Prince Rogers Nelson, RIP

I was actually planning to write a blog post today, my first in a couple of months, talking the passage of time and how it's leaving me with feelings both good and bittersweet. I was literally opening Blogger to get writing, when I saw this. Oh man. Years ago, I had a conversation with a friend about which of the great rock, pop, folk, and soul artists of the second half of the 20th century would have a songwriting legacy that would last into the 21st, or beyond. Not groups, my friend insisted: no Beatles, no Led Zeppelin, just singular artists. In the end, I came up with three: Bob Dylan, David Bowie, and Prince. The Thin White Duke left us in January, and now 2016 has taken Prince has well. (Stay healthy and safe, Bob. Don't emerge from wherever you're hiding.)

What to say? Like Bowie, Prince was an enormously talented musician, whose stupendous skills were often lost in the dizzying way he would change his style, his look, and his sound. Unlike Bowie, he vainly insisted on fighting the contemporary pop music machine, rather than just outlasting it, and so lost years of effective communication with his audience during the whole TAFKAP nonsense. But oh well. He wrote, he produced, he sang, and he played--man, could he play! So here's my offering, to be tossed on the funeral pyre along with hundreds of more which are bound to come:

From 1985,"Raspberry Beret," my single favorite song of his:


Prince - Raspberry Beret

From 1987, "Sign o' The Times," showing his socially conscious side:



From 1991, during his New Power Generation phase, "Cream":



From 2006, with years of fights with the record companies behind him, "Black Sweat":



From 2013, "Breakfast Can Wait." He never stopped being kinky, that's for certain:

The Deep and Discomforting Point of Populism (and Socialism, and Certain Sorts of Conservatism Too)

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Over the weekend, a friend of mine shared an article which had joined in the Hillary Clinton-Bernie Sanders fight, a fight which may come to an end tomorrow in New Hampshire, but probably won't. The title of the piece is "Bernie Sanders Doesn't Know Diddly-Squat About Wall Street" (a claim which, from the author's limited perspective, is undoubtedly true), and it acknowledges the truth of great many of the critiques of Wall Street's behavior over the past decade which are being made by both the Clinton and Sanders camps. But the article's overall critical aim is clear:

It is unconscionable that Wall Street’s compensation system continues to reward bankers, traders, and executives to take big risks with other people’s money in hopes of getting big year-end bonuses...But Sanders never talks about the compensation system on Wall Street. In fact, he rarely mentions anything concrete at all. Instead, he dwells on bizarre and nebulous notions such as imposing “a tax on Wall Street speculation”....The candidate’s website does not really flesh out the idea, other than to say that the tax “will reduce risky and unproductive high-speed trading and other forms of Wall Street speculation.” If one goes back to a bill that Sanders introduced in the Senate last May, there is slightly more meat on these bones; still, the proposed legislation seems to have very little to do with actually taxing “Wall Street speculation” and more to do with taxing every trading transaction--the buying and selling of stocks and bonds and derivatives--that Wall Street and hedge funds engage in. This, of course, makes no sense whatsoever--why tax the very behavior the system depends upon?

In other words, there are clearly bad actors on Wall Street, so why on earth would someone want to burden the whole system of Wall Street, as opposed to doing something to simply target those bad actors? The idea that Wall Street itself--or at least the high-end, high-speed, huge-money, over-financialized skewing of it over the past few decades--might be the problem here simply never crosses the author's mind.

Let me expand on this somewhat discomforting point a little--discomforting because honest populists and socialists (and Sanders, though a career politician, is at least a little more honest than most) know that we are all far more affected by Wall Street practices than we'd like to admit. Indeed, we are all so affected by (and implicated in, and dependent upon) it that excavating the actual moral ideal at work in nearly all actually populist and socialist--as opposed to liberal egalitarian and redistributive--ideas is difficult, even though almost anyone who really thinks about it knows the point is there. Our profound inarticulateness over this point is owed, I think, to the fact that most modern leftism is bereft of the moral language which once animated anti-capitalist arguments generally, and thus those who advocate it--as Sanders does, however inconsistently--find it difficult to say what, on some deep and inchoate level, they clearly want to say. It is a point that, to their perverse credit, clear-eyed libertarian, propertarian, and other Lockean thinkers often recognize and put at the front in their attacks on actually socialistic ideas; some of them really delight in mocking their opponents for it, and those opponents fulminate usually rather hopelessly, because they believe in what they're saying but they're not entirely sure just what they're saying actually means.

What point am I getting at here? To be curt, it's simply this: "why tax the very behavior the system depends upon," you ask? Easy. Because us populists and leftists and other vaguely socialistic types actually don't like the system we're all affected by, dependent upon, and implicated in, and consequently want it to do less of what it does. A financial transaction tax may have a variety of revenue-raising and redistributive pluses and minuses, but from a genuine populist/socialist perspective its greatest effect will probably be to simply make it at least slightly less likely that something we don't like will be done. Both populism and socialism (and local traditionalism or distributism or what-have-you) can refer to a huge range of economic possibilities, but in the post-WWII, post-Cold War, globalized world, they both--whether their proponents realize it or not--basically mean the same thing: the elite generation and manipulation and moving around financial wealth has gone far enough. There ought to be less of it.

What would it mean for the Wall Street system (or, again, mainly the one which has emerged over the past generation or so) itself to see less activity? For taking on risk and collaterizing debt themselves to be seen as a less attractive means of generating capital? Well, as the article correctly points out, it would mean less absolute wealth would be generated overall (but that would also mean less inequality). It would mean investment would be less incentivized (but so would less ruinous speculation). It would mean less capital mobility (but that would also mean less community disruption). Thoughtful and compassionate liberals of all sorts, if they can be led to see clearly what exactly is being argued about here (which is not easily done), are rightly bemused or even infuriated by this idea: I mean, if you can tame the system so as to retain its advantages and generate enough surplus to pay for social programs that ameliorate its structural harms, why on earth would you want to do something that actually burdens the system itself? From Keynes to Krugman (though, to be fair, Krugman was once more willing to give a financial transaction tax some consideration) all these smart folk just look at the socialists, populists, and localists, confused and weirded out by such proposals. And since the language of sustainability and labor and community and other collective moral goods has mostly been in the ash heap for the past century, responding in any way which is actually comprehensible isn't very easy.

That lack of comprehension is a function of our times, of course. A century ago, the moral and communitarian--that is, the conservative (or as I prefer to call it, the "left conservative"--case against socially disruptive, collectively disempowering, but admittedly damn productive capitalist growth was pretty obvious, though by no means broadly accepted. William Jennings Bryan, the most nationally prominent spokesperson for this kind of more democratic, less banker and investor-friendly, more producer-oriented (and thus, inevitably, more localist and agrarian than urban and industrialist) vision of market economics, ran for the presidency--and lost--three times. The parallels between Bryan and Sanders are interesting, to say the least--among others, you can see in the complicated squabbles over whether Sanders counts as a "real" socialist the same sort of disputes over whether Bryan, in accepting the Democratic party's nomination in 1896, was selling out the Populist cause. And, of course, there's the argument that if Sanders actually manages the ridiculously unlikely feat of snatching the nomination away from Clinton, that he'd both be soundly defeated and will have forced class-conscious real changes into the Democratic party, as Bryan's nomination in 1896 (and 1900, and 1908), helped make it possible for progressives like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt to win the party's support later on. But mostly, I think, those similarities are overshadowed by a major difference: Bryan, and all sorts of other populists and socialists (and even some actual traditionalists) a century ago, could recognize that certain types of, and certain amounts of, capitalist growth were just socially bad, however many individuals such transactions may financially reward. Bad because they create inequality and division; bad because they encourage radical individualism and cultural fragmentation; bad because, well, to be frank, the whole Christian tradition has mostly opposed them. And while Sanders has shown himself more than capable of quoting scripture and popes when it suits him, he lacks the civil religion substance that could give the form of his anti-capitalist democratic socialism some real, populist, moral weight.

None of which is relevant to the author of the article in question, because there's no indication that he's cognizant of these questions of morality, community, and sustainability either. And let's give Sanders some credit: if you actually believe (as I do) that our market economy ought to be informed by, and even regulated by, greater collective concerns and democratic controls and moral limits than contemporary capitalism tolerates, than Sanders anti-Wall Street talk at least partakes of the shape of the reforms we need. And at the level of the presidency--or, more realistically, at the level of the kind of highly symbolic exchanges over political possibilities which a presidential nomination contest makes possible--being able to get clear on just what the (admittedly somewhat discomforting) point and the shape of one's differing economic visions are is no small blessing at all.

"No Doubt."

Rest in peace, Mr. Rickman. So many of your performances on stage and screen were wonderful, but my favorite role of yours was Colonel Brandon is Emma Thompson's Sense and Sensibility. My single favorite line from that movie--indeed, from any Austen adaption I've ever seen--was when Brandon revealed his sad past to Elinor. Mr. Rickman, you drew more sadness and wry wisdom out of this short scene--indeed, from those two words, twice spoken, more humor--than I think any equally skilled stage and film actor ever could. I can't find an embed, but we can watch it here. Look up Mr. Bowie, and have a fine drink with him, will you? Godspeed.

Assessing the Freedom Of, and the Freedom From, Cities

[Cross-posted to Bleeding Heart Libertarians]

Jacob Levy's Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom is a superb work of political theory and intellectual history. It introduces, in clear and compelling language, a new way of making sense of the development of liberal ideas, by distinguishing between what he labels "rationalist" (consistent, transparent, state-centric) and "pluralist" (variable, private, culture-dependent) responses to the threats to individual freedom which have arisen throughout the history of liberalism. And then, as an encore, he uses all that his analysis has suggested to shed some new light on contemporary theoretical debates. Overall it's a great book, one that I hope will have a long life.

What is there to criticize? Not much. I'm sure defenders of the rationalist approach to ensuring personal liberty (Jacob makes clear his own preference for the pluralist approach) might take issue with some implications of how he sets up and describes these variations within liberalism. And fans of Charles Taylor (like me) might think that Jacob’s suggestion in the conclusion that Taylor’s history of modernity wrongly attempts a synthesis of rationalism and pluralism is a simplistic reading of Taylor's philosophical aims. But all that is rather small potatoes, especially considering that such nits arise in the beginning and ending of the book, and skip over its central, and best, section, which deals with the history of intermediate groups in the West and their relationship to liberalism.

For myself, the most interesting way to engage that section is through Jacob’s (too short!) treatment of the rise of towns, cities, and provinces, and how seeing those bodies as associational forms presents different types of pluralist challenges to our understanding of how best to define and defend individual freedom. He begins by asserting--relying here primarily upon the scholarship of Harold Berman--that cities and towns are essentially non-contractual entities. Rather than emerging through some hypothetical social contract or actual historical process of constitutionalization, they are bodies of individuals that ratified their own collective existence in particular places (along rivers or trade routes or mountain passes) through “real acts of mutual promise” (p. 96): in other words, through the organic realization of, the participatory recognition of, a community. This distinguishes them, when one speaks of local governing bodies, from counties or provinces, which usually were “geographically far larger than cities...not surrounded by a wall...primarily rural...certainly not founded by equals committing to one another by oaths...[but rather were] in large part the leftover geography of the processes of state consolidation” (p. 108). Jacob’s tracing of the different forms and norms of law which emerged as relevant to these different types of local bodies–Germanic or “gothic,” in the first case; Roman or republican in the second–opens up multiple lines of argument within political theory.

For example, his idea that the “Germanic legal model of law [was] tied to personal status” is only truly effective in “mostly homogenous” contexts, whereas something different was needed for “the arms’-length interactions of strangers engaged in long-distance or urban trade” (p. 101), parallels the arguments of the sociologist Lyn Lofland, who in A World of Strangers contrasted the pre-industrial city, whose inhabitants informally ordered themselves through signs of personal recognition (what someone was wearing, for example), with the industrial, commercial city, where that informal order was provided by recognizing the--often authoritatively determined and imposed--rules of one’s location (the part of the city where one lived or worked). There is also the sense in which these distinctions can deepen our understanding of the intense connection many throughout American history have made between freedom and independent ownership, and the socio-economic and spatial context (urban vs. provincial/rural) relevant to the intensity, or lack of such, felt for that connection. Jacob observes that “the paradigmatic city for the humanists and republicans was a sovereign city-state, maybe sitting at the head of its own empire [though a limited one, presumably]...the independence of the city was a prerequisite to the freedom of its citizens. The Germanic tradition that Stadtluft macht frei [“city air makes one free”] rested on no such assumption” (p. 133). Seeing these bodies as part of ongoing arguments over association freedom, lends important light to ongoing arguments about how public policies ought to be constructed, on the one hand, in regards to the tangles of political and economic obligations and opportunities which so often characterize modern capitalist urban life, as well as towards the (more often idealized than real) clear rules and spatial authority supposedly associated with private property ownership on the other.

That is light which Jacob himself is, perhaps, not entirely aware of. Jacob is to be credited with having been among those political theorists who recognized early on the great value of James Scott's arguments about state and market-based forms of rational, organizational oppression, but he's been ambivalent about accepting Scott's insistence that it is the modernist logics of the market and the state which push this oppression, not something that only happens when the latter appropriates the former. Some of this reluctance might be discerned by looking at what is not particularly discussed early in the book, when Jacob writes about the value of "associations that resist the state" and explores Adam Smith's warning about the "man of system," without making any comment about, say, the rational reformer who wishes to get rid of inconsistent trade barriers and idiosyncratic excise and sin taxes, all in the name of maximizing the benefits of creative destruction (pp. 59, 67). But is important that we make use of the light Jacob has provided in his book exactly in regards to these matters. .

Why? Because, as Jacob superbly demonstrates in his brief history of the Western political understand of cities, these bodies are often much more than--using Oakeshottian terms--civil associations, but rather are enterprise ones, complex and purposive bodies which offer "local and distinct lifestyles to mobile populations, letting people sort into local communities, whose distinctiveness then becomes reinforcing" (p. 289). In connecting this observation to his larger analysis of liberalism, Levy gives added theoretical heft to arguments--made by Jane Jacobs, Richard Sennett, and many others (including me)--about the anarchic-yet-ordered potential of economically sufficient cities. While one can certainly fill whole books with accounts of localities throughout history being threatened by state-mandated "rationalizing" projects, in the name of ethnic cleansing, ideological punishment, or political homogeneity, surely one needs to at least acknowledge that in the modern and (mostly) law-abiding Western societies of today, the greatest threat to the survival of the purposive, economically sufficient, culture-forming capacity of cities is, in fact, the dominance of global finance capitalism. A dominance which is, of course, abetted by economic elites: elites whose propertied position and business revenue tends, more often than not, to be situated in provincial, state, or international contexts, rather than in the local urban communities they are part of; elites who, consciously or not, consistently favor making their lived environments as amenable to those remunerative, globalizing processes as possible.

Note that I acknowledge the remunerative character of these processes. There is no denying that there is a strict utilitarian, economic argument for the individual empowerment which generally arises from the capitalist rationalization of cities, making those bodies, and the consumers and workers who live there, into, as much as possible, enriching nodes in the global finance and capital flow machine. The question is: is liberty always best served by the liberation of individuals from obligation, community, and want which specialization and efficiency often (though not always) provides? Jacob's own preference for pluralism suggests that, despite his own libertarianism, the answer may not be a clear "yes." Still, his overarching thesis is that there can be no resolution of the rationalist-pluralist divide in liberalism, nor any moral judgment as to objective superiority of one over the other, so he really doesn't answer this question--indeed, he doesn't even broach it in these terms. But he shines a new light upon the question nonetheless, and that is valuable enough.

In the end, the great accomplishment of this wonderful book is that it provides a language to help us see (for many of us, for the first time), and thus think productively about, the history and significance of the rationalist-pluralist divide in liberalism. If Jacob himself didn't use that language to address, say, city-county relations, or local versus global markets--well, that's a small loss, but not a great one. Because he's now shown us all a better way to go about doing exactly that on our own. Freedom indeed!

"I Thought He Had One More Regeneration Left in Him"

Five Farewells to Our Thin White Duke

Innumerable tributes will pore forth today for David Bowie, who passed away yesterday from cancer, just two days after his 69th birthday and the release of his final album, Blackstar. That's appropriate, because Bowie's influence as a musician and a performer was as extensive, as protean, as wildly diverse and interpretive, as anyone's. Probably only Bob Dylan, among all modern pop, rock, and folk pioneers still living, could compare with the man's groundbreaking range. So in the midst of the oncoming flood of words, remember this tribute from Will Gompertz:

David Bowie was the Picasso of pop. He was an innovative, visionary, restless artist: the ultimate ever-changing postmodernist. Along with the Beatles, Stones and Elvis Presley, Bowie defined what pop music could and should be. He brought art to the pop party, infusing his music and performances with the avant-garde ideas of Merce Cunningham, John Cage and Andy Warhol.

He turned pop in a new direction in 1972 with the introduction of his alter ego Ziggy Stardust. Glam rock was the starting point, but Ziggy was much more than an eyeliner-wearing maverick: he was a truly theatrical character that at once harked backed to pre-War European theatre while anticipating 1980s androgyny and today's discussions around a transgender spectrum.

He was a great singer, songwriter, performer, actor, producer and collaborator. But beyond all that, at the very heart of the matter, David Bowie was quite simply--quite extraordinarily--cool.

Here, in memoriam, are five slices of the man that come to my mind this morning.

Appropriately enough, let's start with 1971's "Changes":



And follow it up immediately with Bowie, who was so often treated as some kind of the theatrical alien, owning his own reputation with 1971's "Life on Mars":



But Bowie would only allow his audiences to stick with an image of him as long as he wanted them to; when it came time to bury the 1970s, he did, definitively, in "Ashes to Ashes":



In the 1980s David Bowie re-made himself into a fashion and acting icon--but predictably, he's already preceded the meta-commentary on his own transformation with "Fashion":



Thirty years on from what many considered his peak, did Bowie still know how to rock? Oh yeah. Let's end with a holiday he almost lived to see a 70th time, "Valentine's Day":

New Year's Eve Live Music: "Touch of Grey"

A good way to ring out the old year, as we all just keep getting older, and yet life doesn't slow down or stop happening. Happy New Year's, everyone.

A Year of Hard Love

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

I've joked for years about being a closet Lutheran--joked about it for so long, in fact, I can't remember when I first started doing it. I know it wasn't because one day I read and found myself converted to the Lutheran Book of Concord or any such thing (though over the decades I have read and found myself agreeing with its contents a whole lot more than I disagree). It may go way back t my childhood, back to reading scriptures like Matthew 18:7, in the King James Version: "Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!" (A nearly identical passage can be found in Luke 17:1.) There was a terrible, yet comforting, logic to those passages as I understood them, so long ago: first, that this will be world of offenses, of horrors, of hardness, and there's nothing anyone can do about it--and second, that God will still hold by whom those offenses, those horrors, that hardness comes accountable. This was a God, I thought, with whom you can know where you stand.

The KJV reading of those scriptures isn't the best, I know that now. Those passages actually show Jesus speaking specifically about those who create temptations or stumbling blocks to faith in the hearts of others; He wasn't speaking of the brokenness of the world in general, much less morally situating all of us in regards to it. But learning a better reading of those scriptures never altered, I think, my sense that the KJV version really captured so much of what Paul supposedly wrote--and which, much later, Augustine and then Martin Luther would teach about as well. What is that teaching? It is about sin, about its omnipresence, about the way it infects and twists our every perception and action, and the fact that we are called to somehow love one another in the midst of it. We will fail, of course, and stand condemned for that failure--but God by His grace will also save us in that failure and condemnation. The experience of that grace in such a context isn't an experience of lightness; it is, rather, hard. It is something that, all things considered, we would rather have not needed in the first place. But need it, I think, we actually, most assuredly, do.

Here, on the last day of 2015, I look back on a year and see a lot of this kind of difficult grace, this kind of hard love. Maybe you've seen a lot of it as well--hard decisions about the saving or ending of weak and desperate lives, about the rescuing or fleeing of marriages, about opening oneself up to and learning to love a stranger in need or shutting out and accepting the hurt done to a loved one who has become a stranger to you. Whatever your experiences have been, I suspect you feel divided about them, just as I do. I'd be lying if I talked about how "grateful" I am for them, because I'm not: rather, as Frodo confessed to Gandalf, I wish these things "need not have happened in my time." But I'd also be lying if I pretended not to recognize the wisdom of Gandalf's reply: "So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." I look around, and I see offenses of every sort--intentional and unintentional, against loved ones and strangers, against adults and children. I would rather I was free of all of it, just as everyone does. And yet, sometimes I really am kind of happy for that hardness--because, if nothing else, it helps me (and others, all of whom need it just as much as me) see the difficult grace around us better than we could in a world wherein offenses and evils and complications did not come.

Martin Luther, speaking as a Christian prophet should, put it well: "This life is not godliness, but growth in godliness; not health, but healing; not being, but becoming; not rest, but exercise. We are not now what we shall be, but we are on the way; the process is not yet finished, but it has begun; this is not the goal, but it is the road; at present all does not gleam and glitter, but everything is being purified" (Luther, A Defense and Explanation of All Articles). That purity, as so many have put it, will hurt. Chosen or not, we stand here as God's children, committed to it. So here's to God's long and difficult love, a love which comes slowly and inevitably through and I think necessarily as a part of the brokenness and condemnation and failures of these lives we live. And let's wake up tomorrow, with the new year, and keep on keeping on.

The Ten Best Books I Read in 2015

This year's top ten reads reflects my interests pretty well: only one work of fiction, one memoir, one work of scripture, and the rest all research or theory related. I'm boring that way. In alphabetic order:

Ancient Israel: The Former Prophets: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, translated with commentary by Robert Alter. I've spent the entire year continuing to make my slow way through the Old Testament (Revised English Bible version), and I've gotten further than this essential companion book covers--I've also knocked off Chronicles, Ruth, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, and Job, as well as the Psalms (which I didn't love, but found surprisingly meaningful all the same). But this book will stay with me, I think, because I'm now into the literature and prophecy of the Old Testament, whereas Ancient Israel covered the crucial, and fascinating, period of both real-time and after-the-fact (re)constructions of Israel's collective memory, of how myths and legends and stories centuries old--all the tales from the Patriarchs to the Passover--became a part of their narrative of conquest, triumph, corruption, and defeat. A wonderful work of intellectual archaeology, one which helped me see crucial elements of ancient Israel's world in an entirely new light.

Community and the Politics of Place and The Good City and the Good Life, both by Daniel Kemmis. Departing from strict alphabetical order here, I read both of these books because I needed to--Kemmis's work had been siting on my shelf for too long, and while I'd read parts of both these books before, I couldn't remember having read them both all the way through, and I decided I needed to. Ultimately, that was a great decision, and not just because both are very good books. Reading them both also enabling me to see connections between them and other communitarian arguments from the 1990s which I didn't remember picking up on before. Community and the Politics of Place situated civic republican concerns and questions in the context of the sparsely inhabited American West, and thus brought forward ways in which resource-extraction and dependency, as well as broader ecological concerns, are important to our construction of community. The Good City and the Good Life extended upon that idea, linking the idea of community to the small democratic polity--in Kemmis's view, the small cities that he knew best, like the city of Missoula that he was mayor of--in ways that, I realized as I thought more about it, showed a way communitarianism could have developed that might have avoided the state-centric problems that hampered it's intellectual development. Anyway, two very good, thoughtful books.

The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America and The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City, both by Alan Ehrenhalt. Once again departing from strict alphabetical order, these were another two books that I picked up, after only have ever read parts of them before, intending to see what going all the way through them together would teach me. I wasn't disappointed, though there was a greater drop-off in the level of analysis from Lost City to The Great Inversion than was the case with Kemmis's two books. Still, Ehrenhalt had some really great observations to make in both cases; really this is a case of books that inspired me in terms of the theoretical connections between them, and the concepts which I saw being spun off by them, much more than in terms of the stories they actually told. In brief, Ehrenhalt makes wonderful observations, but behind all those observations lurks a concern with authority, identity, solidarity, and community in the context of urban life. They are related concepts that he saw as having been built and buttressed in many diverse ways two generations ago, then taken apart, and now (perhaps) being recovered in equally diverse and unexpected ways. Would any of his observations stand up to rigorous sociological analysis? Perhaps not. But they were greatly thought-provoking at the very least.

The Martian, by Andy Weir. A plain old delightful bit of hard science-fiction; in fact, maybe the purest bit of hard sci-fi I've ever read, because it closes off any and all of the larger possibilities of science-fiction by fitting its sci-fi premise (the near-future exploration of the planet Mars) into the fierce strictures of a survival story (can stranded astronaut Mark Watney survive alone on Mars, and can NASA figure out a way to save him?). Some of the characterizations were plainly taken right from the first-time-novelists file, but I didn't mind: what was matters was that Weir kept me guessing, and rooting from Watney, desperately using science and technology to do the impossible. The film version is often very good, but it doesn't hold a candle to the book.

Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom, by Jacob T. Levy. Written by an old friend and intellectual inspiration/goad to me, Levy's book is a serious, straightforward work of Western political theory, laying out the philosophical and the historical arguments for his construction of liberal ideas, and ably defending his own position regarding them. In a nutshell, he introduces his own spin on the classic "positive (freedom-to-do)/negative (freedom-from) liberty" argument, presenting the "rationalist" view of freedom as one which seeks to establish consistent, predictable, limited laws (which means, inevitably, the establishment of a reliably authoritative and therefore distant state), and the "pluralist" view as one which seeks to escape the disciplinary force of predictability by maintaining and strengthening local governments, traditional bodies, and independent sources of authority (which, in their closeness to out own lives, increases the likelihood of small infringements on liberty). Lining up John Stuart Mill and Lord Acton on the rationalist side, and Alexis de Tocqueville and Montesquieu on the "pluralist" side, Levy makes the case that we can't ever resolve liberalism on one side or the other (though his pluralist preferences are clear). I'll be writing more about this book for Bleeding Heart Libertarians soon, so stay tuned.

Small, Gritty, and Green: The Promise of America's Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World, by Catherine Tumber. I'd never heard of this book before about three months ago, and now I think it's one of the absolutely essential books to my whole research project on mid-sized cities (I wrote some about the book here). Tumber is a journalist and scholar from upper-state New York, who mourned the struggles cites she knew like Rochester, NY and Lowell, MA, have been going through over the past two decades. As the conversation about cities have changed in our adult lifetimes (hopeless cesspools in the 1970s, the future of the planet in the 2010s), she wondered: where do small cities, the cities that aren't linked into and benefiting from the financialization of global capitalism, the cities that once were the backbone of American manufacturing and agriculture before corporate farming and outsourcing destroyed them, fit in? Her answers are thoughtful, well-researched, and to me simply inspiring.

So Anyway..., by John Cleese. This autobiography/memoir continues my ongoing engagement with the legacy of the people and productions of Monty Python, the greatest team of comedy writers and performers in the whole history of the English language, or at least so I think. I've spent a lot of time thinking about Michael Palin, and this year I had the wonderful opportunity to think a lot about his most frequent acting partner and the dominant figure behind Python, the endlessly fascinating and frustrating John Cleese. If Palin was Python's surprisingly normal and patiently observant and kind-hearted Yin, then Cleese was Python's regularly angry, never satisfied, constantly striving Yang. A delightful and insightful read--I can't wait to dig into Gilliam's autobiography next.

The World Beyond Your Head: Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction by Matthew Crawford. more than six years ago, Crawford's first book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work simply blew me away: I thought it was the best and most original work of political and social philosophy that I'd read in years. Combining the insights of Marxist economics, Aristotlean moral thought, and a Heideggerian-influenced phenomenology, Crawford constructed a Laschian defense of manual labor and practical, artisanal skill. In this book, he dives even deeper into the phenomenology, adding too it research on cognitive psychology and the way in which such perspectives are deepening our understanding of the way humans make choices and process information about the world. His basic argument? It's almost impossible to summarize in a single sentence, but if I must, it's this: contemporary technology and economics have pushed us to accept as normal moving through constructed environments in which our ability to think steadily and productively about the sort of habits and forms of action which might actually add to our own individuality and thus to the richness of our social worlds have been crowded out, shouted down, made seem quaint and silly, by a constant stream of advertising, information, and noise. How's that? How to respond to this problem, and rediscover real individuality and connections with the real world? Read the book and find out.

The Ten Best Movies I Saw in 2015

As before, these are the ten best movies I managed to watch this year, whether they are old or new. In alphabetical order:

American Hustle: a movie with wonderful performances that were perfectly calibrated to the film's seedy, knock-off, deeply fake style, as communicated through the costuming, set design, and staging. The story--the Abscam affair as reflection of the hollowness of the American Dream--was merely okay, but we can overlook that.





Birdman: probably the best film I saw this year, at least when we're talking about what movies can do. Compelling story, presented to the audience through bizarre yet brilliant directorial conceits, and a performance by Michael Keaton at the center that was simply magnetic. It didn't stick the landing, I thought--the final scene actually pulled me out of the movie's spell, rather than sealing it for me. But other than that, fantastic.



Cinderella: a warm and non-cynical and completely unapologetic embrace of the story, told with a few original twists and touches, but mostly trusting that there is a reason why people love magical tales like these, and letting it do it's work. And work it most certainly did.






A Dangerous Method: a thoughtful recreation of a few particular people, ideas, and conflicts which characterized the fin de siècle world of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud--but the movie, at least to my mind, found clever ways to suggest the civic shakiness and the emotional danger inherent in their whole intellectual framework. Keira Knightly's performance creepily grows on you through the movie, as I think it was supposed to.



Get the Gringo: a sleazy and smart prison-break flick, with Mel Gibson as the one white American stuck in a Mexican jail. It traffics throughout in all sorts of crude stereotypes, but it can't be faulted for leaning on such stereotypes too much because it respects them, and allows those being caricatured to own their own identities. I kept thinking throughout of Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino, another crude but wise tough guy movie; Gringo might actually be better than that (I think overpraised) film, because it didn't aspire to anything beyond it's own genre.


Mad Max: Fury Road: the first of the two movies I saw this year whose visual story-telling was so powerful it elicited a real physical reaction from me as I sat in my seat in the theater and watched it; the protagonists' initial race for freedom, with the massive dust storm approaching, was so thrilling and awesome I was bouncing up and down in my seat, completely captivated. A gorgeously powerful, righteously feminist action film.



The Peanuts Movie: the second movie I saw this year that actually, physically moved me with its beauty. The style of its visuals could not possibly be more different than Fury Road's, but the animation conveyed a fantasy of the warmth and familiarity which folks like me have for these characters and the comic strip as a whole so well that, at one point during Snoopy's flight in his doghouse Sopwith Camel to save Fifi, I found myself smiling and weeping and shaking my head in admiration, all at the same time.



The Pledge: a hard, surprising police thriller. I never thought of Jack Nicholson as a subtle actor before, instead always expecting him to find the inner crazy within every character he plays, and use it to power his performance. But here, he sublimates the crazy so well that I didn't even realize I was looking at the psychological breakdown of the main character until the very end. A great, tense film.




Selma: an inspiring historical drama, with solid performances, and really very smart, subtle choices that, through a line of dialogue here or bit of pacing there, reminded the observant audience (like myself and a friend who teaches high school history; we talked about the concise smartness of this film for weeks) of the huge and complicated political and social conflict which surrounded Martin Luther King's powerful leadership and oratory.



The Zero Theorem: Terry Gilliam will never be able to recapture his glory years, I suppose, but unlike several of his recent movies, this film genuinely works. As a study of the manipulation, decline, and obsessive self-destruction of a brilliant mathematical and computational genius, Gilliam managed to invoke his own greatest movie, Brazil, with its familiar despairing, existential themes, but also bring his satire up to date in regards to both technology as well as corporate power. A worthy addition to his filmography.



Worthy runners-up: The Force Awakens (a solid B; a fun space adventure movie, nothing more or less) and The Martian (often, but not nearly often enough, up to the level of the book).