Credit…Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times

Dear Commons Community,

In Europe, more people are choosing to read in English even if it is not their first language because they want the covers, and the titles, to match what they see on osocial media.  As reported by The New York Times.

When the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan was in the Netherlands a few years ago promoting her most recent novel, “The Candy House,” she noticed something unexpected. Most of the people who asked her to sign books at author events were not presenting her with copies in Dutch.

“The majority of the books I was selling were in English,” Egan said.

Her impression was right. In the Netherlands, according to her Dutch publisher, De Arbeiderspers, roughly 65 percent of sales for “The Candy House” were in English.

“There was even a sense of a slight apology when people were asking me to sign the Dutch version,” Egan said. “And I was like, ‘No! This is what I’m here to do.’”

As English fluency has increased in Europe, more readers have started buying American and British books in the original language, forgoing the translated versions that are published locally. This is especially true in Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands and, increasingly, Germany, which is one of the largest book markets in the world.

Publishers in those countries, as well as agents in the United States and Britain, worry this could undercut the market for translated books, which will mean less money for authors and fewer opportunities for them to publish abroad.

“There is this critical mass,” said Tom Kraushaar, publisher at Klett-Cotta in Germany. “You see in the Netherlands: Now there is a tipping point where things could really collapse.”

The English-language books that are selling abroad are generally cheap paperbacks, printed by American and British publishers as export editions. Those versions are much less expensive than hardcovers available in the United States, for example, and much less expensive than the same books in translation, which have to observe minimum pricing in countries like Germany.

“People should read in whatever language they want,” said Elik Lettinga, publisher of De Arbeiderspers in the Netherlands. But the export editions, she continued, “undercuts on price.”

English sales have accelerated in recent years, in part because books now go viral on social media. Booksellers in the Netherlands said that many young people prefer to buy books in English with their original covers, even if Dutch is their first language, because those are the books they see and want to post about on BookTok.

I admire the European education systems that have put such an emphasis on second and third language learning.  It is one of the great disadvantages of our American system that we do not do the same.

Tony

Credit…Stefhany Y. Lozano

Dear Commons Community,

A growing movement among parents across the country is a “signing pledge” to keep kids phone free. By committing not to give their children smartphones until an agreed-upon age, parents are hoping for strength in numbers when schoolyard pressure starts to build. The impetus for the movement in part is a new book by the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt that argues the rise of smartphones has led to an increase in mental illness. The New York Times has a featured article this morning describing the “signing pledge.”  Here is an excerpt.

Kiley DeMarco recently attended Safety Night at her children’s public elementary school on Long Island. As she walked around different booths learning about how to protect her children from accidentally taking a cannabis gummy, about a local violence-prevention program, about how police officers would respond to an emergency on campus, one station caught her eye: A parent was asking other parents to take a pledge not to give their children smartphones until the end of eighth grade.

Ms. DeMarco has two children, one in kindergarten and one in first grade. But like many parents, she has already read books and research arguing that smartphones, and the social media apps on them, drastically increase anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts in teenagers.

Asking parents in the same school to commit to holding back phones until a certain age made sense to her. “It means there is no gray area,” she said. “There is a clear grade level when they get the phone.”

The idea of acting collectively, in lock step with other parents, made her feel more confident that she could keep her commitment. “It totally takes the pressure off of us as parents,” she said. “Down the road, when my kids start begging for phones, we can say we signed this pledge for our community and we are sticking to it.”

In schools and communities across the country, parents are signing documents pledging not to give their children smartphones until after middle school. The idea, organizers say, is that if parents take action together, their children are less likely to feel isolated because they aren’t the only ones without TikTok in their pockets.

Considering the prevalence of smartphone use among young people, it’s a bold step: Research from Common Sense, a nonprofit organization that provides technology reviews for families, shows that half of children in the United States own cellphones by age 11 — roughly fifth or sixth grade.

According to Zach Rausch, an associate research scientist at New York University who studies child and adolescent mental health, case-by-case decisions not to have a smartphone or social media can be “risky” for individual children, socially speaking.

“They are saying, ‘I might be banished from all my friends and my social network,’ and it’s a pretty big cost to make that choice,” he said. “But if the parents collectively work together to set the boundary, it will reduce a lot of conflict. It won’t be, ‘My friend has this, but I don’t.’”

Many groups of parents are drawing on a playbook created by Wait Until 8th, an organization that helps parents collect no-phone pledges from their children’s classes at school. Fifty-four pledges in 16 states were created in April alone, each of which had at least 10 families signed up, said Brooke Shannon, the initiative’s founder and executive director.

“I think we’re getting a flood of pledges now because the ‘Anxious Generation’ book came out, and it’s getting a lot of traction,” Ms. Shannon said, referring to a new book by the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt that argues the rise of smartphones has led to an increase in mental illness. “There are also hearings with the Senate judicial committee and the rules coming out of Florida.” (In March, Florida enacted a bill banning social media accounts for children under 14.)

Indeed, some parents are organizing these pledges because they believe their local governments or schools are not taking enough action.

Good luck to these parents.  Our children are better off free of their phones.

Tony

Neil Cavuto and Mike Johnson

Dear Commons Community,

The following was reported by Mediaite.

Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records last week in New York. Though it is a state case, Republicans nonetheless baselessly allege the prosecution was the handiwork of President Joe Biden. The convicted felon is also under indictment in three other jurisdictions – two of which are federal cases brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith.

Since retaking the House last year, Republicans opened an ill-fated impeachment inquiry into Biden centering on his son Hunter Biden’s overseas business ventures, which the GOP claims the president benefitted from, though they have yet to provide evidence. On Wednesday, the House made criminal referrals for Hunter Biden and the president’s brother Jim Biden to the Department of Justice.

Johnson joined Wednesday’s Your World, where Cavuto asked him about the doings in the House.

“There’s sort of a pessimism that begins to develop, Mr. Speaker, that both sides are just playing this political game, a tit-for-tat game,” the host said. “What comes to mind is some of these actions that you have led post-Donald Trump convictions, where conservatives want a floor vote on a bill that would allow current or former presidents to move any case to a federal court. I know Jim Jordan has hinted at denying federal funding for state prosecutors investigating Donald Trump. Measures it probably won’t go very far. So why do them?”

“Well, because we have a responsibility here,” Johnson said. “Congress has very particular duties under the constitution. We have the responsibility of oversight and that’s what we have been engaging in.”

Johnson went on to criticize Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whose office prosecuted Trump in New York. The speaker alleged Bragg’s prosecution was “politicized.”

“I certainly understand where you’re coming from, Mr. Speaker, but are you weaponizing the House–”

“No!” Johnson interjected.

“–the same way you say Democrats were weaponizing the DOJ to get what they wanted?” Cavuto said, completing his question.

“No, no, there is a very clear distinction between what we are doing and what they have done in weaponizing the judicial system,” Johnson insisted.

What a hypocrite!

Tony

John Fetterman. credit. Steven M. Falk – The Philadelphia Inquirer

Dear Commons Community,

“He’s actually the only American that’s ever beat [former President Trump] in an election,” Fetterman said on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” when the host asked him about if Biden is the “best one for” Democrats “to put forward,” in a clip highlighted by Mediaite.

Fetterman later added that he thinks Biden is “the only Democrat that could win.”

“I do believe Joe Biden has that ability to win,” Fetterman said to Maher. “And we have a great — we have a great bench, but I think it’s a very distinct kind of situation right now.”

Maher then remarked that he was “surprised at that,” but that he would “move on.”

“I’m not on the same page there, but okay,” Maher said. “I mean, it’s probably gonna be Joe Biden and I’ll vote for him.”

The Pennsylvania Democrat has staunchly defended Biden ahead of this year’s presidential election, once pushing back against those in his own party who have heightened their criticism of the president ahead of November, stating that they might as well put on a “MAGA hat.”

“I don’t understand why,” Fetterman said on “Morning Joe” on MSNBC. “I don’t know what’s in it for you to do that whether you’re just chasing clout or you want to make it in the news or anything like that. But if you’re not willing to just support the president now and say these kinds of things, you might as well just get your MAGA hat, because you now are helping Trump with this.”

Earlier in the MSNBC interview, Fetterman said Biden “is going to win here in Pennsylvania, and I’ve always believed that whoever wins Pennsylvania is going to be the next president as well, too.”

I hope Fetterman is correct in his assessment!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The U.S. economy added far more jobs than expected in May, countering fears of a slowdown in the labor market and likely reducing the Federal Reserve’s impetus to lower interest rates.

Nonfarm payrolls expanded by 272,000 for the month, up from 165,000 in April and well ahead of the Dow Jones consensus estimate for 190,000, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported yesterday.

At the same time, the unemployment rate rose to 4%, the first time it has breached that level since January 2022. Economists had been expecting the rate to stay unchanged at 3.9% from April.

The increase came even though the labor force participation rate decreased to 62.5%, down 0.2 percentage point. The survey of households used to compute the unemployment rate showed that the level of people who reported holding jobs fell by 408,000.  As reported by CNBC.

“On the surface, [the report] was hot, but you’ve also got a bigger drop in household employment,” said Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab. “For what it’s worth, that tends to be a more accurate signal when you’re at an inflection point in the economy. You can find weakness in the underlying numbers.”

A more encompassing unemployment figure that includes discouraged workers and those holding part-time jobs for economic reasons held steady at 7.4%.

The household survey also showed that full-time workers declined by 625,000, while those holding part-time positions increased by 286,000.

Job gains were concentrated in health care, government, and leisure and hospitality, consistent with recent trends. The three sectors respectively added 68,000, 43,000 and 42,000 positions. The three sectors accounted for more than half the gains.

Overall good news for the economy!

Tony

Anthony Fauci departs congressional hearing on 3 June.  Photo: Francis Chung/Poltico via AP

Dear Commons Community,

A 15-month, often partisan congressional inquiry into the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic reached a climax this week when Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), sat for 3.5 hours of questioning before a House of Representatives panel. Although the packed 3 June hearing included fiery—and sometimes outlandish—rhetoric from the panel’s lawmakers, it shed no new light on the pandemic’s origin and instead probed allegations of wrongdoing by Fauci and other federal officials.

Much of the hearing focused on events early in the pandemic that made Fauci, tapped by former President Donald Trump to help lead the federal response, a polarizing figure. Fans of the 83-year-old scientist labeled him as the voice of scientific reason. But critics blamed him, as well as officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for what they considered overly restrictive COVID-19 policies that led to the closing of schools and workplaces.

Republicans on the panel pressed that attack. “You oversaw one of the most invasive regimes of domestic policy the U.S. has ever seen,” said Representative Brad Wenstrup (R–OH), chair of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. “You took the position that you presented ‘the science’; your words came across … as final and as infallible in matters pertaining to the pandemic.”

Other Republicans accused Fauci of a wide range of misdeeds linked to the debate over the origin of the pandemic. They charged him with protecting a nonprofit group suspected of mishandling a grant that funded virus research in China, colluding with researchers who published a high-profile paper arguing the pandemic virus was not engineered by scientists, and turning a blind eye to a staffer who used a private email account to hide his communications from the public.

Democrats rushed to defend the record of the longtime adviser to presidents, who retired in 2022. “Under the guise of investigating the pandemic’s origins, House Republicans have abdicated their responsibility to objectively examine how COVID-19 came to be, and instead weaponized concerns about a lab-related origin to fuel sentiment against our nation’s scientists and public health officials for partisan gain,” said Representative Raul Ruiz (CA), the panel’s ranking Democrat.

For his part, Fauci—a veteran of numerous appearances before Congress—held his ground, assailing accusations made against him as “seriously distorted,” “absolutely false,” and “simply preposterous.” He noted that COVID-19 policy decisions made early in the pandemic were not entirely his. In a January interview with staff from the House panel he had said the early government guidance that people stay 2 meters apart “sort of just appeared.” Fauci said he meant that there had been no scientific study of distancing. He also said the policy—which was later dropped—had originated with CDC. Fauci noted that, at the time, scientific understanding of how to combat SARS-CoV-2 was a “moving target.”

Fauci also denied that he tried to protect or help conservation biologist Peter Daszak and his nonprofit group, the EcoHealth Alliance. In April 2020, Trump moved to kill a NIAID grant to the group after claims that the work it funded in Wuhan, China, led to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2. Fauci said he questioned the legality of that decision, which was later deemed improper. But he said he agrees with last month’s move by federal health officials to suspend—and seek a longer ban on—federal funding for Eco-Health because of its alleged violations of National Institutes of Health rules.

Fauci pushed back on suggestions he had any role in writing the now-famous Nature Medicine correspondence, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” that argued against the virus being created in a lab. Although he thinks the evidence supports a natural origin, Fauci testified that “I have always said … I keep an open mind” about the possibility of a lab leak. He also noted he and his family have received—and still do—death threats from those who believe Fauci created the pandemic virus or covered up its origins.

In his written testimony, Fauci distanced himself from an adviser, David Morens, who used personal email to communicate with Daszak and others about EcoHealth’s troubles in a bid to evade public records laws. Fauci said Morens helped him write papers and had no role in policy. Morens’s attempts to avoid public records laws were “an aberrancy and an outlier,” he said, and his efforts to help Daszak, an old friend, were “inappropriate.” Fauci denied conducting official business through personal email, as Morens had claimed in one email to Daszak.

Rep. Wenstrup concluded that he hoped the United States will be prepared for the next pandemic. “What should have been a 9/11 moment for this country … turned into a political nightmare. We need to do better,” he said. He told Fauci he was open to “more off the record conversations about things we can do in the future,” such as developing treatments.

As far as I am concerned, millions of Americans survived COVID because of Fauci’s guidance.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading Julia Lee’s Biting the Hand:  Growing Up Asian in Black and White America.  Lee is an associate professor of English at Loyola Marymount  University where she specializes in African American and Caribbean history.  Biting the Hand… is her memoir of growing up in Los Angeles where her immigrant parents owned a convenience store in a predominantly Black neighborhood.  She is candid about the pressures she felt both as a child and as an adult to succeed.  She keenly records events in her life that forced her to examine critically her experiences trying to make it in a “culture of white supremacy.”  I found her insights as a Korean focusing on her own and Black America’s plight in this country illuminating.

At 240 pages, it is a quick read.

Below is a review that appeared in The New York Times  

Tony

——————————————-

The New York Times

Review of Books

Becoming Asian American, From ‘Neither/Nor’ to ‘Both/And’

Julia Lee’s memoir, “Biting the Hand,” is about forging an identity in a nation of boundaries.

By Jean Chen Ho

April 18, 2023

BITING THE HAND: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America, by Julia Lee

Cultural identity, Stuart Hall wrote, is “a matter of becoming.” Although derived from our many histories, both personal and collective, identity is not some inherent essence, rooted in the past. It is instead, according to Hall, in “constant transformation.” Julia Lee’s memoir, “Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America,” examines this process, and in particular the forging of her identity as a Korean American woman in a country that still operates under a racial hierarchy.

The book is divided into three parts, beginning with “Rage,” an intimate account of the author’s tumultuous family life and its tortured silences around racial anxiety and inherited trauma. Lee’s parents, survivors of the Korean War, owned a liquor store in Inglewood, Calif., and then a fast-food chicken joint in nearby Hawthorne. The latter business was heavily damaged in the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, when Lee was 15. At the time, Lee was an angry teenager who clashed with her “psycho Korean mom” and chafed against the conservative culture of her private all-girls school.

“Shame” presents her time as an undergraduate at Princeton, where she was indoctrinated into an exclusive, elitist culture “built upon whiteness and in service of whiteness.” After graduation, Lee had a short, miserable stint in management consulting, before entering a doctoral program in English at Harvard. But she floundered there, too, feeling isolated and depressed. “I’d assumed that a community of people devoted to literature would be kinder and more humane” than the corporate world she’d escaped, Lee observes. “But as I soon found out, academia is no different from other systems of power.”

Things looked up only when a friend in the African American studies department introduced her to Jamaica Kincaid, who became a mentor. She offered Lee this crucial advice: Dare to critique those in authority who expect your subservience for access to privilege. “You must bite the hand that feeds you,” Kincaid said, and Lee took this to heart.

In the final section, “Grace,” Lee moves through a personal and professional reckoning in order to find her footing as a professor of African American and Caribbean literature, first at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and later at Loyola Marymount University. “I had perfected a teaching persona that was based on my experiences in elite white spaces,” she writes. “But now I was exhausted.” Lee admits to “relearning” how to teach, and how to write, in ways that centered her students (and readers) of color. She became a mother, another reorientation of her identity.

Lee spent decades seeking approval from white teachers and wealthy classmates, contorting herself into a hardworking “model minority” figure at devastating cost to her self-esteem and mental health. It’s a melancholic story of second-generation assimilation that treads familiar narrative ground, perhaps, but Lee’s memoir ultimately enacts a powerful apostasy. Turning from a younger self that was restrictively “Neither/Nor” — Black/white, Korean/American, “model minority”/racial sellout — Lee rejects a compulsory allegiance to whiteness, and compels her readers to do the same. She eventually learns to see beyond herself, to distinguish an emergent Asian American identity that is an accretive “Both/And.”

Throughout the memoir, Lee cites works by Black and Latinx critical race theorists, diasporic literary scholars, Indigenous activists and writers of color, as well as the urgent inquiries raised by the undergraduates she now teaches. I love that a memoir about Asian American identity formation does not rely only on the authority of Asian American thinkers and critics. Lee reminds readers that the term “Asian American,” coined by the student activists Emma Gee and Yuji Ichioka at Berkeley in the 1960s, was inspired and informed by the Black Power and Black Pride movements, and in solidarity with the Third World Liberation Front.

Near the end of the book, Lee introduces readers to the idea of “survivance,” a neologism developed by the Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor that suggests the blending of “survival,” “endurance,” “resistance” and, for Lee, “vibrance.” It is a beautiful incantation for the ongoing project of Asian American identity, a matter of infinite becoming, ever in transformation.

Dear Commons Community,

Steve Bannon, longtime ally to Donald Trump and former White House aide, was ordered to report to prison by July 1 to begin serving a four-month sentence for his 2022 contempt of Congress conviction.

Judge Carl Nichols granted prosecutors’ motion to revoke Bannon’s bail after a three-judge appeals panel declined to overturn his conviction last month.

Bannon was convicted after defying a subpoena from the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Outside the D.C. courthouse following Nichols’ ruling, Bannon remained defiant.

“There’s not a prison built or a jail built that will ever shut me up,” he told reporters. “We’re gonna win this. We’re gonna win at the Supreme Court and we’re gonna win on Nov. 5.”

Former Trump adviser Peter Navarro is currently serving a four-month sentence after being convicted of the same crime as Bannon. In March, the Supreme Court rejected Navarro’s bid to remain free.

Despite losing his appeals, Bannon added that he’s “got great lawyers.”

Justice served!

Tony

Student demonstration protesting the closure of the U. of the Arts, in Philadelphia.  Monica Herndon, The Philadelphia Inquirer, AP.

Dear Commons Community,

Over the past week, faculty, staff, and students at the 150-year-old University of the Arts have been scrambling to make sense of the Philadelphia institution’s imminent closure.  As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

At the heart of the university’s troubles appears to be the same issues that have plagued numerous other small, private institutions: too few students and rising expenses. The bottom line, one campus-finance expert told The Chronicle, is that the university ran out of cash to pay its short-term expenses.

But University of the Arts leaders have done little to clarify why they took such an extreme measure with just seven days’ notice, announcing a closing date of June 7. A meeting planned for Monday afternoon to answer questions was canceled just minutes before it was scheduled to begin. Efforts to get more information from the board or campus leadership have been met with silence, several faculty members said, and the president, Kerry Walk, resigned on Tuesday without explanation.

Another fine institution of higher education bites the dust!

Tony

Ever Forward

Dear Commons Community,

Eighty years ago, on June 6th, 1944, Allied forces launched one of the largest military offensives in the history of the world.  It was the beginning of the end of World War II.  In 2019, my wife, Elaine and I visited Normandy, one week before the 75th Anniversary of the invasion.  You can find a video and photo remembrance of our visit here. The bronze statue above, Ever Forward, stands at the entrance of Omaha Beach and depicts an American GI pulling a fallen comrade to safety. Needless to say, it was a day Elaine and I will never forget. On the one hand, it was perhaps America’s greatest contribution to humanity by setting in motion the defeat of Nazi Germany.  On the other hand, the loss of life on both sides of the battle was tragic. 

Tony