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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The Beauty of Invisibility, the Problem with Moral Outrage, and the NBA Ref Who Fixed His Games

Also: Two new editors at the NYRB, in praise of the Alliance of American Football, and more.
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The New York Review of Books has named two editors to replace Ian Buruma (remember him). They are Emily Greenhouse, 32, and Gabriel Winslow-Yost, 33. Daniel Mendelsohn, a longtime contributor, “will assume the newly created role of editor at large.” One of the goals of the duo is to increase the number of pieces written by women for the review, naturally.

The beauty of invisibility: “Akiko Busch is a writer and a swimmer. She teaches environmental writing at Bennington College and seems to live as off the grid as one can in 2019. Much of her writing feels drawn from understated encounters with nature and the pastoral sublime, such as observing water eels in a brook or chopping vegetables in a Hudson Valley home. Her 2009 book The Uncommon Life of Common Objects has an entire chapter devoted to vegetable-peelers. So when her new essay collection, How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency, touches on things like Barbie dolls that can connect to WiFi and smart refrigerators, the reader begins to worry that no one, not even Aniko Busch, can order a new vegetable-peeler online without worrying who’s tracking her and why. In How to Disappear, Busch contemplates how government surveillance, smart technology, and our own desire to be seen have all contributed to a perhaps irrevocable loss of personal privacy. She does this circuitously, eschewing the alarmist and Luddite tropes that encumber many studies of our technology-dependent culture.”

The problem with moral outrage: “Moral outrage is the powerful impulse we feel to condemn bad behavior, and it serves the important role of holding wrongdoers accountable and reinforcing social norms. Yet moral outrage, at least on Twitter and other similar platforms, appears no more effective at reinforcing social norms than it is at driving people to theatrically overreact to the behavior of strangers.”

The internationalist farmers of the American heartland: “The conceit of Kristin Hoganson’s The Heartland: An American History is that Americans have bought into a myth about the middle of their continent: namely, ‘that there is a stone-solid core at the center of the nation. Local, insulated, exceptional, isolationist, and provincial; the America of America First, the home of homeland security, the defining essence at the center of the land.’ A professor of history at the University of Illinois, Hoganson aims to unpack and deconstruct the myth. She does so by telling the story of Champaign County—her own backyard, so to speak—and revealing the myriad ways in which its people and economy, roughly equidistant from Chicago, St. Louis, and Indianapolis, have been anything but local, insulated, isolated, and provincial.”

In praise of America’s new football league: “The Alliance of American Football is great for the not-so-complicated reason that, dorky rule changes or not, it means more football. I can’t think of a better argument than that.”

John Burnside reviews Marlon James’s Black Leopard Red Wolf: “The overall feel is earthy, ribald and very funny, more Rabelais than Tarantino, and this suits the underlying impetus of the novel perfectly. But what is that impetus? Is there some grand moral edifice concealed beneath the myth-making, as in Tolkien’s hierarchical and drearily undemocratic world, or is the aim simply to entertain and provoke some new thinking about what we mean when we talk about Africa?”

Essay of the Day:

In 2007, NBA referee Tim Donaghy resigned after he admitted to betting on games he officiated. But did he also fix them? At ESPN, Scott Eden argues he did:

“James ‘Jimmy’ ‘Bah-Bah’ ‘The Sheep’ Battista was a stressed-out, overweight, Oxy-addicted 41-year-old, in the hole to some underground gamblers for sums he’d sort of lost track of, when he settled in to watch an NBA game for which he believed he’d just put in the fix. It was January 2007. A month or so back, not long before Christmas, he’d done something audacious: He’d sat down and cut a deal with an NBA referee. Now he feared the scheme had become too obvious.

“‘You wanna get paid?’ Battista had said to the ref. ‘Then you gotta cover the f—ing spread.’ The bribe was only two dimes, $2,000 per game — an outrageous bargain. If the pick won, the ref got his two dimes. If the pick missed, the ref owed nothing; Battista would eat the loss. A ‘free roll,’ as they call it. But this referee didn’t lose much. His picks were winning at an 88 percent clip, totally unheard of in sports betting for any sustained period of time. They were now entering the sixth week of the scheme—what you might call a sustained period of time.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Sea foam

Poem: Amit Majmudar, “The Musical Aphasia of Maurice Ravel”

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