Scribbles

Zambia has long occupied a place in the minds of anthropologists and other scholars as the symbol of modernization. With a mining industry in full boom in the 50s and 60s, the cold, steely factories billowing smoke and grittily churning out essential elements was the perfect picture of industrialization, recalling the Industrial Revolution of England. In Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban life on the Zambian Copperbelt, James Ferguson exposes modernization as a myth, a metanarrative that has shaped how outsiders view and analyze African development. It was symbolized in the factories, and also in the urbanizing labor force. As Zambians moved from their villages to the big city to engage in modern labor, they were progressing along a continuum towards an enlightened future.

He begins the book in chapter two with a lengthy history of the creation of modernization, positioning it as a liberal colonial myth. Conservatives had their own take on it, seeing Africans as tribal, primitive people. When Zambians moved to the city, they retained their tribal mindsets, remained trapped in their village kin networks and outdated views of witchcraft. These views were used to justify sparse expenditure on housing, underinvestment in urban infrastructure, and continued racist policies. Why develop a city when the inhabitants remained village dwellers? Why mingle with a backwards people? 

Liberals denounced this as racist, and held up their argument that moving to the city was an embrace of modern ways. Famously, the anthropologist Gluckman wrote "an African townsman is a townsman; an African miner is a miner," (Gluckman 1961, 69). This new type of person could be seen in the style, the dress, the habits of city dwellers, and these observations came to associated with a grand narrative of progress:

Against the specter of the more coercive and segregationist regimes to the south, Copperbelt liberals held up an image of a settled, permanent urban class of Africans who would rapidly lose their rural and traditional attachments and eventually master the whole of European "civilization," just as they had already mastered European dress and even ballroom dancing. (Wilson 1942).” (p. 33)

Zambians were often portrayed as in the middle of a cultural clash between urban and rural, modern and traditional. “The Africans seemed to me to be hovering in the balance between the loin-cloth and the LSE blazer. Which would they choose? (Fraenkel 1959, 134),” Ferguson quotes one mid-century scholar as he traces the genealogy of the modernization myth. But it wasn’t just an academic myth, however, it was embraced by Zambians and became a local myth as well. Ferguson noted that when his subjects would speak about having to return home, they might bring up material issues of supporting kin, delicate relationships, or where they would have to find land. But they reverted to the modernist narrative and embraced dualist ways of speaking. They spoke of the difficulty adjusting to a traditional world again, of a clash of urban and rural styles. Ferguson found himself slipping into thinking this way. He describes a scene where women in traditional dress, on a construction site near a gleaming skyscraper, are carrying water on their heads. At first, he saw this as rural people confronting modernity:

Even as I was having the thought, I knew how badly such images misunderstood the cultural contrasts of urban Zambia. From the simple observation of a group of urban women quietly doing their jobs, my own cliche-infested imagination had in a split-second spun out an only too-familiar web of associations, turning the poor women into incarnations of (1) rural life, who somehow "really" belonged in a village, not a city; (2) a "traditional" past, somehow out of place in the "modern" world; and (3) indigenous "African" ways, in colorful contradiction with "Western" metropolitan culture. It was time to get back to reality: these were urban women, not villagers; they were living in the present, not the past; and they were working-quite free of any evident contradiction-as wage-laborers, employees of a giant, modern capitalist firm. (85)

In chapter three he offers a different way of speaking about this “puzzle of cultural dualism.” Instead of thinking of Africans as transitioning from rural to urban on the path to progress, he began to see rural and urban as different cultural styles, one local and the other cosmopolitan. “I use the term cultural style to refer to practices that signify differences between social categories,” (p. 95) he writes. The idea of cultural styles is a different frame of thinking about individual expression and experience because it doesn’t suggest there are two different cultures clashing; people can adopt a certain style within a culture. Cultural styles represent different practices within a given society.

Cultural style is performative, you “do” a style. But it also requires competence. It’s a practical type of knowledge; people may not be able to explain how they have style, but they can perform it. It can’t be easily adopted and discarded; like an accent, it develops over time and sticks with you. Like fashion, you have to be able to “pull it off.” If you’re not fluent in a style, you just look fake:

…we might do better here to think of culture as fashion. And in fashion, of course, the key is not wearing a particular outfit but being able to wear it, being able to (as they say) "bring it off." Clothing is a mere collection of garments; fashionability is a performative capacity, an ability to effect the right look through an effective combination of garments, social sense, and bodily performance. Style, in this sense, is not achieved simply by having certain ideas or adhering to certain norms; it is a matter of embodied practices, successfully performed. (p. 98)

Lastly, cultural style doesn’t reveal some inherent “real” identity inside people. They actively construct a new self-understanding. A local cultural style signaled a desire to be traditional, to respect family boundaries; a cosmopolitan style was a rejection of this, signaling a connection with the larger world. Like British punks or people with neck tattoos, they were essentially saying “I am not like you” and also “I am connected to something out there.”

This type of thinking draws on Judith Butler’s writing on gender as a performance, and a point she makes is that while identities and styles are partially a performance, they are also "strategies of survival under compulsory systems.” They are adopted under situations of duress, and in this case the pressure comes from a rapidly changing political economy. What makes the idea of cultural styles so compelling in explaining behaviors and significations is that the urban-rural myth was breaking down. People were forced to contemplate (or actually) return home, with the small caveat that “home” has lost all meaning. They would be strangers in the rural terrain, and the prospect of being forced out of the city created a sense of disillusionment and betrayal. Having bought into the myth of modernity, they were left feeling cheated. 

***

Is this book an ethnography? Sort of. At one point, he describes it as an ethnography of ethnographic thinking about modernization; it’s something like the genealogy of an idea, but he uses real stories from people he observed, visited, and interviewed. The motivation of the book is his attempt to describe the feeling of desolation as people’s hopes of living a middle-class, modern life disintegrated. Thus, at another point he describes the book as an attempt to “...concentrate on the social experience of ‘decline’ itself.” (15)

An important source of materials is the long history of writing by anthropologists about Zambia. Apparently, it has been the focus of scholars, both the pith helmet wearing kind and the liberal colonials and then people like him. But he also draws in his own observations captured in a series of short vignettes positioned in little text boxes creating what he calls a “polyphony.” Lastly, he includes an exchange of letters, and rare for ethnographies in my opinion he includes as an appendix several of these letters written to him, giving us readers a chance to see some of his source data.

I found the book incredibly compelling because it was a different type of anthropological writing. It dealt with history, and included ethnographic accounts. But it also delved into the discursive realm, which leads him into the type of analysis done by Foucaul. Ferguson is exploring how narratives construct our realities, how they create imaginataries that we aspire to and perhaps fulfill, even if these narratives are not accurate. 

This is done most explicitly in chapter five, which takes up domestic relations. Here, he describes how the nuclear family was a “metanym of modernity,” meaning when you saw a husband working and being faithful to a wife at home, you were seeing a small step towards the making of a modern society. It’s a hollow vision, Ferguson argues, and he compares it to the futuristic nostalgia embedded in concepts like “streamlining.”

Taken from aeronautical engineering - filtered down to architecture and fashion and even appliances (the streamlined refrigerator?) - streamlining came to represent modern, high tech design. But in other realms, the original design features lost any semblance of functionality and stood just as symbols:

…just as streamlined aircraft design led to streamlined refrigerators, the functional modernity of the Zambian mining industry always brought with it a parasitic, second-order modernity - derived not from the practical imperatives of industrial production but from the "intertextuality" that allows signifiers of the modern to slide across the surface of things, from one domain to another. For if the copper industry was to be modern, the reasoning went, it would have to have modern workers. And if workers were to be modern, they would have to have modern families. (169)

The modern vision was hardly realized, and Ferguson again dives into the ethnographic record to show how anthropologists used all sorts of wild theories of deficiency to explain the lurid and obscene sexual habits of Zambians. They seem to be wild animals having sex whenever they please and with no respect for the bounds of marriage. Ferguson’s own analysis of the case histories and just his street observations does indeed show that marriage as traditionally understood is largely absent. The kinds of monogamous long-term relationships that thrill economists and development experts are just not there. Everyone seems to have a wife and second wife, and women seem to have a rotating cast of lovers themselves. Shortsighted economic decisions are made to support these lovers, while men in bars lament the greediness of the lurking ladies.

Instead of faulting a cultural failure in Zambians, Ferguson highlights what these types of gender relations actually do accomplish. In an economy dominated by male-centric mining, there are few opportunities for women to earn money. These short-term relationships allow women with little earning power, or legal rights to housing, a way to sustain themselves. Furthermore, men and women both do feel a strong obligation to sustain family relations, it’s just that they are tied more closely to the mothers and sisters back in the village than women they just recently met. 

This is a political economy of misogyny. The unequal and frustrating gender relations are as related to harsh and one-sided economic conditions. As the mid-century boomtowns lost their primacy in global markets, these relationships would only be further challenged. People still aspired to the idealized nuclear family, but realistically attaining it was more difficult. “The modern family is, in this sense, a myth,” (p. 204) writes Ferguson. It symbolized moving from lower class to middle and upper class society; “Wanting a modern family - like wanting a streamlined refrigerator - entails an imagined relation to modernity itself, and a desire to escape from the world of the ‘second class,’” (p. 204).

The analysis owes a debt to Foucault. There is a focus less on what the myth of the modern family might “mean” and more on questions such as "How and to what effect is this concept deployed; what does it do?" His answer is that it obscures “crucial political issues” like the welfare of women and children, turning analyses of family life into arguments about the backwardness and pathologies of Zambians

***

The myth of permanent urbanization is dismantled in chapter four. Drawing on interviews, observations, and a poignant collection of letters exchanged with subjects over the years, Ferguson shows how people who had lived their entire adult lives in the city could no longer make it work. They were forced to return home, though “home” was a strange land with relatives who were strangers, where jealousies abounded.

Many didn’t want to go back. But they had few choices; they could stay in the city and try to ake ends meet. They could try to farm on a plot of land gifted by a relative. They could seek to forge new connections with relatives they hadn’t seen in years.

“Moving to a rural area entailed a kind of day of reckoning, a tallying of the ledger of social debts and credits that had built up over the years. The decision of where people would go was largely about to whom they could go, and what treatment they could expect when they got there. It was at this point that what I have called the social and cultural "compliance" of urban workers with the demands and expectations of a wider social nexus was most acutely put to the test, and it was at this point that noncompliant urban workers were most vulnerable to the resentments and sanctions of their rural kin.” 129

Years of disjointed communication with the rural relatives had laid the groundwork for this weak relationship. Furthermore, having cultivated cosmopolitan styles, it was difficult to consider integrating into a very different culture, one that looked down on the excesses of urban life. Rural lands had in effect shaped the thinking and planning of urban residents, haunting their future prospects of having to return to its lifestyle.

The power of Ferguson’s use of cultural styles in deconstructing the various myths of modernization becomes apparent when he shows how they (the myths) are adopted so readily because they help people make sense of an unintelligible world. In chapter six, he uses a bar scene to illustrate: Salary men in suits order bottled beer after bottled beer. Women in modern clothes sidle up to various men. Youth in glitzy clothes circulate, the music is loud, the languages multiple. 

There is a typical anthropological way of analyzing this: “Anthropological understanding, in the familiar Malinowskian story, emerges from learning to see the world as the natives do,” (p. 208) he writes, of developing a cultural fluency. This anthropologist would immediately understand the language use, the significance of the clothes. But a scene like this one shows there are no natives, and not every symbolic element has meaning. Everyone is an outsider, and some things really mean nothing.

This is Ferguson confronting the “intractable unintelligibility” of fieldwork. He stopped trying to make sense of it; “...unintelligibility was not a riddle to be solved but the riddle's solution itself,” (209). There was no underlying signal to be found; everything was noise. This demands an “analytic of noise,” which sees culture not as a system of communication, but also of miscommunication. There is no common and shared collection of signs, a “linguistic utopia” (Chang, 1996); it is a series of partial understandings.

This is uniquely important for Ferguson’s argument about cosmopolitanism. For decades, anthropologists have tried to argue that urban residents were adopting a new way of life aligned with the modern world. These residents were joining a global community in moving towards the promised land of modernity, following the path to industrialized progress. It was a teleological interpretation of culture. This is nonsense, Ferguson argues. People don’t really know what they are doing, what they are signifying, or what any of their fellow citizens are seeking to accomplish. They only know that they are embracing a style that is different from tradition, set apart from rural expectations.

In the bar, a young man walked by a t-shirt reading POSH BOY: ENJOYABLE EXCITING CAFE THOUSANDTHS OF WONDERFUL CITY IN CALIFORNIA. Trying to make sense of such a symbol is a common goal for ethnographers in foreign lands. But the inscrutability of this particular saying defied interpretation. That was the point. Cosmopolitanism in Ferguson’s rendering is not about a specific global citizenship, it’s a nod to “..a distant world imagined but not very well known…what is being signified is often precisely a distance from any familiar, shared semiotic and social system,” (225-226).

These observations recast cosmopolitanism not as evidence of a world trudging toward modernity. But he shows cosmopolitanism to be a messy signification that at times rejects rural ties, at others signals a temporary freedom. It is a way of saying “I am not one of you,” but a saying so realizing that at some point the bar bill must be paid, that rural life awaits.

There is a consistent theme of frustration with the societal decline, of embarrassment and disappointment that what was promised in life was not delivered, and a reckoning with the disorienting social situations in which people were left. Ferguson uses the word “abjection” to describe this feeling: “Abjection refers to a process of being thrown aside, expelled, or discarded. But its literal meaning also implies not just being thrown out but being thrown down - thus expulsion but also debasement and humiliation,” (p. 236).

This is the human side effects of a global world order that is often left unsaid. It’s not that people were unconnected to a modernized world, they were disconnected. More than being merely undeveloped as a nation, they were left underdeveloped. These feelings recall dependency theorists who argued that prosperity and poverty were necessary for one another; progress couldn’t be achieved unless others were held back. It is a defining feature of an economic order defined by global redlining, where capital moves with barely a hesitation to the next more profitable source, leaving behind the toxic mess of extractive industries. This explains the sense of loss and betrayal within the feeling of abjection.

Part of the argument is that the era of development has been a disaster. But it is not development alone, which is simply the continuation of colonial exploitation stretching back centuries. Any new theories to improve the lives of the poor must be wary of repackaging old narratives in new vocabulary. To me, education as a source of progress is such a metanarrative; it has been promised that going to school for a few years will increase life outcomes, but the benefits of holing up in a dreary institution seem overblown. There is a point where motivating narratives cross over into myths, and even worse, lies, and nobody wants to be a liar.

One

It’s 4:45pm, a winter evening and the sun is about to set. A faint glow on the horizon peeks under a blanket of dark gray clouds. It is calm and quiet, though I’m in the middle of New York City All the city noises are there: angry car horns, trains clacking on old tracks, the dull roar of the interstate. As I round the massive green parade ground of Van Cortland Park, I even see the blaring siren lights of an ambulance. But these all quickly fade into the background below the sound of my breathing and the crunch of sneakers on gravel. 

This is my favorite park, the best place in New York no matter the season. It’s where my feet always take me when I’m not thinking and where my body drifts when I need to wander without fear or limits. Thousands of people mill about, there is always a soccer game or festive a party. In the countless nooks, behind a boulder or under an old train bridge, all sorts of human dramas play out. It’s unmistakably alive, a rowdy place in an unpeaceful city, but it’s still a park and no matter what I always find peace.

Today, my peace quickly transforms in to awe as hundreds of geese pour over my head and unleash a storm of honks. I try to single out an individual note but it’s like trying to count the grains of sand in an hour glass, the experience only exists as a totality. The parade grounds always seem to be carpeted with patches of Canadian Geese. For some reason, towards evening they take flight and head over a strip of trees to splashland into the pond on the other side. They perform this mini-migration with such exuberance, a reminder for me that even the smallest of trips is an occasion for joy.  

I love Van Cortland because it’s wild. Animals are everywhere. I am on a first name basis with several ducks. There are bluejays and cardinals and redwing blackbirds and giant hawks; I heard an owl some years back. I’ve had my hair buzzed by fruit bats at night. I’ve jumped over turtles and frogs and almost crashed into a scurrying rabbit. Several times I’ve stumbled upon deer, and while I’ve stood paralyzed with terror by the thought of being trampled by these massive beasts. They always look at each other briefly and then gracefully bound off into the brambles. I saw a coyote half a football field away, loping along in search of food. Once, the ranger took a horse out at full gallop on the parade ground; it was magnificent.

But Van Cortland is a people’s park. At any hour on any day, there are people wandering its trails, stealing away to a lookout, or cozying up with a lover on a bench. People work out on the pull up bar or do curls with a makeshift log.  People turning over a new leaf and going for that first walk, and experienced strollers. You are never far from a cloud of marijuana, or a pile of discarded beer cans.

There are joggers like me, but also real runners who train at a breakneck pace. Fall weekends host massive cross country meets. The race begins with a mob on the parade ground, they shoot over the highway and onto horse trails up into the hills, before finishing at the tortoise and hare sculpture. The field fills with high school tents and flocks of teenagers nervously warming up or joyously cooling down or racing off to cheer their team.

Aspiring country-clubbers hump their irons and drivers over to the golf course. It’s greens are protected by a fence, but I try to spend some time on the eight or ninth hole, entering through one of the many clipped fences (it’s also where I saw the coyote). There is always a game happening; you can look on the basketball courts, tennis courts, handball courts, or the other tennis courts. Once I walked slowly from a baseball game to a soccer game to a cricket match, lingering at each one to admire the competition. There is a full track, and people always congregate on the fraying infield astroturf or up on the concrete stadium bleachers.  

Every weekend from May through September is a party. The cars start double-parking on Broadway in the early morning, unloading grills and giant speakers and Costo-pallettes of food and drink. There are tents, foldable chairs, tables crammed with barbecue and empanadas and birthday cakes. Around noon the music starts blasting, kicking off the quinceaneras and baby showers and birthdays and anniversaries. People dress up like they’re going to the club, they dance, and play small games and run around. Every fifty feet the song changes from bachata to banda to soco. Once a full Mariachi band lit up the evening with their sons. On these days it feels like the entire city has come to stretch their legs and catch their breath from the rat race. 

Sometimes the parties are bigger. There was a giant viewing part for solar eclipse, hundreds of people staring at the heavens in awe or looking into the giant telescopes the Rangers had set up. The New York Philharmonic plays a yearly concert, filling the Bronx night with Mozart and Shostakovich. During COVID they erecting massive tents on the parade ground for an emergency hospital. Luckily, they didn’t need it.

Two

We think of parks as a small piece of nature, a home for animals and a place for plants to flourish. But parks are fully human, an important municipal element as vital as the sewers and as interesting as the skyscrapers. They are designed, planned, constructed, and heavily maintained, no different from a new subdivision or apartment tower. You can sometimes see the specs plastered on a fence when construction is underway, with guidelines for sidewalk width, proper drainage, and which types of trees to include. 

In the best parks, every twist and turn is calculated, every vista manufactured. That’s why walking in a park is less like a communion with nature and more like crawling inside a work of art. Parks are living sculptures that we see from the insides, except instead of marble or clay the medium is plants and dirt and space and trees. 

As part-art and part-infrastructure, parks are more like architecture, and the best parks have the right balance of form and function. It’s hard to see parks in this way because we often think of their chief role as to counterbalance the toxic effluence of urban life. Every travel guide blurb about Central Park seems to describe it as the “lungs of the city.” They are often portrayed as refuges from the brutality of urban life. But the art/infrastructure perspective shows how curational quality varies by neighborhood. The best parks are designed by star architects, like Olmstead and Central Park. They have entire battalions dedicated to the upkeep: landscapers, arborists, cleaners, signage experts. Some come with their own sprawling 501(c)(3) to manage millions of dollars in donations and to fund all the lawyers and public relations experts. The parks of the rich feel like celebrations of community, a joyous coming together to revel in beautiful flowers and stunning foliage, to stretch our legs together in leisurely pastimes, or to lay carefree on a blanket with a bottle of wine. 

The middle class get functional but boring parks. The equipment is pulled from a catalog, all of the designs are standardized and replicated. Nothing is remotely interesting or original; they are like the Thomas Kincaid paintings one used to get at the mall. The baseball fields and the park benches might all work, and everything serves an essential public service function of allowing people to congregate and run wild for a bit. 

The parks of the poor feel like discarded crumbs; only the desperate will spend time on a bench there. Most of the equipment is worn out and unoriginal to begin with. The worst can be like war zones, steaming trash heaps to be avoided. Perhaps there is a beleaguered manager struggling to funnel crumbs in a sparse budget to make sure the monkey bars are maintained. You can tell when a park is neglected; garbage is everywhere, homeless tents pop up, a criminal element might move in. The plants are boring, grass is a luxury. There is usually a smell.

These failed parks feel like institutional failures. They are like a burst sewer line or the broken escalators at a subway station. Local government is caught paralyzed between demands to invest in a neglected community and admonishments of a community that can’t take care of its own backyard.

That is why when I see a park working, it feels like a neighborhood is thriving. There is something about kids running with abandon, couples strolling, and rec leagues playing freely. A healthy park is a barometer of a peaceful, flourishing, community. 

Three

I suppose I’ve become a collector of urban parks. I find the green spots on a map and point myself in that direction. These parks all look the same on a map: a uniform green blob spread across some polygonal shape. But the symbolic representation hides enormous diversity. There are suburban multipurpose parks jammed with areas for baseball, soccer, basketball, and tennis. There are of course the megaparks like Central Park, Chicago’s Millennium, The Presidio in San Francisco. 

And there are the obscure urban gems, known to locals but wonderful discoveries for outsiders. I found ancient fossils at the Falls of the Ohio in Louisville, saw colonial history Point State Park in Pittsburgh, watched beavers in Tualatin Hills Nature park right by the Nike Campus in Oregon. I wandered along the Des Plaines river in an unnamed park while waiting for flights at O’hare, and watched the yachts float by in Miami’s Jose Marti park. 

Many parks are humble, tiny coves that are little more than a few scattered benches, maybe a playground and basketball hoop, or maybe just short path through some trees. Ewen Park, by my house, is one such park. It’s basically 170 stairs up a steep grassy hillside. Every few years it snows enough for hordes of people to bomb downhill on sleds, but otherwise it’s just people trudging through on their way to work.

Some of my favorite places are the gritty parks in bursting global cities. Independence Day Park, in the Nungambakkam section of Chennai, is one such park: nondescript, functional, and wildly successful. I walked through it over several weeks on my way to my hotel. It was surrounded by an iron gate, and you descended into a concrete path that hugged the inner perimeter. People walked laps in pairs while in the middle kids climbed on the playground and small cricket games were squeezed in between the plants. At twilight giant bats fluttered through the tall tropical trees, the same ones that blocked out the harshest midday sunlight. Somehow the awful chaos of the city was muted, buses and trucks were grinding their gears just on the other side of the fence, but the park still magically provided a boundary.

Maybe I developed this appreciation because one of my jobs was as a maintenance worker for the City of Bothell Parks Department. I love the grass and plants, the public architecture ranging from formulaic to gothic to inspired, and all the little local idiosyncrasies. We mowed lawns, emptied garbage cans, weeded planters, and groomed the baseball fields on mini-tractors. In the fading summer evening light, I would take the department truck around to lock up the parks gates. I loved every moment of it, just the sheer thrill of being outside, smelling life and seeing others do the same.

In neighboring Kenmore, a sparkling treasure just opened called ƛ̕ax̌ʷadis park. It’s not only brand new, it’s a completely innovative public space. Growing up, I would run and bike by what was then just a hairy mess of unmaintained land bordered by a trailer park. The city managed to claim a small slice of this territory and turn it into one of the most unique parks I’ve ever seen.

It’s a tiny 6 acres, located right along the Sammamish River. There are no swingsets, no ballfields, no basketball courts. There is barely a quarter mile of walking paths, a few half-benches, and a good chunk of the area is a parking lot. It’s really nothing more than a few short iron trusses spanning over little lagoons and branches of the river. The name, honoring the native Lushootseed village that used to be here, is the type of civic gesture that makes me want to roll my eyes. I would dismiss it if the park weren’t so magical.

The small swampy wetlands of ƛ̕ax̌ʷadis pulse with life. Small families of ducks paddle through the waterways, both curious and fearful of the river otter that always seems to lurk. Blackbirds, robins, cardinals, are in constant motion, filling the air with enough musical conversation to tune out the airplanes soaring overhead. Giant herons lurk, standing motionless for hours before gracefully taking flight. In the evenings, thousands of crows pass by on their way home. The sky always puts on a show as the sun sets, even when the clouds are thick their is drama above.

What I love about these places is that these are my places. ƛ̕ax̌ʷadis, and Van Cortland, and even the glorified staircase that is Ewen Park: they are not “mine” as in I own them, but mine as in I am a part of them. I belong to them and they to me. I know the shades of the trees, the rhythms of the wildlife, the color palettes of the sky. These places flourish inside of me as much as they exist out there. 

Every urban dweller deserves places like these, an accessible, safe, functioning local park. Especially in New York City, where all except the absurdly wealthy live on top of each, crammed together into scarce real estate with barely a backyard in sight, parks are critical spaces. The world is only getting more urbanized, more cramped, masses of humanity desperate for a living squeezed into cities with finite land. Some can scurry off to a summer home or a weekend at a eco-resort; but for them open space is just one more commodity in a life of supercharged consumerism. 

City parks are something else entirely. They are the one place where you can be with others but you can also just be. There is nothing for sale, no entry fee, no requirements to be a participant other than being a living and breathing human.

Somewhere in the middle of the 19th century, there was a change in the nature of the British occupation of India. Colonialism had thus far been a long and violent process of subjugation, essentially an invasion by a private corporation, accompanied by a naked grab for resources and power. Somehow, the initial profit-hungry mission quickly turned into the civilizing project of an empire. But it was not only fueled by the motive forces of colonial racism and greed, it was also grafted onto an existing social hierarchy with its own culture of power and domination. One of the best places to see this dynamic is in the institution of education. That is, colonial education in India was not just the British imposing a way of learning on the natives, it was a relationship that succeeded because it resonated so deeply with the way society was organized.

This is one of the main arguments of Krishna Kumar’s brilliant Politics of Education in Colonial India (2015). The British empire took advantage of what he calls a “Colonial-National” homonymy, a “fortuitous resonance between [the] normative framework of colonial education and [the] indigenous one” (p. 218). Elites and high-caste Indians benefited greatly from this relationship, with lasting effects on the structure and impact on education in India until this day. It is a novel and important argument because it debunks the narrative of British subjugation through education. 

In its place, it writes a new one where education - schools, universities, and the teacher workforce - was a mutually beneficial relationship between colonial administrators and local elites, one that secured the place of an upper class in both civil service and other leadership positions while allowing the British to offload some of their administrative tasks (like collecting taxes, managing trade, and other vital operational details). A new picture emerges of colonialism that was perhaps directed by the British, and that channeled untold riches their way, but was also directed and beneficial to a class of upper-caste Indians. These elites secured (or continued to secure) all of the advantages of benign close to power, and also secured an attitude of superiority under a belief that (a) the masses lived in a poverty of their own making and (b) education could offer a way out. Together, these two aspects “...endowed upon the educated native a deeply satisfying sense of intellectual and moral superiority over the illiterate masses, very similar to the superiority the colonizer felt towards Indian society as a whole,” (p. 212). Left aside were the masses, always held as an imaginary group providing moral justification for the remaking of governance on the subcontinent even as they saw little improvement in their lives.

The book is divided into two parts. The stronger part one argues that homonymous discourses helped lay ideological foundations of a vast colonial educational bureaucracy pushing for order and moral reform. These influenced and reshaped conceptions of knowledge, ultimately creating a class of subordinate teachers with little status, influence, or autonomy. Teachers became civil servants whose work was strictly regulated by endless regulations, the insistence on closely following the lessons in textbooks written elsewhere, and the pressure of a centrally administered system of exams. This extreme control of their work turned them into “meek dictators”, obedient to a watchful bureaucratic structure while exerting brutal compliance within their tiny classroom fiefdoms out of fear of not fulfilling their duties. They were essentially powerless instruments of colonial power who used their tiny sliver of authority to become small tyrants over their students. Part two takes a look at the paradoxical effect of education: it was meant to extend colonial authority but also spurred the nationalist movement. Through this emerged contested ideological battles over national self-identity, progress, and equality. Once again, colonial ideas mixed with native ones to construct a strange type of new post-colonial nation.

In the 19th century, the British government moved to rein in the East India Company, essentially nationalizing a private enterprise that had always enjoyed state support. The consequence was a transition from a profit-seeking enterprise to an effort to further national ambitions of empire creation. Other ideals - progress, civilization, moral reform of natives - came to exist alongside the ever-present aims of capital extraction. Violence alone was no longer sufficient; it might work at the margins, but a “new order had to be constructed in a manner that would not disturb the ongoing commercial enterprise…coercion had to be replaced by socialization” (p. 16). 

Institutions like the railways, public works, and the post office all had important pedagogical functions, but education was the most direct way for this order to be created. Alongside the control of the population, a moral reformulation was also pushed through education with the goal of bringing reason and enlightenment to the masses. The fact that in practice this type of education was restricted to a select elite didn’t change the rhetoric. What made it all work was a “colonial-national homonymy,” where British avowals of improving society through education were grafted onto long-standing high-caste beliefs in the sanctity of education. These elites thrived in the British system; education justified an existing social structure, and helped monopolize access to new Western knowledge and power.

A consequence of these changes was a new relationship to knowledge that was European to be sure but build on existing epistemologies. In Europe, the Enlightenment had made the interpretation of the written word accessible to all, opening routes to personal development and meaning. In India, text had remained sacred, a collection of works passed down through oral recitation. The meaning or interpretation of the words was less relevant; as Kumar writes, real meaning was to be expressed through recitation: “...even when the student was expected to recognize the text as meaningful, the meaning was regarded as something the text contained, not something that the reader could attribute to it” (p. 47).

This impacted how teachers taught and how they were trained, enmeshing them in what Kumar calls “textbook culture,” an atmosphere of continual acquiescence to the sequence of knowledge presented in textbooks that persists till this day. Teachers taught from a textbook, children copied those words and then memorized what they had written down, and then were ceaselessly drilled to recite what they learned. This basic dynamic was supported by a vast colonial machinery that turned the lofty goals of bringing reason to the masses into little more than the accumulation of facts.

In textbook culture, the textbooks were both a means to control what was taught and a symbol of colonial authority:

…textbooks became an instrument of norm maintenance ...a convenient yardstick by which an inspector could judge a teacher's efficiency. From the teacher's perspective, the textbook was a symbol of the same authority which had the power to appoint, promote, penalize and transfer teachers. The best means for the teacher to protect himself against this power structure was to stick to the textbook. (p. 87)

If textbooks were a yardstick, examinations were like the specific markings that signaled the measurement of learning. Teachers had little autonomy to stray from the textbook because their employment and reputation were up against the exams. The fact that these exams were centrally designed was important. The whole centralized system of examination created “an aura of secrecy and bureaucratic ritual” (p. 87). Administrators in a distant office designed the exam, teachers could not examine their own students, and anything not in the textbook became a distraction: “...the teacher knew the precise spatial limits within the textbook beyond which he did not need to go” (59). Their only move was to “prepare [students] to the hilt” (p. 59) for upcoming tests. 

But the effect was more than just to control teachers:

This function had a social significance inasmuch as it enhanced the public image of colonial rule as being based on principles and impartial procedures. The secrecy maintained over every step, from the setting of papers to the final announcement of the result, gave a dramatic expression to the image of the colonial government as a structure that could be trusted. (p. 59)

The teachers' role in this structure was simple: do as they were told. Even if they had wanted to bring their own creativity, they had little leeway in trying new practices and anyway there always loomed the final exam. The power differentials were crystallized in the great disparities of salaries: district inspectors could earn five or even ten times as much as a teacher.  There were constant inspections, and teachers were assigned a host of dreary administrative tasks such as tracking expenses, keeping student records, and tabulating attendance. A sub-inspector could ruin a teacher’s life, making them (the teachers) mere “functionaries of the state…a meek subordinate of administrative officers” (p. 70). 

Kumar notes the irony in another, paradoxical effect of such a prescriptive dynamic. With so many restrictions from above, teachers turned to the one context where their authority remained unquestioned: the actual delivery of lessons. The humiliation and lack of autonomy outside the classroom turned into harsh fiefdoms within. They became meek dictators, weak and vulnerable within the bureaucracy and even community at large, but tyrants in the classroom. Here is how Kumar describes this:

Ironically, thus, the lack of any role in curriculum planning and in the choice of materials - two major indicators of teachers' professionally meek status - contribute to their acting as dictators in the classroom. The prescribed curriculum and textbook serve as the backdrop against which the drama of dictatorial power over docile children is played. The syllabus and the textbook conceal the teachers’ lack of professional power; they are the ‘givens’ of the situation. The children do not know that their teacher is a feeble servant of the authorities who determine what knowledge the teacher must teach; nor do they perceive him as a mere delivery man. For them the teacher is the man on the spot with all the power in the world to force them to do what he wants. They do not know that their teacher hides his powerlessness behind the mask of being all powerful.” p. 89

In part two, Kumar shows that as instrumental as education was in securing British control, it was also vital in spurring the Independence movement. He argues that three nationalist ideals were contested through education: equality, self-identity, and progress. The lively debates among nationalists in India, largely well-educated elites who had found success in the British system of education both in India and London, showed the other consequence of the new colonial education system: a native self-awareness and empowerment. The seeds of the independence movement were planted through education, but the vibrant debates and efforts show how hard it was to create a unified vision.

Theories that education could uplift the masses had been shown to be empty. Could education further equality, or was it nothing more than a system of producing new elites? Theories of downward filtration of knowledge and power through education had similarly been shown to be baseless. Because education remained the province of high caste elites, others were skeptical that a new nationalist education founded on caste principles had any hope of furthering equality. Ambedkar, for this reason, was initially eager to maintain the British system of education, with its English medium. Interestingly, he eventually won out, though Kumar argues that the various incentives for low-caste students did little to challenge the capitalist logics of empire.

National identity was also debated through education; should schools be Hindu? Should they teach Hindi over Urdu? Hindi won out and became a partial symbol of new nationalist progress, of a new nationalist identity, at the expense of alienating Muslims and other vernacular languages. Movements in the west and south resisted these homogenizing programs, and the national identity remains contested.

Many nationalists wanted to tap into the wonders of modern technology, and there emerged a tension between national identity and embracing western learning. There was great reverence for European knowledge, particularly in science, and thus education was a place to debate local views about progress. Nationalists like Tagore, Godkale, and Nehru all advocated for the wholesale importation of Western scientific principles in Education; only Gandhi resisted. 

Gandhi saw western civilization as more barbarian than progressive; he wasn’t necessarily anti-West, but in his own unique way of expressing pride, he advocated a pedagogy of self-reliance, local production and reverence for local knowledge. As part of this, he envisioned a return to the value of the teacher: “Gandhi wanted to free the Indian teacher from the slavery of bureaucracy… [his] plan implied the end of the teachers [adherence] to the prescribed textbook and curriculum,” (p. 195). He would write in his newsletter, The Harijan, that the teacher “becomes a slave of textbooks and has no opportunity or occasion to be original.” Thus emerged his unique pedagogy based on self-reliance. At one point, he wrote:

“It is my firm conviction. The main reason why the present regime goes on and continues to perpetuate atrocities it does, is that we have come under the spell of its education. Before it’s intrusion we were self-reliant, and not dependent as we are today.” (Gandhi, 1977c, 37)

His ideas were born out of his experiments on his communes in South Africa, and though he had some success implementing them decades later in India, they stood no chance against the momentum of a nation racing towards recreating a bureaucracy which needed to train and educate millions of students. It was a nation that began to find its identity in Hindi, to a certain extent in secular ideals, and in reality a Hindu curriculum. There was a growth in Hindi literature, the use of Hindi as a language, and a marginalization of Islamic themes:

An important implication of this history is that the customary view of education under colonial rule as a secularizing influence needs to be questioned. Such a view can be sustained, only if the inner workings of education system, particularly curricular, and textbooks, or ignored. (p. 163).

The demise of Gandhi’s vision nicely captures the contradictions, debates, and ultimate effects of colonial education in India. Kumar’s book is valuable because it clearly shows how colonial education succeeded through brute force, to be sure, but also through finding a fortuitous resonance with the existing culture of hierarchy. He shows how struggles over the value of progress, national identity, and equality, played out through debates about education. The resulting decisions grafted local values onto a colonial structure, ultimately continuing a system that constrained the deeply constrained work of teachers by tying them to textbooks, exams, and a complex bureaucracy. It is a dynamic that continues to this day.

What is an airport for? The easy answer is they exist to help people travel to places far away. Over the years, I’ve gotten a good sense of exactly who is going on the planes, and why. Salespeople readying their pitches, high school teams off to a tournament, presidential candidates on a barnstorming tour, consultants lugging their high-priced expertise from global hubs to the semi-urban margins. Tourists, with ski’s, guitars, beach blankets, and Hawaiian shirts. So, yes, airports allow travel; but also without them, modern society wouldn’t exist. 

But they are something else else, however, something less functional: I’ve come to see airports as teachers.

Airports are neither people nor schools. Yet they might be more effective than any textbook, documentary, or social studies teacher in the front of a classroom. Airports teach us about ourselves, our relationship to others, and our place in the world.

Above all, airports teach us about order. Everyone has to follow rules; launching and landing hundreds of planes is complicated business with horrific consequences if things go wrong. Humans learn are subject to exacting control, just another well regulated input like fuel or the maintenance of the plane. Every part of the experience is standardized with only minimal variation. From the moment we arrive at an airport, whether by shuttle bus or city train or dropped off at the curb of the departure terminal, our movements are scripted in advanced and heavily restricted. Check-in, baggage drop offs, the theater of the security, and the boarding ritual, all filled with small humiliations that we usually gracefully accept so that we can fly. Any grumbling or viral video of unruly passengers masks the overall reality: we all ultimately learn to submit to the process because airports have taught us to follow the rules.

Airports teach us a different type of order, social order. There are countless small ways this happen, the most commonly recognized example is being assigned a boarding group. Add to this bartering airline status, walking past executive lounges, the humiliations of TSA, and of course being force-marched through the first class cabin. Considering all the wealthy and pretenders all relaxing in their barca-loungers, gloating with a champagne glass in hand as we lug our oversized carry-ons past them, I’m always surprised that this has yet to foment a rebellion.

More subtly, we are also given expert tutoring in consumerism. Once you survive security, most airports are one big mall. Most actual malls in the US are dead, but the gated shopping experience lives on in the Terminals and Concourses of airports. There are few other semi-public places where people can parade their consumption. They can lounge at the airport bar, step out of duty free carrying bags heavy with Johnny Walker, or order a three course meal. I’m pretty sure price inflation at airports is largely so people can flex by purchasing a $30 pizza.

It’s also probably why people seem to take such great care in what they wear at the airport. I frequently see stylish ensembles, the latest athleisure, pristine Cowboy hats paired with well-ironed jeans, and young aspiring models letting it all hang out. Even the most casual of travel attire seems deliberately composed. This is all residue from the golden age of Pan Ams and TWAs when marketers remade air travel as an experience of glitz and glamor, and its remade in the modern airport as people learn to present themselves to the public. 

Business travelers are the most ridiculous; it’s almost sad to see them show up trapped in their suits and ties and leather shoes.In the movie Up In the Air, George Clooney - starring as the peripatetic business traveller living out of his suitcase - opens by saying “To know me is to fly with me.” What he meant was that all the small privileges he had earned, the black cards and gold medal status and complimentary upgrades, tell us all we need to know about what he values, how he makes decisions, and how he measures his self-worth. He calls the whole experience “Airworld,” like entering a corporately owned nation-state where the rules are different, the liquor is watered down, a hundred different butts have sat in your seat, and the only smiles you’ll get are professional ones. But the lighting is great, you’re accruing points on your mileage plan, and you are constantly made to feel important; the only thing you need to do in return is keep shopping.

Airworld High Society

Airworld is glamorous. Everyone seems to be having so much fun; they are pampered, massaged, served gourmet meals. The lighting is bright, the tiles are well-polished, and the the brands are only the best. Airports teach us that only the chosen few can enter this wonderful land, that Airworld is not for everyone.

Less than half of Americans flew on a plane in 2022, and less than half even have a passport. Those numbers have risen dramatically with cheap airfare, internet startups scraping the bids for the lowest prices, and the steady cheapness of oil. In the 1970s only 25% of Americans had been on a plane and only 5% had a passport in 1990 (1). This means millions of people are experiencing airports for the first time. 

Most of the over 150 million annual passengers are repeat flyers (2), meaning for those who rarely fly, the airport is a special event. The stressed-out newbies or harried parents lugging small children, for example, are not real residents of Airworld, they’re just trying to get a glimpse of the good life and contain any tantrums. Their time is one where senses are on high alert and stress hormones are surging, the perfect conditions for deep learning.

India is a great example of the pedagogic potential of airports. Just a few decades ago, there was barely a market for domestic air travel; now it’s the third largest in the world. New airlines are sprouting up, fueled by venture capital, and have backlogged orders in with Boeing and Airbus. Low-cost travel in India has increased over 27-fold in the last two and half decades (3).  Around 400,000 passengers fly daily, close to 150 million a year. 

But, to put that in perspective, that’s still (generously) only around 10% of the country that is flying every year. One report estimates that 25 million are first time flyers (4), meaning most air travelers in India are repeat flyers. Airport construction has soared in India as well, with glittering new terminals in Bangalore, Delhi, Ahmedabad, and even remote locations like Pakyong (5). Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminal is an architectural jewel, and yet the city is still constructing a second larger airport in the suburbs (6). That means millions more or more people will soon be learning at the feet of airports.

This is all helpful to recall the next time you are left stewing over your boarding group number. The real social division is the one between those inside an airport and those on the outside, and there are way more looking in. Squinting at the stats from India, it seems at least 1.3 billion people remain grounded in India every year. This basic fact reinforces for us air travelers that we are in the privileged few, modern demi-gods soaring the sky. 

Still, those numbers for the U.S. are larger than I would have thought. The truth is, air travel is, (sorry:) taking off. It’s at the global scale where the growth of air travel can really be appreciated. Worldwide, 100,000 flights lift off daily carrying ten million passengers, an entire airbound megalopolis (7). That’s 10 million people a day removing their shoes, waiting for their boarding group, fitting their lives into approved luggage, handing over the right papers, paying the right amount of money. Ten million people pledging allegiance to Airworld.

The Mental Maps of Non-flyers

What is it like to not fly? What is learnt by watching airplanes soar above? Do they think less of their lives, or their value? Do they come to understand their place in the world as fixed? Is the world flat?

For for the not-so-frequent flyers, especially those who sit in the aisle seats, I imagine airports are like elevators: you enter, the doors slide shut, a few moments of nothingness, and you are in a different place. Everyone has a mental map of the world, and for these people, their map is a winding road to an airport in City A, followed by a Xanax and two drinks, and their eyes open to City B.

My personal mental map stretches around Earth, networked nodes sprawling across a curving surface. The airport terminal is a sliding door that every I time I walk through opens on to different scenery. Sometimes an iconic skyscraper, others a picture perfect vista, a friendly neighborhood. But the details quickly get blurry. There are densely textured hotspots, like Heathrow or De Gaulle or Chang Mai, spearated by a grand emptiness seen from the window of an airplane. It is the barest of sketches of places or a really simple toy model. I fill in the blanks with an from a TV show or the narrative of a popular book.

What does the mental model of the world look like for people who never enter an airport? I imagine the world is small blip, densely filled with memories and idiosyncracies. Every square foot, every brick in a building, revealing a history and a personality. It’s charming, authentic, real and textured in the way a postcard or a Hollywood depiction is not. There is probably room for airports, but they are mysterious places at the edges of these mental maps, portals through which others disappear. 

Airports as Pedogical Tool

I’m taking the idea of airports as pedagogy from Sanjay Seth’s excellent book Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India. In it, he argues that the British may have used force to overtake India, but a whole body of knowledge and way of thinking arrived alongside military control. War was costly and brutal, and bred resentment, and anyway you can’t beat a way of thinking into people. Instead, western knowledge was disseminated through institutions like the army, schools, commerce, and my favorite, railroads.

Think of all the knowledge that has to go into establishing a safe, functioning system of trains. There is all the mechanical knowledge and complex engineering and design of routes and timetables, the writing of rules and policies to be followed, the drafting of job descriptions and civil service exams to build out the workforce. Anyone involved with the railways would find that the whole interaction rewires the brain. For passengers, the railway station is more than a building but an invitation to the entire subcontinent. The timetable is more than just a schedule of the next arriving train, it orders how we think of the passing of hours as something strictly regulated by bureaucrats, the same clock guiding Calcutta and Coimbatore. Travelers are not just free agents going where they need to, they are assigned a specific class, a berth on the train, and they stay in their place. I personally remember how in fear I was of getting the right information to the ticket agent.

Obviously, learning occurs in other institutions. Everyone is supposed to follow rules on the street or at school or work. But the mundanity of these experiences reduces our readiness to learn from the discomfort. In airports, like railways before them, the newness, the magnificence of the what is about to take place, the stress, all prime us to relinquish control and experience the rewards of compliance. Entering airports in such heightened emotional states, our expectations cultivated by years of sponsorships and glamor TV spots, we are ready to primed to learn about order, consumption, and the allure of modern society’s bargain of trading obedience and consumption for gratification. 

In fact, the pedagogical impact probably largest on those who work in some way for the airport, which stretches its tendrils far into society through the “multiplier” effect. For every new employee toiling at an airport, there are 2.2 additional jobs created beyond the tarmac (8). Think of the travel agents, lawyers, urban planners, cargo coordinators, lawyers, food providers. In North America, 1.2 million people are employed in some way at airports (9), a massive army of workers serving Airworld everyday.

In London, 76,000 people have their employment somehow tied to Heathrow, something like 22% of the local community’s jobs (10). Over 16,000 work at Istanbul Airport: 700 in airport operations, 3,522 in security, 1,300 in the food court, and 2,532 in cleaning, valet and parking services (11). Singapore’s Changi airport has its own promotional video inviting people to “Come make magic with us” (12). After watching, I’m almost ready to sign up and participate. There is something magical about being at an airport. It’s not just the tons of metal that are thrown into the air. It’s the people from every corner of the world, the thousands of stories, so many humans in motion. It’s the overwhelming wizardry of it all.

What Our Passports Say

Back in the real world, airports teach us about citizenship. These are one of the few places where our national identities are reinforced. Passports must be kept at the ready, there are immigration forms to be filled, and questions to be answered about our purpose of travel and visa type. Breezing through airports, we learn everyone is a citizen of somewhere. We belong to a government, in a sense we are property of a nation-state. 

International terminals are the best place to learn these lessons. An Gulf Arab might walk by in their thawb, an East African will cruise the concourse in a colorful wrap. There may be Indians in cotton shirts and saris lounging at the gate, Americans in jerseys and sneakers. 

The air also filled with languages. I like walking the concourses and hearing French, Egyptian, Albanian, Telugu, all wash over me, a torrent of incomprehensible sound. They are reading books I’ve never heard of, watching shows I’ve never seen, and awaiting flights to places I’ve never been.

These leaves no choice but to understand that the world is large and mostly out of our reach. Watching the cities flash across the arrivals board - Dar es Salaam, Reykjavik, Hanoi - drives the point home even more. Everyone calls one of these cities home. They are understood there, they know how to take a taxi and find a bus and feel at home. They will forever belong there and I will forever be an alien. 

This global sense of citizenship is dramatically brought home outside of Airworld in a less humane way at border crossings and checkpoints, where sentries stand by the barbed wire and regulate the human flow. The power of the state to detain or deport, to deny entry, is clear. Airports teach these same lessons but do so with a velvet-gloved fist; there may an icy question from a customs agent, perhaps a solider in the background with a machine gun. But you can also buy a latte, kick your feet up on the airport furniture, and stare out giant picture windows.

Undoubtedly, there is a global hierarchy of citizenship. Travelers from Africa or Asia, overloaded with luggage and kids, seem to be at the bottom, jet-setting Europeans a rung above. An American passport feels like a cheat code in your pocket. These states of citizenship show how some are traveling for leisure, some to make a quick buck, and some just for survival. This world order is also seen from browsing the different airline brands. Ethiopian Air feels sketchy, Air India less so. Avianca seems intriguing, KLM a trusted carrier. None of these measure up to Emirates or Singapore Alines, essentially flying emblems of ambitious governments. They are the symbols of Airworld extended to an entire city-state, a gated land of infinity pools and luxury shopping, where slums don’t exist and the air is clean and fresh fruit is always in season. 

The idea of a hierarchy is silly. It only works because airports, modern temples to citizenship, solidify our sense that everyone has a country. We are allowed to cross some borders but not others because our little book may or may not have the right stamp. The absurdity was popularized in another Hollywood movie, The Terminal, about a man who was trapped in an airport for years because he didn’t have the right visa. Mehran Karimi Nasseri was the person behind this film, and his real story reveals the absurdity of citizenship.

Born in Iran, sent to live in Brussels, and trying to get to England, he someone misplaced the documents proving his identity and travel permission. Caught in a diplomatic limbo, he took up residence in the basement of Terminal 1 at Charles De Gaulle airport. Taking over a small table, surviving on McDonald’s and the kindness of stranger, eventually the right bureaucrats took notice and he was granted a visa. By that time, however, Nasseri had found the netherworld of airports to be his one true home. He denied his origins, refused amnesty, and re-christened himself Sir Albert. Journalists found him alluring, and Nasseri relished his new home in the media, where the only stamp needed is the one of public interest. But Airworld, with its insistence on citizenship, nationalities, and constant consumption, appears to have driven him insane. His responses to interviewers, when closely analyzed, are nonsensical. H began endless shaving and scribbling notes on loose paper and protecting a small nest of boxes.

Then again, maybe he was liberated, refusing to live in a world where we all have to keep our papersin order. Citizenship was nothing but a fiction to him, so he preferred to read another story.

My Temple

This is an overintellectualized and, cynically elitist view of airports. The truth is, I love airports. I enter an airport like I enter a cathedral, with slow reverence and quiet contemplation. A good day for me is one watching megaliners and cargo jets take off and land, gracefully putting gravity to their own uses. I give in to the collapse of time and space, surrendering any hope of understanding how in a few hours I’ll be in another city staring at the sun and moon from a different angle. I am thrilled to see diverse people mingle together in this small confined space. I trick myself into thinking it is a coming together of humanity, forgetting that in a few moments everyone will be retreating back to their tribe.

I get swept away in the kitschy architecture. A few fake facades, or a change in color of the tiles, and all of the sudden we are in an Italian Villa, a hacienda where they serve tacos, or a hip fashion store. I forget quickly that these are lines in the sand, small construction motifs meant to distract us from the fact that we are essentially moving through an open warehouse, one where we are the products being shipped.

I forget all of that because airports are reflective spaces. The buzz of passengers alongside the hurried calls for boarding all work just like the reverent silence of a cathedral. Historically, religion has been one of the best teachers. The enormity of the logistics and engineering and legal frameworks and not to mention the small economic decisions that each traveler is making, an entirety that could only coalesce through supernatural coordination, making airport feel less like a place of departure than a place to worship the miracle of the present day.

 It’s all beyond my comprehension. It’s the closest I get to considering a higher power. What else would be able to bend the elements to its will and move us around the globe? That’s why I’m writing this in an airport, and not the drab sameness of another cafe. I’m caught in another moment of contemplation, and I’d stay right here if I could, but they just called my boarding group.

1. US State Department. (December 18, 2023). “Return to Pre-Pandemic Passport Processing Times.”  https://www.state.gov/return-to-pre-pandemic-passport-processing-times/ 

2. Airlines for America. (March 22, 2023). “New Survey: Nearly 90 Percent of Americans Have Flown Commercially”. https://www.airlines.org/new-survey-nearly-90-percent-of-americans-have-flown-commercially/. 

3. Ros, Miquel. (April 29, 2019). “Inside India’s aviation revolution and what it means for travelers,” CNN. https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/india-aviation-evolution/index.html. 

4. Chowdhury, A. (Jan 31, 2024). “Flying start for first-timers taking to skies.” The Economic Times. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/transportation/airlines-/-aviation/flying-start-for-first-timers-taking-to-skies/articleshow/107275146.cms?from=mdr. 

5.  I had to look that one up. https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/pakyong-airport-india/index.html  

6. no idea the source

7.  https://www.solotravellerapp.com/how-many-people-fly-per-day/. 

8. Gottdiener, M. (2001). Life in the air: surviving the new culture of air travel. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 24. 

9. Baskas, Harriet, (Marc 30, 2016). “How many people does it take to run an airport?.” USA TODAY. https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/flights/2016/03/30/airport-workers-employees/82385558/ 

10. https://www.heathrow.com/content/dam/heathrow/web/common/documents/company/about/airports-commission/best-placed-for-britain.pdf. 

11.  https://www.timesaerospace.aero/news/airports/16000-people-to-be-employed-initially-at-istanbul-airport.

12. "Come Make Magic with Us." https://youtu.be/v_7lIFKKapU?si=TU77zd6VX64PwRUn    

Charter schools have sparked fierce debate. The most successful have shown eye-popping academic results for poor and minority students, but they have also weathered criticisms about their unjust discipline policies, selective admissions, and heavy teacher workloads. But, what is it like to be a student at one of these schools? We got a small peek at the student experience in no-excuses charter schools from an unlikely source: Instagram.

Sometimes called “no-excuses” schools, they are usually operated by Charter Management Organizations, or CMOs. Some of the most successful brands (and they are brands) are Uncommon, Success Academies, IDEA, and KIPP, and they operate through CMOs that manage several schools through a shared central management office. This structure allows standardization across schools; they use similar discipline policies, follow the same curriculum and pacing calendar, and have standard student experiences. Essentially, they act like franchises. But the actual experience of being a student within CMOs yielded few descriptive studies. 

Think back to 2020: the pandemic is in full swing, a tense presidential election is launching, and George Floyd’s murder spurred passionate and honest debates about racism in our society. Much of this played out online, and one example was the creation of several “Black at” accounts created on social media platforms. These were social media accounts with titles like “Black at Dartmouth,” or “Black at MIT”, and they were a forum for Black students to share their experiences within predominantly white institutions of higher education. Similarly, students at CMOs created a collection of “Black at CMO” accounts - Black at Uncommon, BIPOC@KIPP, Black n Brown at DP, SA Survivors Anonymous. For about three months in the summer of 2020, these accounts were buzzing with posts and comments describing what it felt like to be a Black student at a charter school.

These posts were the focus of a recently published article I co-wrote with my colleague Matthew McCluskey at the University of Vermont. The posts we analyzed were raw and visceral, consistently describing school as a place of pain, humiliation, and alienation. At times, teachers and parents would chime in through the comment sections with messages of encouragement and support. We came to view the posts as a form of protest giving voice to the challenge of being a Black student in a CMO.

We collected over 1,200 posts across the different Instagram accounts. We coded the actual text, noted visual details of each post, and also charted the over 200,000 likes and 7,500 comments. Like much of the internet, this collection of data was ephemeral, spiking during the summer of 2020 before fading away. But also like the internet, there was a semi-permanence in that we could go back and access these posts to re-capture the spirit of a particular moment in time.

Students wrote about emotional and physical abuse, unjust treatment, mental health, and the prevalence of whiteness. Often, these posts took the form of stories, as one person wrote “‘I already knew that I had detention for the upcoming week. So I sucked my teeth as [the Dean] entered. He immediately told me to go to his office and suspended me for 3 days.” Another student recounted how a teacher said that her hairstyle was “not cute.” Like a Greek Chorus, a commenter wrote “The AUDACITY 🤢 🗣YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL NO MATTER WHAT!!!” One post shared the discipline policy as Success Academy, and then simply wrote “Just a few of the ways you can get suspended at SA in elementary school.” 

Beyond the actual content, we saw these posts as flipping the normal conventions of social media. Instagram, a platform known for shallow self-promotion, shameless corporate sponsorships, and carefully curated aesthetics, was instead used as a potent voice of solidarity. The posts in our collection instead were all anonymous. Rather than images of stunning vistas or visually rich tableaus, the posts were stripped down, bold, and almost completely devoid of pictures. Each account created its own brand of sorts with a shared background, a consistent font, and a small logo. 

These design elements worked to build what might be the most prized commodity on the internet: authenticity. These weren’t posts contracted out to web designers or created by a team of consultants. Instead, they were shaped by both online discourse and youth vernacular, filled with emojis, all caps, alternate spellings and even misspellings. These features were essential because they served as a silent reply to an obvious question: why should we take these posts seriously?

Critical Race Theory (CRT) gave us the frame to show that these posts were worthy of attention. While CRT has become a flashpoint, we found great beauty and resonance in the application of this theory to a real world context. CRT urges us to consider that racism is endemic to society. It’s uncomfortable to admit society might be racist; but it’s also true that children of privilege don’t attend CMOs, and their parents would be horrified to learn if their students shared the experiences described in these posts.

CRT also argues that counterstories can reveal realities hidden from people steeped in dominant cultural norms. How can we expect to understand those with different backgrounds without hearing their stories? It is entirely possible that these posts are embellished, distorted, or just molded by the vagaries of social media. But in that respect they are no different than the official social media accounts of major CMOs.

Our study also raises more troubling questions about how we can honor the experience of poor and minority children. Instagram may be out of style now, but other companies have stepped in. Will those spaces - shaped by algorithms, under constant surveillance, and privately owned - be the only windows we have into the lives of students? How we as a society answer such questions will be critical for citizenship and justice.

As far as philosophers go, Foucault was a star. He is the apotheosis of the French Thinker: obscure sentences, frequent stroking of the chin, turtlenecks. The only thing missing was a pipe. He is regarded as a genius because there is always a moment when you understand his writings, your whole world shatters with the crumbling of everything you had once believed to be true. 

But it's usually lasts only a moment. That's because noone is really sure what excatly he meant, only that it's important. I don't happen to believe him to be a genius; I think of him as more superstar than philosopher, and like superstars, it is vital that he be mercurial, whimsical, and at all times not like us. I think he played up the obscurity and the troubled philosopher stuff, but that doesn't make his ideas any less valuable because he really did have powerful ideas.

Powerful. Not complicated. To illustrate, let's take his concept of orders of discourse. You could go and read his 150 mind-bender The Archaeology of Knowledge, and maybe follow it up with The Order of Things, and then ask yourself what the hell you just read. Or, you could watch the Hollywood romantic comedy-ish blockbuster The Devil Wears Prada. I think there is still a paperback version of the bestseller in the laundry room downstairs. Meryl Streep does in two minutes what Foucault tried to do in a small novel. 

Here is Foucault explaining orders of discourse: 

…that in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality. In a society like ours, the procedures of exclusion are well known. (p. 52).

Foucault, M. (1981). "The Order of Discourse." in Young, R. (Ed.). Untying the text: A post-structuralist reader. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

First, you have to know what a "discourse" is; mind you, it is not Discourse with a capital D, later fanboys followed and tried to make it into a proper noun. "Discourse" is, like it sounds, language, but more than language. It's language plus everything around language that makes it possible. It's not just the words you say but your accent and phrasing. It's not just the memo posted in the h

allway, but the font selection and the reason it's placed in the hallway, and also has to do with who decided to place it there and who is expected to read it. Discourse is the power and culture and norms around language; essentially, the words you speak are not chosen by you, the ideas you think are not thought by you, and the way you express those unthought thoughts and unoriginal words is dictated by larger forces.

Those larger forces are the "orders of discourse." Or, for a better explanation, let's turn to the movie. I don't know remember context enough to set the scene, other than Miranda Priestly - played by the brilliant Meryl Streep - is the editor of an important fashion magazine. She is a tastemaker in fashion, the single person who decides what that fuschia is in or capri pants are not. She is confronted with a disbelieving intern who, like me, thinks fashion is a joke:

Miranda Priestly: Where are the belts for this dress? Why is no one ready?

Jocelyn: Here. It’s a tough call. They’re so different.

Andy Sachs: (snickers under her breath)

Miranda Priestly: Something funny?

Andy Sachs: No. No, no, nothing’s… you know, it’s just that… both those belts look exactly the same to me. Y’know, I’m still learning about this stuff, and uh… (giggles uncomfortably)

Miranda Priestly: This… “stuff”? Oh, okay. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you.

You… go to your closet, and you select… I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back, but what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean.

You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that, in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns, and then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent, wasn’t it?… who showed cerulean military jackets. I think we need a jacket here.

Nigel: Hmm.

Miranda Priestly: And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores, and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.

However, that blue represents millions of dollars of countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry, when in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room… from a pile of “stuff.” 

This is the best explanation of orders of discourse. You can watch the clip from the movie version of The Devil Wears Prada. Of course the acting makes the whole scene so much better. 

To return to Foucault's quote above, we now see the "certain number of procedures." They are hard to locate in everyday life; in all likelihood there is no one person pulling the strings, or no organization that deliberates on what people are allowed to think and say. Still, our collective minds come together and somehow a gradient of power emerges and those on the higher end control, select, organise, and redistribute the ideas and words and thoughts that circulate, just like Miranda is there selecting the blue sweater from amongst the piles of possibilities.

The theory of "orders of discourse" has been criticized for being overly deterministic. Indeed, Foucault abandoned the whole project and went to work on other brilliant things. Some have said that we work backwards to influence the ordering, for example, it's possible that cerulean blue just doesn't see and people instead prefer polka dots. And others in even deeper post-modern veins would challenge that there is no such thing as blue, we're just following along because someone convinced us of such (that's my view).

That's why postmodern perspectives are fun. You can disrupt any thought or idea out there, and you usually end up saying things like "well, nothing matters then," or, "what's the point in choosing clothes at all if someone else is deciding what is in front of me." One piece of advice: don't think that way.

The The Hero’s Fight, by Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, is a book with tremendous heart, moral courage, and a clear point of view. Filled with powerful personal stories and a searing analysis of our social order, this work shows how policy without considering people is a soulless endeavor. It is complex in the details and analysis, but ultimately commonsense in the solutions it suggests; thus, it is affirming and hopeful. 

This book tells the stories of a group of residents of West Baltimore, stories that we are privileged to hear through the incredible investment of time and energy by the author. But these are not random stories, they illustrate how the lives of people are shaped by the workings of the state. These two strands, biographies of the poor and government analysis, make up the core of this book. It is necessary, as she shows in a comprehensive review of literature on the poor and government, because most works are written “about” one or the other, but rarely about how these the poor interact with the government.

Fernandez-Kelley traces the history of writing that essentially casts the poor as undeserving, lazy deviants. From authors like Charles Murray and Herbert Gans, even to people like Moynihan and perhaps WJ Williams, the poor are seen as lazy, less intelligent people who are incentivized to mooch off the government through programs like welfare. Liberals are often left defending the state and it’s “sad parody” of capitalist interventions in fields like health care, welfare, education, and finance (pp. 3-4). The result has been that the poor are caught between conservatives who demonize the poor for their habits and liberals who infantilize the poor through their paternalistic government programs. Thus, this book is a progressive critique of the state.

The state, meanwhile, is fascinating in its reach and power, but in works of the poor it is often “signified but not explained,” (p. 351). Here, she uses the concepts of “embedded autonomy” and “distorted engagement” from Peter Evans to show how interactions with the government by the poor lead to a different field of cultural meanings. For this, she relies heavily on biography, she works at “testing the limits of ethnographic narratives” (p. 14) while also doing real analysis. As she writes, “Ethnography without theory is mere anecdote but theory without ethnographic research often leads to vacuous speculation,” (p. 14).

This book is not vacuous speculation; it is rigorous sociology and I love it. I love this book because it emphasizes that the poor are people. The category “poor” is so derisive, dismissive, and limiting. The poor are heroes, they fight an incredible fight that is hard to comprehend, one with its own demons and dragons and trophies but always backlit by tragedy, and it’s time we sought to understand it.

Distorted Engagement

Most people have little interaction with the government. For upper and middle class people, when they do interact with the state they are treated as customers, valued clients whose needs are carefully tend to. This is the model of a developed stated, termed “Embedded Autonomy” by Peter Evans. In this form of interaction, the state supports people but in general people are granted a high degree of autonomy. Measures like the land-grant act, the homestead act, the GI Bill, favorable tax legislation, are all examples of state actions that support the success of middle class folks.

In undeveloped states, the government doesn’t function like this because it is predatory. Civil servants are not protected from their ties to interest groups, and so these agencies funnel funds and power to the elite. What makes embedded autonomy so special is that civil servants are not so removed from civil society as care only for vested interests, but not so rooted in segments of civil society to represent only those segments, (pp. 105-107). But what of the poor? Where do they show up in such a highly functioning state?

In the United States, people living in poverty is not a historical accident. Drawing on a range of studies, she shows how racism, government neglect, and bad policies have affected blacks. “Blacks from rural south confronted unparallel hatred in urban settings, a dearth of programs to promote their social integration, and high levels of bureaucratic intrusion (Massey and Denton, 1993),” she writes (p. 107). Furthermore, 

“...the American state has dramatically deviated from its developmental stance. With respect to poor and racially distinct populations, laws, and policies have been geared toward control and restraint rather than social incorporation.” 112

Because of this drive for control and restraint, the poor are subjected to a very different types of interactions with the state. For them, the state is intrusive, humiliating, and all pervasive: “...government agencies become critical sites of encounter between the urban poor and the outside world. Bureaucratic interference is to life in poverty what marketing bombardment is to society at large,” (p. 3). In order to get even a minimum of support, they must fill out onerous forms, provided bodily fluids, and have their privacy violated. This treatment is not a historical accident, but a “systematic effect of distorted engagement realized through liminal government institutions,” (p. 347). Liminal institutions “operate on the fringes of standard deportment and practice,” (p. 347), places places are full of punishment, supervision, surveillance. Hence police beatings, dysfunctional schools, and draconians social workers at the welfare office.

Distorted engagement has three elements: 

Palliative Action: Years of interventions have proven worthless at raising up the poor while they have enriched the social welfare industry (and bolstered some academic careers). The severe lack of investment is why no functioning markets are able to develop.

Acute Regulation: Because the poor are undeserving, they are subject to lots of regulation, in their privacy, sexuality, finances. This recurrent tenor to interactions with the state is ultimately humiliating, and it seeps into the language, actions, and habits of a people - their habitus. This is what accounts for the defiance and resistance that the poor put up; they are tired of being stigmatized and end up viewing the state as illegitimate. The “culture” of the poor, something that has been used to explain their shortcomings, isn’t this standalone product but the result of economic privation and mistreatment:

“Such exchanges mold what Pierre Bourdieu (1984) calls habitus, that is, a system of dispositions flowing from embodied knowledge. A specific habitus provides social actors with the practical skills and orientations necessary to navigate infields that range from employment and sexuality to domestic relations and artistic expression; it directs behavior with the need for formal rules and mediates between social structure and individual practice. A focus on the habitus reveals nondiscursive knowledge deployed by social actors as they adapt to and modify particular environments. The concept forces us to interpret culture as an ever-permeating aspect of economic and political adaptations.” 126

Violence: This is clearly overt, but more often it is “symbolic violence” of the type discussed by Bourdieu. Such violence is difficult to analyze, it takes words like charity and ‘aid’ and turns them into weapons. 

The distortions spread into all fields of life. Fernandez-Kelly spends time illustrating how years of unimaginative and paternalistic social policy - combined with inhumane treatment - have distorted gender roles for males and females in impoverished West Baltimore. The original catalyst was an exodus of well-paying employment in industry; men couldn’t provide for their families and poverty rose. Subsequent government policies ended up infantilizing, erasing, and demeaning men. For example, welfare policies required women to be single mothers to receive funding; men had to be erased from the household. Policing criminalized drug activity but also loitering, small crimes; hence, more men in prisons than in college. Unable to provide for their families, erased from the home, men were quite literally replaced by the government as a male provider figure. Men found other ways to assert masculinity through violence, etc. Meanwhile, policies would use violence to control men or make them feel small; this bred distrust with women, who were able to get their jobs etc;  it was a policy-based castration of men [total sidenote: this is sort of what Jordan Peterson talks about in discussing crisis of masculinity; he doesn’t mention race but he is speaking more generally about how male values/feelings/aspirations are ‘denigrated.’ I can see this in discourse in society (violence, toxic masculinity, what else?) but this attack on males is poor].

This theoretical framing of how the poor interact with the government allows Fernandez-Kelly to make an argument about the cultural lives of the poor. That is where the power of her biographies come into play.

Cultural Capital, Social Capital, and Meaning Making.

Typical explanations of poverty draw on social capital or cultural capital, two powerful economic metaphors that pervade sociology (and education, anthropology, etc.). In both cases, the argument goes that a lack of these types of capital can explain why the poor are unable to rise; without the social or cultural resources, they are at a loss. These sophisticated forms of victim-blaming avoid altogether the material realities of the lives of the poor. Instead, if we were to take a more human approach to our thinking of the poor we would see them to be just like us: people seeking meaning in the world around them. This is where Fernandez-Kelly’s book is most powerful.

Her analysis starts from the theory of Robert Merton, with the essential thesis that most people aren’t deviants. Instead, people have cultural goals and seek them out through institutional means. Where there is consonance between goals and institutional means, you get ‘conformists’. If people have goals without the means, you get ‘innovators,’, which, because of their creativity, includes law-breakers. Thus, there are few outright rebels or defiant people: “...what appears to be anomalous conducts are better described as attempts to approximate standard objectives in situations bereft of conventional means to achieve them,” (p. 197). 

Rather than viewing people as carrying reserves of cultural capital that fail to buy them results, or seeing people lacking the social capital to get access to economic opportunities, the painful and real personal stories that Fernandez-Kelly tells show how culture and social relations are profoundly shaped by circumstance. There is Towanda, a young girl with a strong personality who stakes her claim to status in school and at home. She gets pregnant at 15 when she finds a man who provides her with a route to respectability. There is Little Floyd, a young man who was essentially abandoned by his crack-addicted mother, unable to be supported by his father, and separated by the foster care system from his two adoring sisters. He is molested, shuffled from house to house, discounted in school, and finds solace in gender-bending role plays with older men. His sister, the most heartbreaking story for me, is Clarisse and she is an exceptional student who flourishes in Catholic school with dreams of being a swimmer, a doctor, a lawyer. But when her half-brother returns, a devout Jehovah’s witness, she is removed and placed in a dysfunctional public school. She fights for her reputation and soon gets pregnant.

It’s easy to consider these stories as examples of poor people with no direction, few connections, failing to take advantage of their education, and seeking to get a free ride from welfare or the people around them. Not only is this line of thinking blind to the resilience, hope, and persistence, these young people show, it is also unsympathetic to the human struggle. Fernandez-Kelly shows us that these people, and their stories, are heroic. 

Consider the typical social capital argument: without the right ties or a weak community, people are unable to connect with others and find routes out of poverty. For many authors, the solution to poverty is to increase social capital of poor communities. This is the view supported by influential works like the Colemen Report and Putnam’s Bowling Alone. But this is misguided and simplistic.

Social capital alone is not sufficient. We should first understand social capital and the strong and weak connections that people possess/make in their communities. Poor people have tons of strong connections; indeed, that is what helps them survive. However, many lack the “weak ties” necessary to connect with institutions and resources outside of their neighborhood (Granovetter, 1973). Instead, “it is not the paucity of social capital but the absence of material resources and external links that produces destructive effects in impoverished urban settings,” (193). Indeed, in some cases, social capital can lead to implosion. Consider immigrants who have to support distant relatives or poor families who have to take in wayward family members (work of Alejandro Portes).

This is very much different from sociological arguments about, for example, “closure,” the “capacity of social networks to command vital resources in the pursuit of particular ends, enables individuals connected through trust and mutuality to maximize the effect of endowments,” (199). For the poor, strong ties won’t save them; they need resources:

“...to be poor is to command information of a different scale and quality than the one available to people in control of more and better assets. Leveling competitive fields through the expansion of choices does not improve the capacity of people to improve personal options unless the fundaments of economic and racial inequality are directly addressed.” p. 200

Arguments about cultural capital are no better. They assume that the mismatch of cultural norms is what bring people down. But the stories of these young people show that their goals for life are very similar to ours, they are mainstream goals of domesticity, family, personal success, and status. It’s not that people abandon mainstream goals (like an education, or not getting pregnant,); instead, they have a “shift in the perceived locus of efficacy;” they recast what is possible in their world and adopt a  “reorientation of effort to avoid defeat,” (p. 199). These are real world examples of the “sour grapes” fable; when things aren’t possible, we just reframe them.

It’s typical to assume culture is everything; but people seek meaning with whatever resources are around them. In fact, poverty shapes culture through its material realities. Life transitions like motherhood or moving into your own place are not failures; they have distinct meanings within the social context. They are not deviations from people’s goals but their best approximation of dominant norms learned through people’s embodied knowledge (p. 242). 

This last point is the true strength of the book. It challenges facile theories of cultural and social capital to suggest that people draw on incredible resources and creativity to meet their goals, but their ability to do so is shaped by the material world around them. With few legal avenues for action and little support, and even fewer economic resources, people create meaning through events like motherhood, codes of respect, and other actions. Repeatedly and consistently, their interactions with the government serve to thwart efforts at independence, advancement, and dignity; and so people turn to other means to achieve them. 

As policy makers, as educators, this is an argument to approach people with profound respect, to give them a voice in their future, and to make the investments necessary to give people the future they deserve.

There is a quote in the The Quiet Americans that is something to the effect of:

“Many people argue that the United States lost the Vietnam War despite it’s vast resources. If you just change that word ‘despite’ to ‘because,’ you may get closer to the truth.”

That is the core argument of Meredith Lair’s excellent book, Armed with Abundance. It is an extended answer to the question: what are the implications of the vast, unimaginable abundance, the overwhelming resources that were brought to bear in commanding the war in Vietnam? Her answer is: the consequences were many, and we might even find the core of the reasons why the war was so tragically lost. What’s more, the incredible material advantages of the United States reveals something fundamental about the cultural core of American strategy, a core that is almost certainly rotten. While bombs were creating real destruction and bullets erased very real lives, behind the (or rather, underneath) the battle lines a cultural war was waged and the United States was under the illusion that their sheer materiality could not only overwhelm the Vietnamese, it was proof of their moral superiority.

To make this deep, complicated, original, insightful argument, Lair has to dispel many long held myths about the war, and she does so by unearthing military bureaucratic arcana, the vast internal media world of the army, self-published books, cultural artifacts, and of course the military’s own  endless march of statistics. Together, she pieces together a convincing, fresh, original story of who we are as a culture, a story very much alive today, albeit (intentionally?) intentionally obscured. 

Perhaps more accurately, the story is cropped out of existence. Laird starts her book with thestory of Henri Huet’s 1966 cover photo for Life magazine. It is a picture that is dramatic, haunting, heroic; it is also only part of the story. Just outside of the frame, what is happening? This is the point of the book, “to stretch the frame, reorient it toward another world of the Vietnam War, one that existed just miles away, where the mud was tamped into orderly streets, where ball caps replaced bandages, and where beauty and ice cream took precedence over the bullets,” (6).

And what do we find just beyond the frame? It’s not the Vietnam War of Life magazine photos, nor is it the one of glorified war memoirs, it’s not the mythology found in presidential memoirs or the outright lies found in retroactive speeches about the war. What Lair uncovers is a place called ‘Nam, both imaginary and very real, an otherworldly Carnival-esque space miles from the norms of American life:

At the nexus of burgeoning self-interest, material plenty, and military occupation, soldiers found themselves inhabitants of “the Nam,” a social and psychological construct in which contact with the war was mediated by distance, consumer goods, and media itself and where stateside checks on carnal appetites failed to reach….American soldiers were, quite literally, armed with abundance, making the project of war perhaps easier and certainly more palatable.” p. 8

Her book has several surprising themes:

1) For US Soldiers, Vietnam was a place of consumption, of quasi-leisure.

Whereas the predominant idea of war is soldiers who are suffering, bullets flying everywhere, every moment with your life on the line, the Vietnam war was a place that defies our mythological assumptions. However it is portrayed, soldiering in 'Nam “was seldom about doing without;" instead, their experience “reflected the essence of midcentury America,” (9).

Statistics help to show how the ethic of consumption was everywhere. In America's Vietnam, you would have found:

• 100 airfields

• 7 deep-draft ports

• 3 billion barrels of oil storage/petrol, miles of pipeline

• Billets for 350k troops

• Hospitals w/ 8k beds, 56 million sq ft

• 600 miles of roads, 5 miles of bridges, 50 miles of trail

• Moved 91 million cubic yards of dirt

• Treated 4 billion gallons of water p. 71

These numbers are stunning, and it is important because it challenges what we think it was like to be a soldier. Most of the soldiers had an experience defined by leisure, by abundance. Even the privation and suffering is put in context by considering the statistics; consider:

• Almost ⅙ of deaths were ‘misadventures’ (~10,000 people)

• Only a ⅕ of soldiers spend a majority of time in combat

The work of the army was certainly to level destruction and death upon the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong. But to get to that end, the very nature of the Army changed from fighting to almost social welfare. For example, to supply soldiers with palatable and nostalgic food, a whole complex and massive supply chain was created; food was less about sustenance, “....food nourished soldiers’ bodies and served to remind them, with its lavish availability, of the power and resources at the US military’s disposal,” (p. 75). The size & scale of operations, supply chains, and quantities of food: “....effectively rendering the US Army a giant international grocery chain,” (p. 77).

Entertainment was another front of the war; “In essence, the US Army was a massive production company that opened a new front in the war on boredom every time a performer took the stage,” (126). As can be seen from this quote, just like food nourished nostalgia, entertainment was meant to address boredom. The R&R was another weapon in the war on boredom, a lavish and intense period of debauchery; it was a vast consumer experience that, by the latter half of 1970, 17k went on R&R each month (110).

(2) In the shadow of a bad war rationale, morally questionable purposes, and horror, consumption and abundance were ways to ease soldier morale.

There is an anecdote that Lair shares:

“An old Vietnamese woman was afraid he would shoot her, so she ran from. And he shot her because she ran from him. The self-fulfilling logic of that moment was exquisitely simple, and yet it told the whole story of the Vietnam War. For fear of communism spreading to the United States, the U.S. government deployed its armed forces to a fiercely nationalistic country and then authorized its combat troops to kill anyone who shot at them for being there.” 240

The circularity of this is maddening; the lie shrouding it is horrific and confusing and disorienting. This little mini-story encapsulates the moral rot at the heart of the Vietnam war; there was not rational or logical or sensical reason for our involvement. Vietnam was not a real place, it was a Cold War invention that the US decided to fight for. With an unpopular draft, without calling on reserves, and with an increasingly professionalized (wage-labor-esque) army, the army had to satisfy their soldiers. To counteract this absence of purpose, the US “adopted a ‘policy of plenty’,”(69). “In the end, the US military sought to raise morale not by resolving soldiers’ doubts about the war by by improving their material circumstances.” p. 87. 

There is a parallel to the way modern consumer culture does the same; ignores the big q’s and eases our pain w/ stuff. In Vietnam, …”military authorities effectively tried to purchase soldiers’ compliance and productivity with tasty food, homey barracks, and readily available consumer goods,” (87). 

This explains the military’s obsession with the elusive “morale.” ‘Nam didn’t have moral reasons, and signs of progress were vague. “The US military could not provide convincing guarantees that the war would be won, that the ends would justify the terrible means, so it tried to make its unhappy charges as comfortable as possible.” 

(3) Abundance defined this war, though we rarely talk about it. Deprivation, sacrifice, are essential to our myths about the war. This dissonance robbed people of purpose and created deep existential questions. What is my contribution? How is it valued? Where do I fit in the story of the war? (p. 56). Soldiers who participated in dangerous missions knew exactly who and what they were, combat veterans, but other soldiers spent their tours in Vietnam questioning their role, their contributions, their very identity (p. 58). For most americans it wasn’t brutal, it was a war of “loneliness, boredom, exhaustion, and doubt.” - and that story was erased.

People expected “John Wayne,” but the experience of comfort & abundance in war undermined soldiers' search for meaning. “The very duty that spared them a year of discomfort and possible death also thwarted any hope of making a sacrifice for brotherhood, for the mission, or for the nation.” A soldier said “this place just isn’t JW,”....”...acknowledge the fundamental weirdness of Vietnam. He was recognizing the war’s refusal to make him a hero and its inability to make him a man” (p. 104)

This particular war, then, robbed soldiers of their manhood by denying them the Hollywood version of fighting. Perhaps this in part explains the deep feminization of Asian women, and their treatment. Up against vast abundance, soldiers were conflicted; They valued the niceties but were angry at being so isolated from the real world. The military's attempt to buy compliance had a dark side: "In answer to their grievances, military authorities softened the war experience but failed to infuse it with meaning,” (p. 106).

The most striking claim that Lair makes is that maybe being awash in consumer goods and creature comforts is what ultimately cost the war. There are several reasons this might be. American spending fundamentally altered the South Vietnamese economy, triggery steep inflation and corruption. But also, it made Vietnamese subservient and catering to American needs through menial labor and sex. As Lair writes, "despite the fantasies, Americans didn’t stumble into a sex-crazed nation; they created it through power - of the dollar and the gun (p. 212)."

The lavish lifestyle of America soldiers created incredible resentments. Resentment wasn’t just with Vietnamese; it was within the corps. The derogatory term REMFs (rear-echelom motherfuckers) neatly captures the feeling toward an entire class of soldiers: “...grunts and REMFs may have served on the same side, but they did not serve in the same war.” p. 52

Maybe the war on boredom made the war worse; every thing in entertainment was a potential target, and fed the circular logic of the war: 

As the war progressed, escalation followed a circular logic: more war matériel in Vietnam required more American military personnel to provide security, which antagonized Vietnamese locals, and presented more targets for enemy attack. This, in turn, prompted the need for more American personnel, more supplies, and more military hardware to protect them. P. 139

Frequently, American Generals clamored for more resources, and LBJ was commited to not allowing his army to have to fight with one arm tied behind it's back. The US Army was not hamstrung or wanting for resources; instead, they used those resources to unleash untold horrors: 1 million Vietnamese dead, probably more. Half a million orphans, complete destruction of agricultural fields. Hundreds of thousands - if not more - refugees. And yet American firepower was not enough. As she writes at point, with devastating clarity: "Thanks to these efforts and the wealth that sustained them, most American soldiers in Vietnam had everything they could possible need, except a reason to stay in the fight forever," (p. 144).

Somewhere, in the middle of the Nevada desert, there is a massive sculpture. It is a series of mounds and causeways made of millions of tons of dirt and rocks, a mile and a half long, over thirty years and $40 million in the making. It will likely to be there for generations. This is the most powerful art I have ever experienced, and I don't plan to ever be within five hundred miles of it. 

Titled "City," it is the work of Michael Heizer, a man who has retreated from the heady art world because of his obsession with this project. Staring down mortality at 77 years old, he has finally declared it finished and opened it to the world. Sort of. "City" has been described as a "mash-up of Chichén Itzá and an unfinished highway interchange;" viewed from above on Google Maps it looks to me like a vast abandoned international airport. But it is not meant to be viewed from above, and is hardly meant to be seen at all. Some three hours from Reno, limited to only a handful of visitors, accessible only by hours on an unpaved road, the remoteness is part of the project. It defies description; it is meant to be experienced. 

These are just the types of barriers that excite people, and it represents everything I hate about art. The very exclusivity is what is making City's popularity rise; you can find the coordinates on Youtube, the site is geotagged on Google Maps, new write-ups abound. To me concept is stupid. That someone would waste millions in reshaping anonymous dirt strikes me as offensively ridiculous. The vast amount of money screams waste, vanity, self-importance. The sub-community of art collectors, gallerists, curators, and auctioneers, are collectively deplorable; they sip wine, fly around the globe, and dish out trust fund dividends to whatever they feel like deeming the vanguard at the moment. Then, not unlike used-car salesmen, investment bankers, or real-estate scumbags, they create an arbitrary market for what is essentially garbage and live like titans off their commissions. 

In this case, their jewel is the "land art" movement, a product of the sixties that rejected mainstream art and tried to make an art you couldn't hang on your wall. It wouldn't be in a museum, it would be in the open spaces. Robert Smithson was the chief evangelist, designing random patterns in the Southwest, then writing essays and wooing investors and basking in art-world glory.

Heizer, the child of a Berkeley archaeologist, had authored some of the defining movements of the land art movement. He dug trenches in the desert to create strange patterns. He blasted two long angled grooves into opposing canyon faces to make a thousand-plus foot imaginary square. He received attention and money for all of this; there was an appeal to the theory behind his art, "negative sculpture" or "unsculpture," sculpture created by subtraction. The theory was that there is art in what you leave behind when you remove matter, when you let time and decay do their work. As Heizer comments: "There is nothing there, yet it is still a sculpture."

Heizer also was something of an asshole. He resented Smithson's fame, bitterly accusing him (Smithson) of copying his (Heizer's) ideas. In interviews, he projects as the type of uncaring narcissist that seems to rule the world and is responsible for much of our current travails. Married twice, cursing at everybody, starting feuds with fellow artists, and somehow coming to believe that his creations are somehow more precious than others. This is a guy who made motorcycle tracks in the dirt and wanted us to appreciate it. He unashamedly claimed a boulder and traded that for critical acclaim.

His art is in part a flight from the New York Art Scene. He couldn't abide the elitist snobbery, and the rejection was probably an affront to his manhood. Here's how he described it:

You don't control your own destiny in New York. It's fine if you trust the system and agree to move along the street in an orderly fashion. But you can't carry a weapon to protect yourself, even though it's more dangerous there than here. I find it castrating.

"City" was the project he created after leaving New York in the 70s. He bought some land and set about creating a work that would endure, that would out scale anything else in the world. And somewhere along the way, he retreated from everything and devoted his life to this slab of land, something out of view of the world. It is a statement of will that refused to be defined by the art mavens, a self-exile built on wounded pride that is so human and understandable. His assholery makes sense in that context; his commitment and devotion to the absurd are what are truly fascinating. That is the true work of art.

I've experienced this almost exclusively through the writings of MIchael Kimmelman. He is the art and architecture critic at the New York Times, and one of the writers who is fixated on how architecture serves the public. He has authored long pieces obliterating the revolting temples of corporate greed and vanity projects here in New York City, spaces like the Hudson Yards, Santiago Calatrava's PATH Station (his take: a glorified mall for the ultrarich masquerading as an infrastructure project), the unbelievably nauseating "Little Island" park (I taste bile every time I bike by this on my way to work; the project itself is cool but what is truly gross are the idiotic lemmings - hordes, really - who clog the bike path on their way to see this billionaire's giant pat on the back. All I see is the dozens of concrete wastelands that could have been transformed throughout a Bronx borough starving for safe public spaces). Not just a hater, he has called attention to practical and needed housing projects in the Bronx, the revitalized Penn Station, and efforts to reduce homelessness.

Kimmelman has written about Michael Heizer and "City" for years, and it is through his writing that I've been profoundly moved. Kimmelman takes me past the stark photos and overhead shots into the site. I can close my eyes and walk alongside a massive, pristine, mound, the angle of incline the result of some hidden precision. There are gentle, sinuous curving curbs made of concrete, I can hear a methodical crunching of gravel beneath my feet as i walk. To one side might be a towering slab of rock, on the other side an earthen mound of unreal symmetry, size, and fluidity.

This is a project about scale; the tonnage, the distance, the sheer size of these objects is stupefying. "I call it a defracted gestalt," Heizer says in one of Kimmelman's articles. "From the ground you grasp the size but can't make out the shapes -- the opposite of what you sense from the air -- and your perception changes as you move around." It's a fundamental human challenge to see past our specific personal details, the mundane hopes and insignificant stresses; it is heartstopping to be able to perceive a hint of some greater design. "I've made it big to make you feel small standing in it. Flying over it squishes the Gestalt. It's supposed to be about a motor-delayed, cumulative observation: you've got to walk around it, climb over it and later put it together in your mind and figure out where you were. It isn't the old convenient art object." In the desert, surrounded by mountains in distance and a vast expanse of nothingness in between, the audacity of this endeavor might just give us such a glimpse. 

The site is anchored by two inscrutable sculptures at either end. One is a giant steel frame that dissolves as your point of view shifts. The other is a large wedge disassembled into triangular prisms. These are large, precise to a sixteenth of an inch, standing watch like Platonic solids. They cast sharp angled shadows. The desert sun makes a constantly changing collection anti-luminous ghosts hauntingly recede and swell throughout the day; maybe these shadows are the real art. I can feel myself walking through the site, a chill in the air as the sun begins to set. I'm followed by my own lengthening shadow, breath shortening as I gasp at the giant mounds and impossibly beautiful concrete curves. I can feel my legs waiver from the long walk through the sculpture, coming across an inscrutable concrete, steel, dirt sculpture. Feel my smallness in the project, which is strange because a project like this is largely the product of a giant ego.

Kimmelman has created a linguistic experience of space. While his most recent piece includes jaw-dropping drone shots, the sculpture now lives in my mind as a collection of words. I will never visit "City." To visit is to buy the tickets, take the pictures, and most deplorably, tell the story of the visit; it would cheapen the whole experience. But mostly it's because I already have been there. On my imaginary walk, I also see the years of toil, the crushing doubt that must have driven him as he created this project. If all art is really the story of an artist, Kimmelman infuses the sculpture with Heizer's biography. He cuts through Heizer's bravado to reveal the very real emotional hurt that fueled a project of this magnitude. "City" is everything New York City is not. Or rather, it is what NYC will be in the future. In that respect, "City" is less about spatial scale but temporal scale: it's about time, and thus it's about death. His death, particularly.

 Heizer was almost felled some years ago by a neurological disease, and he remains frail. Now, on the brink of death, he lives in a long moment of sublimity, an artist who took on something impossible, indescribable, incomprehensible to most people, and hardly marketable, and he made it happen. He marshaled millions of dollars, and most importantly, countless hours of people's time, their commitment, to create something of his youthful bombast. This will all be incomprehensible to any future generations that stumble upon "City" and they no doubt will create their own stories about it. 

 It reminds me of El Milagro Secreto, a story by Borges about an author about to be executed by firing squad for some unknown crime. He is distraught, not because he is about to die, but because he hasn't finished his last book. As he is marched to the firing squad, he prays to God to allow him to complete his great final passion project, and as the bullets fly from the muzzles of the rifles, God grants him his wish. Time slows, the bullets hover in midair; he closes his eyes, sits down and starts to clear his mind, to go on refreshing walks, to sleep as needed, and to write, until he finishes his novel. With a brief but eternal moment of satisfaction, the bullets continue on their path.

"City" is a secret miracle as well. It's out there, a special private moment in the middle of the desert. I think the desert is a metaphor; we all have the capacity to turn our backs on everything we know and walk into the emptiness. We will certainly encounter our death; maybe in undertaking this quest we will also find something beautiful and sublime and transcendent.

I feel surrounded by exceptionally talented people. Whether stunned by a guitar solo, hypnotized by a Tik Tok video, or simply shamed by a resume, it seems that everyone has a passion that they have honed to perfection. I have none of these; the bulk of my day is consuming what other geniuses have created. The only hobby of any sort that seems remotely accessible is writing - anyone can put words on a paper, right? Anyone who has tried has learned it's not so simple. No matter how many insightful observations, brilliant epiphanies, and witty sayings flash through one's head during the course of the day, it is really hard to capture them in words. 

William Zinsser's On Writing Well is an uplifting and enjoyable guide to starting on the journey to writing. The book is partly a collection of many small and practical rules for crafting well-written prose. He illustrates his guidelines with excerpts from a wide variety of authors, including himself, though his expertise is well established in the text itself. His rules are united by their allegiance to a straightforward premise: good writing makes a reader want to keep reading. 

Thus, the first section of the book is filled with commonsense rules. Verbs are your most important tool. Use active verbs instead of passive verbs. Always collect more material than you will use. "The most important sentence in any article is the first one," he tells us, and then shows how a poor first sentence can lose the reader before they even begin. A writer must be aware of a piece's unity. You know you've written too much when you start seeing phrases like "In sum, it can be noted that…" (p. 65).

These are opening salvos in Zinsser's war against the "disease of American writing:" clutter (p.7). The bulk of his rules are small weapons in this fight.  "Most adverbs are unnecessary," (p. 69), he writes, and I find myself agreeing with the incredulous at the commonality of examples like "slightly spartan" or "smile happily." Most adjectives are also unnecessary as well; a lacy spiderweb? a precipitous cliff? a stately elm? (I actually liked that last one, I think the word "stately" adds something to how we experience an elm). "Prune out the small words," he says, and avoid faddish words like paradigm, parameter, and potentialize. Have a sentence that is hard to wrangle? "Surprisingly often a difficult problem in a sentence can be solved by simply getting rid of it," (p. 80). Zinsser is evangelical in urging us weed out the unnecessary:

Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it. Ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy? Is anything pompous or pretentious or faddish? Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think it's beautiful? Simplify, simplify. (p. 17)

The consequence of being alert to wasteful words and torturous sentences is becoming hyper-attentive to the importance of everything written down. I find myself reaching a new level of conscious about how every word should play a vital function. When a word is just there, when it serves no purpose in a piece, it becomes almost offensive. Everywhere I begin to notice hopeless jumbles of unconnected thoughts, random facts, and ideas that don't obviously lead to the next one. I start to get mad that the author didn't take the time to pin down what they wanted to say. I have my own whirlwind of ideas, why must I be subjected to yours as well?

Worse is writing that strolls by laden with gaudy jewelry. I want to smack the extra words away. The tone, the word choice, the structure of this type of writing- they all signal something about the author, their values as a person. Much of my reading is half-formed term papers, academic journals, and various public documents; unfortunately, I am away both jumbled and flashy writing. I have empathy for the first sort; my job when reading an assignment is to help the student get through the fog and find the nuggets worth writing about, and anyway I'm in the same boat. The second type I just have utter disdain, people trying to desperately prove their worth through self-important phrases and needlessly long words. Clicking on a file at random, I found this string of showy nonsense:

Diversity brings inevitable change and transformation for communities, and particularly for families who share their day-to-day cultural practices that are part of their social capital, and to the academic demands their children face in schools. At the same time, educators are challenged to find ways to support students’ learning experiences and to draw from young children and their families the social capital that exists within the diversity of their communities. (Reyes et al, 2016).

I think I agree with their point - it's hard for white teachers to see the brilliance of children of color - but this party is neither fun nor interesting and I want to desperately leave. But enough criticism ("Writing to destroy and to scandalize can be as destructive to the writer as it is to the subject," Zinsser gently nudges); the real point is that I'm becoming incredibly attuned to the power and purpose of every word, it's placement, its function. 

When I sit down to pour out my thoughts, I can start to recognize how the those first expressions are very much like vomit; they emerge from somewhere deep inside and are incredibly messy. Zinsser communicates a shared pain in the experience of re-reading those initial thoughts. They are supposed to be messy, maybe even a little revolting. But if you feel there is something worth saying, it is worth rooting through the slime. "Rewriting is the essence of writing well," Zinsser writes, (p. XX). The initial part of writing sucks, there is no getting around it. But to take a mass of garbage and mine it for good notes, to mold it into something readable - that is a practice worth doing. 

Using his own published pieces, he shows how he takes a garble of writing and transforms it a first time, a second time, a third time or more. We see his edits, his deletions, his substitutions, and it makes me think of the countless changes, from major reworkings to fine tunings, that lay ahead. The end result, though, is worth it: a small personal masterpiece. Zinsser drives the point home with the perfect metaphor: "Writing is like a good watch - it should run smoothly and have no extra parts," (p. 85). I start to see good writing as more than "just there." I see the tremendous effort, a beautiful work of craftspersonship.

At it's heart he is conveying a deep truth about the nature of writing. It is a constrained medium, a special case of communicating. 

All your clear and pleasing sentences will fall apart if you don't keep remember that writing is linear and sequential, that logic is the glue that holds it together, that tension must be maintained from one sentence to the next and from on paragraph to the next and from one section to the next, and that narrative - good old-fashioned storytelling - is what should pull your readers along without their noticing the tug (pp. 265-66).

This is not a conversation, there is not a give and take, you are not performing in a theater or making a plot unfold on a TV sound stage. The only thing you have are your words and you get to create an experience through how you arrange those words. "Every step should seem inevitable," he writes, a maxim that should be enough to motivate a writer to do all the background work needed to make a piece just so.

There are enough books about the process of writing that I suppose you could say it's a genre. Steven King, Strunk and White, all those Norton Anthologies and high school textbooks: these are largely enjoyable books, well-written in their own right, and filled with their numerous fine-pointed guidelines and portraits of the writer at work. What makes Zinsser's book stand out is his insistence that the whole purpose of all this attention to detail and careful thought is to clearly state the profound or interesting or funny or interesting things you want to say. He pushes us to consider why we want to write in the first place, and to shrink away if our first answers are….I don't know?

It's scary to look into the void of my soul and see nothing. It's all jarring, especially when your heros are architects of winding and florid prose, people like DFW whose each sentence can turn you inside out and leave you with an emotional charge. Images of Styron with his number 2 pencils and legal pads, or Hemingway with his shotgun and typewriter, or Hunter S. Thompson late into the night with opiates and alcohol coursing through his veins, they have all been romantic obstacles to my own attempts at writing.

Keep writing, Zinsser encourages. Sure, some of us have something to say, but sometimes you have to write your way to those beautiful truths. "You learn to write by writing, he says, in my favorite piece of wisdom, "It's a truism, but what makes it a truism is that it's true," (p. 49). The wisdom helps get rid of any obsession with famous authors and their habits. I'm a normal person, a perfectly average citizen who can never aspire to such leaps towards greatness. My whole stable middle-class world would crumble. Zinsser's book is a patient and trusted dose of encouragement; life is not over, and I still have a say in how I live it. 

 Reyes, I., Da Silva Iddings, A. C., & Feller, N. (2016). Building relationships with diverse students and families: A funds of knowledge perspective. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 16(1), 8-33.