 percent savings on groceries, as compared to retail. It has more than $60 million in annual sales, and over 75 employees. Unlike the situation at other co-ops, you can’t buy your way out of a shift, and only members can shop. . . . We have a high quotient of crazy, but for 53 years, for the most part, our members have lived and let live. Until recently.” (For a painful yet beautiful glimpse of some people working for genuine peace between Israelis and Palestinians, see Chris Zimmerman’s report on Parents Circle – Families Forum.)

“Belfast after the ‘Beheading’: Old Hatreds Gave Way to New Grievances.” Aris Roussinos talks with residents of Belfast about the recent anti-immigration riots that have turned Catholics and Protestants, Nationalists and Loyalists, toward a common enemy: “there was something novel and unexpected about the occasion: the working-class communities of both sides, accustomed to hating each other, and increasingly estranged from their political leaders in Stormont, for the first time eyeing each other up, from a distance, like awkward teenagers at a disco. Northern Ireland is an extremely dysfunctional country, though very charming and livable for it: it is entirely unique for both communities to find common cause in blaming Westminster for introducing an unexpected source of random, violent dysfunction to unsettle their old and comforting, formalized one.”

“Why America is Still Immune to the Soccer Virus.” Bill Kauffman gives Americans permission to ignore the World Cup: “Teams of savages have kicked balls (or enemies’ skulls) toward goals since time began, but the English codified soccer in the mid-nineteenth century. The game then was spread throughout the world by British tradesmen, soldiers, and missionaries. In India, Egypt, South Africa, and elsewhere, soccer was taken up by local elites eager to mimic the Brits. Indigenous games fell before the sinister black-and-white ball. Soccer, as sports historian Bill Murray writes, was the British Empire’s ‘most enduring export.’ The fabled ‘sport of the dispossessed,’ as proto-wokesters dubbed it for its popularity in the Third World, is in fact a legacy of British imperialism.”

“Revolutionary History.” The great American historian Gordon Wood passed away this week. To get a sense of the import of his scholarship, you might read this sweeping consideration of his work by Scott Spillman: “By what means had the people of thirteen separate colonies come together ‘in the same principles in theory and the same system of action’? Adams considered those questions ‘surely interesting to humanity to investigate, and perpetuate to posterity,’ and he hoped that young men around the country would begin to collect sources and write histories to answer them. Since then, plenty have followed that path, but perhaps none has investigated the nature of the revolutionary change in American thought and its consequences as thoroughly as the historian Gordon Wood.”

“Beauty: A Needed Balm for Our Nation.” Elizabeth Stice makes the case for public art: “Today, as our national confidence slides and our culture seems fragmented, there is a case to be made for public murals and sculptures. A renewed emphasis on public art, featuring the “American scene,” could do a great deal of good. Beautiful images of our country, and not just the landscape, could inspire some national pride and even national renewal. The strength of that work would come from beauty itself, not didacticism.”

“The Death of the Summer Job.” Larissa Phillips sings the praises of working teens: “It wasn’t just about the money, though. Whether you scooped ice cream, took tickets at the movie theater, or worked in a mall, those first jobs were the first steps toward adulthood. You felt cool, and skillful—operating the machinery or making the popcorn—especially if your friends happened to come by and see you. Plus, you belonged; you were needed by this place that was so much bigger than you. But the golden era of teen jobs, which peaked in the 1970s, may be coming to an end. Last year, teen jobs were the lowest ever recorded in nearly 80 years of Bureau of Labor Statistics data, and last week Forbes reported that this is the worst summer job market for almost 80 years.”