Weekly Grounding #49
News, links, writing
Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
“University of North Carolina to Divert $2.3m DEI Budget to Safety and Policing”
The Guardian reports that “the University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill announced that it would divert the school’s entire $2.3m diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) budget toward public safety and policing. Some members of the board of trustees, which voted for the divestment, cited students’ recent anti-war demonstrations as a reason for the redesignation of funds to the campus police.”
The article continues: “UNC Chapel Hill’s commencement was held the day before Monday’s DEI announcement. At the ceremony, football stadium screens displayed a message that read: ‘Anyone who does not leave or put down signs when asked will be removed and arrested. Thank you for your cooperation.’”
This is yet another example of the how the domestic conflict triggered by Israel’s war on Gaza has further fractured American college and university campuses. In Weekly Grounding #46, I featured
’s compelling argument that “woke is over.” While woke may be on its way out, the so-called alternative at places like UNC Chapel Hill is hardly something to be celebrated.“Is College Worth It?”
As campuses are torn apart by the unfolding conflict between Zionist donors and woke zoomers, more and more Americans are asking whether going to college even makes sense. This is, of course, not only because of the campus “culture wars,” but also for economic reasons. This study by Pew Research notes that “economic outcomes for young adults without a degree are improving.” Among the many interesting results from this survey, almost half of Americans believe that a college degree is less important than it was twenty years back:
Additionally, just twenty-two percent of Americans believe that the cost of college is worth it when loans are involved:
For more on this topic, see Weekly Grounding #42.
“Live From Gaza, American Nurses Trapped”
In this interview on Breaking Points, Ryan Grim and Emily Jashinsky interview Monica Johnston, a nurse who was trapped in Gaza and unable to return home to Portland, Oregon due to Israel’s efforts to block the entry of another medical mission waiting in Egypt (she has since been able to return). Johnston describes the horrific injuries to civilians, including children, and the shocking lack of medical supplies due to Israel’s siege on Gaza.
Johnston states: “We’ve…learned from the Palestinians here—to give. You see them, and they have nothing and they’re constantly inviting you for tea, and what little food they have they’re giving and giving. So, as a volunteer here, it’s hard not to want to do the same thing for these people, and the thought of leaving them and abandoning them—it’s just not on our minds.”
Despite its obvious journalistic significance, this interview received far less views on YouTube than many of Breaking Point’s other content, a fact which helped contribute to the channel’s migration to Rumble in order to combat future algorithmic shadow banning and censorship.
“From Misogyny to No Man's Land”
reflects on transformations in the American literary world at : “The contemporary American literary scene is constricted by class—too many of the affluent writing and editing, too few of the working and poor doing the same—and a wearying ideological homogeny, but it has largely slayed the demon of misogyny. If men still sit at the top of the publishing conglomerates, it’s college-educated women writing, editing, and agenting most of the novels of note.”He continues: “None of this might be of pressing national import. The people who read will read, and those who won’t read won’t. The shrinking male in modern literary fiction matters more, rather, for what is getting left out: the interiority of men, nearly half the population, and particularly those who are failing. What I wonder about is what has replaced literature for most men. I wanted to be a Major League baseball player and when I could not do that—when my talent was evidently in short supply—I decided I would be a writer. One, it seemed, could bleed well enough into the other, one arena of achievement swapped for another. A career in letters was, implicitly, masculine enough. What was missing, in my late adolescence, were the seductions that rob the time of most younger men today, and I am not referring to online pornography, mostly because I am not convinced men can’t lust alone and then attempt to write literature. Rather, it’s video gaming and online sports gambling, the two great 2020s addictions, that probably keep men most thoroughly away from books. To become a reader and writer, one must take solace in empty time. The mind must have moments for wandering and imaginative growth. Gaming, which still remains a mostly male pastime, absorbs whatever idle hours the twentieth century male might have had at home, when instead of plugging away for hours on Call of Duty he thumbed through a Vonnegut paperback or a back issue of Esquire. We have undoubtedly left the golden era of male readership, when a generation of World War II vets, propped up by the GI bill, enrolled in college, read men’s magazines, and turned to literary fiction to make sense of their own world. Military veterans still publish novels, but they tend to be the Ivy League-educated, like Phil Klay and Elliot Ackerman; if men arrive at all to literature today, they are not working class, not poor, not the sort who’ve known humiliation and deprivation.”
Barkan concludes: “What is ticking inside the American male of the mid-2020s and what can novelists tell us about that?… And what of those far below, fully denied wealth and status, the men barely working or not working at all? The incels, the volcels, the MGTOWs? The gambling addicts and the gamers? Those who, instead of Hemingway, wish to be Rogan? The Latino and Black men drawn to Trump? The Asian men who do not, in fact, want to master the SAT? There’s a strange, teeming world out there. Literature can’t—and shouldn’t—be blind to it. If it’s going to be complete and speak to this era of tumult, it must find a way to those who aren’t near books at all. It must expand.”
“‘Shut Up and Calculate’”
Jim Baggott discusses the suppression of philosophy in post-war physics at Nature. He contrasts this with the earlier philosophical debates on quantum mechanics between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein in the 1920s and 30s: “The Americanization of post-war physics meant that no value was placed on ‘philosophical’ debates that did not yield practical results. The task of ‘getting to the numbers’ meant that there was no time or inclination for the kind of pointless discussion in which Bohr and Einstein had indulged. Pragmatism prevailed. Physicists encouraged their students to choose research topics that were likely to provide them with a suitable grounding for an academic career, or ones that appealed to prospective employers. These did not include research on quantum foundations.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.