"Indian Americans own about half of all the motels in the United States. Even more remarkable, most of these motel owners come from the same region in India and—although they are not all related—seventy percent of them share the surname of Patel. Most of these motel owners arrived in the United States with few resources and, broadly speaking, they are self-employed, self-sufficient immigrants who have become successful—they live the American dream.
"However, framing this group as embodying the American dream has profound implications. It perpetuates the idea of American exceptionalism—that this nation creates opportunities for newcomers unattainable elsewhere—and also downplays the inequalities of race, gender, culture, and globalization immigrants continue to face. Despite their dominance in the motel industry, Indian American moteliers are concentrated in lower- and mid-budget markets. Life Behind the Lobby explains Indian Americans' simultaneous accomplishments and marginalization and takes a close look at their own role in sustaining that duality."

"A hand-written and illustrated translation by an American artist". To make this multiply bizarre, the visual style resembles nothing so much as a medieval Book of Hours, only with scenes of contemporary American life. It seems really strange, though the pictures attached to the article aren't much on which to evaluate it.

How we seem to our friends from afar: "If we’re talking outside the space launch field, then, hell, America innovates every day, in a myriad of fields. The field of metamaterials, for instance — invisibility cloaks, and hiding events from time itself? That’s just today, as I talk to you, and that’s all American. I realize there’s a narrative that America is all done, and doesn’t make stuff any more, and it’s midnight for the American experiment and all that, but that ignores the basic mathematics of a country with three hundred million people in it. For every bunch of dubiously photogenic fetal-alcohol-syndrome cases from New Jersey who get on the TV for ten minutes, there are ten times as many people at MIT inventing the future."

"The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you was suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God's hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell."

"We know that it was Henry James and no one else who killed Daisy Miller. James did not kill Daisy because he shared society’s view that her behavior was scandalous and intolerable, or Winterbourne’s milder version of that same judgment; these judgments were not his, but part of the story he told. It may be that he felt that he had to kill Daisy to protect himself (and his book) against Daisy’s fate. As it was, the book outraged many, and if Daisy had blithely returned to Schenectady and New York to wreak havoc there, the outrage would have been much more intense. Furthermore, if Daisy had returned to the United States without anything really big happening – for example, if she had returned married to Winterbourne* — it would have been anticlimactic. The demands of the story meant that Daisy had to die or something, and death was the only storyteller’s ending that would not have made James’ book too shocking to publish.

* Astonishingly to me, in 1883 James did write a dramatized version with a happy Daisy-marries-Winterbourne ending. The young author was apparently still finding his way."

--- Surely there must be fanfic where Daisy _does_ return to Schenectady to wreak havoc? Perhaps a historical mystery series?

"If you were looking for a philosopher likely to appeal to Americans, Friedrich Nietzsche would be far from your first choice. After all, in his blazing career, Nietzsche took aim at nearly all the foundations of modern American life: Christian morality, the Enlightenment faith in reason, and the idea of human equality. Despite that, for more than a century Nietzsche has been a hugely popular—and surprisingly influential—figure in American thought and culture.

In American Nietzsche, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen delves deeply into Nietzsche's philosophy, and America’s reception of it, to tell the story of his curious appeal. Beginning her account with Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom the seventeen-year-old Nietzsche read fervently, she shows how Nietzsche’s ideas first burst on American shores at the turn of the twentieth century, and how they continued alternately to invigorate and to shock Americans for the century to come. She also delineates the broader intellectual and cultural contexts within which a wide array of commentators—academic and armchair philosophers, theologians and atheists, romantic poets and hard-nosed empiricists, and political ideologues and apostates from the Left and the Right—drew insight and inspiration from Nietzsche’s claims for the death of God, his challenge to universal truth, and his insistence on the interpretive nature of all human thought and beliefs. At the same time, she explores how his image as an iconoclastic immoralist was put to work in American popular culture, making Nietzsche an unlikely posthumous celebrity capable of inspiring both teenagers and scholars alike."

Later: There's a good (and quite positive) review in The Nation, http://www.thenation.com/article/164321/american-idol-nietzsche-america

"We start with a group of people living as slaves for 250 years... We take what should be their wages ... forbid them from marrying ... sell off their kids, some of whom are actually our kids. We forbid them to learn to read. ... We then are forced to grant them freedom, but we pass more laws ... to keep them from exercising any sort of political power ... Wide-ranging campaign of home-grown terror ... We burn down their schools ... so ardent in our enmity toward them that we actually attack education for poor whites, for fear that it may help blacks by mistake... Policies at virtually every level of government... [to keep] down the values of their homes, [keep] them from competing with us for jobs ... We do this for ... 300 hundred years. And then we develop a conscience, and for about 30 years we try to make up for what we've done, before deciding that [is] reverse racism. And then we [wonder] why ... a disproportionate share of black people can't live in a nice neighborhood."

"Today, while the U.S. enjoys tremendous military and economic power, citizens are increasingly insulated from everyday decision-making. [But] America ... began as a settler society grounded in an ideal of freedom as the exercise of continuous self-rule—one that joined direct political participation with economic independence. However, this vision of freedom was politically bound to the subordination of marginalized groups, especially slaves, Native Americans, and women.  ... [A]t crucial moments, social movements sought to imagine freedom without either subordination or empire. By the mid-twentieth century, these efforts failed, resulting in the rise of hierarchical state and corporate institutions... presented national and economic security as society’s guiding commitments and nurtured a continual extension of America’s global reach. Rana envisions a democratic society that revives settler ideals, [but with] meaningful inclusion for those currently at the margins of American life."

The thing is, despite my "modest proposals" tag, the numbers make sense. You'd have to bet against the program working at (back of the envelope) more than 10:1, and think it would deliver _no_ benefits if it didn't completely cure diabetes...

Cute, but I still think Washington should be on the $1.

"The explanation: “Soccer would be popular in the U.S., but it can’t be televised profitably because there are no natural breaks for advertisements.”

The attraction: It cleverly posits that the simple sport is being kept down by evil American capitalism and the pursuit of the Almighty Dollar.
... the plausibility of this explanation requires belief in the proposition “Americans can’t figure out how to make money from something.” Think about this. Let it simmer. We are the land of the Free and the Home of Billy the Big-Mouthed Bass. Someone is making millions on the goddamn Lolcats. I’m sure we could figure out how to make money from televising soccer were there the interest in doing so."

Loud and prolonged applause. (I don't expect this to make any sense to friends from abroad.)

"There have been lies; yes, but they were told in a good cause. We have been treacherous; but that was only in order that real good might come out of apparent evil. True, we have crushed a deceived and confiding people; we have turned against the weak and the friendless who trusted us; we have stamped out a just and intelligent and well-ordered republic; we have stabbed an ally in the back and slapped the face of a guest; we have bought a Shadow from an enemy that hadn't it to sell; we have robbed a trusting friend of his land and his liberty; we have invited our clean young men to shoulder a discredited musket and do bandit's work under a flag which bandits have been accustomed to fear, not to follow; we have debauched America's honor and blackened her face before the world; but each detail was for the best."

A marvelously-written little post. The final sentence is worthy of Mencken: "This is who they are--the proud and ignorant. If you believe that if we still had segregation we wouldn't "have had all these problems," this is the movement for you. If you believe that your president is a Muslim sleeper agent, this is the movement for you. If you honor a flag raised explicitly to destroy this country then this is the movement for you. If you flirt with secession, even now, then this movement is for you. If you are a "Real American" with no demonstrable interest in "Real America" then, by God, this movement of alchemists and creationists, of anti-science and hair tonic, is for you."

"Special guest post by the intellectual leader of the Republican Party"!

Genius.

How can this appear in the Washington Post? (But I'm glad it did.)

New Deal building projects. (Yay, Cathedral of Learning!)

Yglesias has seen Finland, and it works. Meanwhile, "we’re trapped in a frustrating circle of passive acceptance of the idea that we just have to live in a country where public services are ill-funded and poorly delivered. And it’s not just that conservatives block reforms — progressives have let their horizons slip incredibly low. A country that once built transcontinental railroads and sent people to the moon has decided that for some reason it’d just be impossible to solve our current social problems." Perhaps one might say our problem is, to coin a phrase, being beholden to "hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit"?

Is this really what we look like, there?

Wonderful essay by a Canadian historian on the deep strand of Americanism which recasts radical reform as simply trying to do what was implicit at the beginning: " And so on and so on down through history, with every kind of American reformer looking backward to move forward, couching their goals as nothing more radical than America’s alleged founding ideals.... Canadians are not against life or liberty or happiness, in moderation. But we don’t hear the music, by and large. We see windmills where Americans see dragons and damsels in distress. And because we do, we don’t have that engine driving us onward, those whirring pistons of the gap between the real and ideal."

Map of the continental US showing _only_ streets and roads.

"a story of collective action in the name of justice, of triumph over obstacles, of right making might. A history of liberalism."

Abbas Raza's misadventures with the law in New York.

With reflections on witchcraft and conspiracist thinking.

Bush calls a program to fund Portuguese-language training "wasteful", draws wrath of organizations representing American Lusophones.

Using Khalilzad to illustrate Americans _learning_ the word/concept "inshallah" is crazy: he grew up in Afghanistan and Afghans use it all the time. But that he could use it and expect to be understood is different...