Author: Tracy R. Walsh

by Tracy R. Walsh

David Smith considers the political uses of the “first pet”:

There is little doubt that dogs are politically useful. A half-serious study in the political science journal PS suggests a “diversionary dog” theory. The authors find that presidents display their dogs more during wartime and scandals, though less during economic crises, when the public does not want to see the president frolicking with a spoiled pet.

According to that study (pdf), which tracked press coverage of presidential pets between 1961 and 2011:

[Presidents] use their pets as part of the White House communications strategy. To maximize good feeling, one might imagine that presidents would seek to choose the most adorable pets possible and make regular, public demonstrations of affection. But as one observer recently noted, “the political dogs for the ages are not necessarily the most loved, but the ones that have been used most effectively as makers of points or diffusers of scandal” (Davidson 2012). Presidents, it seems, may be strategic in how they publicly use their pets.

by Tracy R. Walsh

Michael Brick finds that many conservatives have rallied around cursive instruction:

The defense of cursive is not a strictly partisan issue … but the balance of enthusiasm does seem to tip rightward. Intrigued by the politics of handwriting pedagogy, I called Morgan Polikoff, an education-policy expert at the University of Southern California who has prominently endorsed a shift away from cursive instruction, to ask about his hate mail. “When I get hate mail – hate e-mail – about cursive, it’s mostly from conservatives,” he told me. “The hate mail I get from liberals is that we’ve decimated the curriculum and there’s no more beauty in schooling. … The argument you get from conservatives is more ‘How are we going to be able to read the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence?’”

More Dish on cursive instruction here.

by Tracy R. Walsh

Meghan Neal considers the question:

There’s an argument to be made that the right to a certain standard of living is interwoven with connectivity. Amnesty International made that very argument, writing that as the web is increasingly necessary to enjoy freedoms like health, education, employment, the arts, and gender equality, which “means that Information Technologies (yes, the Internet) are inseparable from the rights themselves.” …

Curiously, the strongest argument against connectivity as a human right comes from Vint Cert—curious because he sort of invented the internet. Last year, in the midst of the Arab Spring and social media-enabled revolutions, Cerf wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times that internet access enabled basic human rights but wasn’t itself one.

by Tracy R. Walsh

Russell Saunders watched Peter Pan in its entirety for the first time and was shocked by its racism and sexism:

Popular media is full of beloved movies that are, in retrospect, embarrassing in some way. I remember a (straight) friend prevailing on me to watch Revenge of the Nerds with him (I’d never seen it), and then having to reconcile his remembered affection for the film with the offensively fey gay character, which he hadn’t really thought much of when he first saw it decades before. (I wasn’t all that worried about it.) Attitudes change, generally for the better in my opinion. Unless we want to constantly cull things from our culture (which I am loath to endorse), we have to address the mixed bag of good and bad that they will appear to be from the perspective of our contemporary vantage point.

But it still leaves me a bit stunned that something so obviously racist was made such a relatively short time ago and is still so universally embraced. For all the talk about whether or not Washington’s football team or Atlanta’s baseball team need new names, I would honestly have expected more attention paid to the much more overtly problematic content of a movie that has spawned a whole “fairies” franchise of its own. America’s attention to such things remains quite selective, it seems, and makes me wonder how much more attention I should be paying than I have up to this point.

by Tracy R. Walsh

Bill Bradley compiled a list of countries that receive more more federal aid than Detroit:

Oftentimes, the first thing people say when they see Detroit’s hulking ruins and blight is, “It looks like a third-world country.” It’s not unsavory to imagine how more money injected into depopulated cities and struggling urban cores, from New Orleans to East New York, instead of struggling countries might benefit the economy and country as a whole.