Dispatches from the Culture Wars – Rolling Stone Rashomon edition

Persnickety about Picketty; ALEC’s anti-choice clone; Rolling Stone’s rape story, two takes; Geeks reek; We are how we eat

portside
Printer friendly  
ThinkProgress/ Andrew Breiner

Top FT Editor Lambasts Piketty's Book Just Before FT Names It Book Of The Year


By Mark Gongloff

November 12, 2014 

Huffington Post

The Financial Times has declared that Thomas Piketty's Capital In The Twenty-First Century is the best business book of the year, which kinda-sorta makes up for that time it declared the book was riddled with errors.
In fact, the FT editor who criticized the French economist's blockbuster, 700-page tome on inequality is sticking by his critique, even after his newspaper on Tuesday named Capital the winner of the 2014 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.
Capital, for the uninitiated, warns that unfettered capitalism tends to widen the gulf between the haves and the have-nots, and that the major economies of the world could be doomed to Gilded Age-style inequality if they don't take steps to stop it. It was, unexpectedly, a red-hot bestseller, exposing broad public anxiety about the fairness of the global economy.

Inside The Highly Sophisticated Group That’s Quietly Making It Much Harder To Get An Abortion

by Erica Hellerstein
December 2, 2014
ThinkProgress

On a mild afternoon last April, Randy Grau, a Republican representative from Edmond Oklahoma, took to the state House to argue in favor of Senate Bill 1848. The bill, later signed into law, regulates standards for abortion centers and requires abortion providers to obtain nearby hospital admitting privileges.
To the pro-choice advocates closely tracking the rash of anti-abortion bills introduced at the state level, however, Grau’s bill looked eerily familiar. His charges — that SB 1848’s abortion restrictions (also known as Targeted Regulations on Abortion Providers, or TRAP, laws), were being introduced to safeguard women’s health — had all been seen before. The language in the bill was strikingly similar to “The Abortion Providers’ Privileging Act,” a piece of model legislation introduced by Americans United for Life (AUL), a Washington-based anti-abortion organization that pens and propagates model legislation through ties with conservative legislators. In fact, a ThinkProgress examination found that parts of Grau’s bill were essentially written by AUL; the two are so comparable that in the section of SB 1848 outlining admitting privileges for abortion providers, only ten words from the AUL version are not used.
Not unlike the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), AUL functions as de facto legislation mill for like-minded politicians and on-the-ground anti-abortion activist groups. According to an email obtained by ThinkProgress that was sent to AUL supporters, the group is responsible for one third (74) of the 200-plus anti-abortion laws that have passed since 2010.

How to read the Rolling Stone UVA rape story

By Carrie Mannino
December 9, 2014
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

As a teenage girl looking toward college, Rolling Stone’s choice to retract its story about University of Virginia rape policies scares me. Most of the responses to Rolling Stone’s action deal with journalistic mistakes, but that isn’t the real issue here; the real issue is the safety of young women and the culture that allows rape to happen every day.
The story, published in mid-November, graphically detailed the alleged experience of a UVA freshman who was gang-raped at a fraternity social event. The victim, who requested to be unidentified and was referred to as Jackie, implied that the rape was part of frat hazing. Now Rolling Stone claims it no longer trusts Jackie as a credible source and says it should have checked out her story more thoroughly.

Feminism Can Handle the Truth

By Judith Levine
December 6, 2014
Boston Review
Just before Thanksgiving, Richard Bradley sensed something was wrong with the story in Rolling Stone of a gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity. On his blog, Bradley, editor-in-chief of Worth magazine, suggested some possible consequential omissions in Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s reporting. Why, for instance, was there no response—or even a “no comment”—from any of the alleged offenders? Bradley’s doubts were piqued, he said, precisely because he was inclined to believe the piece. He had given the benefit of the doubt to the infamous necromancer Stephen Glass at George magazine, and learned his lesson.  
Bradley’s questions unsettled Reason staff editor Robby Soave, who had until then taken Erdely’s narrative at face value. Soave followed up. His headline was hyperbolic: “Is the UVA Rape Story a Gigantic Hoax?” But the piece was a straightforward skeptical inquiry, which, after all, is Reason’s raison d’être.
This did not go over well in certain feminist circles.  It didn’t help that the two skeptics were men.


The racist #BlackStormtrooper backlash shows the dark side of geek culture

By Matt Rozsa
December 02, 2014
The Daily Dot

There is a deeper lesson to be learned by the racist backlash against the casting of John Boyega as a major character in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It’s cliché these days to point out that “geek is chic,” but 2014 may be remembered as a turning point for the nerd subculture once associated with social marginalization—namely, the year in which it was held accountable for its own dark side.
The Boyega controversy began after the British actor experienced racist backlash following the premiere of the new Star Wars teaser trailer. Soon there was even a Twitter hashtag, #blackstormtrooper, that went viral. Yesterday Boyega posted a brief Instagram message for anyone who had a problem with his race: “Get used to it.”
Trent Clark of Hip-Hop Wired wrote that “given the current racial divide this country is now facing, it is hardly surprising that new Star Wars actor John Boyega is getting racist blowback.”
While Clark is correct in identifying a serious racial divide in our country, his comment only captures part of the picture. Over the past few months, the news has increasingly covered disturbingly virulent and nasty racism and misogyny in various sections of the nerd subculture that have gone mainstream.

What Was the Hip Butcher?

By Melanie Rehak
December/January 2014
Bookforum

The way we eat has evolved in ways both wonderful and worrying, and how we write about what we eat has reflected that progression accordingly. We’ve gone from books that taught us simply how to cook, to books that told us the truth about the food others produced and cooked for us, to books telling us how we can eat better ourselves and make sure everyone else has the opportunity to do the same, both now and in the climate-challenged future.
But the change has not been wholesale, and awareness, as invariably happens, often remains eclipsed by practical realities. Leading up to Thanksgiving of 1994, an article in the New York Times about the growing interest in traditional American foods quoted the president of a California company that had just launched a line of “lost crops,” who noted that “most people still do not know what quinoa and jicama are.” I can’t vouch for jicama, but I recently saw a six-pack of sodium-laden precooked quinoa pouches at Costco, which fairly neatly sums up the American food scene now. Even as better food becomes more widely known and available, we still find ways to overprocess and eat too much of it, and we still expect to do so both easily and inexpensively.