Ok. I've figured out a way to run around the Chicago Reader's charge-for-articles policy (see below). I'm not proud of it, and I'm only going to do it this once to bring you Rosenbaum's awesome review of Rushmore. I think this is the first essay of his I ever read; after reading it, I had a profoundly altered sense of what film criticism can do. Read it here.

Treating quirky adolescents with affection was already central in Bottle Rocket, Anderson and Wilson's only previous feature (in which Wilson played one of the leading parts), but for all that movie's style and grace, it bears the same relationship to Rushmore that a watercolor bears to an oil painting. This movie goes further by creating something more than a milieu and a circle of friends, widening its span to encompass a little world to contain them. It also dissolves the usual distances between characters of various ages (including not only Dirk and Magnus in relation to Max, but also Herman and to some extent Rosemary), creating a utopian democracy of concerns that purposefully rejects the automatic and often unconvincing generational solidarity that underlies most movies about teenagers.

posted by neel master at 12:30 PM

I suppose this smear of Jonathan Rosenbaum from Variety functions, paradoxically, to bolster his credibility. Rosenbaum is author of several brilliant books on film; his latest, Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit What Films We Can See (read the first chapter here) no less stunning. The guy has a critical acumen that makes my mouth water; his essays on films like Rushmore and Ghost Dog really blew my mind with their depth and knowledge (the Reader has unfortunately begun charging $2 a pop for archived articles, so I won't bother linking to these reviews.) In Movie Wars, he mounts a critique of a complex of practices that narrow the view of the filmgoing public.

The whole notion of expertise in film criticism is tautological. According to current practice in the United States, a "film expert" is someone who writes or broadcasts about film. Yet most film experts are hired not on the basis of their knowledge about film but on the basis of their capacity to reflect the presumed existing tastes of the public. The late Serge Daney understood this phenomenon perfectly -- and implied that it wasn't an exclusively American one -- when he remarked that the media "ask those who know nothing to represent the ignorance of the public and, in so doing, to legitimize it."

[...] The first contemporary film critic I ever read regularly with admiration was Dwight Macdonald, who wrote a monthly column for Esquire between 1960 and 1966 . . . I was as enthusiastic about his polemical prose style as I was about his taste and critical perceptions . . . Yet by the time he compiled his film pieces in the late 60s, in a collection called On Movies, my feelings about his work had changed. [. . . I] had a growing suspicion that Macdonald's grasp of film history was limited and in some ways superficial. This was eventually brought home to me by the juxtaposition of two statements in On Movies. The first is: "I know something about cinema after forty years, and being a congenital critic, I know what I like and why." The second occurs 17 pages later, in a passing remark on a letter James Agee sent him in 1927: "`Why was movie jargon puzzling?' [Agee] begins and proceeds to explain the `lap dissolve' (which I must confess it's taken me forty years to realize doesn't refer to holding the camera in the lap but to overlapping; should have read his letter more carefully)." It's characteristically refreshing of Macdonald to cheerfully concede his ignorance about a technical term, but his candor is also highly revealing, exposing how little is expected of film critics and how little many of them expect of themselves. Try to imagine a respected literary critic writing at the end of his career, "I know something about literature after forty years," and then confessing without embarrassment a few pages later, "I've just discovered that a semicolon is something other than part of the lower intestine." It might be argued, I suppose, that the importance of the semicolon in literature exceeds the importance of the lap dissolve in cinema, but I would counter that the lap dissolve is every bit as important to the work of Josef von Sternberg (a director Macdonald treats fairly dismissively) as the semicolon is to the work of Henry James. I would argue further that the importance of lap dissolves and superimposed images in Sunrise is fundamental to its art. This doesn't mean that an acquaintance with the term lap dissolve would necessarily have altered Macdonald's appreciation for Sunrise, but it does suggest that his objections could have been voiced in a more sophisticated and intelligible fashion.

posted by neel master at 12:19 PM

Check out this discussion between Chicago Reader film critic and personal hero Jonathan Rosenbaum and several younger critics, about the so-called death of cinema. Kent Jones, one of the discussants, has this to say:

As much as I resent the mournful pronouncements of the demise of cinephilia and the impending death of cinema, all so full of barely concealed anger, I sympathize with that anger. From 1982 to 1984 I worked in one of the first video stores in Manhattan, and I will never forget the shock I felt when a customer asked me for "something big and plush that I can really sink into, like the Godfather movies." That was when I realized that home video was opening up a new form of film appreciation antithetical to any I had ever seen, in which each film was potentially a self-prescriptive therapeutic device. And this was only possible because home video had made each film into a portable consumer object that could be stopped, started, reversed, repeated, or abandoned at will. And as horrified as I was, I knew that I had to come to terms with what amounted to a whole new world, the beginnings of the world we live in today.

It's interesting that in Sontag's death of cinephilia tirade, Quentin Tarantino becomes what is quaintly referred to as a structuring absence. Obviously, the problem for her is not so much that he's not a cinephile but rather that he's the wrong kind of cinephile. Tarantino's background as a video-store clerk has now become a joke, and I'm afraid that the joke is a snide, snobbish one. As Adrian points out, home video may have turned films into consumer objects but it has also opened up and popularized film culture, and that cannot be denied, nor can the tendency of cinephilia in its most extreme forms to mutate into a sort of virtual populism at best and a complacent, academic bickering at worst. By now, of course, video culture has been thoroughly infected by corporate culture. But along the way, the disposable weightlessness of the video experience has opened up the cinema to some very interesting forms of contamination.

posted by neel master at 11:45 AM

Charles Lloyd In Russia: Ovations and Frustrations
by Ira Gitler

"I can't describe it in words," said Charles Lloyd of the fantastic eight minute and 20 second ovation he received from a transported audience at the Tallinn Jazz Festival. "I played my experience from Memphis [his birth-place] up to then," he said, describing the intense energy he put forth in his performance. "There was so much stress leading up to it that it exploded."

Following a 50-minute set consisting of Days and Nights of Waiting (an unintentionally appropriate title) by pianist Keith Jarrett, and Tribal Dance, Love Song to a Baby, and Sweet Georgia Bright by Lloyd, the Estonians exploded too. Despite the entreaties and shouts of the festival officials ("We are not children. Please sit down!"), the applause thundered on. "They hid our drums so we couldn't do an encore," said Lloyd. Finally, a half-hour intermission was announced to restore calm. Live modern American jazz had come to the Soviet Union for the first time.

For a while in college, Charles Lloyd was my favorite jazz musician. Lloyd first came into prominence in the early 60s playing in Chico Hamilton's and Cannonball Adderley's groups (he's on Cannonball's fucking incredible album Fiddler on the Roof, which Blue Note has promised to reissue by next year.) By the middle of the sixties, he had formed his own band. As the sixties grew ever more heady, Lloyd rode the wave. He played the Fillmore and put psychedelic covers on his albums. His band was aggressively promoted by manager George Avakian; one of the more disillusioning moments of my jazz experience was realizing that the liner essay accompanying Lloyd's Love-In LP was not critical but a pr piece written by his manager.

In spite of the marketing, I think Lloyd was fundamentally committed to the hippie project and its Nietszchean musical aesthetic. He used to say things like, "I play love vibrations" and talk about totality. This kind of hippie kitsch was my bread and butter during college, so I ate Lloyd up. It is no coincidence that the kids at the Fillmore liked him so much; his tunes tended to have a bounce and humor, and his solos possessed a meandering quality that make them great to get high to. Stylistically, he could be characterized as modal-lite; his solos contained Coltrane-ish moments, but they were less oriented to genuine searching than to moment-to-moment hedonism.

I really wish I had more musical training; whenever I go to describe jazz, I always have to make recourse to the language of the humanities. There's a whole dimension of meaning that I can't properly access. Argh.

Anyhoo, I listened to Lloyd's relatively new (1999) Hyperion with Higgins last night on my way home from work. Lloyd's music still works powerfully on me; driving and listening to it, my mental agility was ratcheting up gradually until I was damn-near to that feeling of intense concentration or 'oneness' that seems only attainable in the car or the shower. The closest analogue to this feeling that I can think of is when Neo finally becomes the Matrix (I feel as dirty as you do; sorry.) In this condition I feel as though I can manipulate the object of thought with ease; the language just comes--the scene in the Matrix literalizes this sudden fluency so well. I believe that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to this condition as the Flow. Whatever this condition is, we know this much: it is ripe for subjection by impotent metaphors.
posted by neel master at 3:47 PM

My last entry (below) ends with the word 'immutable,' which reminded me of John Dewey's The Question of Certainty: Philosophy's Search for the Immutable, which everyone should read. It's relevant to everything.
posted by neel master at 1:30 PM

Psychology's Two Cultures: A Christian Analysis
by Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen

Van Leeuwen is a professor of psychology at Calvin College. In this article, she discusses the rift in psychology between the traditional positivist camp and the more postmodern humanist camp, and attempts to locate a disciplinary space in which a uniquely Christian psychology can develop. My college anthropology teacher once told me that the production of knowledge requires passionate commitment to indefensible values; in this case, the development of a Christian psychology is welcome.

To the Christian analyst, perhaps the most intriguing aspect of these studies is not so much what does differentiate the "two cultures" in psychology as the failure of the theism/atheism dimension to enter into the picture at all. According to the second of these studies, theism and atheism are no differently distributed among behavioral and non-behavioral psychologists and, moreover, there is no significant correlation between strength of theistic beliefs on the one hand and patterns of either disciplinary or social values on the other. To a consideration of this point I will return, but for the moment let us consider some reactions to this pair of "two cultures" studies from later issues of the American Psychologist. Interestingly, none of the published responses endorsed the positivistic status quo which dominates academic psychology—perhaps because that which is in ascendancy generates no sense of defensiveness in its adherents. Actual reactions ranged from pleas for methodological reform to those calling for the wholesale replacement of the traditionally-positivist paradigm by a postpositivist one emphasizing the sociology—and even the politics—of psychological knowledge.

According to the latter, psychology is as much about values as it is about objective facts. Moreover, psychological theorizing reflects the disguised ideology of its creators in ways that these two studies barely began to tap. Social psychologist Rhoda Unger reported her own research indicating that both socioeconomic background and political allegiance are strongly correlated with psychologists’ position on the nature/nurture controversy. More specifically, psychologists from economically privileged backgrounds and/or of conservative political views were much more apt to endorse statements such as "Science has underestimated the extent to which genes affect human behavior": "Most sex differences have an evolutionary purpose"; "Biological sex, sex role, and sexual preference are highly related to each other in normal people"; and "A great deal can be learned about human behavior by studying animals."17 The apparent connection between political conservatism and allegiance to a more biologically-determinist theory of human nature is particularly worrisome to feminist psychologists, because, in Unger’s words,

[it] may account for the consistent reappearance of biology in controversies involving the empowerment of formerly disenfranchised groups. The assumption of whether a racial or sexual entity is a biological or a social group is fundamental to both political and scientific paradigms. Thus, a shift from the biological position (the study of sex differences) to a social position (the examination of gender) was a necessary step in the development of a new psychology of women.18

But it is not only feminist social psychologists who advocate the politicization of psychology in a more leftist direction. In an earlier American Psychologist article titled "Cognitive Psychology as Ideology," Clark University’s Edward Sampson argued that current cognitive theory, by emphasizing the mental structures and operations of the individual, "represents a set of values and interests that reproduce and reaffirm the existing nature of the social order"19 Taking his cue from the Frankfurt critical theorists, Sampson asserted that psychologists such as Piaget take the existing object and social worlds as given, and concentrate only on how the individual person schematizes and performs mental operations on these. In doing so, they fail to see how the existing social order may actually influence what persons take to be "given" and "immutable."

posted by neel master at 1:27 PM

Evildoers in our Midst
by Chuck Morse

This is a post-attack right-wing smear of the American left. I can't say that its virulence is surprising, but I am concerned about its final paragraph:

Perhaps the American left is attracted to Bin Laden's atrocity propaganda. After all, the left insists that it stands for "peace." The fact is that in the name of "peace." leftists have killed of over 100 million people according to the Black Book of Communism.

The Communist genocides of this century have killed unprecedented numbers of people. In spite of this, Communism has always been protected from the sort of condemnation reserved for Nazism. Brian Caplan, of the Museum of Communism, explores this phenomenon:

Were Communism and Nazism "morally equivalent" movements?
Both Stalin and Mao's Communist governments indisputably murdered more people in cold blood than even Hitler's Nazi regime did. This certainly establishes a powerful prima facie case for the proposition that Communism and Nazism are "morally equivalent." Once it is granted that a regime deliberately murdered millions of innocent people, it is difficult to see how any other achievement - the world's best highway or the world's biggest dam - could change one's final evaluation.

Probably the most common distinction made between the Communists and the Nazis is that the former were misguided idealists, while the later were brutal thugs. Alternately, one might argue that the Communists ultimately wanted a world where all people would live together in harmony, while the Nazis wanted a world where the master race reigned supreme over a world purged of inferior races. In short, the difference between Communist and Nazi is supposed to be one of intentions. Joseph Davies, the pro-Stalin US Ambassador to the USSR, gave this point of view its classic expression:

Both Germany and Soviet Russia are totalitarian states. Both are realistic. Both are strong and ruthless in their methods. There is one distinction, however, and that is as clear as black and white. It can be simply illustrated. If Marx, Lenin, or Stalin had been firmly grounded in the Christian faith, either Catholic or Protestant, and if by reason of that fact this communistic experiment in Russia had been projected upon this basis, it would probably be declared to be one of the greatest efforts of Christian altruism in history to translate the ideals of brotherhood and charity as preached in the gospel of Christ into a government of men... That is the difference - the communistic Soviet state could function with the Christian religion in its basic purpose to serve the brotherhood of man. It would be impossible for the Nazi state to do so. The communistic ideal is that the state may evaporate and be no longer necessary as man advances into perfect brotherhood. The Nazi ideal is the exact opposite - that the state is the supreme end of all. (Journal entry, July 7, 1941)

This "argument from intentions" needs to be answered:
First, many people are both misguided idealists and brutal thugs. They are the "true believers" who join religious crusades, set up the Inquisition, exterminate Jews, and liquidate kulaks. Brutality alone may lead a movement to set up a police state, but why go to the effort of killing millions of people when it provides little material gain? It is sadism combined with idealistic fervor which animates history's most destructive movements. As Solzhenitsyn puts it:

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good... Ideology - that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination... That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations. Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. (The Gulag Archipelago)

Mark Lilla, of the Committee for Social Thought at the UofC, has written a book about the inability of 20th century intellectuals to confront tyranny and genocide. This discussion between Lilla and the Nation's Eric Alterman was published last month in the New York Times.
posted by neel master at 8:31 AM

An Interview with Judith Williamson

Judith Williamson: I wrote a piece last August about disgust, the language of disgust. I don't know what it was like here, but in Britain, it was fairly striking to me that the language that was used by the Prime Minister and by government spokespeople about Saddam Hussein and about what was happening after the invasion of Kuwait, the words used were words like repellent, nauseating and repugnant. You know, there is a whole language that you use for condemning things, like "atrocious," or "this is outrageous," or "this is appalling," or "this is wrong." But it seemed to me that the language of moral outrage was somehow too weak, it was perceived as too weak, like it wasn't enough to say that this was wrong, this is a terrible thing that has happened. The language of disgust had to be mobilized. If you had the radio on while you were doing things at home, every few minutes you would hear somebody say "this is really repugnant," "this is totally nauseating" and you got the feeling that somebody was getting sick, like there was some kind of horrible smell or something. It's very much physical language.

And then I wrote about the flip side of that, which is language like "surgical strikes," "mopping up" operations, "flushing out"-I've heard that on the radio in the last week here, I think Bush talked about air raids to "flush out" military personnel. And I wrote about physical disgust being used to replace moral outrage-leaving aside whether or not I would agree with the moral outrage, which is a separate issue. It seems to me perfectly to be expected that people would publicly make declarations about moral issues. But using language about disgust and cleansing is a completely different thing, and it's almost like it's so familiar to us that until you start to think about it, it doesn't all piece together.

posted by neel master at 12:39 AM

Jesus. I got so wrapped up in talking about Cindy Sherman (below) that I forgot to hook you guys up with the Judith Williamson link. Fear not. Judith Williamson link.

There are certain problems that inhere when you blog in reverse chronological order; the biggest one is that you keep having to say "(below)".
posted by neel master at 12:36 AM

Judith Williamson is a neglected heroine; she doesn't appear on my list to the right, but she ought to. I read her Consuming Passions right after my incubation in the warm bath of Foucault and Barthes and Goffman. She pulled these theoretical insights out of their vacuum, and applied them to an analysis of contemporary advertising. I was reminded of her when I stumbled upon a site full of Cindy Sherman photos; one of the first essays in Consuming Passions articulates Sherman's preoccupation with the instability of the self. I always liked the idea of Cindy Sherman.

But, ooh, we have to worry about liking Cindy Sherman thanks to Nadine Lemmon, who writes:

Although Sherman is often heralded as the quintessential ‘postmodern’ artist, the modernist tendencies of her work coupled with the critics’ inability to confront the ambiguity of her work, have rendered her ‘postmodern’ label problematic. Postmodern theory advocates a deconstruction of the power structures embedded in late capitalist society. But Sherman’s work functions seamlessly (and successfully) within the market strategies of the ’80s, typified by corporate control of museums and market control of galleries. Given that her work can be read as both a challenge to the art market and a creative, marketable product, the boundary between postmodern critique of the market and marketability has clearly been eroded. While critics applaud Sherman’s work for deconstructively denying the totality of a ‘real Cindy’, the meaning of her work is dependent upon the concept of the celebrity ‘Cindy’. Simultaneously, critics partially negate her ‘deconstruction’, mythologizing her as the autonomous ‘artist-genius’, harkening back to the modernist heroization of the creative individual. On one level, Sherman’s work appears to be subversively linked to ‘low’ art characterized by ‘b-grade’ film and photography, on another level, her work is fetishized as the modernist ideal of the ‘high' art object.

Damnit.
posted by neel master at 12:30 AM

The Christopher Hitchens Web
posted by neel master at 11:55 PM

The Guardian's Guide to "Difficult" Art Forms: Jazz

This article, by Jonathan Jones, is woefully inadequate. His most irritating assertion, "To this day, there is no such thing as anti-humanist jazz" is an insult to the memory of the angry saxophonists, notably Albert Ayler. And there is at least as much in the John Zorn catalog that eschews transcendence as there is that aspires to it.

This article, like so much else out there, emphasizes the canonical figures in jazz, ignoring the possibilities presented by an approach that is more sensitive to the sociology of jazz. To conceive of jazz simply in terms of masterworks and genius artists ignores that those artists and works developed in the larger scheme of a historically situated jazz world. Jazz writing that emphasizes canon formation does so in order to glorify jazz by its easy comparison with the Western classical tradition, but this emphasis usually forces writers to efface important sociological truths about the way the jazz world works. Furthermore, the elevation of certain musicians (Coltrane, Davis) into some mystical pantheon on the basis of their innovation ignores the fact that innovation is a staple of what jazz musicians do. People like Jimmy Giuffre and Roland Kirk were as innovative as Coltrane and Davis, and certainly as inspired, but they get no press. It is not because they are less interesting musicians, but because jazz generally gets written about in terms of nodes instead of webs.

Although theoretical nuance is a value in itself, its neglect is especially infuriating because of its most prominent effect: the systematic neglect of important artists. There are figures in jazz whose importance can't be underestimated yet who receive virtually none of the attention that is lavished on the canonical players: Roland Kirk, Freddie Hubbard, Eric Dolphy, Donald Byrd, Harold Land, Jimmy Giuffre, Lee Konitz, and Chico Hamilton are just a few.

One of the best books I've read about jazz is Stuart Nicholsons's Jazz Rock: A History. The book is both a sweeping factual survey of the major trends in this varied genre, as well as a critical attempt to trace vectors of influence among musicians and bands.
posted by neel master at 1:19 PM

Journalist Jailed for Refusal to Reveal Information
Washington Post

A freelance journalist in Texas has been in jail for 152 days (and counting) because she refuses to turn over her investigative material to the police. Jason was telling me about this story a little while ago, so I'll yield to him for comment.
posted by neel master at 12:56 PM

What are Cultural Studies of Scientific Knowledge?
By Joseph Rouse

Here is an article that the giant social criticism archive (see below) missed. I will quote it later since my damnable half-hour lunch is over.
posted by neel master at 1:31 PM

Eliot Gelwan at Follow me Here has beaten me to several excellent links, which I will reproduce here.

First of all, he points today to a large archive of social criticism. This archive is actually way beyond "large." This is one of those web resources that could keep me reading for weeks on end. I might get into the habit of blogging one of these articles a day, to make the archive a little less overwhelming. If this does become a habit, blog archaeologists will be able to trace its origin to today, when I link to this speech by Vaclav Havel:

At the same time, however, the relationship to the world that modern science fostered and shaped now appears to have exhausted its potential. It is increasingly clear that, strangely, the relationship is missing something. It fails to connect with the most intrinsic nature of reality, and with natural human experience. It is now more of a source of disintegration and doubt than a source of integration and meaning. It produces what amounts to a state of schizophrenia, completely alienating man as an observer from himself as a being. Classical modern science described only the surface of things, a single dimension of reality. And the more dogmatically science treated it as the only dimension, as the very essence of reality, the more misleading it became. Today, for instance, we may know immeasurably more about the universe than our ancestors did, and yet, it increasingly seems they knew something more essential about it than we do, something that escapes us. The same thing is true of nature and of ourselves. The more thoroughly all our organs and their functions, their internal structure and the biochemical reactions that take place within them are described, the more we seem to fail to grasp the spirit, purpose and meaning of the system that they create together and that we experience as our unique "self."

Clearly, Vaclav Havel is the man (I will here admit that I know virtually nothing about Havel except that he and Madeline Albright are rumored to have been yelled at by John Zorn for talking during one of his performances.)
posted by neel master at 1:27 PM

Scott Yanow's All Music Guide essay on Free jazz


I've been listening to a bunch of Ornette Coleman's later stuff. Soapsuds, Soapsuds; Body Meta; and Tone Dialing. This later-period Ornette stuff is a treasure trove. This article calls Soapsuds, Soapsuds "screechy," but that's baloney. Everything about this album is gentle, from the title onward.


Good Ornette Coleman synopsis

Ornette begins sessions by explaining his musical conception in very dense, puzzling terms, but when it comes time to perform he says "Just go ahead and play, man." His oldest sideman, Charlie Haden, had already been similarly drawn to this free-jazz experience in the late 1950s, when, as he relates in the People, Ornette told him: "Here are some chord changes, but you don't have to play them. Just play what you hear." Haden's response was like that of many a modern jazz player since: "Man, I had so much fun I couldn't believe it. It was spontaneity like I had never experienced before. Each note was a universe. Each note was your life."

posted by neel master at 1:27 PM

Complications threaten our idyll.
But we shall prevail.

As has been noted previously, all is not right with the Goffmania archives. The problem is that there are no archives from Goffmania:Week 1. I am going to solve this problem by haphazardly reposting these entries over the course of the following week. I suppose Jason will read this and decide to do the same. To those of you who have been reading since the absolute beginning, I thank you for your patience. I recommend that these readers periodically look at a calendar while reading to avoid some sort of deja-vu inspired crisis.
posted by neel master at 1:22 PM

Sporting Chances: The Cost of Varsity Athletics
by Louis Menand

At many of the best colleges and universities in the United States today, there is a group of students who can be identified by an attribute that has nothing to do with academic ability. These students have, on average, lower S.A.T. scores than their classmates; they underperform in college (their grades are even lower than their S.A.T. scores predict) and are more likely than other students to rank in the bottom third of the class; their lives after graduation are relatively unaffected by their college experience; and they tend to feel isolated from other students-on some campuses, they live in separate dormitories. These students are aggressively recruited; admissions offices give them preferential treatment; and at some schools they are awarded scholarships regardless of financial need or academic merit. Any attempt to compromise the privileges or reduce the opportunities enjoyed by this special class of students, or to suggest that they somehow do not belong on campus, is met by threats and protests from outside groups. These students are varsity athletes.

[...] [study authors] Shulman and Bowen's point is not that there are more athletes at small liberal-arts colleges than there are at large state universities. Twenty-seven per cent of Ivy League students are athletes today; twenty per cent were athletes in 1951. What has changed is the relation of the athletes to the rest of the student body. In 1951, the academic profile of a varsity wrestler or swimmer at a place like Princeton or Williams was indistinguishable from the academic profile of his non-athletic classmates. By 1989, the varsity athlete at every type of school except all-women's colleges was highly distinguishable from the rest of the class-not only in terms of academic aptitude and achievement but in terms of values and interests as well. College athletes today are more likely than their classmates to identify themselves as conservative, to name being "very well off financially" as an "essential" or "very important" goal in life, and to enter a business-related field (in the case of male athletes) or psychology (in the case of female athletes).

[...] And they know they're different. Shulman and Bowen tell the story of a female graduate of one of the schools in the database who, when asked by a job interviewer why she had chosen the college she attended, replied, "Well, I'm a catcher, and I was recruited to come here to play on the softball team." This tendency of athletes to define themselves in non-academic terms seems to be reinforced by peer effects ("jock culture"), and it helps explain why athletes underperform in class. (It's not, apparently, because they spend so much time at practice. Shulman and Bowen found that students engaged in other time-consuming extracurricular activities, like editing the student paper, tend to overperform.) Again, conventional assumptions are misleading. It's true, as you would expect, that the S.A.T. scores of the typical football or basketball player at a big-time sports school like Michigan or North Carolina are much lower than his classmates', but the S.A.T. scores of the typical varsity tennis player at a coed liberal-arts college are also much lower-a hundred and forty-three points lower-than his classmates'.

posted by neel master at 2:11 PM

The Problem of "God" in the Boy Scouts
by Jay Mechling

I was a Boy Scout until my eighteenth birthday. When my time ran out (at eighteen, scouts are no longer boys and therefore cannot be Boy Scouts), I had attained the penultimate rank, Life Scout. I was carrying out a small public health project in my town that year, and I couldn't commit to an Eagle Scout community service project as well, so I never 'got my Eagle.' I've always regretted not becoming an Eagle Scout, because I would have savored using my ceremony as a soapbox (when I was eighteen, I had a rather pervasive habit of turning things into soapboxes.)

But despite my antipathy to the exclusionary policies of the Boy Scouts, I still can't hate the organization. My experience with the Boy Scouts was entirely pleasant; the incidents in which I had to lie about my lack of transcendental belief were few and mostly comical. In my suburban troop, atheism wasn't a big issue; I'm sure the country-club Republican fathers who supervised my troop were all too happy to avoid searching discussions about morality and belief. So instead of ideological quibbling, we did fun and instructive things like 10-day canoe trips in Maine and backpacking in the Shenandoah and giddily lighting the aerosolized spray of a can of insect repellent on fire (which creates a seriously cool fireball) and exposing our assholes (the 'red' eye.) I wish that the Boy Scouts would reconsider its position on inclusion, but since that won't happen, I'd recommend that potentially excluded boys reconsider their positions on principle. Screw principle; when you're fifteen, a weekend camping and learning how to pitch a tent and build a fire beats standing up for one's self every time.

The BSA had finessed the Trout case by framing it as a mere dispute over the meaning of the word "God," but these suits pitted avowed atheists against the BSA requirement that members believe in God. The National Council's stance was that the BSA is a private group that can admit and exclude members by criteria particular to the organization. "Also supporting the status quo," explained a New York Times story, "are the Church of Latter-Day Saints, or Mormons, which formed the first Scouting council in America in 1913 and which remains the largest single Scout sponsor, and the Roman Catholic Church, the fourth-largest Scout sponsor. The two churches, which together support more than a quarter of all Scout troops, contend that the Boy Scouts has every right to keep certain people out, whether as Scouts, volunteers, or staff members."

Public schools, it seems, sponsor the largest number of Scouts, which provided fuel for the plaintiffs' view that the BSA is a public organization. But the public schools "do not speak with the unified voice of the Mormon or Catholic churches," notes the New York Times reporter, who also points to a basic contradiction in the BSA practices regarding religious belief. "Officials say the organization was founded for boys who believe in God and should remain true to those principles," he writes. "But while the organization accepts Buddhists, who do not believe in a Supreme Being, and Unitarians, who seek insight from many traditions but pointedly avoid setting a creed, it does not tolerate people who are openly atheist, agnostic, or unwilling to say in that Scout oath they will serve God."

posted by neel master at 1:37 PM