#Jill Lepore, "The Age of Consent," The New Yorker, March 29, 2021. - "The Dutch, the Portuguese, and the English offset the cost of arms and men by buying and selling and exploiting the labor of -- stealing the lives of -- African men, women, and children. [Linda] Colley, a historian at Princeton, points out that nine of the first ten Federalist Papers concern the dangers of war and two more concern insurrection. Thirty of the fifty-five delegates had fought in the war for independence." "Wars make states make constitutions; states print constitutions; constitutions guarantee freedom of the press. In the nearly six hundred constitutions written between 1776 and about 1850, the right most frequently asserted -- more often than freedom of religion, freedom of speech, or freedom of assembly -- was freedom of the press."
"Before constitutions were written, women had informal rights in all sorts of places; constitutions explicitly excluded them, not least because a constitution, in Colley's formulation, is a bargain struck between a state and its men, who made sacrifices to the state as taxpayers and soldiers, which were different from the sacrifices women made in wartime." "The problem, in the United States, is that it is extremely difficult to amend the Constitution." "The system of government put in place by the Constitution is broken in all sorts of ways, subject to forms of corruption, political decay, and anti-democracy measures that include gerrymandering, the filibuster, campaign spending, and the cap on the size of the House of Representatives." Historically, American state constitutions have been amended over 7,500 times, amounting to an average of 150 amendments per state."
#Buce Dobbens, "Degrees of Emancipation," The New Yorker, April 26 & May 3, 2021. - "In his [Avineri's view, [Karl] Marx was inspired by the desperation of the 19th century working class, which cried out for immediate revolutionary change, more then by the Enlightenment ideals of liberty and justice, whose realization might be seen as following a less pressured timetable." "For Shlomo Avineri, author of 'Karl Marx: Philosophy and Revolution,' "the jarring experience inspired both Marx's commitment to an egalitarian universalism, and his skepticism as to whether liberalism could deliver on that commitment."
#David Treuer, "How to Kill a Hydra," The New Yorker, April 26 & May 3, 2021. - "But there are more than 20 petroleum pipelines projects (and some 22 national gas pipelines) currently under construction in the United States, crisscrossing the country, threatening land and water." "The forgoing crisis was largely the fault of the US government's gutting of the Glass-Steagall Act, and its unwillingness to regulate a predatory market full of bundled subprime mortgages, among other toxic assets."
"The struggle -- than as now -- is an older and bigger struggle between the common good and corporate profit, between the harms the US government has so long inflicted, and the values it professes." "The embrace of conspiratorial narratives has been particularly pronounced in GOP organizations." Treuer calls on all "American news organizations -- including TV, radio, and Social Media outlets -- to investigate, acknowledge, apologize, and make amends for their role in disseminating racist ideas and profiting from racist violence."
#Zoe Carpenter, "Going Viral," The New Yorker, April 26 & May 3, 2021. - "The GOP remains eager to weaponize misinformation, not only to win elections but also to advance its policy agenda." "One outcome of unplugging Trump and other right-wing influences has been a surge of interest in those alternative social media platforms, where more dangerous echo chambers can form and, in encrypted spaces. become more difficult to monitor."
"For now, the reforms at Facebook and other companies remain largely superficial. The platforms are still based on algorithms that reward outrageous content and are still financed via the collection and sale of user data." "According to Media Matters, Fox News pushed the idea of a stolen election nearly 800 times in the two weeks after declaring Biden the winner." "The far-right media ecosystem has become so powerful in part because there's no downside to lying."
#Alisa Solomon, "Theater Under Covid," The New Yorker, April 26 & May 3, 2021. - "A Brookings Institution analysis published over the summer estimated that the performing and fine arts industry had by that point --four months into the pandemic -- lost 1.4 million jobs and $42.5 billion in sales. And as a February, 'accountability report' states, more than 100 institutions have been taking steps toward 'naming and addressing the ten of white supremacy ingrained in our culture.' "
"According to the most recent surveys, more than 70 percent of writers whose work is produced on US stages are white men; 23 percent of acting contracts go to performers of color; 85 percent of directors at New York theater nonprofits are white -- and on Broadway, 94 percent."
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