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Entry tags:
Distractions before the election
Million Puppet March: “Whose street? Sesame Street!”
“What do we want? Cookies! When do we want them? Now!”
“EL-MO! We won’t go!”
Hendrik Hartog, Someday All This Will Be Yours: A History of Inheritance and Old Age: Based on a study of 19th and early 20th-century New Jersey cases, Hartog examines the complicated interplay of love, duty, gendered expectations, promises, work, and inheritance as society changed while human needs remained relatively similar. In order to avoid the King Lear problem, older people tried to keep young people near them and taking care of them, often by making promises of what those young people would get after the older people died. Sometimes those promises weren’t carried out; sometimes they were, and other excluded family members sought to invalidate them as the products of undue influence. Courts struggled with these messy situations, using concepts of testators’ freedom to devise property regardless of whether the allocation was fair; ideas of contract and exceptions to the requirement that land be transferred only in writing when a young person had sufficiently disrupted his (almost, but not always, his) life in order to do an older person’s wishes; expectations about what it meant to be in a family (especially for women, this meant that care given wasn’t supposed to be remunerated, so they were often disappointed if the will didn’t bear out past promises of reward); and, over time, changing understandings of what kind of care was natural within a family, as nursing in particular moved towards the market. The stories are complicated, and Hartog shows that they always were, even as Social Security and other changes have altered the way that older people secure care and provide for their children (now increasingly by investing in their education rather than leaving them property at death).
Eric Klinenberg, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone: An interesting, albeit accidental, followup to the Hartog: Klinenberg argues that, when they can, a large number of people worldwide prefer to live alone, especially after the death of a longterm partner but also increasingly throughout adult life. Though this poses risks, especially for people who are poor or sick, it also is often something they prefer to the alternatives, and he suggests that public policy can reduce the risks and increase the opportunities for people to live as singletons in cities to the benefit of both society and themselves. Getting the kids to take care of you, in other words, turns out to have been its own second-best.
Michael Levy, Kosher Chinese: Living, Teaching, and Eating with China’s Other Billion: Entertaining memoir of a Peace Corps volunteer’s experience in the interior city of Guiyang, which was growing but still a comparative backwater. There’s a lot of mutual incomprehension and good-faith but often insufficient attempts to understand on both sides. Levy’s students are smart, but/and they see no alternatives to one-party rule, while recognizing that it’s at least as much crony capitalism as Communism; most of them seem very worried about their futures, and not unreasonably so. Levy adopts a running joke about “x with Chinese characteristics” for many things, including his Judaism, which ends up becoming a reason to have pizza night. Slight but enjoyable.
“What do we want? Cookies! When do we want them? Now!”
“EL-MO! We won’t go!”
Hendrik Hartog, Someday All This Will Be Yours: A History of Inheritance and Old Age: Based on a study of 19th and early 20th-century New Jersey cases, Hartog examines the complicated interplay of love, duty, gendered expectations, promises, work, and inheritance as society changed while human needs remained relatively similar. In order to avoid the King Lear problem, older people tried to keep young people near them and taking care of them, often by making promises of what those young people would get after the older people died. Sometimes those promises weren’t carried out; sometimes they were, and other excluded family members sought to invalidate them as the products of undue influence. Courts struggled with these messy situations, using concepts of testators’ freedom to devise property regardless of whether the allocation was fair; ideas of contract and exceptions to the requirement that land be transferred only in writing when a young person had sufficiently disrupted his (almost, but not always, his) life in order to do an older person’s wishes; expectations about what it meant to be in a family (especially for women, this meant that care given wasn’t supposed to be remunerated, so they were often disappointed if the will didn’t bear out past promises of reward); and, over time, changing understandings of what kind of care was natural within a family, as nursing in particular moved towards the market. The stories are complicated, and Hartog shows that they always were, even as Social Security and other changes have altered the way that older people secure care and provide for their children (now increasingly by investing in their education rather than leaving them property at death).
Eric Klinenberg, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone: An interesting, albeit accidental, followup to the Hartog: Klinenberg argues that, when they can, a large number of people worldwide prefer to live alone, especially after the death of a longterm partner but also increasingly throughout adult life. Though this poses risks, especially for people who are poor or sick, it also is often something they prefer to the alternatives, and he suggests that public policy can reduce the risks and increase the opportunities for people to live as singletons in cities to the benefit of both society and themselves. Getting the kids to take care of you, in other words, turns out to have been its own second-best.
Michael Levy, Kosher Chinese: Living, Teaching, and Eating with China’s Other Billion: Entertaining memoir of a Peace Corps volunteer’s experience in the interior city of Guiyang, which was growing but still a comparative backwater. There’s a lot of mutual incomprehension and good-faith but often insufficient attempts to understand on both sides. Levy’s students are smart, but/and they see no alternatives to one-party rule, while recognizing that it’s at least as much crony capitalism as Communism; most of them seem very worried about their futures, and not unreasonably so. Levy adopts a running joke about “x with Chinese characteristics” for many things, including his Judaism, which ends up becoming a reason to have pizza night. Slight but enjoyable.
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