Weekly Roundup
· 5 min read
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Our most popular articles this week were an essay by anti-war leftist Stuart Parker on Canada's Trucker Convoy, David Benatar on the disturbing decline of the world's most progressive university, and Jared Marcel Pollan's exquisite reflection on Ulysses—one hundred years after it's publication.
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Editor-in-Chief
Going South: Life at the World’s Most Progressive University
Many universities have a problem—on this point there seems to be widespread agreement. The nature of that problem, however, remains bitterly contested. Liberals and conservatives worry that higher education has succumbed to regressive radicalism on matters related to race and gender. Those who self-…
David Benatar
Smearing an Entire Protest Movement as Fascistic Will Come Back to Haunt My Fellow Leftists
My career as a political essayist began 13 years ago. I had been asked by a left-wing Canadian website to expand on my views about a then-ongoing constitutional crisis—and explain why public opinion had turned so sharply in favour of then-prime minister Stephen Harper, even among supporters of parti…
Stuart Parker
A World of Waste, Stripped of Transcendence: James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ at 100
Few novels become institutions, to have departments rigged up around them, whole constituencies and spheres of scholarship, as works of lifelong study, fascination and confusion. Ulysses, whose publication centenary will be observed on February 2nd, is one such book. Like Marx’s Kapital, Joyce’s doo…
Jared Marcel Pollen
Paradise Lost?
A review of The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s by Ellen Schrecker. University of Chicago Press, 616 pages (December 2021). The 1960s were the tipping point of postwar American history at which the conservativism of the previous decade evolved into an era of growing liberal consensu…
Roger L. Geiger
Why This Feminist Is Taking the University of Bristol to Court
Next week, I am taking my university to court. To my knowledge, it is the first time an academic institution has been forced, at trial, to justify why it prioritises trans rights over women’s rights. The other party in the case is the University of Bristol, which one might
Raquel Rosario Sánchez
Watching My Beloved, Once-Eclectic Library Become Just Another Bastion of Orthodoxy
In 2018, the New York Times published an op-ed that illustrated the traditional conception of the public library. Under the headline, To Restore Civil Society, Start with the Library, sociologist Eric Klinenberg wrote: For children and teenagers, libraries help instill an ethic of responsibility, to…
Greg Barkovich
The Maus That Roared
A lot of foolishness has been written about McMinn County’s decision to remove Maus from the middle-school Holocaust curriculum. Headlines from across the political spectrum bellowed that Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel had been “banned” and outraged commentary duly followed: “…
Thomas Balazs
Why Boycotts Should Not be Imposed on the Arts
Over the last four weeks, we have witnessed an unprecedented amount of press coverage and social media chatter surrounding the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement’s efforts to discourage artists and entertainers from participating in the 2022 Sydney Arts Festival, one of the premiere a…
Craig Emanuel
Quillette Podcast #179: Racist Orcs, Ableist Adventures, and Non-Binary Monsters: Can ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Survive Wokeness?
Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay talks to psychology professor Christopher J. Ferguson about his newly published academic paper, Are Orcs Racist? Dungeons and Dragons, Ethnocentrism, Anxiety, and the Depiction of ‘Evil’ Monsters.
Quillette
From Around the Web
The Joe Rogan Controversy Has a Deeper Cause
Recording artists are angry at Spotify because, in music streaming, there isn’t enough money to go around.
Will Butler
When the Pope Hits Your Eye Like a Big Pizza Pie, That’s Ahmari
From neoconservatism to integralist cosplay to active worship of China and Russia, the ‘post-liberal’ right has had a giddy five years
Park MacDougald
Digging for Utopia
That the history of our species came in stages was an idea that came in stages. Aristotle saw the formation of political entities as a tripartite process:
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Quillette Circle Comment of the Week
The Maus That Roared
Not having ever read or even heard of Maus, I took first to Wikipedia, and then to the free on-line version of ‘Maus: a survivor’s tale…’, which I briefly glanced through to get a gist of it. As something of a holocaust student, I have seen some really obscene stuff, like Ka-Tzetnik’s, ’The House o…
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