"The problem with a rights-based liberalism is precisely that it is not and never can be the end of history, that it is never secure or stable, that every liberty claimed through toil and protest, no matter how acclaimed and cherished and generative, is one day away from the firing line when some powerful interest decides that some right or practice is inconvenient.

"It doesn’t even matter if the end of a right, a freedom, a possibility will ultimately hurt that powerful interest. The contemporary businesses who have registered a powerful stake in exceptionally restrictive monopolies over intellectual property have themselves been enormous beneficiaries of a conception of the public domain as a fundamental and irreversible right of a free society. No matter: they would now see it ended. Better to kill the future than live in a present where you can only have two Ferraris in the driveway."

"Literature professors often encounter and complain about the student who arrives in their classes with a professed ‘love of literature’. We sometimes come to see our job as grimly breaking those blithe spirits on the wheel of the hard labor of criticism and dismissing them from our company when they refuse to come into the quarry and break stone." (Why do I like that sentence? The metaphors are horribly mixed.)

"Equally to the point, a lot of what Gabler describes as Big Ideas turn out to have been actively wrong or at least misleading in the wrong hands, and one of the reasons is not the insights and findings of their initial creators but the seductive refashionings of later popularizers. The process that made Big Ideas into two or three-sentence applause lines that can be rattled off in succession in an op-ed in the New York Times is often what allowed them to turn into ideology and dogma.
If the informationally overloaded present is resistant to Big Ideas, maybe that’s not because we’re too busy watching YouTube videos of Jennifer Aniston playing with a cat. Maybe it’s because we’re acquiring an immune system resistance to the salesmanship of middlebrow middlemen trying to extract saleable Big Ideas from the raw material of knowledge production."  (That last seems more like a hope to me than a real observation.)

"There is a reason that critics did stop making “is this great?” the first and last question of literary analysis (Edmundson is not wrong to say that this problem has been sidelined in cultural criticism, and this does indeed raise problems, as the concept of good and bad work is indispensible). The reason is that it’s a really hard philosophical problem that was made to seem easier through slight-of-hand when the answer was conflated with the preferences and tastes of a fairly narrow social class that held itself aloof from a wider public... I’d welcome an investigation of what makes some cultural works great and others ordinary or bad that was consciously intended to provide a critical toolkit to other readers and critics. ... Not a canon, but the foundation for making a canon...." - A canon foundry, as it were.

"digital media [have enabled] the massification of self-performance, of crafting a self through the publication of text and image. ... [Not] a brave new world of spectacularly predatory frauds and newly vulnerable victims ... everyman a Lord Byron or George Eliot, if he or she wants to be. The crafting of gentler fictions of selfhood, performative shadings and experiments of our everyday personalities, through disseminated publication, is now a widely distributed possibility.
... practice which was previously restricted to a small cultural elite. ... If everyone can make a literary self ... then crafting a memorably exaggerated literary self like Norman Mailer or Mark Twain or Jonathan Franzen is not in itself anything remarkable. If millions are doing it, most ... will be banal, confused or generic, but there will be enough [who do it well] to demonstrate that past literary lives were less ,,, extraordinary in their inventions than their celebrants have so often proclaimed."

"what I worry about when I hear that there are too many “relativists” around: that the people complaining the most about that supposed surplus are the most supremely relativistic folks you might ever imagine encountering."

Not a group of tags I ever expected to have occasion to type.

Now, how _do_ I teach the 2nd part in 350?

The remarks about chain bookstores are astute. But I am not sure about the incentives to change. E.g., I don't think there's a hardware store other than Home Depot in a five mile radius of my house. If another one opened, the chain has the resources (by cross-subsidization) to temporarily price it out of the market...

Tim Burke on the NY Times pretending that its readers are clueless about popular culture. Good, as usual. But this bit bugs me: "Of course, there is always more to say about the content of expressive culture. Cowboy-and-indian or zombie, any theme or story or genre, has deeper roots, deeper meanings" --- why assume this? I won't toot my own horn, but I will refer, again, to S. Lieberson's brilliant book on fashions, especially fashions in names. The content of the zombie apocalypse mythology might be as irrelevant to its success as their sounds and associations have been to the rise of "Madison" and "Abigail".

"One of my private pleasures as a historian is reading old newspapers in sequence just to see pundits and prognosticators try to guess what is coming next. They almost invariably fail badly, often because they cannot imagine either just how terrible the near-future will become or how wonderful and strange some of the developments just around the corner are going to be."

LolPalin: "interactional expertise --- I hazn't it"

"If you had asked me in 1998 what I thought the consequences would be if the United States government was revealed in public to have officially sanctioned torture ... I would have said that this revelation would be an enormous scandal with catastrophic po

"Dear White Pennsylvanians..."

Loud and prolonged applause.

Pining for "kind of intellectual history recognizes that any contemporary idea has junk DNA in its genes, has unacknowledged ancestral branches full of bastards and incest, that its evolutionary line is a bush and not a spine"

Timothy Burke saves me from reading a book. Thank, Tim!

Henry Farrell on Brad DeLong on Timothy Burke on Dick Cheney, as viewed through John Padgett and Christopher Ansell on Cosimo de Medici.

"even when I have a notional openness to what he’s trying to say, the guy basically comes off like a used-car salesman"

" If we’re going to start doing this, let’s add special statutory provisions for what the President is empowered to do in case of attack by extraterrestrials, in the case that supervillains seize NORAD, or in the case that intelligent Nazi gorillas ar

Tim's post depresses me for the following reason: I entered academia as a student when arguing about political correctness was just starting, and we are still doing it almost 20 years later, and after reading him I have this glum sense that we will still