Beacon Broadside

Silent Spring: How Rachel Carson Responded to Industry Backlash

Fifty years ago today, Houghton Mifflin published Rachel Carson's revolutionary book Silent Spring. In honor of the anniversary, we share this excerpt from Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson, a collection edited by Linda Lear and published by Beacon in 1998. 

Linda Lear is a biographer and historian. She is the author of the acclaimed biography of Rachel Carson, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature. Lear’s research papers and adjunct collections dealing with Carson’s life, Carson’s friends and colleagues, and the controversy over Silent Spring form the core of the Lear/Carson Collection at The Linda Lear Center for Archives and Special Collections at Connecticut College. Find out more about Carson, Linda Lear, and upcoming events at RachelCarson.org.

This address to the Women’s National Press Club (December 1962) stands as one of Carson’s most important statements following publication of Silent Spring and the beginning of the ferocious industry backlash against her. Like Silent Spring, her speech can be read as a democratic manifesto in the long tradition from Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe through Martin Luther King Jr. Carson dares to suggest here that “profit and production” might be motives that would make industry and government officials lie to the public about what was being done to the environment and to the whole fabric of life. This was an astonishing idea in the Cold War. Like those who came before her, Carson as an individual was pushing back to power and in doing so she was declaring that environmental rights were also human rights.—Linda Lear, September 2012

My text this afternoon is taken from the Globe Times of Bethlehem, Pa., a news item in the issue of October 12. After describing in detail the adverse reactions to Silent Spring of the farm bureaus in two Pennsylvania counties, the reporter continued: “No one in either county farm office who was talked to today had read the book, but all disapproved of it heartily.”

This sums up very neatly the background of much of the noisier comment that has been heard in this unquiet autumn following the publication of Silent Spring. In the words of an editorial in the Bennington Banner, “The anguished reaction to Silent Spring has been to refute statements that were never made.” Whether this kind of refutation comes from people who actually have not read the book or from those who find it convenient to misrepresent my position I leave it to others to judge.

Early in the summer–as soon as the first installment of the book appeared in the New Yorker–public reaction to Silent Spring was reflected in a tidal wave of letters–letters to Congressmen, to newspapers, to Government agencies, to the author. These letters continue to come and I am sure represent the most important and lasting reaction.

Even before the book was published, editorials and columns by the hundreds had discussed it all over the country. Early reaction in the chemical press was somewhat moderate, and in fact I have had fine support from some segments of both chemical and agricultural press. But in general, as was to be expected, the industry press was not happy. By late summer the printing presses of the pesticide industry and their trade associations had begun to pour out the first of a growing stream of booklets designed to protect and repair the somewhat battered image of pesticides. Plans are announced for quarterly mailings to opinion leaders and for monthly news stories to newspapers, magazines, radio, and television. Speakers are addressing audiences everywhere.

It is clear that we are all to receive heavy doses of tranquilizing information, designed to lull the public into the sleep from which Silent Spring so rudely awakened it. Some definite gains toward a saner policy of pest control have been made in recent months. The important issue now is whether we are to hold and extend those gains.

The attack is now falling into a definite pattern and all the well-known devices are being used. One obvious way to try to weaken a cause is to discredit the person who champions it. So the masters of invective and insinuation have been busy: I am a “bird lover – a cat lover – a fish lover”– a priestess of nature – a devotee of a mystical cult having to do with laws of the universe which my critics consider themselves immune to.

Another piece in the pattern of attack largely ignores Silent Spring and concentrates on what I suppose would be called the soft sell, the soothing reassurances to the public. Some of these acknowledge the correctness of my facts, but say that the incidents I reported occurred some time in the past, that industry and Government are well aware of them and have long since taken steps to prevent their recurrence. It must be assumed that the people who read these comforting reports read nothing else in their newspapers. Actually, pesticides have figured rather prominently in the news in recent months: some items trivial, some almost humorous, some definitely serious.

These reports do not differ in any important way from the examples I cited in Silent Spring, so if the situation is under better control there is little evidence of it.

[…]

We are told also that chemicals are never used unless tests have shown them to be safe. This, of course, is not an accurate statement. I am happy to see that the Department of Agriculture plans to ask the Congress to amend the FIFRA to do away with the provision that now permits a company to register a pesticide under protest, even though a question of health or safety has been raised by the Department.

We have other reminders that unsafe chemicals get into use – County Agents frequently have to amend or rescind earlier advices on the use of pesticides. For example, a letter was recently sent out to farmers recalling stocks of a chemical in use as a cattle spray. In September, “unexplained losses” occurred following its use. Several suspected production lots were recalled but the losses continued. All outstanding lots of the chemical have now had to be recalled.

Inaccurate statements in reviews of Silent Spring are a dime a dozen, and I shall only mention one or two examples. Time, in its discussion of Silent Spring, described accidental poisonings from pesticides as very rare. Let’s look at a few figures. California, the only state that keeps accurate and complete records, reports from 900 to 1000 cases of poisoning from agricultural chemicals per year. About 200 of these are from parathion alone. Florida has experienced so many poisonings recently that this state has attempted to control the use of the more dangerous chemicals in residential areas. As a sample of conditions in other countries, parathion was responsible for 100 deaths in India in 1958 and takes an average of 336 deaths a year in Japan.

It is also worthy of note that during the years 1959, 1960, and 1961, airplane crashes involving crop-dusting planes totaled 873. In these accidents 135 pilots lost their lives. This very fact has led to some significant research by the Federal Aviation Agency through its Civil Aeromedical Unit – research designed to find out why so many of these planes crashed. These medical investigators took as their basic premise the assumption that spray poisons accumulate in the pilot’s body – inside the cells, where they are difficult to detect.

These researchers recently reported that they had confirmed two very significant facts: 1. That there is a causal relation between the build-up of toxins in the cell and the onset of sugar diabetes. 2. That the build-up of poisons within the cell interferes with the rate of energy production in the human body.

I am, of course, happy to have this confirmation that cellular processes are not so “irrelevant” as a certain scientific reviewer of Silent Spring has declared them to be.

This same reviewer, writing in a chemical journal, was much annoyed with me for giving the sources of my information. To identify the person whose views you are quoting is, according to this reviewer, name-dropping. Well, times have certainly changed since I received my training in the scientific method at Johns Hopkins! My critic also profoundly disapproved of my bibliography. The very fact that it gave complete and specific references for each important statement was extremely distasteful to him. This was padding to impress the uninitiated with its length.

Now I would like to say that in Silent Spring I have never asked the reader to take my word. I have given him a very clear indication of my sources. I make it possible for him – indeed I invite him – to go beyond what I report and get the full picture. This is the reason for the 55 pages of references. You cannot do this if you are trying to conceal or distort or to present half truths.

Another reviewer was offended because I made the statement that it is customary for pesticide manufacturers to support research on chemicals in the universities. Now, this is just common knowledge and I can scarcely believe the reviewer is unaware of it, because his own university is among those receiving such grants.

[…]

A penetrating observer of social problems has pointed out recently that whereas wealthy families once were the chief benefactors of the Universities, now industry has taken over this role. Support of education is something no one quarrels with – but this need not blind us to the fact that research supported by pesticide manufacturers is not likely to be directed at discovering facts indicating unfavorable effects of pesticides.

Such a liaison between science and industry is a growing phenomenon, seen in other areas as well. The AMA, through its newspaper, has just referred physicians to a pesticide trade association for information to help them answer patients’ questions about the effects of pesticides on man. I am sure physicians have a need for information on this subject. But I would like to see them referred to authoritative scientific or medical literature – not to a trade organization whose business it is to promote the sale of pesticides.

We see scientific societies acknowledging as “sustaining associates” a dozen or more giants of a related industry. When the scientific organization speaks, whose voice do we hear–that of science? or of the sustaining industry? It might be a less serious situation if this voice were always clearly identified, but the public assumes it is hearing the voice of science.

What does it mean when we see a committee set up to make a supposedly impartial review of a situation, and then discover that the committee is affiliated with the very industry whose profits are at stake? I have this week read two reviews of the recent reports of a National Academy of Sciences Committee on the relations of pesticides to wildlife. These reviews raise disturbing questions. It is important to understand just what this committee is. The two sections of its report that have now been published are frequently cited by the pesticide industry in attempts to refute my statements. The public, I believe, assumes that the Committee is actually part of the Academy. Although appointed by the Academy, its members come from outside. Some are scientists of distinction in their fields. One would suppose the way to get an impartial evaluation of the impact of pesticides on wildlife would be to set up a committee of completely disinterested individuals. But the review appearing this week in The Atlantic Naturalist described the composition of the Committee as follows: “A very significant role in this committee is played by the Liaison Representatives. These are of three categories. A.) Supporting Agencies. B.) Government Agencies. C.) Scientific Societies. The supporting agencies are presumably those who supply the hard cash. Forty-three such agencies are listed, including 19 chemical companies comprising the massed might of the chemical industry. In addition, there are at least four trade organizations such as the National Agricultural Chemical Association and the National Aviation Trades Association.”

The Committee reports begin with a firm statement in support of the use of chemical pesticides. From this predetermined position, it is not surprising to find it mentioning only some damage to some wildlife. Since, in the modern manner, there is no documentation, one can neither confirm or deny its findings. The Atlantic Naturalist reviewer described the reports as “written in the style of a trained public relations official of industry out to placate some segments of the public that are causing trouble.”

All of these things raise the question of the communication of scientific knowledge to the public. Is industry becoming a screen through which facts must be filtered, so that the hard, uncomfortable truths are kept back and only the harmless morsels allowed to filter through? I know that many thoughtful scientists are deeply disturbed that their organizations are becoming fronts for industry. More than one scientist has raised a disturbing question – whether a spirit of lysenkoism may be developing in America today – the philosophy that perverted and destroyed the science of genetics in Russia and even infiltrated all of that nation’s agricultural sciences. But here the tailoring, the screening of basic truth, is done, not to suit a party line, but to accommodate to the short-term gain, to serve the gods of profit and production.

Eboo Patel: A Common Life Together

Eboo Patel is the author of Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation and Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice, and the Promise of America. He is founder and Executive Director of the Interfaith Youth Core, an international nonprofit building the interfaith youth movement.

This post originally appeared at Huffington Post.

“So which side are they on?” The question was part of a conversation I overheard on the street the other day, and it was in reference to people like me—American Muslims.

As several of my country's embassies have been violently threatened by people of my faith, this seems as good a time as any to be clear about my answer: I am on the side of all those who seek a common life together. I believe America's founding creed, E Pluribus Unum, makes us humanity's best chance to achieve that possibility. I believe that Muslim values—just like Jewish, Christian, Hindu and humanist ones—can contribute to that spirit. And I believe, as the violence and ugliness demonstrate, that building societies where people from different identities live in equal dignity and mutual loyalty is one of the great challenges of our times.

We find ourselves in a terrible situation. The evening news in America is full of Muslims burning American flags and trying to breach embassies. The evening news in Arab countries is full of stories of Americans defiling the Prophet Muhammad. And the actions of a thuggish few are increasingly viewed as representing the sentiments of entire nations and religions.

The sad part is that those thuggish few are not just skewed representations of the broader whole, they actually stand in violation of their traditions. I believe as a Muslim that the mob violence we are witnessing does a greater dishonor to the Prophet Muhammad than the original offense. Muslims are meant to act in the tradition of the Prophet, who dealt with insults during his entire mission, responded unfailingly with mercy and commanded his followers to do the same: “You do not do evil to those who do evil to you, but you deal with them with forgiveness and kindness...”

Moreover, Islam is a tradition that protected pluralism from its beginnings. One of the Prophet Muhammad's earliest acts in his adopted city of Medina was to enact a Constitution that created a single political community—barring tribal violence, establishing basic freedoms and assuring collective security—between his growing number of Muslim followers and the various Christian, Jewish and pagan groups already present in the city. During Islam's expansion, the Caliph Ali sent his governor in Egypt a letter that said, “All people there are your equals in faith or your brothers in creation.” The Quran affirms the holiness of this pluralistic view: “God made you different nations and tribes that you may come to know one another.”

America, contrary to the strain of ugly Islamophobia that has become more prominent since 9/11, has a long and positive history of respect for Islam and Muslims. The Flushing Remonstrance, a 17th century document which established the precedent of religious freedom and goodwill between different faiths, explicitly includes Muslims: “The law of love, peace and liberty in the states extending to Jews, Turks and Egyptians, as they are considered sons of Adam.” Thomas Jefferson famously owned a Quran and hosted an iftar dinner for a Muslim diplomat. Benjamin Franklin started a hall in Philadelphia and said that the pulpit would be open to all preachers, including a Muslim from Constantinople. An envoy appointed by President George Washington negotiated the Treaty of Tripoli with a majority-Muslim nation, a document which stated that “no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.” The treaty was later signed by President John Adams.

Current events highlight a harsh reality of globalization. That people on one side of the world can create something that incites violence on the other side of the world. But there is a silver lining here: just as ugliness begets ugliness, so might beauty inspire beauty. Let's not let the handful of people who seek to spread hatred between faith communities pattern interfaith relations across the world. Now more than ever, we need to lift up those stories within Islam and America that speak to the power of pluralism. And we need to act on those stories, by working together to apply the values of mercy, compassion and hospitality that are shared across all traditions. I remember President Obama telling his Inaugural Faith Council, of which I was a proud member, that he hoped Americans of all faith backgrounds would participate in interfaith service projects together. This was not just as a way of strengthening our own nation, it was also an example of diversity leading to harmony in a world that is increasingly convinced of the inevitability of conflict.

In an interconnected world, the only chance we have is a common life together. If we are to build it, we must insure the bridges between us are strong enough to withstand the bombs of the extremists. As the American poet William Stafford wrote, “The signals we give must be clear now ... the darkness around us is deep.”

Pronouns Go Gaga with J. Jack Halberstam

J. Jack Halberstam is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Halberstam is the author of five books, including Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal. This post originally appeared on Halberstam's blog. 

Every few weeks, I get an email from a colleague, a friend or a student asking me what pronoun I prefer. I mostly go by “Jack” nowadays, although people who have known me for a really long time and some family members still call me Judith. Then there are a few people, my sister included, who call me “Jude.” I have debated switching out Jack for Jude to try to compress the name ambiguity into a more clear opposition between Judith and Jude. But then again–and contrary to my personality or my politics—when it comes to names and pronouns, I am a bit of a free floater. This goes against my instincts and my general demeanor—I don’t hang in the middle ground on much, not politically, not socially, not in terms of culture, queer issues, feminism or masculinity. I am a person of strong opinions so why, oh why, do I insist on being loosey goosey about pronouns?

Well, a few reasons: first, I have not transitioned in any formal sense and there certainly many differences between my gender and those of transgender men on hormones. Second, the back and forth between he and she sort of captures the form that my gender takes nowadays. Not that I am often an unambiguous “she” but nor am I often an unambiguous he. Third, I think my floating gender pronouns capture well the refusal to resolve my gender ambiguity that has become a kind of identity for me.

I watch friends, one after the other, transition, mostly from butch to TG male and I wonder whether I am just sitting on a fence and not wanting to jump. But actually, as a real medi-phobe, I don’t see taking hormones, even in small doses as right for me for any extended amount of time. Top surgery? Well, yes please, but then again, would this make it even harder for me to use the women’s locker room when I swim or work out (and I do one or the other almost every day so that would really be something to think about). So, while I could “transition” and still live in the ever-evolving, improvised territory of transgenderism…well, I prefer not to.

Yes, like Bartleby, that wonderful and doleful example of a refusenik who declined to explain his refusal to work, to comply, to communicate even, I prefer not to transition. I prefer not to clarify what must categorically remain murky. I prefer not to help people out in their gender quandaries and yet, I appreciate you asking.

I still use women’s restrooms, and I avoid any and all contact on going in or coming out. If someone looks frightened when they see me, I say “excuse me” and allow my “fluty” voice to gender me. If someone looks angry, I turn away, but mostly I just ignore what is going on around me in the restroom and do what I am there to do.

I wish more people would behave like my partner’s son (he’s 9 years old) and simply ask, politely and without judgement, what pronoun anyone prefers—he rarely presumes and often asks. I also wish more people would adapt to a pronoun system based on gender and not on sex, based on comfort rather than biology, based on the presumption that there are many gendered bodies in the world and “male” and “female” does not even begin the hard work of classifying them.

So, if you are wondering about my pronoun use and would like it resolved once and for all, I cannot help you there. But if, like the UK in the 1980′s, you are ready to give up on the “imperial” systems of measurements in favor of new metrics, then consider my gender improvised at best, uncertain and mispronounced more often than not, irresolvable and ever shifting.

And ps: grouping me with someone else who seems to have a female embodiment and then calling us LADIES, is never, ever ok!

Visit the other stops on the Going Gaga Blog Tour

My Husband Betty
Where Jack wonders, "When did 'vagina' suddenly become a fashionable term?"

Queer Fat Femme 
"Feminism is as much about naming one’s desires with precision and care as it is about expressing desire in more amorphous ways."

Sugarbutch Chronicles
"Heterosexual mainstream conversations about desire love to depict women as the ones who create an environment for love and romance and men as the ones who set the whole thing on fire."

The Qu 
 "For the Gaga feminist, in fact, the end of the normal is in sight and we don’t want the same old norms packaged back up for us and sold to us again as new norms!"

 

Put Away Your Wallet: Why You Shouldn't Buy the iPhone 5

Award-winning journalist Fran Hawthorne has been a writer or editor at Fortune, BusinessWeek, Institutional Investor, and other publications. She is the author of Ethical Chic: The Inside Story of the Companies We Think We Love, The Overloaded Liberal: Shopping, Investing, Parenting,and Other Daily Dilemmas in an Age of Political Activism, and books on health care and investing.

Another new iPhone. Could you try to yawn?

Could you actually not buy it?

Or at least, before you pull out your wallet, think about the forced student labor, the warlords who benefit from mineral smuggling, the children exposed to toxic waste from old phones, and the pile of useless accessories you'll throw out.

With its constant pitching of the newest cool thing to replace its previous newest cool thing, Apple has always been one of the worst violators of the environmentalist credo “reduce, reuse, recycle.” It barely gives customers a chance to use its toys, let alone reuse, before making the toy obsolete and unfashionable.

But with the iPhone 5, Apple has really outdone itself.

For instance, customers have recently become aware that iPhones and other Apple gizmos are made in crowded and unsafe Chinese factories where people toil 15 hours a day for barely $50 a month. That’s bad enough. Then, just a week before the iPhone 5 went on sale, it was revealed that the factories had dragooned students onto the assembly lines in a rush to get the phones made on time, threatening to kick them out of school if they demurred.

Nor has anything been done to ameliorate the environmental problems. As with any product, making an iPhone uses up resources for the components, ingredients, packaging, and marketing, and also uses fuel and creates carbon emissions in the manufacturing and shipping processes. Again, iPhones are worse than the average, because their components include dangerous metals and ores like coltan, which is found only in endangered gorilla habitats or in African war zones where the profits get siphoned by warlords.

Moreover, when you throw out your old iPhone 4—even if you think you’re recycling it—most likely it will end up in a dump where little kids will poke  through dangerous metals with their bare hands, breathing in toxic fumes, to scavenge a few pennies’ worth of metal they can sell.

And with the iPhone 5, Apple has added to its garbage pileup and waste by redesigning the connector on the phone’s base precisely so that most of your old charging cords, docks, iPhone-compatible clock radios, and other add-ons will no longer fit. Into the garbage go all that rubber, metal, and plastic. Out of your wallet comes $30 for a special Apple adapter plus money to replace the accessories that still won’t work on the adapter.

Okay then, here’s an idea: Your iPhone 4S is less than a year old. How about sticking with it just one more year—until the iPhone 6 comes out?

Photo of iPhone from Bigstock.

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The High Stakes of Child Poverty

David Chura is the author of I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup. He has worked with at-risk teenagers for the past 40 years. For 26 of those years, he taught English and creative writing in community based alternative schools and in a county penitentiary. His writings have appeared in the New York Times as well as other scholarly and literary journals. He blogs at kidsinthesystem.wordpress.com.

This post originally appeared at Reclaiming Futures. 

I met Amber at a tutoring program for inner city children. It was 1966, my senior year in high school, and the war on poverty was on, a war we’ve failed to win.

At nine years old Amber looked like a scarecrow, an old scarecrow at that, bird-picked, weather beaten. She was stick thin. None of her clothes fit, hand-me-downs from her sister Bunny who quickly outgrew her clothes while her younger sister didn’t seem to grow at all. Her eyes were dark circled; her hair, straw and falling out.

Saturday mornings she was one of the first kids through the church basement doors. My friends and I weren’t naïve. We knew that that gaggle of children who showed up each week wasn’t there for the mandatory hour of instruction. They put up with our drilling them on the timestables or helping them parse a paragraph. They were really there for the cookies and milk, and the tables spread with art supplies and games. It wasn’t until years later that I realized that they may have been just as eager for our attention, our reliability, and perhaps even our youthful faith in the future as for those treats.

I worked with Amber all that year. She didn’t progress much. But that didn’t seem to matter. She was always there. Besides, there was something else going on: I was being tutored in what poverty was really all about.

Walking Amber home several times I got to see where she lived—a cramped, drafty tenement—and to meet the rest of her family. Her mother, Mrs. Laurel, was as frail and battered looking as Amber. She had a nervous tic that twitched her head, a purple bruise on her cheekbone, a baby on her hip and a toddler pulling at her housecoat. Peter, a year older than Amber, dervished through the apartment while Bunny, a twelve year old with a fifteen year old’s body, refused to say hello.

There were no secrets in the Laurel family. Sitting at their kitchen table I heard how Bunny was boy-crazy, how Peter ate paste in school, and how they all loved margarine and sugar sandwiches. Amber, I was told, shared the bed of whatever brother or sister let her: she was a bed wetter. Pointing to the toddler pulling a waste basket over and the baby on her lap, Mrs. Laurel told me how “Mr. Laurel” was in and out of the house. “That’s what these two are all about,” she laughed ruefully then touched her cheekbone.

I lost track of the Laurels when I went off to college and got involved in another war—the war against the war, the Vietnam War. I didn’t think about them until Ronald Reagan in the 1980s started talking about the “deserving poor.” By then I was teaching kids in an alternative high school that very well could’ve been the children of an Amber or a Peter or a Bunny. I remember at the time wondering if the Laurels would’ve fit Reagan’s criteria for “deserving.” What would he have made of that bubble bath that tumbled out of the grocery bag Mrs. Laurel plopped down on the table one day when I was there? Or the endless packages of Lick-a-maid her kids lapped up from their grimy palms instead of lunch.

And now, years later, census figures show that the US poverty rate has hit its highest levels since President Johnson declared war on it, and that child poverty has increased from its 2010 twenty-two percent level.

This is especially bad news in these high stakes, high pressure days of “educational reform.” How will the Ambers of this world fare with so much depending on a student’s test performance especially when “education reformers” continue to refuse to acknowledge the crippling role that economic disparity plays in academic performance? Yet the stakes have gotten higher. According to a recent Council on Foreign Relations report, “US Education Reform and National Security,” (a report Diane Ravitch called the latest education “jeremiad”) educational failures are indeed a threat to national security. Another burden put on young shoulders.

In 1962 Michael Harrington showed America the face of “the invisible poor.” Now that the ranks of the Ambers among us are growing will we finally be able to look squarely into those faces and help the children of poverty achieve true academic parity? Or do we—and they—have to wait another 50 years? 

Milk and cookies photo from Bigstock.

Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal

Why are so many women single, so many men resisting marriage, and so many gays and lesbians having babies?

In Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal, J. Jack Halberstam answers these questions while attempting to make sense of the tectonic cultural shifts that have transformed gender and sexual politics in the last few decades. This colorful landscape is populated by symbols and phenomena as varied as pregnant men, late-life lesbians, SpongeBob SquarePants, and queer families. So how do we understand the dissonance between these real lived experiences and the heteronormative narratives that dominate popular media? We can embrace the chaos! With equal parts edge and wit, Halberstam reveals how these symbolic ruptures open a critical space to embrace new ways of conceptualizing sex, love, and marriage.

Using Lady Gaga as a symbol for a new era, Halberstam deftly unpacks what the pop superstar symbolizes, to whom and why. The result is a provocative manifesto of creative mayhem, a roadmap to sex and gender for the twenty-first century, that holds Lady Gaga as an exemplar of a new kind of feminism that privileges gender and sexual fluidity.

Part handbook, part guidebook, and part sex manual, Gaga Feminism is the first book to take seriously the collapse of heterosexuality and find signposts in the wreckage to a new and different way of doing sex and gender.

About the Author

Jack Halberstam is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Halberstam is the author of five books including: Skin Shows: othic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995),Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011) and Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012) and has written articles that have appeared in numerous journals, magazines and collections. Halberstam is currently working on several projects including a book on Fascism and (homo)sexuality.

Halberstam has co-edited a number of anthologies including Posthuman Bodies with Ira Livingston (Indiana University Press, 1995) and a special issue of Social Text with Jose Munoz and David Eng titled “What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?” Jack is a popular speaker and gives lectures around the country and internationally every year. Lecture topics include: queer failure, sex and media, subcultures, visual culture, gender variance, popular film, animation.

Photo by Assaf Evron.

Follow the Going Gaga! Blog Tour

My Husband Betty
Where Jack wonders, "When did 'vagina' suddenly become a fashionable term?"

Queer Fat Femme "Feminism is as much about naming one’s desires with precision and care as it is about expressing desire in more amorphous ways."

Sugarbutch Chronicles "Heterosexual mainstream conversations about desire love to depict women as the ones who create an environment for love and romance and men as the ones who set the whole thing on fire."

The Qu  Coming soon!

 

Watch J. Jack Halberstam discussing Lady Gaga, Gaga Families, and Gaga Feminism

 

Beacon Buzz: Interfaith Cooperation

Watch and Listen:

Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice, and the Promise of America by Eboo Patel

Melissa Harris-Perry Show on MSNBC

WNYC Radio/Brian Lehrer Show

Interview on Christine Amanpour's show, "Amanpour" on CNN International

 

Tweet Land of Liberty: Irreverent Rhymes from the Political Circus by Elinor Lipman

Lipman was a guest on WBUR's "Here and Now"

Review and Interview in Shelf Awareness for Readers, and Book Trailer of the Day in Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade

Notable Mentions:

The Springs of Namje: A Ten-Year Journey from the Villages of Nepal to the Halls of Congress by Rajeev Goyal

Booklist review, in print Sept 15: “An honest and inspiring look at the hard work and reward of development efforts.”

Write-up and author interview in The Island Now, Sept. 06; The Island Now

 

When the World Calls: The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and Its First Fifty Years by Stanley Meisler

Stanley Meisler wins a Peace Corps Writers Award: 2011 Publisher’s Special Award, Peace Corps Worldwide

 

 

Coming Soon:

Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married by Nancy Rubin Stuart (April 09, 2013) 

"In this lively double-biography, Nancy Rubin Stuart reveals the resilient lives of a leading Patriot and a notorious Loyalist: both of them women.  Lucy Flucker Knox and Peggy Shippen Arnold deftly performed the parlor politics that helped to shape the American Revolution in surprising ways."

--Alan Taylor, author of The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies

Note to School Officials: Be Wary of Punishing Students for Online Speech

David L. Hudson, Jr. is a First Amendment Scholar with the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University. He teaches at Vanderbilt University Law School and Nashville School of Law. He is the author of Let the Students Speak!: A History of the Fight For Free Expression in American Schools.

School officials need to be wary when punishing students for inappropriate off-campus, online speech or forcing students to disclose social-media passwords. Such conduct could violate students’ First Amendment right to free speech and Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.

That appears to be the lesson from a recent federal court decision in Minnesota. Earlier this month, a federal judge refused to dismiss a lawsuit arising from a middle school’s punishment of an eighth-grader for her Facebook posts.

In early 2011, a student at Minnewaska Area Middle School known in court papers as “R.S.” got mad at a school monitor and posted on Facebook that she “hated” the school monitor. After receiving a detention and being forced to apologize to the monitor, the student posted a second message containing profanity and inquiring who told school administrators about her initial post. She was subsequently punished for this post.

Later, in March 2011, school officials learned that R.S. apparently had engaged in sex talk that was initiated by a boy in her class. According to R.S., school officials, including a school resource officer, took her out of class and forced her to disclose her Facebook username and password and then read her public postings and private messages.

R.S. then sued in federal court, contending that school officials violated her First Amendment free-speech rights by punishing her for her off-campus, online postings. She also alleged that school officials violated her Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures when they forced her to disclose her passwords and then searched her online content.

The school defendants filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. On Sept. 6, U.S. District Judge Michael J. Davis denied the defendants’ motion with respect to the First and Fourth Amendment claims in R.S. v. Minnewaska Area School District.

On the First Amendment claim, Davis ruled that public school officials can punish students for off-campus, online speech only if the speech constitutes a true threat or “pose[s] a substantial disruptive effect.” The judge characterized R.S.’s statements about the school monitor as merely “inappropriate” and a far cry from a true threat or speech that caused a substantial disruption.

Even more significant perhaps to the ultimate outcome of the case, Davis ruled that there is “clearly established” law that school officials cannot punish students merely for “inappropriate” online speech. This finding caused Davis to deny the defendants’ request for qualified immunity, a defense available for government officials if they don’t violate clearly established law.

On the Fourth Amendment claim, Davis emphasized that R.S. “had a reasonable expectation of privacy to her private Facebook information and messages.” He also reasoned that this principle was clearly established law.

Davis stressed, however, that “this case is still in its infancy” and that the school officials “may reveal facts which change the Court’s analysis of the school defendants’ qualified immunity claims or of the ultimate merits of [R.S.’s] claims.”

The Springs of Namje: A Ten-Year Journey from the Villages of Nepal to the Halls of Congress

A Peace Corps volunteer's inspirational story about the power of small change 

In 2001, Peace Corps volunteer Rajeev Goyal was sent to Namje, a remote village in the eastern hills of Nepal. Brimming with idealism, he expected to find people living in conditions of misery and suffering; instead, he discovered a village full of happy, compassionate people. After organizing the villagers to build a water-pumping system in the midst of the dangerous Maoist war that had gripped the country, Goyal learned how complex rural development truly is. He also witnessed how the seemingly lowliest villager can hold profound power to influence not only his or her own village but also the highest rungs of government.

Years after this experience, Goyal applied the lessons he learned in Namje to his work on Capitol Hill. Approaching Congress as if it were a Nepalese caste system, Goyal led a grassroots campaign to double the size of the Peace Corps. His unique approach to advocacy included strategically positioning himself outside the men's room of the capitol building waiting for lawmakers to walk out. As a result of his determined bird-dogging, Goyal managed to make allies of more than a hundred members of Congress and in the process, he ruffled the feathers of some of the most powerful figures in Washington. But due to his efforts, the Peace Corps was granted a $60-million increase in funding, the largest dollar-amount increase in the organizations history.

On this path to victory Goyal endured a number of missteps along the way, and, as he reveals, his idealism at times faded into fear, anger, and frustration. In this honest and inspirational account of his life as an activist, Goyal offers daring ideas for how the Peace Corps and other organizations can be even more relevant to our rapidly changing world. He urges environmentalists, educators, farmers, artists, and designers to come together and contribute their talents. Filled with history, international politics, personal anecdotes, and colorful characters, The Springs of Namje is a unique and inspiring book about the power of small change.

Buy The Springs of Namje at Beacon.org.

Read an excerpt at Scribd.

About the Author

Rajeev Goyal, a graduate of Brown University and the New York University School of Law, is a lawyer, activist, rural-development worker, and former Peace Corp volunteer. Since 2008, he has served as the national coordinator for the Push for Peace Corps Campaign. He leads environmental and sustainable agriculture initiatives in eastern Nepal through several NGOs.

Read Peter Hessler's profile of Rajeev Goyal at the New Yorker. 

Watch a New Yorker video about Rajeev Goyal and his work in Nepal.

Reflections on 9/11

On this day eleven years ago, life in America was altered in ways we still grapple with today. Most of us have vivid memories of the day--the phone calls urging us to turn on the television, the shock of realizing the deliberateness of what at first we imagined could only be a horrible accident, the concern for loved ones and strangers that flooded our emotional circuits. For those among us who survived the attacks, who witnessed them directly, and who lost family and friends, we hold you in our thoughts today. 

In honor of the day, here are links to the thoughts of several of our authors on remembering the attacks, how they found comfort in the aftermath, and how we can move forward in ways that heal divisions forged out of anger and prejudice. 

"Ground Zero," an excerpt from Sacred Ground by Eboo Patel (You can also listen to Eboo Patel on the Brian Lehrer show and, later today, watch him speak with Christiane Amanpour on CNN at 3pm.)

Joan Murray on writing her poem "Survivors--Found" (read the poem here)

Eboo Patel on making sense of the day through the words of Rumi and Walt Whitman 

Danielle Ofri: A Bellevue Doctor Remembers 9/11

Kate Whouley: Eating Cake on 9/11

Susan Katz Miller: Raising My Interfaith Children With Hope

An excerpt from We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant Communities after 9/11 by Tram Nguyen 

Beacon Buzz: Your Source for Convention-Themed Poetic Tweets

The Perfect Complement to the Conventions

Tweet Land of Liberty: Irreverent Rhymes from the Political Circus by @ElinorLipman

Elinor Lipman spoke with Here and Now about tweeting political poetry.

Shelf Awareness for Readers author interview.

Shelf Awareness Book Trade book trailer of the day.

Be sure to watch and share the Elinor Lipman for Tweet Laureate Campaign Video.

 

Listen and Watch:

Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice, and the Promise of America by Eboo Patel

Listen to Eboo speaking with Wisconsin Public Radio's Joy Cardin Show.

Upcoming: Patel interview on Christine Amanpour's show, "Amanpour," on CNN International September 11

Iowa Public Radio/River to River; September 07.

Melissa Harris-Perry Show/MSNBC; September 09.

WNYC Radio/Brian Lehrer Show; September 11.

Watch Eboo Patel give the convocation lecture at Concordia College, where he discusses the journey of college life. 

 

Notable Mentions:

White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf by Aaron Bobrow-Strain

Interviewed in a feature about white bread in Boston Globe

Mother Earth News review in the Aug/Sept issue:  “A really good read.”

Interview on KCRW (Southern California NPR) “The Lunch Show.”

The Most Expensive Game in Town: The Rising Cost of Youth Sports and the Toll on Today's Families by Mark Hyman

Boston Globe review in sports book round-up.

Remembering the Music, Forgetting the Words: Travels with Mom in the Land of Dementia by Kate Whouley

Boston Globe author and book mention

Coming Soon:

Fast Future: How the Millennial Generation Is Shaping Our World by David Burstein (Forthcoming February 2013)

“The millennials are a unique generation with a strong entrepreneurial streak that has seen them create some of the most impactful businesses of this century. As a millennial entrepreneur, I found Fast Future to be an inspiring and powerful account of the world we live and work in every day.” —Ben Lerer, Founder & CEO, Thrillist

The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theoharis (Forthcoming January 2013)

"Charisma is not a word often used to describe Rosa Parks yet we have to recognize her star. The Rosa Parks challenge to the political system was deep and lasting even while she never raised her voice. The first female Speaker of the House of Representatives once said, 'You can get a lot done if you don’t need to take credit for it.' She took a page from the book of Parks. Theoharis’ scholarship brings forth a woman whom many followed without ever realizing they were. She was courageous and strong. She also had a wonderful sense of humor. And an awesome sense of responsibility. This is a much needed book on the woman who is, arguably, the most important person in the last half of the twentieth century. Just as the Lincoln Memorial needs a statue of Frederick Douglass gently bending over with a pen in his hand for Lincoln to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, the statue of Martin Luther King, Jr. needs a statue of Rosa Parks just one or two steps ahead mouthing the words: 'Come on, Dr. King. We’ve got work to do.'" --Nikki Giovanni, Poet 

 

Upcoming Author Events:

Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice, and the Promise of America by Eboo Patel 

September 10th, 2012: Union Theological Seminary, New York, NY

September 17th, 2012: Augsburg College, Minneapolis, MN

October 9th, 2012: College of St. Scholastica, Duluth, MN

October 11th, 2012: : Chicago Ideas Week, Chicago, IL

Upcoming media appearances: MSNBC/Melissa Harris-Perry Show, Sunday, September 9^th

WNYC Radio/Brian Lehrer Show (NPR New York), Tuesday, September 11th

 

Tweet Land of Liberty: Irreverent Rhymes from the Political Circus by Elinor Lipman

TONIGHT! September 6th, 2012: Corner Bookstore (NYC)

September 23rd, 2012: Writers for Obama and Elizabeth Warren at the Hotel Northampton (Northhampton, MA)

September 24th, 2012: Broadside Books at 7 PM

September 27th, 2012: Women & Children First (Chicago, IL)

September 28th-29th, 2012: Ragdale Foundation, Lake Forest, IL

October 2nd, 2012: Port Washington Public Library (Port Washington, NY)

October 10th, 2012: Brookline Booksmith (Brookline, MA)

October 11th, 2012: Worcester Public Library

October 17th, 2012: Hewlett Woodmere Public Library (Long Island)

October 30th, 2012: Porter Square Books (Cambridge, MA)

Educational Courage: Resisting the Ambush of Public Education

A collection of empowering stories bringing together the voices of teachers, parents, and educational activists fighting market-driven educational policies 

Lost amid the debate over educational policies are the stories of the educators, parents, and students who are most affected by legislation such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. In Educational Courage, veteran educators and activists Nancy Schniedewind and Mara Sapon-Shevin bring together the voices of those who are resisting market-driven initiatives such as high-stakes testing, charter schools, mayoral control, and merit pay. The diverse narrators who write in this volume confront the educational agendas that undermine teachers' judgment and knowledge, ignore the different backgrounds of students and parents, and debase the learning process. Yet these educators, parents, and activists also offer stories of resistance and hope as they fight to uphold the ideals of democratic public education. 

Educational Courage includes four sections:

1. "Is This What We Call 'Education'?"
2. "I Won't Be a Part of This!"-Educators, Parents, Students, and Community Members Resist
3. Resisting by "Working in the Cracks"-Creating Spaces to Teach Authentically
4. "Not My Voice Alone"-Organizing to Reclaim Public Education

View the table of contents.

Read the introduction on Scribd.

Additional Resources

Readings not included in the book can be found on the Educational Courage website. 

Bill Nye on Scientific Literacy

Glenn Branch is Deputy Director of the National Center for Science Education. Branch is co-editor, with Eugenie Scott, of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools, and the author or coauthor of numerous articles on creationism and evolution in such publications as Scientific American, The American Biology Teacher, and Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics. This post originally appeared on the NCSE blog.

A two-and-a-half-minute video with Bill Nye discussing the creationism/evolution controversy went viral, garnering over 2.5 million views in its first week on-line. Posted on August 23, 2012, on the YouTube channel of Big Think, under the title "Creationism is not appropriate for children," the video reiterates the centrality of evolution to the life sciences and laments the prevalence of evolution denial in the United States. In it, Nye remarked, "And I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, in your world that's completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that's fine, but don't make your kids do it because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future."

Nye later told CBS This Morning (August 28, 2012), "My concern is you don't want people growing up not believing in radioactivity, not believing in geology and deep time. You don't want people in the United States growing up without the expectation that we can land spacecraft on Mars. You want people to believe in science, this process, this great idea that humans had to discover more about the universe and our place in it, our place in space. And I really want to emphasize, I'm not attacking anybody's religion, but science, if you go to a museum and you see fossil dinosaur bones, they came from somewhere, and we have by diligent investigation have determined that the earth is 4.54 billion years old."

NCSE's Steven Newton was interviewed on KPCC (August 29, 2012) for its story about Nye's video. Nye's remarks were fully in step with the views of the scientific community, Newton explained, adding, "Science teachers around the country are pretty much in sync with scientists around this country in understanding that evolution is the foundation of the biological sciences, and as such, it should be part of the curriculum and it should be taught," citing the courageous teachers in Dover, Pennsylvania, who in 2005 refused to read the evolution disclaimer mandated by the school board there. "Intelligent design or overtly biblical Creationism — all of them have the same root [in] a denial of evolution and how science works," Newton commented.

A Supporter of NCSE, Bill Nye "The Science Guy" was the host of the popular science education television programs Bill Nye the Science Guy— which won eighteen Emmys — and The Eyes of Nye; he is currently the executive director of the Planetary Society, the world's large space interest organization. The video was by no means Nye's first excursion into defending the teaching of evolution: in 2011, for example, he told Popular Mechanics, "it's fine if you as an adult want to run around pretending or claiming that you don't believe in evolution, but if we educate a generation of people who don't believe in science, that's a recipe for disaster. ... the main idea in all of biology is evolution. To not teach it to our young people is wrong."

David Bacon: A Year in Labor Stories

David Bacon is a writer and photojournalist based in Oakland and Berkeley, California. He is the author of Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, and his new bookbook about migration and work will be published by Beacon Press in 2013. 

Bacon writes about labor, immigration, and international politics for The Nation, In These Times, American Prospect, TruthOut, among other publications, and he regularly appears on KPFA and KQED radio. The East Bay Express described his work: "As the US labor movement has come under near constant attack in recent years, the Oakland journalist is one of the last of his breed in the country." 

For Labor Day, we've collected some of Bacon's stories about labor as a snapshot of a year in workers' rights. 

All photos copyright David Bacon, used by permission of the author.

 

UpFront on KPFA: (August 22) David Bacon interviews a house cleaner about California's Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights (which passed the California Assembly this past week). Interview starts at 18:15.

UpFront - Drones, Castlewood, Vote Suppression - August 22, 2012 at 7:00am

Click to listen (or download)

 

"In early April, an anti-immigrant bill like those that swept through legislatures in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina was stopped cold in Mississippi." How Mississippi's Black/Brown Strategy Beat the South's Anti-Immigrant Wave The Nation, April 20.

"Employers say they’re 'independent contractors.' Drivers call that a legal trick to deny them their rights–a nice-sounding label obscuring an ugly reality." Seattle Port Strike Challenges "Independent Contractor" Lie In These Times, February 21.

"Migrant rights activists, artisans and public officials spoke about the important role migration continues to play in Oaxaca's economic, social, political and family life. The state in southern Mexico is the source of one of the largest waves of migration from Mexico to the United States." "Oaxaca's New Government Calls for Migrant Rights," TruthOut, January 5.

"A bruising 16-year battle, the fight brought together African American, white, and Mexican immigrant workers, who were able to find common ground despite the company’s attempts to use racial division and immigration enforcement to try to defeat them." "Common Ground on the Kill Floor: Organizing Smithfield," Labor Notes, April 20.