Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

(Charles Platiau/Reuters)

I have a friend upstate whose tech job brings him once a week to the city. His urban workplace embodies the very latest theories of postindustrial aesthetics and worker productivity. The room has no drop ceiling; up there all the pipes are exposed. The floor plan is open, the tables communal. The floor is concrete, with no carpeting. The bareness, the acoustic brightness, and the abolition of privacy are meant to encourage interaction, spontaneous teamwork, and intellectual stimulation. Inspiration and ideas will zip back and forth, frictionless, just as they did at Menlo Park, Renaissance Florence, and Socrates Piraeus.

All my friends colleagues wear noise-canceling headphones so they can get a little work done.

I once gave a talk at the very model of the modern workplace, the campus of a great tech Oz (you use it every day). Inside, the buildings seemed composed of nothing but endless irregular hallways. Strung along these were a multitude of carrels, with here and there a snack bar. All the food on offer appeared to be cereal, as if the ideal worker was supposed to have three breakfasts a day. There were also laundry bins, in which you could deposit dirty clothes when you pulled (not that your bosses required it!) all-nighters. There were three classes of employees to be seen. The great majority resembled bright college kids, cleansed and slightly aged. They wore bland, sensible clothing, informal but neat, and all looked the same, despite slight differences in race (white, Asian) and sex (M, F this was before T). A second class, a small minority, were all men, perhaps 15 years older. They had long unkempt hair and beards and looked like Orthodox who had been living on the tundra because they would not cross themselves with three fingers. The final class contained a single individual: a dapper older man wearing a suit, necktie, and pocket square, with a trim beard. He seemed like the man behind the curtain. I learned later that he was one of the inventors of the Internet.

So much for the corporate workplace. Recently I have noticed, even in my neighborhood, a spin-off: the pop-up workplace. These appear in spaces once occupied by other businesses, which have been sitting vacant for a while. One popped up in the site of a vanished Asianish restaurant; another, where a bicycle-rental shop had been. From the street, these places look like knockoffs of the new corporate office: white, empty walls; scattered tables, as in a food court in an airport. Thermoses of coffee stand ready to keep the synapses firing. Seated at the tables one place had stools, the other actual chairs are people bent over their laptops. From day to day the people working are different, yet similar, much like the pigeons in the gutters outside.

You wonder: Why arent these people working at home? Are they traveling (but wouldnt their hotel rooms have desks and outlets)? Do they need a simple change of ambience from familiar apartment walls? Or, sober thought, do they live in apartments so subdivided this is the island at the heart of the city, not the dependent territories across the river that there is no space bigger than a lap on which to work at home, and so they must flee here? One day the space in the former restaurant was dark, disarrayed: no more work there. Where did its frequenters go?

There was, of course, the empire of workplaces that crashed and burned when it tried to go public. Its founder seems in retrospect to have been obviously bonkers, a person you would not trust to take a package to the post office, much less run a multibillion-dollar business, though since great wits are sure to madness near allied, it can always seem worthwhile to throw start-up money at someone beyond the fringes of normal, in the hope that he strikes it rich. This business model failed, but the workplace template that justified the model marches on. It touches, sad to say, the only job I have ever held, the only job I have ever wanted. The offices of this magazine are currently in by far the handsomest building we have ever occupied, a century-old fortress smack in Midtown, with a view looking down at the roof of the Harvard Club. Yet my heart sinks a little whenever I look in the main room and see my younger colleagues, strung out in rows as if waiting to take an eye exam for a drivers license or be summoned for a voir dire. When I first came to work here, three workplaces and four decades ago, I sat at a desk wedged between a filing cabinet and a bookshelf. But I occupied a room to myself, with a door that closed and a window that looked on an airshaft (at midsummer the sun paid it a brief visit). If I needed to wash my hands, I could step down the hall, without fetching a key with an idiot-proof fob. There was no cereal on offer, but there was a deli around the corner one way, and a bar that served burgers and chili around the corner the other. The bar displayed regimental paraphernalia behind the cash register; if you had been at Imjin River (which I had not), you drank for free. Some of the offices at the old workplace, it is true, were more crowded than mine, containing as many as two people.

All nostalgia of course, for a world that is both vanished and partial. Men and (lucky you!) women have worked together like sardines in tins for millennia. Galleys, quarries, cotton fields, factory floors: Poor children, snorted Gouverneur Morris, can be pent up, to march backward and forward with a spinning jenny, till they are old enough to become drunkards and prostitutes. Even a pencil-neck profession like journalism had bullpens. Typewriters when they all clacked together gave adrenaline shots.

But, but . . . those weird white walls.

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The Way We Work Now - National Review

New Delhi: Union Home Minister Amit Shah Kastar is campaigning in Delhi Assembly elections. Addressing a rally on this connection, Shah stated that for the primary time after the removing of Article 370, Kashmir will have a good time Republic Day with open thoughts and enthusiasm. This time the tricolor will unfurl on the day of Republic Day. Hands up, he instructed the individuals current within the assembly, 'Speak loudly, Bharat Mata ki Jai, in order that this voice reaches Shaheen Bagh.' Significantly, with a view to deal with the rallies in Delhi, this was the second rally of Amit Shah, which was held on Saturday at Bhalswa Dairy of Badli Assembly.

Addressing the individuals, Amit Shah stated that the election goes to be held on February 8, this election shouldnt be just for Delhi, however will determine the way forward for the complete nation.

->Attacking Kejriwal strongly, Shah stated, "He and his company kept making false promises for five years and pushed Delhi back 10 years." He stated, 'Ive not seen a authorities that competes to lie. I had yesterday requested Kejriwal that the place are 1000 faculties, the place are 50 schools, what occurred to 15 lakh CCTVs, free wifi, what occurred to 5000 DTC buses, the place is the promise of regularizing jobs. But Kejriwal went to Biffer.

Taking up the problem of polluted water in Delhi, Shah stated that the worst water in 21 cities of the nation is in Delhi. Delhi's water is like poison. Taking a dig at Kejriwal, he stated, 'I had stated that the federal government bungalow is not going to take the automobile. But took every little thing. Modiji wrote a letter twice in regards to the unauthorized colony, however didnt give the listing. Modiji approved 1731 colonies. The registration work began. Our authorities has promised that the place theres a slum, we are going to give homes, two-room homes can be given.

Pointing to the mountain of rubbish current in entrance of the gathering place, Shah stated, 'MCD will take away this rubbish mountain. But we promise that we are going to make the adjoining lake world-class and India's most lovely lake. He stated, 'In the Lok Sabha elections, within the MCD elections, the AAP is clear. You have shaped a authorities in Delhi that doesnt enable itself to work. Change the federal government of Delhi. Modiji additionally desires to alter Delhi. We will make Delhi essentially the most lovely capital of the world.

Referring to the Citizenship Amendment Bill and Section 370, Amit Shah stated, 'We took some huge selections, however it damage Kejriwal and Rahul Baba. These persons are protesting. Doing votebank politics. The entire nation wished Ram's grand temple to be constructed, however Congress, Mamta, Akhilesh have been all opposing it.

Referring to the brand new citizenship regulation, the Home Minister stated, 'We have simply enacted a regulation and given shelter to these brothers who have been tortured in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. On which there was extra on the premise of faith. But Kejriwal and Rahul Gandhi solely see politics. The Congress and AAP authorities disturbed the peace of Delhi. Rioted. Will you help the rioters? Should one be residing in Shahnibagh? If he goes to Delhi in his fingers, then Delhi will finish.

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After the abolition of 370, the tricolor will unfurl in Kashmir: Amit Shah - Sahiwal Tv

Long before monuments were generating debates, protests and headlines over what and who should be commemorated, the Polish-born conceptual artist Krzysztof Wodiczko was broadening the scope of what memorials around the world could be, taking them well beyond their makers intentions.

Since the 1980s, he has been projecting videos onto historical statuary and structures, making monuments into megaphones for the powerless in society. War veterans, Hiroshima survivors, the grieving mothers of murdered children, abused female laborers all have proclaimed their personal stories from these pedestals.

Monuments can be useful for the living, said Mr. Wodiczko, 76, at his studio in the East Village, the New York neighborhood he has called home since 1983. (Mr. Wodiczko, who is married to the painter Ewa Harabasz, commutes each week to Cambridge, Mass., where he has taught for the last decade at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.) Sometimes its safer and easier for people to tell the truth in public, he mused.

Two socially and politically charged public projections are currently bringing new life to monuments in Manhattan. After dusk each evening in Madison Square Park, continuing through May 10, the faces and hands of 12 resettled refugees animate the 1881 bronze statue honoring Adm. David Glasgow Farragut, a Civil War hero, which was designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The refugees, in a looping projection by Mr. Wodiczko, recount their harrowing journeys to the United States from their war-torn countries, including Syria, Guatemala and Mozambique.

People dont really know what it means to be stateless and to flee, one participant from Burma said in a recent phone interview. (Like the other refugees in the video, her identity is cloaked to protect family members back home.) It was an opportunity to tell people that refugees are not here just to take, she added.

A man who fled from Afghanistan said by telephone that he found participating to be cathartic. It was really important for me to get it off my chest, he said. No one in the world would ever choose to take refuge in another country. They will be compelled for whatever reason.

In late summer, on Governors Island, Mr. Wodiczko hopes to launch drones equipped with screens that project the blinking eyes and voices of young immigrants. It is a new iteration of the project Loro (Them) presented in Milan last year. The drones actually look at us and speak, like angels, he said.

Intense during conversations, he is immediately engaging, and also mirthful. Mr. Wodiczko described himself as a refugee, but autobiography is not a part of his work. I am against ego art, he said.

Krzysztofs own personal story is so steeped in trauma and he has an incredibly special gift for coaxing this out of people, said Jill Medvedow, the director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. She commissioned the artists Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown, Mass., in 1998, a part of the city that had a high murder rate from 1975 through 1996 and a rigid code of silence that left the majority of those murders unsolved. On the obelisk he projected bereaved mothers talking about their sons murders.

What I remember most was that he got these mothers to speak, Ms. Medvedow said. It did bring people together to see it. It had a healing factor.

Mr. Wodiczko was born in Warsaw in 1943, three days before the start of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the enormous act of Jewish resistance during World War II. His mothers side of the family were among the thousands of Jews who perished. As a baby, he was hidden with his mother, then smuggled through the front line to the Soviet side with the help of his fathers family, who were Christian.

Mr. Wodiczkos earliest memories were of returning to Warsaw after the war. Youre just on the ruins of everything, human and physical, he said.

The artist enacted his first public intervention in Poland in 1969 as a response to suppression under Communist-party rule. After receiving his graduate degree in industrial design, he created a headset and hand sensors that selectively filtered the sounds of the street as he walked through Warsaw wearing this equipment. Personal Instrument showed Mr. Wodiczko, like a conductor, exerting his freedom of choice, tuning out the megaphones telling you how you should live under the authoritarian regime.

In the mid-1970s, while working in Canada as a visiting artist, Mr. Wodiczko was called to the consulate in Toronto and told that the Polish government had decided for him that he lived in Canada permanently. I was kicked out of Poland, he said, incredulously. After that, he would have to apply for a visa to visit his homeland.

He moved to the gentrifying East Village. His first collaboration with a marginalized group began in 1988, when the homeless crisis peaked with the Tompkins Square Park demonstrations, near where Mr. Wodiczko lived in an apartment without heat. Of course I had a much better situation than they did, Mr. Wodiczko said of the homeless men he enlisted as consultants in the design of his Homeless Vehicle. The cart, with a missile-like projection, could be wheeled through the city and expanded for sleeping and bathroom facilities, as well as storage for can collections.

It wasnt designed as a solution but to expose a situation that should not exist in a civilized world, said Mr. Wodiczko, who showed photographs of the men and these structures in an art gallery.

The vision of New Yorks homeless pushing these vehicles was a kind of nightmare, said Manuel Borja-Villel, the director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. The dystopia of the artists objects is a key element that made his work very relevant in the 1980s, he said, and even more relevant today. (Mr. Wodiczko received the Hiroshima Art Prize for his achievement in contemporary art and his contribution to world peace.)

In A House Divided, which goes on view Saturday at Galerie Lelong in Chelsea, Mr. Wodiczko tries to mediate the polarization threatening to rip apart the United States.

For the first time, monuments will engage in a conversation. Two eight-foot-high models of Abraham Lincoln face off, each animated by projections of residents from Staten Island, which in the 2016 election split almost 50-50 along party lines. Mr. Wodiczko filmed people who know each other friends, colleagues, even family members expressing opposing viewpoints, which bounce back and forth across the twin Lincolns. Their responses show more civility than is typically depicted by the media, he noted.

The dialogue is the issue here, said Mr. Wodiczko. This project is not curing the problem but more a recognition of somebody elses point of view.

At the Harvard Art Museums this fall, he plans to stage a debate with two replicas of a Gilbert Stuart painting of George Washington and projections of students exploring the meaning of democracy today.

Mr. Wodiczkos large-scale installations sell in the low- to mid-six figures, largely to institutions like the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, Fundaci Antoni Tpies in Barcelona, Spain, and the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto in Japan.

A coming documentary by Maria Niro, The Art of Un-War, will explore Mr. Wodiczkos 50-year career shaking up the publics complacency around war. A focal point is his proposal, first made in 2010, to temporarily transform the Arc de Triomphe in Paris glorifying the armies of the Frances Revolution and empire into the World Institute for the Abolition of War. It called for this war monument to be enclosed in a latticelike structure that would allow the public to see its friezes up close while encouraging peace activists to gather.

This proposition is a culmination of all his work, Ms. Niro said. Hes really questioning war in its entirety.

Though it may never be realized during his lifetime, the proposal was an inspiration and provocation, Mr. Wodiczko said. The main narrative of this Arc de Triomphe is that the path to peace is war, which is an absurd idea.

The Arc de Triomphe is the mother of all this nonsense all over the world, he said. Everything in this monument needs to be discussed.

Monument

Through May 10 at Madison Square Park, Manhattan; madisonsquarepark.org.

Krzysztof Wodiczko: A House Divided

Saturday through March 7 at Galerie Lelong, Manhattan; galerielelong.com.

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A Monument Man Gives Memorials New Stories to Tell - The New York Times

Sayles Hall on the campus of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, is pictured on April 25, 2019. (Photo by Lane Turner / The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

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When interpersonal harm or violence occurs on a college campus, it can feel like the only options are penalwhich can create new harmor that there is no accountability at all. With no accountability, there often is no healing, either. For a student like Alex, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, another option was desperately needed.Ad Policy

When Alex was a sophomore, she was sexually assaulted by another student on her dorm floor. She saw him every morning as she left for class and every evening when she brushed her teeth in the bathroom down the hall. She became intimately aware of the difficulty, even the trauma, of living in close community with the person who had harmed her.

This story was produced for Student Nation, a section devoted to highlighting campus activism and student movements from students in their own words. For more Student Nation, check out our archive. Are you a student with a campus activism story? Send questions and pitches to Samantha Schuyler at samantha@thenation.com. The Student Nation program is made possible through generous funding from The Puffin Foundation.

For Camila Pelsinger, one of Brown Universitys first transformative justice student coordinators, this story was all too common. Now a senior, Pelsinger was in her first year when she started working on sexual violence prevention education on campus. From the beginning, she said, she could see that few survivors felt comfortable using the existing institutional systems of accountability, like Title IX and the criminal justice system. Most survivors I worked with had no desire to report the incident and go through a hearing and investigation, knowing the defense would likely deny the incident had happened or, even worse, blame the survivor for what happened, she said. And she remembered how she would watch survivors like Alex navigate this impossible choice over and over again. If they didnt want to use the legal system, survivors across campus were just forced to share spaces and communities with the very people who had assaulted them, with no opportunity to get any semblance of justice.

This dilemma for survivorsbetween staying silent or relying on the criminal legal system or punitive campus processes, like Title IXfelt all the more salient on a campus where anti-prison and abolitionist values run deep in many organizing communities and campus spaces. Because of this, Pelsinger spearheaded an investigation into students experiences of harm on campus, seeking student testimony around how individuals utilize legal or institutional processes, like Title IX, and how communities seek accountability themselves.

After a year of advocacy, these findings turned into the opening of the universitys first transformative justice program and the creation of two-year pilot position, which recruited Dara Kwayera Imani Bayer, a Brown alumnus, transformative justice practitioner, and public school teacher in Boston, as the nations first formal transformative justice practitioner on a college campus.

Student activism in the last decade has worked to bring greater consciousness on campus of the ways that punitive systems entrench white supremacy, patriarchy and classism, and how complicit higher education is in mass incarceration. Students Against the Prison Industrial Complex, one iteration of abolitionist organizing on campus, successfully campaigned to make The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander, the required first-year reading the year Pelsinger was admitted to Brown. In the years since, other campaigns emerged to organize against incarceration in a variety of ways, from a proposal for a Brown Incarceration Initiative that would provide credit-carrying classes to incarcerated students, to Railroad, a student group fighting for university hiring practices that disregard conviction history. A core tenant of this activism, and abolitionist work more generally, is the understanding that no human being is disposable. When someone commits harm, locking them up in prisons provides no growth, education, or help for that individualand, most of all, it doesnt center the survivors healing.

The experiences of students like Alex, gathered through extensive focus groups and campus conversations, showed Pelsinger and other student activists that this was needed for all kinds of harm, not just sexual assault. In each focus group with student leaders, I asked how they addressed harm and violence when it occurred within their communities, and every single student had the same response: They didnt. This startling pattern encouraged her to push for something that could emerge as that resource: transformative justice on campus. She spent the following months meeting with administrative officials to share the findings from the focus groups, drawing up a position description, and advocating for a new transformative justice program.Current Issue

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Models and practices of transformative justice look different all over the world, but they all reject the state as the source of accountability and instead see community networks, relationships, and support systems as the alternative. Community accountability frameworks like transformative justice emerged from and are rooted in indigenous, black, queer, and other marginalized communities, who have historically been subjected to the violence of the states justice. Community accountability processes use facilitators to guide conversations among the person who was harmed, the person who caused harm, and the communities they share. It is, at its core, a penal abolitionist political framework that seeks to create mechanisms of accountability within communities themselves.

For survivors like Alex, this could look like a facilitator working with Alex, the student who assaulted her and some of their dorm peers, to guide conversation around questions about the impact this had on Alex, and how can their shared peers can best support her. How can their community come together to help Alex feel safe, while supporting her perpetrator in transforming his behavior? Were there existing conditions within the community that allowed the harm to happen, and how can they be changed? This could take many forms, too: with Alex in the room or not, letting a letter written by Alex to be read aloud by a proxy, inviting other networks of support each person has outside the dorm, but it must always be one thingconsensual. It would be, above all else, an option for Alex, a resource available to survivors like her if they choose.

On Browns campus, there were plenty of communities, well beyond just decarceration activists, who craved a resource like this.

Transformative justice exists for communities to solve problems on their own terms, in ways that arent punitive, Bayer said. Thats where my work lives. Upon arriving, one of the first things Bayer did was ensure that others were learning how to do this work: She brought on Pelsinger and Xochi Cartland as student coordinators and began recruiting for an intensive year-long program for student transformative justice practitioners. The idea of the cohort was simple: Bring students together from as many different spaces as possible in order to bring transformative justice back to all of those communities.

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It also has a broader goal, too: to ensure that transformative justice doesnt just live on campus. The ethic of transformative justice demands that its practices are not confined to elite spaces like Brown, especially in the context of the historic and present-day harm the school has created in the greater Providence community. Part of Bayers mission, she said, will be to build authentic partnerships with Providence community members in an effort to determine ways to collaboratively engage in transformative justice practices in spaces off campus, too. This emphasis is an effort to redistribute resources in ways that support self-determination of communities impacted by historic and current harm.

Now a semester into the training, the 12 students in the cohort spend their time hearing lecturers, reflecting, and holding Circle, a facilitation technique that fosters connection and voice. According to Bayer, that last part is key. The best way to do this type of work is through practice. Its not something you can just theorize aboutyou have to live it and do it. We have to really experience what that feels to create a space where people can be intentionally seen and heard and valued.

For Kuno Haimbodi, one student in the cohort, this meant holding conversations with fellow black student organizers on campus. For Leah Shorb, it was working within her athletic teams. Each of the 12 students are working within their own communitiesteams, groups, clubs, friends, communities they live with or organize with. They first determine the needs each community has, what kinds of harm occurs, and then move into conversation about how to address it.

Both Haimbodi and Shorb came to learn about transformative justice and the cohort through their prison abolition work. People are so caught up in the fact that if someone makes a mistake, they need to face a specific consequence. If youve never even met the person, if youre not the person who was harmed, why are you so convinced that this person needs to pay, needs to suffer, in order to have balance? Haimbodi said. People see justice as wanting people to face retaliation. When I think about meaningful changes to the carceral state, I know there are other ways.

All of the students in the cohort share the belief that there must be another option available to students that centers the needs of the person harmed without relying on the legal system. According to the students involved, as the first campus to do this in the country, imagining the implications of this program is both exciting and overwhelming. As a prison abolitionist, Im always practicing radical imagination by asking, what could this really become? Shorb paused for a moment to think. When I think about the future of this program, I would love for the cohort to be trained to train other people, so that these skills are spread wider and wider. I want Circle processes to reach all communities as a resource that they can call on when they need it, and for it to just grow and grow. I can see that happening. I really can. And Im hopeful.

The work is just beginning, but Bayer and this first cohort are committed to longevity. I hope to just be that drop in the water, causing a ripple. That image of a ripple is how I think about what this work looks like, Bayer said, drawing bigger and bigger circles on her palm, to mimic ripples. Its these small interventions. When I can support individuals in engaging with their communities and healing from harm, and then they can do the same in their own relationships. its a ripple effect. Thats powerful.

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These Students Are Bringing Transformative Justice to Their Campus - The Nation

(CN) Franois hauled his heavy, expensive camera via train from Lucerne in the French part of Switzerland to shoot B-roll video for a large European insurance company that had an outsize presence on the main street outside of the World Economic Forum in Davos.

This thing is all bullshit, he said, waving toward the Congress Center, where most of the main events of the 50th Annual World Economic Forum take place. Theyll talk about solving global problems and climate change, but really its just a bunch of rich people figuring out ways to stay rich.

Franois last name is omitted to protect his identity and his freelance business.

He speaks for many who have come to see the week-long event at Davos as a symbol for greed, inequality, environmental destruction and an economic system that is designed by the elite to keep money flowing one direction into the hands of a few.

Franois is shooting video on the Promenade, the main street through Davos.

Most weeks shop owners sell wine, ski gear, haircuts, alcohol or whatever else is desired by the outdoor enthusiasts who flock to Davos to try their mettle on the steep Alpine slopes.

But come the third week in January, these small businessmen rent out their storefronts to the most powerful corporations in the world. Salesforce, Tradeshift, Facebook and IBM all had a major presence along the Promenade leading to the Congress Center.

The closer to the heavily guarded entrance gate, the higher the status of the corporation.

This almost ceremonial homage to capitalism and its biggest players has made Davos so important for corporate CEOs, politicians, nonprofit leaders and activists, but has also created a populist hostility to the event not lost on its founder.

When we look around the world, we cant deny that there is a general loss of trust and confidence, said Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum. It is coupled with a profound pessimism and cynicism.

More than 500 people marched 26 miles from Klosters to Davos, at times blocking traffic and chanting about the abolition of billionaires, but at all times expressing the anger and despair the global working class harbors for the elite.

There is an age of despair out there and thats driving what youre seeing in every continent with people pouring into the streets, said Sharan Burrow, a labor leader from Australia, who spoke inside the forum seemingly on behalf of the throngs who did not get an invitation.

Internationalism and its limits

Schwab and other Davosites have long carried water for the dream of a multilateral world where international cooperation and global economic integration brings more peace and prosperity to more corners of the world.

They say this notion epitomizes the Spirit of Davos

Sustainable progress and sustainable peace are impossible to reach without a common nation among nations, said Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, during the opening night ceremonies.

While few would take issue with the expressed sentiment, many say it is a palatable veneer meant to disguise the darker forces of economic globalism, entailing supply chain disruption, the insatiable quest for cheap labor and the marginalization of working-class people the world over.

Multilateralism is in crisis, Burrow said.

She and her supporters point to Brexit, to convulsions of protests throughout the world, whether in Chile, Lebanon, Hong Kong or Germany.

The election of Donald Trump can also be viewed through this prism.

Trumps America First agenda and hostility to the type of internationalism that Davos is typically keen to peddle made his appearance as a keynote speaker at the World Economic Forum this week particularly tense.

A nations highest duty is to its own citizens, Trump said, giving no ground to an audience ostensibly keen to hear a different message. Honoring this truth is the only way to build faith and confidence in the market system. Only when governments put their own people first will people be fully invested in their national futures.

His nationalist message diverged completely from other leaders who at least paid lip service to the central tenets of the Spirit of Davos free trade, economic and social liberalism, multilateral institutions like the United Nations and the World Trade Organization and with an abhorrence for things like tariffs and other trade restraints, and nationalism.

But Trump trashed free trade during his remarks, saying past trade deals victimized blue-collar workers and encouraged companies to make things in other countries and then sell them back. He harped on the now-defunct North American Free Trade Agreement as just one example.

The NAFTA agreement exemplified the decades-long failures of the international system, Trump said. The agreement shifted wealth to the hands of a few, promoted massive outsourcing, drove down wages, shut down plants and factories by the thousands.

Many remained critical of Trumps pitch, noting that problems like climate change require more global cooperation, not less. If one country reduces emissions, it matters little if all the rest fail to curtail their own contributions, said several speakers during the event. Care of the oceans and other matters requires cooperation too, according to old guard Davosites like Angela Merkel, who has addressed the World Economic Forum 12 times during her long tenure as Germanys chancellor.

We have seen environmental problems come to the fore, said Merkel during her speech on Thursday. So in regard to sustainability we will see the world converging more and more.

Merkel, though, has also come under increasing pressure back home as the backlash against globalism has touched Germany and many other prominent members of the European Union.

The Spirit of Davos

Perhaps the most full-throated endorsement of Davos tenets came from Han Zheng, vice premier of China, which may be looking to usurp Americas former place as the tip of the globalist spear.

Back in 2017, President Xi delivered a historic speech here, expressing firm support for economic globalization a message that resonated far and wide, Zheng said. Acting as stakeholders in a cohesive and sustainable world is very relevant today, and the essence of multilateral cooperation defines the Spirit of Davos.

Klaus Schwab, the Davos forums founder, couldnt have said it better.

But there remains deep unease with Chinas rise, judging by the discussions both on and offstage at Davos.

China has to find a way to make people trust them, said Charles Li, CEO of Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearings.

Given the choice between Americas unilateralism and its newfound penchant for tariffs, and Chinas espousal of the Davos ethos, most of those queried while in Switzerland would still choose America.

The question then becomes whether the backlash is temporary. Is Trumpism in America and the rise of nationalism on all continents throughout the globe a passing fever?

There is a real risk we will see deglobalization going forward, said Michael Froman, who served as the U.S. Trade Representative under Barack Obama.

Perhaps.

But its too soon to completely write off the Spirit of Davos.

We are in such a global mutual dependency that all of this is semantics, said Li. He added that the rise in nationalism across the globe could be ascribed to the fact that politicians have to satisfy their own domestic political needs.

Many in attendance besides Li believe climate change will galvanize the global community to work closer together. Some see the interconnectedness of technology making the approximately 190 nations of the world inextricable.

But Trump, Burrow and the legion of protesters have at the very least ensured that the devoted Davosites who recently projected themselves as the ones with all the answers leave the 50th iteration of the global economic forum with some questions.

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Davos: Globalist Retreat in the Rise of Nationalism - Courthouse News Service

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Senator Nina Turner

Two years before his death, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King wrote that there is no way merely to find work, or adequate housing, or quality-integrated schools for Negroes alone. We could only achieve these goals, he said, by pursuing them for all people regardless of their race, gender, class or creed.

Dr. Kings belief in universal programs as the key to our nations shared prosperity has long been central to the African American tradition. For centuries, Black men and women have struggled to guarantee human rights and economic securitynot just for themselves, but for everyone. Their perseverance in this universal cause has resulted in the greatest strides towards progress that this country has ever made.

For example, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished chattel slavery, established equal protection under the law, and protected the right to vote, benefited people of all races. Reconstruction, which created public schools in the South and advanced the interests of poor farmers, benefited people of all races. And the Civil Rights Movement, which brought an end to the Jim Crow era, benefited people of all races.

Even accomplishments that we do not associate exclusively with civil rights and racial justice would not have been realized without Black leadership and struggle. Social Security and Medicare, key pillars of our safety net, were won by working-class movements in which African Americans played a central role. Millions upon millions of elderly people have been rescued from poverty thanks to their efforts.

The elites who would rather see us divided have tried to limit these victories every step of the way. At times, like during the early Jim Crow years, they resorted to open violence, hoping to terrorize us into submission. More recently they have relied on the less visible but no less real violence of budget cuts and austerity. But because of the overwhelming popularity of policies in which everyone has a stake, they have not been able to do away with these hard-earned achievements for good.

This history provides a lesson: rather than adopting a narrow focus on the differences between us, the best way to advance the age-old struggle for racial justice and freedom is through universality.

African Americans are 50% more likely than our white sisters and brothers to be uninsured. This together with the stresses of economic hardship leaves us with worse health outcomes by almost any measure. We suffer from higher rates of hypertension, diabetes, asthma, and maternal mortality. The only way out of this public health crisis is through a Medicare for All system thatprovides every single person with access to the kind of care that the rich take for granted as their birthright.

We are 25% less likely to graduate from college yet have more student debt than anyone else. Black women like myself are the most indebted of all. I have served as a City Councilwoman and a State Senator and like millions of others still have monthly student loan payments. Free public higher education and the cancellation of student debt would enable millions of African Americans to get the education they want but currently cannot afford.

We are twice as likely to be unemployed, and the jobs we do have are more likely to pay starvation wages. This is the reason why the poverty rate among African Americans is so much higher than the national average. There is no better anti-poverty program than a federal jobs guarantee and labor laws that make it easier to unionize.

A Green New Deal would make desperately needed investments in our communities and go a long way towards addressing the environmental racism African Americans in urban and rural areas alike endure. A national housing program would benefit African Americans who, because of the history of redlining and segregation, are disproportionately renters, living month to month at the whims of predatory landlords and forces of gentrification.

The list goes on and on.

Those who benefit from the status quo will tell us that these are radical ideas that the American people will never accept. But we should remember that the abolition of slavery was a radical idea until it was not. Social Security and Medicare were radical ideas until they were not. The integration of public schools was a radical idea until it was not. For people in my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, public goods that alleviate the stress caused by economic insecurity are not pie in the sky proposals. They are much deserved and long overdue.

More than fifty years after Reverend Kings death, we have yet to achieve the basic level of economic security for all that he understood to be a precondition for true racial justice. But as the great civil rights leader Ella Baker put it, We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes. This year, we have an opportunity to take a step in that direction. So, in the months to come let us dedicate ourselves to bringing people together around a vision that works for all of us. If we do, we can finally create the foundation for a truly just and free society.

NinaTurneris a former Ohio state senator and the national co-chair of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders presidential campaign.

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MLK, We Must Commit to The Work That Cost Him His Life - Dallasweekly

History has tended to sanitize the lives of abolitionists, many of whom were involved in other radical movements as well, including Free Love, which promoted womens independence and an end to traditional marriage.

American Radicals: How Nineteenth-Century Protest Shaped the Nation

Holly Jackson

American Radicals establishes the truly riotous nature of nineteenth-century activism, chronicling the central role that radical social movements played in shaping U.S. life, politics, and culture. Holly Jacksons cast of characters includes everyone from millenarian militants and agrarian anarchists to abolitionist feminists espousing Free Love. Rather than rehearsing nineteenth-century reform as a history of bourgeois abolitionists having tea and organizing anti-slavery bazaars for their friends, Jackson offers electrifying accounts of Boston freedom fighters locking down courthouses and brawling with the police. We learn of preachers concealing guns in crates of Bibles and sending them off to abolitionists battling the expansion of slavery in the Midwest. We glimpse nominally free black communities forming secret mutual aid networks and arming themselves in preparation for a coming confrontation with the state. And we find that antebellum activists were also free lovers who experimented with unconventional and queer relationships while fighting against the institution of marriage and gendered subjugation. Traversing the nineteenth-century history of countless strikes, raids, rallies, boycotts, secret councils, [and] hidden weapons, American Radicals is a study of highly organized attempts to bring down a racist, heteropatriarchal settler stateand of winning, for a time.

Reframing the nineteenth-century United States as a war society, Jackson helps us to see social movementsfrom abolitionism and labor to feminism and early environmental activismas a continuation of the Revolutionary War by other means.

Jackson illuminates how the creative and performative qualities of nineteenth-century public protest sought to interrupt the status quo. When, in 1854, 50,000 people showed up in Boston to protest the return of fugitive slave Anthony Burns back to slavery, an act authorized by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, protestors staged an elaborate funeral for democracy: black crepe adorned the street, a huge U.S. flag was hung upside down, and a coffin labeled Liberty was hung out of a building while the crowd below shouted Shame! at federal troops deployed to transport Burns back to the South. Then, as now, the threatening spectacle of both police and military were marshalled as a bellicose display intended to intimidate the massive politicaland creativeenergy of protestors who dared to question the nations daily acts of anti-democratic violence and violation of its own founding documents.

The antebellum United States was a deeply unstable formation, suffused with the symbolic and physical traces of the Revolutionary War and, government officials feared, teetering on the verge of anarchy. Reframing the nineteenth-century United States as a war society, Jackson helps us to see social movementsfrom abolitionism and labor to feminism and early environmental activismas a continuation of the Revolutionary War by other means. In other words, the militancy of the American Revolution lived on in the many factions and revolts that fomented among the nations multitude.

The United States sought to reaffirm its sovereignty through routine celebrations of its independence from Britain. But a militaristic society always celebrating its freedom from tyranny is a powder keg: it constantly threatened to tip over into rebellion against a standing government that many deemed illegitimate. In this way, when African Americans in Boston dressed up and walked in parades celebrating the abolition of the slave trade, they werent participating in a quaint ritual that reaffirmed the U.S. social order: they were reminding the nation of its recent betrayal of its black citizens, who took up arms and joined the fight against the British in the name of freedom but still remained in chains. Their presence in the streets must have registered to onlookers as a haunting, insurgent body, in formation and ready to revolt, to start the nation anew or to jettison it for a completely new form of governance.

Activists across various reform movements continued to return to the countrys founding documentsnotably the Constitution and the Declaration of Independenceas well as the events of the Revolutionary War as inspiration in their struggle to dismantle structures of exploitation and oppression. This was not based in some sense of idealism about the nations character or potential: for most nineteenth-century radicals, especially those dispossessed, displaced, and held in captivity, the nation was helpful only insofar as it was a commonplace for revolutionary rhetoric. Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson calls the Constitution one of the most successful counterrevolutionary schemes ever devised, but notes that, as an ur-fetish, it has often served as a site of social cohesion. American Radicals is, in many ways, a history of what was done with that founding fetish.

Sex radicalism was prominent within the broader terrain of anti-slavery. Indeed, abolitionists were often discredited in the press for their reputation as queers.

Jacksons story of collective action is told, somewhat paradoxically, through a set of individual biographies. For example, she traces black intellectual and activist Martin Delanys journey from antebellum militancy to a baffling postwar conservatism. Readers will also learn about the inspiring rise and then tragic downfall of Franny Wright, a European heiress who believed so strongly in the ideals espoused during the American Revolution that she moved to the United States to help bring about the nations unfulfilled promise of freedom and liberty for all. A supporter of Free Love, she agitated for the abolition of marriage, became a notorious figure in the press, and founded a utopian settlement on indigenous lands in Nashoba, Illinois, that ultimately reproduced the gravest errors of the nations founders.

American Radicals is particularly attentive to the long and storied career of William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist leader and staunch radical pacifist who was unrelenting in his hatred of the U.S. government. For Garrison, the United States was an unsalvageable formation. Garrison burned the Constitution before a Boston crowd; he rejoiced when the South seceded from the Union; he, like other members of the Non-Resistance movement, did not vote, pay taxes, or serve in the military. Amid the intensification of anti-black state violence and surveillance in the 1850s, along with the expansion of slavery into the Midwest, Garrisons political commitments were pushed to the brink: at a speech in Boston after John Browns execution, Garrison called out to his fellow Non-Resistants, dwindling in number by the 1850s, but then went on to wish success to every slave rebellion in the South. This was an incredible reversal for Garrison, who had preached total pacifism since the 1830s. Garrison ultimately locked arms with abolitionists who advocated the use of force as he became increasingly aware that the United States was never going to voluntary give up its reliance on enslaved labor.

Jacksons book highlights the degree to which nineteenth-century social movements were deeply interconnected, drawing inspiration from one another and often sharing members, even meeting space. Spanning from the beginning of organized abolition in the 1830s to the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s, American Radicals explores not just coalitional successes, but also the critical moments when alliances broke down. For example, Jackson details the splintering between anti-racism and suffrage after the war, when white suffragists sought to mainstream their struggle by disconnecting it from racial equality. At the 1869 Equal Rights Association meeting in New York, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton showed up to face down Frederick Douglass, who had been a longstanding defender of suffrage but was critical of members of the movement who had turned their back on black Americans. When Douglass stood up to deliver his remarks at the meeting, Anthony jumped to her feet and charged down the aisle toward Douglass. Douglass, in turn, raised his hand while declaring, No, no Susan. Susan sat down.

Jacksons account of the 1850s is especially energetic. The decade witnessed an intensification of anti-abolitionist and anti-black violence, growing sectionalist discord, the territorial expansion of slavery, and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. The shift to direct action and use of force among abolitionists in the 1850s shines through in Jacksons meticulous, play-by-play account of John Browns plot to capture the national armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and thus (he hoped) begin an insurrection that would end slavery and topple the U.S. government. Jacksons account of the raid on Harpers Ferry as a highly orchestrated but also deeply collective action, involving many networks of black abolitionists, allows her to subsequently reconceptualize the beginning of the Civil War as one of Confederate insurgency. In the aftermath of the states violent suppression of the rebellion, Confederate insurgents captured the arsenal at Harpers Ferry for themselves. This is a helpful reminder that well before the Civil War was officially declared, violent, extralegal battles were being waged directly between abolitionists and white supremacists. In other words, by the time the Civil War was declared, it had already been underway for years.

Sex scandals plagued abolitionists, many of whom were committed to what was then called Free Love: they denounced their marriage vows, had affairs, and were polyamorous.

American Radicals is perhaps most groundbreaking for how it illuminates the place of sexual freedom within the history of nineteenth-century reform. Sex radicalism, experiments in communal living, and free love were prominent within the broader terrain of anti-slavery, labor, anarchist, and feminist activism in the nineteenth century. Yet histories of abolition have long sanitized the movement, overlooking the extent to which anti-slavery activists were often also involved with movements to abolish marriage and dismantle heteropatriarchy. Indeed, abolitionists and other reformists were often discredited in the press for their fanaticism and for their reputation as queers.

Sex scandals plagued abolitionists such as Fanny Wright and Henry Ward Beecher. Many were committed to what was then called Free Love (disconnected in time though not in spirit from the Free Love movement of the 1960s): they denounced their marriage vows, had affairs, were polyamorous. Jackson takes political and erotic desireand their intersectionseriously, in a way that has rarely been the case for scholars of abolition. As a result, American Radicals liberates abolitionist history from the stuffy confines of Civil War historiography, a tradition that has long leaned toward nationalism and sexual normativity. So doing, Jackson not only offers a compelling revision of abolitionist history, but offers a long-hidden genealogy for todays queer and trans abolitionists.

Jackson notes that many reformers cross-dressed or were ostentatious in their style: they wore bloomers or dashikis, full beards, and even flowers in their hair. Describing what she dubs reform weirdos, Jackson draws out the countercultural dimensions of nineteenth-century reform and its clear connections to more recent iterations of U.S. counterculture, perhaps most obviously the blending of the antiVietnam War and hippie movements. She reminds us that in memorializing reform history and venerating individual heroes, the weirder elements of nineteenth-century reform have been edited out.

At the same time, Jacksons account of antebellum bohemianism drives home how a movement can simultaneously be an activist vanguard and contain within itself the ugliest of mainstream bigotry. Jacksons exploration of experiments in communal and intentional living helps us to recognize such utopias as white utopias. In addition to reproducing bourgeois social arrangements and entertainments, they often reproduced divisions of labor that were patriarchal and racist. Jackson does not shy away from the racist underbelly of nineteenth-century communes, offering a frank account, for example, of how, when Fanny Wright left Nashoba, she put a cruel and abusive overseer-type in charge. He whipped black residents, coerced them into plantation labor, and fueled a culture of sexual terror. Here, the transformation of an idyllic agricultural paradise into a racial dystopia is a reminder of the disingenuity with which some communal experiments sought to fulfill and extend the American experiment. The sadism of Wrights inheritor also reveals the continuity between the (white) commune and the plantation, as a space that gave free reign to white libertinism, sadism, and the exploitation of black flesh.

Jackson offers a highly original account of postwar Reconstruction as a strategy aimed at conscripting the activist energy and anarchic spirit of the antebellum period toward rebuilding the state.

In Jacksons account, Free Love at times also feels both really white and really repressed. Undergirded by eccentric theories of self-denial and bodily control, we see that nineteenth-century reform was also animated by (settler) fantasies of mastery and by anxieties about excess, contamination, and miscegenation. In these moments, Free Loves connection to an emerging regime of eugenics become clear. What is less clear from Jacksons work is how activists of color themselves pursued their utopian visions in ways that were inadequately documented by institutional archives. What, in other words, is the history of the black commune? Of blackand Nativefree love, gendered experimentation, and sex radicalism in the nineteenth century? That book has yet to be written.

So what happened to all of this energy and organizing around radical social causes? How was the end result a Victorian U.S. society remembered, not altogether incorrectly, for its conformism? Jackson offers a highly original account of postwar Reconstruction as a strategy aimed at conscripting the activist energy and anarchic spirit of the antebellum period toward rebuilding the state. In this account, Reconstructions failure is already written on the wall by as early as 1866, when former free lovers, labor organizers, and abolitionists became officers in and representatives of the reunited state: Men formerly involved with socialist communes and treasonous plots were now leaders of the federal project that would shape the American futureproof of their vindication but also their containment.

Across the board, this was a moment when former abolitionists and reformists saw an opportunity to make strategic and practical gains at the federal level. But in the name of visibility, recognition, and concrete political gains, reformers jettisoned the coalitional politics, intersectionality, and radical imagination that had once infused the movement. A handful of figures, including Wendell Phillips, critiqued former movement leaders for selling out, while figures such as Delany decided to play what they thought of as the long gamein Delanys case, ultimately becoming such an accommodationist that he supported former Confederates and segregationists for office. Even Garrison, a hardcore Non-Resistant, now felt confident handing his lifes work over to the state, going so far as to declare that the American army was now the American antislavery society.

Since its founding the nation has trafficked in a language of plurality and diversity while policing and criminalizing actual acts of sexual, gendered, and racial freedom because of their insurgent potential.

When Jackson offers vivid descriptions of roundups and executions in the wake of racial rebellion; of draconian ID laws meant to hobble African Americans; of the raiding of queer salons and Free Love boarding houses; of national gaslighting campaigns and the emboldening of white supremacists from a white supremacist White House, its hard not to see connections to the suppression of U.S. protestand social lifein the twenty-first century. As it turns out, since its founding the nation has trafficked in a language of plurality and diversity while policing and criminalizing actual acts of sexual, gendered, and racial freedom because of their insurgent potential.

Though deeply rooted in the historical record, Jacksons book also helps illuminate the terrors of our own moment as ones related to transition rather than apocalypse. (Its a common error: Walter Benjamin describes historical moments such as these as ones in which the dreaming collective mistakes the decline of an economic era for the end of the world.) To collapse a world-historical transitional phase of capitalism with the end of the world itself would indeed be a mistake. But it would also be a missed opportunity. Or as Jackson writes, One upside to the failure of the world is that other worlds become imaginable. In some ways, Jacksons is a history that asks activists to persist in the face of likely failure, and even imminent doom. She reminds us that some experiments in abolition were successful precisely because they failed: the failure of Browns raid on Harpers Ferry was a lightning rod that ignited the start of the Civil War.

In this way, American Radicals stands as a surprisingly non-instrumental history of U.S. social movements. It asks us to pay attention to political experiments whose effects cant objectively be measured and to remember that all liberal reform now ensconced in U.S. law began as radical demands. It advocates for a slower and more thoughtful relationship to the history of radicalism. At the same time, American Radicals feels so electrifying and alive, so textured and so real, it is a book that asks to be used. A deep dive into the archives of U.S. radicalism, it doubles as a tool to be mobilized by radical actors, collectives, and dreamers today. Against the grain of our apocalyptic-feeling present, American Radicals asks us not to despair, but to organize.

Continue reading here:

The Radical Lives of Abolitionists - Boston Review

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In Marine Park, Brooklyn, on the corner of Avenue S and East 35th Street, there's a bar called Mariner's Inn. It's got a brown wood stone facade and a green awning, an American flag hanging above its door. It looks like a place you might stop in to catch a sports game on a Sunday afternoon, if you were into that sort of thing. It's next door to a nail salon, which is next to a liquor store, and across the street from a dry cleaner called Classic Cleaners.

It's also half a block away from the longest continually owned house in New York City's history.

If you were to pass it by chance, you might not think anything of the Hendrick I. Lott House, which bisects the block behind Mariner's Inn. You might think, Hmm. That house has an especially large front and back yard. It's small and unassuming with white clapboard walls and dark hunter green window shutters. It's surrounded by grass both in the front and the back and sits at an angle to the street. It appears as a kink in the Robert Moses fever dream that is the grid-obsessed New York City organization.

You might not have guessed that this house actually predates Robert Moses, the urban planner who oversaw the expansion of New York City into Brooklyn and Long Island. Or that inside the house is a hidden passageway that once formed part of the Underground Railroad. Or that four sets of cookbooks, passed through two centuries' worth of hands, were found sitting on the shelves of its kitchen, collecting dust.

Neither did Alyssa Loorya, an archaeologist and historian, until those cookbooks and the well-being and maintenance of one of New York's most important historical relics were placed into her hands.

Loorya had grown up near the property. She remembers riding past the house small and abandoned-looking with a disastrously overgrown yard on her bike on the way to the mall, yet never thinking much of it. It wasn't until years later when, as a student in the archaeological school at Brooklyn College, that the Lott House circled back into her life.

As a grad student, Loorya had explored the grounds of historic houses across the Greater New York area. As she and her cohort began to look for fresh sites to excavate, she remembered the farmhouse at 1940 East 36th Street. Could the ramshackle property she'd spent her childhood skirting around hold archaeological potential?

As it turned out, yes. And then some.

The first Lotts to arrive in North America Engelbart Lott and his two sons Pieter and Engelbartsen were French Huguenots who emigrated from Holland in 1652. They settled in modern day Flatbush, a wide, treeless grassland. The prairie and its nearby streams were originally the Canarsee tribe's summer settlement where they mined the waters for oysters and clams until they were displaced and their population ravaged by the onslaught of disease brought over by European settlers.

In 1719, Pieter's son Johannes and his wife Antje Folkerson bought a farm in the southern area of the Flatlands and laid the groundwork for a house that would pass through his family for the next two centuries. An ambitious and successful farmer, Johannes amassed a property that skirted along the coast of Jamaica Bay and swallowed the whole of what we today call Marine Park.

The house's location lends itself to highly fertile farmland. As Loorya puts it, "This area was created out of glacial outwash, so it's all these highly organic alluvial deposits in the landscape. Because of the high number of creeks and streams, we have a relatively high water table but an exceptionally well-drained soil."

In other words: Everything grows and it grows really large.

The Lott property owes much of its early agricultural prosperity to the slaves that coaxed its earth. According to census records, the Lotts had 12 slaves in 1803. By the end of that decade, however, Johaness' son Hendrick freed them all and hired them back as paid workers). Historians posit that the Lotts were abolitionists as Hendrick's actions predate the 1827 abolition of slavery in New York City.

Another important discovery supports this theory. In 2002, The New York Times reported on a clandestine closet, tucked into the house's architecture, purported to have hidden slaves making their way to Canada through the Underground Railroad.

The house belies many old artifacts. Some, like the closet, reveal truths about the family's beliefs, others provide texture on mundane patterns, quotidian habits. A storage bin full of oyster rakes hearkens to a time when New Yorkers ate bivalves like hot dogs. Once while repairing a kitchen leak, the house's caretaker Wendy Carroll unearthed an assortment of corncobs, assembled together in a pattern. Archaeologists point to a cosmogram, a West African symbolic tradition, as an explanation.

And then there are the cookbooks.

Loorya was gifted the cookbooks by Catherine Lott, whose father lived in the house. She received a box full of recipes in various conditions bound, stained and stapled pages, journals filled with faded phrases, tears and watermarks, and fraying edges. Amidst the flotsam, Loorya and her team teased the Lott residence back to life.

Since she first became involved with the site's excavation in 1998 as a graduate student, Loorya has been instrumental in the Lott House's most modern era. She has since founded her own archaeology firm, Chrysalis Archaeology, and become vice president of the board that works with the city to manage and operate the house.

Part of that management means ensuring the city allocates proper funding to the upkeep of the property. At other times, her involvement skews more quite literally hands on. Recently, she and her team have been participating in what they call experiential archaeology.

It all began with a cake. First a chocolate one. Then a white one. The recipes, simple cakes in no-fuss loaf pans, reminded Loorya of her grandmother alongside whom she learned to bake. She felt a pang of nostalgia both for her own family and a new one she was beginning to learn about. The kitchen became the flashpoint for animating the Lott House, abandoned since 1998 and falling into disrepair once again.

A recipe for "Demon Cake" produced a sludgy molasses cake so sticky it had to be begged out of the bowl.

The recipes with their dated ingredient lists and reliance on outdated products clashed with modernity. "It so often says to bake in a modern oven and I'm like what does that mean?" Loorya laments. "A modern oven? Do we have a temperature? Do we have a time? No!"

The directions for Grandma Voorhee's mincemeat pie begin by imploring one to "get a cow." It later suggests leaving something in a stoneware crock on the porch for three weeks. Another recipe sent Loorya to the grocery store looking for Borden's condensed coffee, only to discover that she was actually in search of a coffee concentrate that existed around the time of World War I.

The recipes have proven valuable to Loorya and her team. They feel closer to the Lotts and this project than they do to many others.

"In one of the photos I have, they took a dining room table and put it out on the front lawn. The table was set and everything," Loorya tells me. "Any one of those items in that cookbook could've been on that table."

It's this ability to forge intimate connections with the past that brought Loorya to archaeology. Rather than the promise of grandeur or the golden relics of history's greats, it's the way a dusty photograph, or a fleeting slice of cake, can animate the past that tethers Loorya to the project.

"It's kind of my baby."

Caitlin Welks, an archaeologist who works at Chrysalis with Loorya, has also taken a particular liking to the Lott House. When we talk on the phone, she excitedly points my attention to the ways recipes reveal the passage of time. Presented in chronological order they function as an archive, and by combing through them from back to front you can watch the way technologies, tastes, and trends evolve.

"You go from the turn of the century," says Welks, "to Wheaties."

The recipes also work as farm records. In one year, for instance, they harvested over 400 heads of cabbage. There appeared in the cookbook, suddenly, dozens of recipes for canning and preserving cabbage.

"New York City could not become the city we know today, this international capital which it has been since the 17th century without the support of the farms in the outer boroughs, growing the food so [those in the city] could focus on business," Loorya tells me. "The Lotts were one of those families."

Read the rest of the story at Food52.

Demon cake recipe

(Rocky Luten/Courtesy Food52)

This story was originally published on Food52.com: The oldest cake recipe from the oldest house in New York

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A cake recipe from the oldest house in New York - The Week Magazine

The city, they say, never sleeps. Or does it?

From this weekend, Mumbai will do its best to live up to the tag. Forget about London or Singapore, all you want to do at night will be made available right here, with the State government officially opening up the citys services 24x7.

Tourism Minister Aaditya Thackeray, who has been pushing his Mumbai 24x7 plan for years, announced this week, From January 26, the policy will be implemented in Nariman Point, Kala Ghoda, BKC and mill compounds.

Malls, stores, restaurants, multiplexes, salons and all establishments can now stay open 24x7 provided they do not serve alcohol. They will not require additional clearances, as long as they have all the requisite permissions from the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), Mumbai Fire Brigade and police.

A senior civic official, who did not wish to be named, said any commercial establishment that does not serve alcohol located inside a gated community, mill compound or a commercial area will be allowed to stay open 24x7. They do not need separate permissions, but the rules for serving alcohol stay the same, the official said. Alcohol can currently be served only up to 1.30 a.m.

Some of Mumbais establishments have taken cue, staying open through Friday night. They plan to keep the buzz all the way to Sunday, while others are still testing the waters. But more than them, the Mumbai 24x7 plan is a test of political will.

So far, malls such as R City in Ghatkopar, Atria Mall in Worli, Phoenix in Lower Parel and Kurla, Growels 101 in Kandivali, Infiniti in Malad and Andheri, Star Mall at Dadar, Fun Republic in Andheri, apart from several restaurants in Kamala Mills, have expressed interest in staying open through the night this weekend.

The Multiplex Association of India has said multiplexes such as CR2 in Nariman Point and Viviana Cinepolis in Thane will have late night shows on an experimental basis this weekend.

McDonalds has announced that its seven restaurants will stay open through the night over the weekend. Apart from these, most large establishments will wait to see the response this weekend before committing to the proposal. Also, most have said they are yet to have the logistics and infrastructure in place.

Those who are on board have welcomed the initiative and are laying out on the benefits.

R City, for instance, has lined up late night offers, deals and entertainment options. We have given the liberty to our retail partners to choose work timings and the deals they would like to offer to consumers, said Santush Kumar Pandde, head, R City Mall.

The Tourism Departments idea of trying it out over the weekend, he said, will help the malls understand consumer behaviour and the profitability for various businesses, basis which this initiative can be tweaked in the long run.

Westlife, which has 315 restaurants 94 in Mumbai and 46 within the BMC jurisdiction will keep all its seven McDonalds restaurants open and plans to scale this up. We are very excited about this move and believe that this will truly make Mumbai a maximum city. It will help boost business for brands and generate employment, said Saurabh Kalra, senior director, strategy and operations, at Westlife Development (McD). McDonalds restaurants in many parts of the globe operate 24X7 and have seen significant success. We hope to replicate this in Mumbai, he said.

Sachin Dhanawade, chief operating officer, retail and real estate, Grauer & Weil (India) Limited (Growels 101), said, We appreciate the concept of 24x7 in Mumbai and are happy to support the initiative; however, it is imperative that we take feedback from our retail partners.

While Growels 101s entertainment and food and beverage tenants have responded positively to the plan, most retailers are working on their revenue versus expense projections to assess the financial impact, he said. We are also reviewing the cost impact that would be generated for tenants to support the initiative partially, if not fully. To begin with, we may consider trying this out on Fridays and Saturdays.

The initiative will mean the police will need to beef up its monitoring, whereas for the BMC, it is only a question of increasing awareness on the new state of affairs.

This is an enabling provision; the laws were already in place. No new permissions will be needed, said a senior BMC official on condition of anonymity. The BMC, he said, is putting up frequently asked questions on its website and plans to start a helpline for anyone who wishes to report untoward activities. This is a self-regulatory policy: establishments will themselves have to adhere to guidelines, else have their permissions revoked. For instance, the Excise Department will revoke the liquor licence if anyone is serving alcohol after the deadline. Food trucks, he said, cannot be started yet as a policy is in the offing.

The police, on the other hand, is keeping close watch on a few locations with some help from the establishments themselves.

The government on Thursday directed the Commissioner of Police to prepare a proposal regarding additional deployment that may be required.

Nine locations are on the police radar, where malls and eateries will be allowed to stay open all night, and if private establishments require police security, they will have to pay for it, Home Minister Anil Deshmukh had said on Thursday.

The Mumbai Police said the fact that the malls will have their own security measures in place will help enforce law and order once the change comes into effect. With ample lighting, security personnel and CCTV cameras in place inside the establishments, the police will focus more on the area outside and around them.

We will be increasing patrolling as well as deployment in the relevant areas to ensure that there are no law and order issues. We already have a CCTV camera network in place which lets us view events in real time in the control room, Joint Commissioner of Police (Law and Order) Vinoy Kumar Choubey said.

Mr. Choubey said meetings with the establishments managements will be held at the police-station level so that police can get a sense of the existing security measures and accordingly work out deployment and patrolling.

Activities like keeping a check on antisocial elements, especially those who commit thefts in crowded areas, will need to be stepped up.

Police officers said only weekends will need special focus as on other days, people will have to go for work, or take their children to school the next morning.

Apart from being a step towards making the city a truly international one and boosting tourism, the success of the plan is a litmus test for Mr. Thackeray. The Shiv Sena scion said, on Friday, that Londons night economy is worth 5 billion, and the nightlife proposal can lead to large-scale employment generation. Mumbais service sector employs around five lakh people, he said.

Mr. Thackeray had conceptualised the Mumbai 24x7 project when he was still in the Yuva Sena. The move was seen as another attempt by the Sena to distance itself from its former anti-Valentines Day avatar, and make it more youthful.

But the going has not exactly been smooth. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA Ameet Satam had demanded night markets be allowed in the city instead, and the two parties sparred in the BMC several times over the proposals.

In 2018, the BJP-Sena government gave it the go-ahead and even issued a notification subject to police approval.

The police had concerns related to law and order, and it was never implemented.

But earlier this month, Mr. Thackeray, now Tourism Minister and Guardian Minister for Mumbai Suburban District, convened a meeting with Municipal Commissioner Praveen Pardeshi and Police Commissioner Sanjay Barve, along with representatives of various establishments. It was decided that the government would go ahead with the policy.

However, based on a 2017 report of consultancy firm Accenture, Mr. Barve is believed to have conveyed to the government that 6,500 additional police personnel will be needed if the nightlife plan has to be implemented across the city and not just in pockets.

On Friday, Mr. Thackeray said there would be no strain on the police. Since establishments cannot serve alcohol after 1.30 a.m., police will only have to focus on law and order issues, if any.

Political parties are not convinced, though.

The BJP has criticised the project, bringing its oft-repeated argument out of the bag: it is against Indian culture.

On Friday, Mr. Satam tweeted, Mumbai needs ease of living, good roads, clear footpaths free of encroachment, proper hawking policy, public transportation Night life is not the priority at the moment. Aping the West is not the solution.

Mr. Satam has written to the Municipal Commissioner to not introduce nightlife in Juhu for security reasons.

If social media is any indication of what Mumbaikars think of the idea, it appears not everyone is gung-ho. One Twitter user @ViolentVeggy wrote: So, I can get a haircut at 2 a.m., go to the bank, but I cannot get a drink. Non-drinkers can get food all night long #Mumbaineversleeps.

Another user @amind1970 wrote: ...Does that mean our festivals can also be celebrated beyond 10 p.m.? Nightlife comes with serious security threats and burden on police. The staff in all these establishments also have to commute to and fro, please think about their safety too. Plus, the burden on trains, buses, autos, police, traffic police etc.

The move may be big-bang for now, but almost everyone in Mumbai is watching if it will work.

The previous BJP-Sena government in the State had commisisoned Accenture in 2017 for an Ease of Business Report on the hospitality industry.

The report had predicted that tourist expenditure and average length of stay in Mumbai will double if the 24x7 plan is implemented. The stay is pegged at two days for domestic and four for foreign tourists in Mumbai.

The average tourist expenditure per day is 6,718 for foreign tourists and 3,141 for domestic tourists.

The report also predicted a rise in employment opportunities from the existing 60 million (direct and indirect) jobs generated by the tourism sector in Maharashtra.

Of the 71 permissions required at the operational level by bars and restaurants, many are insignificant and should be deleted, the report said.

Of the 142 licences, 29 should be merged, while the remaining 113 should be brought down to 20, it said. The report recommended the abolition of permit rooms and permits for drinking.

On the basis of the report, the government announced it would do away with drinking permits. However, the Mumbai Police objected to this.

A note from the Maharashtra Home Department had asked the then police commissioner to speak to the municipal commissioner to identify select spots where nightlife could be opened up. But that never happened.

The BMC has issued several instructions to establishments. Some of them are:

Give an undertaking to the Excise Department stating they will not serve alcohol beyond 1.30 a.m. Display this notice to customers

Permissions to play music by live bands in concourse areas within malls may be considered, provided there are no tickets being sold

Permission to extend screening time in theatres beyond 1 a.m. can be sought (Labour Department to issue clarification)

If the scheme is successful, establishments may have to pay the police for their services

Authorities might consider extending the timing of public transport like BEST in these areas

(With inputs from Gautam S. Mengle, Lalatendu Mishra)

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Mumbai 24x7: its baby steps yet - The Hindu

RECENTLY Ive been searching for a word that describes our present system of government.Liberal democracyisnt quite right (though it has features of both) because the phrase omits too many of its other features: notably, the rise and dominance of cranks, the casual overriding of well-established professional rules, and the imposition of formal and informal censorship on matters of controversy.

All three hang together, and all are dealt with below, but the key one seems to me to be the rise and dominance of cranks. Several people have suggested that the wordidiocracyis the one for which Ive been looking. Its also the title of a clever comedy of a few years back which some commentators predictably argue forecast the presidency of Donald Trump. Its producers have recently coined the witty advert: The film that started as a comedy . . . but became a documentary. Fair play to them. Its a funny movie, now on video. Watch it.

But its not about Trump who, though an infuriating mix of cleverness, boldness, impulsiveness, touchiness and at times mean-spiritedness, is not an idiot, still less a crank. Theyre not the same thing, anyway. An idiot is simply a stupid person. A crank may actually be quite clever, but hes in possession of One Big Idea (or maybe two) that drives him to promote it interminably and with no sense of proportion or practicality.

Cranks have been around in politics a long time, probably always Swift lampoons them as projectors inGullivers Travels but there seem to be more of them around since the rise of ideological politics in the French Revolution and, still more significantly, with the later rise of socialism. Ideological politics are the attempt to use government to implement some ambitious project of human betterment that will avert a vast catastrophe and bring about a new ideal society without greed, inequality, division and other human vices. Both the end of the world and utopia usually figure in ideology, and its sometimes hard to tell them apart.

Crankery figures too. The nineteenth century socialist theoretician Saint-Simon believed that under socialism the oceans would turn into lemonade. That didnt happen because it was fanciful nonsense and, besides, there werent any socialist governments around to give it a try. Stalin was around in Russia by the 1930s, however, and as part of the campaign to improve grain production, he supported applying the cranky anti-scientific theories of the geneticist Trofim Lysenko to agriculture (largely because they fitted in with Marxist ideology). Grain production and Soviet agriculture suffered, but Lysenkos theories remained Soviet orthodoxy until after Stalins death. Scientists who criticised them were dismissed in large numbers and some very distinguished geneticists were imprisoned and executed.

Theres an almost logical progression here. A government claims intellectual authority in some non-political field, genetics, say, or music. Some of its pronouncements run counter to established scientific truths, but they are backed by strong pressuresfrom loss of employment to execution, and the usual professional rules and legal safeguards designed to prevent the spread of quackeries are ignored from a prudent cowardice. And when the crankish policy begins to fail, censorship is imposed and its critics are dismissed, silenced, or worse.

Crankocracy = the rise of bogus experts + the junking of professional standards and legal protections x the repression of objectors.

We might think that with Saint-Simon and Lysenko in our history we would be alert in future to such dangers. Not so.

Marxist socialism is itself one vast exercise in crankery applied to politics, philosophy and economics, and it seems to have a family affection for lesser fallacies. But only thirty years since the collapse of Soviet communism revealed the economic wastelands and the mass graves of its political victims across the USSR, there is now a growing revival of support for socialism/communism/Marxism on the Left and among young people in the Western world.

And any large movement of perverse decadence, which this surely is, will be unlikely to leave other aspects of life alone. When the rules and protections and protections that sustain civilization in one area of life and thought begin to collapse, they knock down others elsewhere just as falling dominoes spread instability across an entire table. As Auden writes inThe Fall of Rome:

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;Agents of the Fisc pursueAbsconding tax defaulters throughThe sewers of provincial towns.

One might argue that in modernity, as in modernism and dominoes, everything is ultimately disconnected from everything else. Let me suggest two areas where crankery has already won significant victories. The first is genderand transgender theory. This holds that someones identity is not determined by his/her biological sex but by his/her gender identity, which may be malleable and is anyway a matter of individual conviction. As one slogan has it: If your boy says shes a girl, then shes a girl.

That seems false to me, but even if it were true, its effects should be limited at least by its own founding theory. Our social interactions with others, whatever their theoretical identities, should always be shaped by courtesy and goodwill, including treating them as they wish within reason. But even gender theory has not abolished biological sex entirely. We would surely not base a transwomans medical treatment on the assumption that her gender identity is a better guide than his biological sex to what they need.

Yet hospitals, schools, colleges and woke corporations do exactly that when they make available tampons to transwomen. Athletic bodies do likewise when they decree that transwomen with male bodies are eligible to play in womens sports, with the predictable result that many able women players who might win in a fair contest are defeated. If this goes uncorrected, it will simply end in the abolition of womens sports.

Admitting transwomen into womens-only safe spaces will similarly end a civilised protection for women in a world that certainly doesnt seem to be becoming less dangerous for them. Above all, as John Whitehall has documented inQuadrant,needless human tragedies and massive lawsuits are hurtling towards us when young people persuaded to undergo transitioning surgery and drug treatments that are life-changing and unalterable at an age when they cannot possibly understand the consequences believe in adulthood they have made a terrible mistake.

In all these cases the major institutions of society have capitulated to aggressive pressure groups pushing a theory that is highly dubious, unsupported by the great majority of clinical researches, regarded by many gays and feminists as a threat to their identities, and above all damaging to its supposed beneficiaries. Not enough attention has been devoted to examining the science behind the activism. A research project on gender-transitioning by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) did not include the control group required by the rules. And as Madeleine Kearns ofNational Reviewhas detailed,when sceptics seek to raise these questions in public meetings, they are shouted down and threatened. Crankery or should it be quackery? is followed by ignoring the rules and enforced by repression.

Its a similar story in the academys history wars, reliant as they are on student rebellions (which in reality are highly conformist) and enforced by riots and iconoclasm. These, too, are a consequence of abolishing the border between truth and falsehood in postmodern scholarship. Of course, truth is sometimes hard to discover and to distinguish from persuasively false interpretations. The answer to that is more work in the archives. For postmodern historical interpretation was refuted in the 1920s by Georges Clemenceau, who led France in the Great War. A young historian kindly explained to him that future historians would re-examine the war from different perspectives and reach different conclusions different from his own. Yes, replied Clemenceau, future historians will say many things I might dispute. But one thing they will not say. They will not say that Belgium invaded Germany.

He may have been too optimistic. Relieved of the obligations of truth and accuracy, students all too often replace research with the pre-cooked conclusions of Marxist Critical Theory, as illustrated by theNew York Times1619 Project,which starts from the conclusion that slavery is the true essence of American history. As historian Richard Brookhiser said when asked about this recently: Two weeks before those first slaves landed, the colony adopted a democratic constitution. No one owns slaves in America today. But were still voting. How often will such rebuttals be heard in colleges in which the administrators as well as the students are striving to decolonise the curriculum, and when in effect both co-operate to close down debates and shut out speakers who might enlighten them. Once again, academic (and media) crankery is followed by, first, throwing overboard the rules of scholarship and, next, by the banishment of heretics.

It might reasonably be objected that not all of these are examples of rule by cranks. In part, thats a fair criticism. The cranks are in the streets; the corridors of power contain the cowards who yield to them. But Im not sure thats much of a comfort. Im getting the queasy feeling that in about five years anyone who has criticised Greta Thunbergs absurd views on the demise of Planet Earth by next Thursday will be up before the magistrates. It seems agreed by all well-meaning people that its a coarse and brutal insensitivity to express any scepticism aboutArmageddon predicted by a child.

All of which is a little odd, not least because the feisty Ms Thunberg is not a child. Shes a young woman of some 17 years, able to vote in progressive jurisdictions, and a rather typical self-righteous adolescent too. Now, it used to be a breach of feminist etiquette to refer to young women as if they were just starting high school. Yet we have not had any feminist complaints that Gretas honorary girlhood is an offensive slight even in these much woker days.

But could you have a better illustration of the coming crankocracy than the assembled leaders of the world nodding solemnly and applauding timidly as a 17-year-old adolescent condemns them angrily for not halting the medieval plague about to descend on them unless they replace their business suits with sackcloth and ashes?

They know their place.

This article first appeared in Quadrant Online on January 19, 2020, and is republished by kind permission.

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Greta and the rise of the crankocracy - The Conservative Woman