Wages for housework: my grandmother did all of the typing for decades and this is how people talk about her 😒

“James would have documents typed, annotate them, and then dispatch them to comrades around the world for political discussion and feedback.”

I ran out of characters but her name is Selma James.

“Have the letters typed” like the typists and their don’t matter. In a Marxist discussion. Good god.
Anyway you can see in this milieu of watching her husband be vaunted as a theorist while she was his main intellectual partner and making his work possible while also not being acknowledged that she first formulated the need for a Wages for Housework campaign.
Their labor*

I’m so annoyed!! https://t.co/SQUjDwY1DU
“But he wrote the Black Jacobins when she was still a kid” yes but as the interview notes, he came back to it for multiple editions and *someone* was typing his documents

Selma James was the someone. The typist had a name, a life, and an intellect of her own.
And Selma and my dad probably disagree with me about this but I think Nello’s own sexism is why she gets erased from his story a lot. He never made a point of crediting her.
I feel like since I just publicly thrashed my grandfather a bit I should say that he’s why I love collecting art books. He gave me my first ones, Picasso, when I was about six.
People are complicated.
When I say Selma has a whole intellect of her own, see her Wikipedia page

https://t.co/PLD1TY3UBr

and also
The first collection of her writings over the years, which she typed herself: https://t.co/Myyjzazeym
And her forthcoming second collection of writings, out in May: https://t.co/4xlgPeLVyf

These works span over 50 years of thought and writing.
Selma turns 91 this year. Maybe she’s earned getting credit for her work? Or not, because casual academic misogyny.

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I’m torn on how to approach the idea of luck. I’m the first to admit that I am one of the luckiest people on the planet. To be born into a prosperous American family in 1960 with smart parents is to start life on third base. The odds against my very existence are astronomical.


I’ve always felt that the luckiest people I know had a talent for recognizing circumstances, not of their own making, that were conducive to a favorable outcome and their ability to quickly take advantage of them.

In other words, dumb luck was just that, it required no awareness on the person’s part, whereas “smart” luck involved awareness followed by action before the circumstances changed.

So, was I “lucky” to be born when I was—nothing I had any control over—and that I came of age just as huge databases and computers were advancing to the point where I could use those tools to write “What Works on Wall Street?” Absolutely.

Was I lucky to start my stock market investments near the peak of interest rates which allowed me to spend the majority of my adult life in a falling rate environment? Yup.
"I lied about my basic beliefs in order to keep a prestigious job. Now that it will be zero-cost to me, I have a few things to say."


We know that elite institutions like the one Flier was in (partial) charge of rely on irrelevant status markers like private school education, whiteness, legacy, and ability to charm an old white guy at an interview.

Harvard's discriminatory policies are becoming increasingly well known, across the political spectrum (see, e.g., the recent lawsuit on discrimination against East Asian applications.)

It's refreshing to hear a senior administrator admits to personally opposing policies that attempt to remedy these basic flaws. These are flaws that harm his institution's ability to do cutting-edge research and to serve the public.

Harvard is being eclipsed by institutions that have different ideas about how to run a 21st Century institution. Stanford, for one; the UC system; the "public Ivys".
I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x


The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x

Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x

The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x

It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x