Attention to the Unseen

Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent write: It isn’t every day that the ruminations of local bureaucrats in a small rural Texas county become national news. But when commissioners in Llano County — population 21,000 — voted Thursday to keep its three-branch library system open, the moment was closely monitored by the biggest news organizations in the country. That’s because Llano County has become a national symbol of local right-wing censorship efforts after officials threatened to close its libraries entirely rather than allow offending materials to remain on shelves….

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Vanity Fair reports: It took New College president Patricia Okker three attempts to deliver her farewell remarks. She kept being interrupted during last week’s board meeting in Sarasota, Florida, including once by a member of the school’s board of trustees, making a motion to terminate her without cause. Okker had been addressing the dozens of students, faculty, and parents who’d come to defend her record—and the hundreds more outside who weren’t admitted—saying she was sorry to disappoint them, but she…

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Eric Levitz writes: Blue America is an increasingly wealthy and well-educated place. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, Americans without college degrees were more likely than university graduates to vote Democratic. But that gap began narrowing in the late 1960s before finally flipping in 2004. John F. Kennedy lost college-educated voters by a two-to-one margin yet won the presidency thanks to overwhelming support among white voters without a degree. Sixty years later, our second Catholic president charted a…

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Santul Nerkar wrote in May: America’s racial wealth gap is well-documented, even if many continue to underestimate its existence. Black Americans’ net worth is, on average, less than 15 percent of white Americans’, the legacy of centuries of systemic anti-Black racism. Moreover, both political parties have failed time and again to address the inequities facing Black Americans. But what if I told you that an effective way to start closing this gap was within reach? According to the scholars I…

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ProPublica reports: [Celia] Lewis was beginning to prepare for her move South, spending as much time with friends and family as possible, when she got a strange call from an official in her new school district. The person on the line — Lewis won’t say who — asked if she had ever heard of CRT. Lewis responded, “Yes — culturally responsive teaching.” She was thinking of the philosophy that connects a child’s cultural background to what they learn in school….

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Lucas Mann writes: I’m a college professor, which is one of those jobs that people outside the profession love to ask you about. For the better part of a decade, most of those conversations have been about one thing: free speech. Are universities, once sites of pure, open intellectual discourse, no longer so pure? What is the future of this endeavor I’ve dedicated my life to, if my peers and I are afraid to speak our minds? In one way,…

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Thomas B. Edsall writes: A highly charged ideological transition reflecting a “massive four-decade-long shift in political values and attitudes among more educated people — a shift from concern with traditional materialist issues like redistribution to a concern for public goods like the environment and diversity” is a driving force in the battle between left and right, according to Richard Florida, an urbanologist at the University of Toronto. This ideological transition has been accompanied by the concentration of liberal elites in…

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