The Roundup Top Ten for December 16, 2022
What's the Path from Crunchy Counterculture to Alt-Right?by Kathleen BelewObservers have tracked a growing affinity between online adherents of natural lifestyle and alternative medicine communities and the antigovernment and white supremacist movements. Thinking about the connections disrupts our idea of a linear spectrum of political affinity from "left" to "right." |
Why It's No Contradiction for Trump to Demand Illegal Actions to Defend "Law and Order"by Lawrence B. GlickmanSince Reconstruction's overthrow, calls for "law and order" have imagined the former as a tool for enforcing a particular vision of the latter, usually in the form of white-dominated racial hierarchy. |
How the "Third Way" Made Neoliberal Politics Seem Inevitableby Lily GeismerThe Third Way never presented a coherent case for what it stood for or how it might balance the roles of the market and the state. But it led to a generational reworking of the role if government and a sidelining of mass political movements. |
Neither Neoliberal nor Woke: What's Really Going on in Elite Higher Edby David A. BellCritics from the right and left who argue that universities are captured by some interest group or other ignore the way that universities pursue their own distinct instutitonal imperatives. |
Is Messi the Avatar of a Post-Macho Argentina?by Brenda ElseyLionel Messi's tenure at the top of the soccer world has coincided with an upsurge of feminism in Argentina and its sports culture, changes Messi has quietly supported. |
It's Time to Be Honest About the Partisan Nature of Gun Cultureby Heather Cox Richardson"The national free-for-all in which we have 120 guns for every 100 people... is deeply tied to the political ideology of today’s Republican Party. It comes from the rise of Movement Conservatism under Ronald Reagan." |
Defenders of Affirmative Action at Harvard Need to Confront Anti-Asian Biasesby Jonathan ZimmermanIt's clear that Harvard's criteria for rating prospective students connect with cultural traits and stereotypes in ways that disadvantage Asian American applicants. But keeping affirmative action and fixing these issues aren't mutually exclusive. |
Resisting the Plans for America's "Nuclear Sponge"by Taylor RoseAn unlikely coalition of conservative "sagebrush rebels" and Native tribal activists opposed a plan to locate the US ICBM arsenal in Utah and Nevada, creating a single nuclear sacrifice zone in the event of an attack. |
The Farm Workforce Modernization Act Raises Troubling Echoesby Matt GarciaThe support of the United Farm Workers for the bill reverses its historic opposition to the Bracero guestworker program, and signals its shift toward advocacy of global responsibility initiatives in the food supply chain. Other labor organizations believe the bill would reestablish indentured servitude in farm work. |
From Hot Yoga to Tae Bo: How American Fitness Trends Went Globalby Natalia Mehlman PetrzelaThe cultural disaffections of the affluent and emergent globalization made a host of exotic exercise trends big business in the 1970s and afterward. |