Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based writer, editor, and multimedia
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July 20, 2007
James Fallows has a fascinating, if also fascinatingly uncritical article [subscribers only] in the latest Atlantic about the outsourcing of American manufacturing to China and the working conditions of Chinese workers.
The arrangement, he concludes, is working for everyone -- Chinese leaders, Chinese workers, American businessmen, American consumers-slash-workers.
To be sure, the timing of the piece is a bit awkward, given the barrage of front-page news lately about shoddy, adulterated, and deadly Chinese products, as well as rampant corruption in Chinese industry.
Sure, Fallows writes, workers may work 12-hour shifts six or seven days a week -- but they get free meals. And workers in industrializing 19th-century England had it rough, too. And, since the official Chinese workweek is 40 hours, the workers get a lot of overtime play, Fallows notes. No doubt that 40-hour standard is rigorously enforced by China's pro-labor-movement bureaucrats. Fallows doesn't explain how, but I'm sure it's so.
The line that leapt off the page for me, though, was this one, which comes amid a blandly neutral-to-positive description of working conditions at these factories: "'The people here work hard,' an American manager in a U.S.-owned plant told me. 'There's none of this 'I have to go pick up the kids' nonsense you get in the States.'"
The line passes without comment or explanation (where are the kids? with Grandma, back on the farm? in communal day-care centers?), although an editor was alert enough to run the quote in large red type on the next page.
How did the editors let that screw-American-families comment, from an American outsourcer, through in such an oh-by-the-way fashion -- in a piece designed to defend outsourcing? My wife unfairly suggests the answer is that the Atlantic is "written and edited by men, for men -- and Caitlin Flanagan." The editors simply didn't realize that this disparaging quote about American working parents -- or American labor laws; same difference -- raises important issues.
Fallows himself appears to have no clue how the line would sound to American ears; everywhere else in the piece he portrays the foreign businessmen on the make in China as scrappy heroes and truth-tellers, contrasting them with Ivory Tower and desk-bound whiners and fretters in the United States.
And now, I have to go pick up the kid.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 05:15 PM
July 20, 2007
Reader D.D. contributes this:
In the piece "Leave those kids alone" ... you point out that parents in traditional societies don't spend time playing with their children. This may be true, but children in traditional societies grow up surrounded by other children to play with. I grew up in a Midwestern small town, and we roamed around all day in the summer -- and all afternoon on school days -- playing with other kids. I see the same thing where I work, in a semi-rural section of a large urban county. In a traditional setting, the seven-year-olds teach the four-year-olds, and the twelve-year-olds rule the roost. The kids who are bored and understimulated are those who do not have cousins in the house or other children on the block -- or whose parents aren't comfortable letting them run off with the other children, letting them participate in their normal socialization. We were only required to tell my mother whether or not we expected to be back at lunchtime, otherwise it was liberty hall between breakfast and supper. She knew where we were (or thought she did).
I love the last parenthetical.
I grew up in a semi-rural suburb in which parents basically turned kids loose (after toddler age) to play as they saw fit. Where I live now, I find it hard to imagine giving my son (now 3) that degree of freedom when his time comes. I suspect many people feel a similar shift (because of the dangers of cities, real as well as perceived, and the increasing pedestrian- and bike-unfriendliness of many suburbs). Maybe that partly explains the turn inward -- to the house, and to intra-family play.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 02:45 PM
July 19, 2007
The mighty Arts and Letters Daily has already linked to this essay, by the Washington Post fiction critic Ron Charles, about the ambivalent effects of the Harry Potter phenomenon -- so recommending it here may be redundant.
Still, it's hilarious as well as smart, so do check it out.
The gist is that the blockbuster-book phenomenon may not be good for literature. Here's one musty but startling fact Charles drops into his essay: "According to a study by Alan Sorensen at Stanford University, 'In 1994, over 70 percent of total fiction sales were accounted for by a mere five authors.[emphasis added]' There's not much reason to think that things have changed."
At the end of the piece, Charles (disclosure: he's a friend) says his favorite book this year was "The Law of Dreams," by Peter Behrens, a historical novel centered on a boy who -- unlike his parents -- survived the Irish Potato Famine. When Charles filed the piece for the Post, it had sold 8,367 copies in the United States. At least one independent bookstore is now plugging Behrens' book as an alternative (or complement) to Rowling's latest monster, and its publisher reports a surge in sales.
Bigfoot
Long-tail underdog
*Title stolen from an off-hand line in Ron's piece.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 10:11 AM
July 18, 2007
Elena Kagan, dean of Harvard Law School, didn't make the cut for the Harvard presidency, but could there be a considerably higher post in her future? And what about a shift to the judicial branch (federal division) for Deval Patrick?
On SCOTUSblog, Tom Goldstein, who runs the Supreme Court practice at a major DC law firm, made some much-discussed predictions this month about just whom a prospective Democratic President might pick to replace retiring Justices, post-2008.
Sure, it's a parlor game -- with a doozy of a built-in assumption. Still, court-watchers across the blogosphere eagerly joined in. Goldstein's list for the first vacancy was lawyerly and insiderish: It included three judges from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (famous for its liberal bent) -- the Hon. Johnnie Rawlinson, the Hon. Sonia Sotomayor, and the Hon. Kim McLane Wardlaw -- plus the Chief Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, Leah Ward Sears.
More interesting to New Englanders was Goldstein's second-tier roster -- those who might have a shot at filling a second or third opening: That's where the Harvard Law dean and the Massachusetts governor prominently appeared. (The others on the secondary list were Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, the Hon Merrick Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for DC and Ken Salazar, a U.S. Senator from Colorado).
"My ultimate predictions?" Goldstein wrote. "Kim Wardlaw (2009, for Souter), Deval Patrick (2010, for Stevens), and Elena Kagan (2011, for Ginsburg)." Goldstein believes that Souter pines for New Hampshire and will retire before his older colleagues, a view many other legal observers consider idiosyncratic.
After Goldstein's readers added their two cents, things got even more interesting, from a Bostonian perspective. In a follow-up post, in response to those comments, Goldstein bumped Kagan up to his first tier of candidates. A longtime star among liberals, Kagan, Goldstein observed, has won conservative accolades by brokering the hiring of conservatives at Harvard Law, which the right has long viewed as an impenetrable liberal fortress.
Could that be her ticket to the high court, when the next Justice steps down?
(Hat tip: Legal Times. [Subscribers only.])
Posted by Christopher Shea at 04:17 PM
July 18, 2007
The news -- reported by Publishers Weekly yesterday, among other places -- that the children's graphic novel "Tintin in the Congo" will be published in English, and in the US, this fall has sent a shockwave through the blogosphere.
First published in 1930-31 in the children's supplement to the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtieme Siecle, then updated and colorized in 1946, with additional changes in 1975, Herge's story about the intrepid boy reporter Tintin's adventures in the Belgian Congo is racist and colonialist -- there's no question about it. The black Africans are childlike, quick to worship Tintin, and helpless without his aid. But like Hugh Lofting's racist and colonialist "Doctor Dolittle" series, which first appeared in the 1920s, "Tintin in the Congo" is also exciting, funny, and charming. So what to do with a book like this?
Though it wasn't translated into English, "Tintin au Congo" was in print in the 1970s in England, where my father -- whose antiracist credentials are impeccable -- bought it for me. He used it as a teaching tool about racism, and I've done the same thing with my children. (The book was published by the indie press Last Gasp in 2002.) Now, thanks to Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, the book will be widely available in the US, in English.
According to Publishers Weekly, Borders stores in the US will stock "Tintin in the Congo" in an adult-oriented section of the store -- the graphic novels section -- because of material the retailer says "could be considered offensive by some of our customers." (This is mealy-mouthed: Anyone who does not consider the racist aspects of the book offensive is deluded! But I support Borders' decision to shelve the book outside of the children's section.) Little, Brown acknowledges that the book "may be considered somewhat controversial as it reflects the colonial attitudes of the time it was created." A belly band expressing this sentiment will be wrapped around US editions of the book; there will also be an explanatory preface in the new edition.
Soft Skull Press will soon publish "Tintin and the Secret of Literature," a book-length analysis of the Tintin oeuvre by Tom McCarthy. On their blog yesterday, publisher Richard Nash offered an excerpt from the book looking at the right-wing origins of the strip.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 08:27 AM
July 17, 2007
Language bloggers, not surprisingly, have a couple of nits to pick with "grammar vandal" Kate McCulley, who goes around town adding commas and apostrophes to defective signs like a Reebok ad reading "Run easy Boston." A feature in Sunday's City Weekly explained:
The Reebok sign should have read "run easily," McCulley observed, and it should have had a comma after "easily," before "Boston."
(Grammar note: “Easy” is an adjective, which must never be used to describe a verb, such as “run”; that task calls for the adverb “easily.”)
"Run easily, Boston"?
Not so fast, said the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar:
While we appreciate the zeal, easy can be used as an adverb that means "with ease," and has been used this way since 1400. (We checked in the Oxford English Dictionary.)
Over at Language Log, Mark Liberman asks if we think Shakespeare's line should be edited to read "The course of true love never did run smoothly." Anyone who thinks "easy" is only an adjective, he says,
needs to take the general grammatical point up with William Shakespeare, Jack London, Francis Beaumont, Wilfred Owen, and many other worthies, as discussed in an earlier Language Log post: "Amid this vague uncertainty, who walks safe?"
Mr. Verb was stopped in his metaphorical tracks by something else entirely: McCulley's declaration "Without punctuation, we have nothing."
What's so striking about the use of "without X, we have nothing" is how it's traditionally been used: Check around a little and you get love, hope and dreams filling that X. . . . all matters with some metaphysical heft. I'm fairly sure you have never been so high that punctuation made that list.
Zeno, blogging at Halfway There, says McCulley's comma campaign warms his prescriptivist heart. Still, he agrees that her objection to easy is wrongheaded, and warns (too late?) that the entire grammar-vandal enterprise is hazardous:
No one can safely wave an admonitory finger and hold forth authoritatively on exactly what is right and what is wrong. That is a fool's errand. Anyone who tries too hard to fill the role of grammar police is certain to find him- or herself brought up on false arrest charges.
Posted by Jan Freeman at 04:46 PM
July 17, 2007
My column on parent-child play generated some good responses from readers:
Correspondent P.B., for example, offers one perspective on the upper-middle-class tendency to feel they need to get down on the playroom floor with Junior as often as possible:
A few months ago, I was sitting in the lobby of [a local music school], surrounded by a group of very upper middle class, seemingly accomplished, mothers. They were saying that they could never stay home, because they could not play with their children all day.
I entered the conversation, politely I hope, to say that I had been home with three children for 20 years, and had never played with them (this was a slight exaggeration, but mostly true).
I guess I see this new middle class emphasis on play as being mainly a result of two parents working: in other words, a combination of guilt and desire to be with the children in an intense way ("quality time") to make up for the togetherness lost during the workday. Parents who are home can be a lot more relaxed about all this ...
It seems as if no one trusts kids anymore. Boredom and doing nothing are the greatest teachers. I remember a term in Mothering Magazine in the 1980's: benign neglect. The idea was to be there to facilitate, but not direct. So, while your children play store, you might be the customer, if asked, but not supply the idea or the supplies. When my son built the Tobin Bridge with Legos, I read the paper. If he asked how to spell "Tobin" I would help (and only if he asked), or, if he asked how I liked it, I would tell him. But I never got on the floor, nor did I suggest the project in the first place.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 11:00 AM
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