November 6, 2024 Posted by Jay Livingston Half a score and seven years ago, I said something (here) that I am now rethinking: Authoritarianism has always had some allure to some Americans, especially in times of crisis. In the Depression, people like Huey Long and Father Coughlin played to this sentiment with some success. But in the end they failed, and most people today have never heard of them. To some extent, it’s because of the eventual good sense of the American people. But more likely, our success in avoiding a Godfather government stems from the enduring institutions of our society ..read more

September 21, 2024 Posted by Jay Livingston “Two pair wahr,” said the young woman next to me in the Place Aristide Briand in Carpentras. We were both there for the marché aux truffes, a truffle market held every Friday morning in the cold months. The waitress at the restaurant Thursday night had told me about it, so Friday morning I was up early to make the half-hour drive. I was early. A few dozen people were standing in a loose circle. The farmers, with their baskets of truffles and their hand-held balance scales, stood in the center. At 8:45, someone blew a whistle and trading started. I ..read more

November 23, 2009 Posted by Jay Livingston I knew it was the ecological fallacy – using aggregate data to draw conclusions about individuals – but I took a shot. And even though I got a bull’s eye, more or less, the effect wasn’t what I’d hoped for. Here’s the story – sociological knowledge in action. I wanted to make a change in my phone account, so I tried the “chat with one of our representatives online” option. My chat window correspondent typed, by way of introduction, that she was Wendy M. Now Wendy was a name I hadn’t heard for a while. So as we were waiting for the system to registe ..read more

July 1, 2023 Posted by Jay Livingston I didn’t see this when it happened nearly three weeks ago. None of the three Jeopardy contestants knew “hallowed be thy name.” Nor, until now, was I aware of the distress and outrage it provoked. For me, it was déja vu. I was on Jeopardy fifty years ago. At the studio, before the taping began, they had some of the contestants do a practice round. Presumably, this was to help us feel comfortable with the cameras and lights and other aspects of the set. I was not one of those selected, so I sat nearby and watched. One of the categories on the board was ..read more

April 27, 2023 Posted by Jay Livingston Drew Maggi was a 15th-round draft pick by the Pirates in 2010. He played in the minor leages for thirteen years — Double-A and Triple-A farm teams of a half-dozen different MLB franchises, 1,155 games, 4,494 times at the plate,  Yesterday, three weeks shy of his 34th birthday, he made his first appearance in a MLB game. He was a pinch hitter in the bottom of the eighth inning in a game the Pirates (the division-leading Pirates!) were winning 8-1. He struck out. The fans cheered. They had cheered even more loudly the moment he was announced. All th ..read more

March 22, 2023 Posted by Jay Livingston During the protests over the killing of a Black man in Kenosha, WE, CNN reported that the demonstrations were “mostly peaceful.” Unfortuantely, the background visual behind the reporter showed a lot of fire. The right-wing had a field day. Technically, CNN was correct. The demonstrations were mostly peaceful. But that didn’t matter. What mattered were those who posed the greatest threats, the ones who torched those buildings. And now we have Tucker Carlson (here) saying that the “overwhelming majority” of people who invaded the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 ..read more

March 15, 2023 Posted by Jay Livingston In 2014, the Princeton Tory, the campus conservative publication, ran a piece condemning the phrase “check your privilege” and the ideas behind it (here). The author, Tal Fortgang complained that “the phrase . . . assumes that simply because I belong to a certain ethnic group I should be judged collectively with it,” Check-your-privilege diminishes “everything I have personally accomplished, all the hard work I have done in my life” and “ascrib[es] all the fruit I reap not to the seeds I sow but to some invisible patron saint of white maleness who plac ..read more

March 5, 2023 Posted by Jay Livingston What do our reactions to AI, UFOs, and DMT have in common? Ross Douthat, in today’s Times (here), has an answer: There is a shared spirit in these stories, a common impulse to the quests: the desire to encounter or invent some sort of nonhuman consciousness that might help us toward leaps that we can’t make on our own. The impulse is an ancient one: The idea tha one might bind a djinn, create a golem or manipulate a god or fairy to do your bidding is inscribed deep in the human imagination. Surprisingly, Douthat does not remind us that these deals ..read more

December 18, 2022 Posted by Jay Livingston Tom Lehrer has put all his songs online and has ceded all copyright protection. Performing and recording rights to all of my songs are included in this permission. Translation rights are also included. In particular, permission is hereby granted to anyone to set any of these lyrics to their own music, or to set any of this music to their own lyrics, and to publish or perform their parodies or distortions of these songs without payment or fear of legal action. [The full statement and the songs are here.] In the movie White Christmas, Danny Kay ..read more

November 18, 2022 Posted by Jay Livingston Dave Chappelle, in his SNL monologue, offered an insight about language that I’ve used a few times in this blog. It’s about adding the definite article “the” to a demographic category. Here’s how I put it in a blog post seven years ago after candidate Donald Trump (remember those good old days? they’re back) had told an interviewer, “I’d be phenomenal to the women.” When you add “the” to a demographic group and speak of “the women” or “the Blacks,” you are separating them from the rest of society. Without the definite article, they are include ..read more