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Dispatches From the Culture Wars – Old Time Religion Edition

Schools respond to the great immigrant purge; Trump’s permanent base; Prescription: more recess; Left printing in a market maze; Politicized scientists; Finally Got the News

Visitors at the Finally Got The News: The Printed Legacy of the U.S. Radical Left, 1970–1979 exhibition at Interference Archive,photograph by Bradley Duncan and courtesy the Interference Archive)

‘Your Child is Safe’: Schools Address Deportation Fears Among Immigrant Families

By Moriah Balingit and Emma Brown
March 19, 2017
Washington Post

Across the country, President Trump’s promise to crack down on illegal immigration is leading schools with large immigrant communities to consider how to care for children whose parents could be detained in federal raids. Parents, teachers and administrators have raised questions about how schools should respond if U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents come to a school to take away students or obtain records — even though the agency’s policy restricts enforcement actions on school grounds.
Officials in Sacramento, Denver, Chicago and Miami have declared their schools havens, out of reach of ICE agents without special permission or a warrant.

Why Trump’s “Betrayal” of His Voters Won’t Stick

By Jeet Heer
March 17, 2017
New Republic

Will Trump’s voters in fact feel betrayed by his economic policies? There’s good reason to think not. Trump’s plutocratic tendencies have been startling clear in the early stages of his presidency (given his cabinet of billionaires and push for tax cuts for the rich) but haven’t affected his standing with his supporters.
Trump won the presidency not simply because he drew an increased share of the white working class vote, but because regular Republicans (who are wealthier than average white people) never defected to Hillary Clinton or abstained from voting en masse, as Democrats had hoped they would.

Several Texas Schools Tripled Recess Time and It Has Been Helping the Growing ADHD Problem

By Alanna Ketler
March 4, 2017
Collective Evolution

The majority of us who attended public school probably have dreadful memories of enforced drudgery —  being forced to sit at our desks, listen to the teacher, memorize textbooks, and complete tests based on that rote memorization. As horrible as this sounds, it’s actually been getting worse.
Perhaps the most obvious solution is also the most beneficial: giving children more time to run around, play, explore, and use their imagination. This will inevitably help them to sit down and focus when the time is right. If children can’t sit still, it’s because they need more time to be active.
Several schools in Texas are being praised for trying a new program that solves behavioural problems by doing just this, giving children more time to play outside and more often during the school day. It may sound too simple to work, yet it has proven extremely effective thus far.

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Circulate Now, Mobilize Later

By Maximillian Alvarez
March 8, 2017
The Baffler

Digital technologies have indeed made some significant political action possible. And, of course, things have gotten particularly interesting with Trump, who actually does seem to be greatly affected by what goes on in the anything-goes world of the internet. But that doesn’t mean that the left can pretend it isn’t, like everyone else, still caught in this perverse and debilitating system.
We are facing a media market and a political arena in which communication aggressively comes hither as an end in itself, alongside a purely instrumental model of “democracy” as the circulation of content with no need to promote action. We are trying to write our way out of a networked system that has already captured our writing as another commodity for people to choose from, as consumers, in order to suit their individual, not collective, tastes in leftist critique. This isn’t to say that failure is a foregone conclusion, though; it is, however, to say that, in order to begin conceptualizing how we might actually win in the marketplace of ideas, we need to take full and honest measure of how the game board tilts.

Should Scientists March on Washington?

By Evan Hadingham
March 8, 2017
PBS Nova

In lecture halls packed to overflowing at the nation’s biggest science conference in Boston, the buzz wasn’t all about a new discovery, but political activism.
Underlying many of the sessions at this year’s American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting was a central preoccupation and worry: how should scientists respond to looming challenges posed by the new administration’s policy statements and threatened cuts to the budgets of agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency? One answer was public protest, as hundreds of scientists took to the streets and attended the “Stand Up for Science Rally” in Copley Square half a mile from the conference—a dry run for the national March for Science in Washington planned for Earth Day on April 22.
 

The Graphic Idealism of the 1970s US Radical Left

By Murat Cem Menguc
March 20, 2017
Hyperallergic

In these days of protest and protest culture, the Interference Archive is making its own contribution in order to keep us going. Titled Finally Got The News: The Printed Legacy of the U.S. Radical Left, 1970–1979, their new exhibition focuses on the legacy of US radical left movements during the 1970s.
One of the most impressive aspects of the exhibition is the array of printing styles, techniques, and formats brought together. They create the feeling of wandering around an old curiosity shop where the stock is radical politics.