Book Review: Rebecca Skloot's "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks"

This is the second of my posts written during the COVID-19 quarantine, during which I tried to catch up on reading I've been neglecting. For this week I'll be reviewing freelance science writer Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010), an engaging, thought-provoking, and unflinching nonfiction tale at the intersection of medical ethics, race, and biotechnology.

The year was 1951. Henrietta Lacks, a 31-year-old Virginian mother and tobacco farmer, found a hard "knot" on her womb that she could not explain (Skloot, 2010, p. 56). It wasn't until her subsequent appointment that she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. While Henrietta was anesthetized to receive a radium treatment, samples of her tumor were taken without her knowledge or consent by Johns Hopkins cell tissue researcher George Gey in his quest to culture a line of human cells that would be useful in advancing biomedical research. Up until that point, most cell lines did not last that long, because a sample's original cells only divide a finite amount before dying, about when they have "doubled fifty times," making research resource and time intensive (Skloot, 2010, p. 390). This limit on cell division is known as the "Hayflick Limit" (Skloot, 2010, p. 390).

Unfortunately, Lacks would succumb to the unusually aggressive cancer not long after her diagnosis and gruesome radium treatments; but her cells, known as "HeLa" for the first two letters of her first and last names, would (and still) live on in labs around the world. This is due to the fact that her cells, infected by a particularly virulent strain of Human Papillomavirus (HPV), were cancerous in nature and not constrained by the Hayflick Limit like normal cells. It would be those properties of hardiness and rapid reproduction that allowed researchers to make numerous advances beneficial to humankind in the development of treatments and vaccines for a wide variety of ailments and diseases without risking human test subjects. 

Not coincidentally, biomedical and pharmaceutical companies would largely reap the benefits of HeLa's rise. Initially unaware of the commercialization of the HeLa cells, the Lacks family would find out twenty years after Henrietta's death of HeLa's fame and accompanying profitability, with understandable feelings of betrayal and exploitation. Skloot contextualizes this episode in a long history of gruesome experiments conducted on African-Americans, such as the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study, in order to get readers to understand the complex ethical issues surrounding patient consent, tissue ownership rights, and scientific advancement. The latter is especially important considering our tissues are taken all the time. For example, when we attend doctor appointments or send in our DNA to companies like Ancestry and 23andMe.

Of course, there are now laws that seek to promote patient consent, privacy, and rights such as those prohibiting genetic discrimination or the unauthorized release of patient medical records. However, the reach of these laws is limited. For example, modern laws surrounding consent largely apply to federally funded research. Should these laws expand their reach to the situations not covered by federal research law? Would this chill scientific advancement? These are but a few of the questions raised. Skloot's book provides no definite answers, but leaves it up to the reader to make an informed judgment on these important ethical questions.

Overall, Skloot's employment of the running parallels of the Lacks family story and HeLa's scientific journey makes The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks an informative and engaging must-read for everyone, scientist or not.

Works Cited:

Skloot, Rebecca. (2010). The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Broadway Books.

"The Danger of a Single Story"

Like many of you during this pandemic, I too am largely confined to my dwelling. As an introvert used to staying in, this isn't much of a problem! However, I have had to find more creative ways to structure my time now that I am on leave from my library position and have additional time on my hands. One of those ways I am keeping myself busy is by taking advantage of remote staff development opportunities like webinars.

Today, I viewed the Wisconsin Library Association's presentation from this past October titled "Putting Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion into Action" and learned about how public libraries are making themselves more welcoming to diverse patron communities. During this webinar, a 2009 TED Talk by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, well known for works like We Should All Be Feminists (2014), was referenced among a list of resources libraries are using for diversity training. Curious, I decided to check it out after I finished with the webinar. And I'm glad I did!

Titled, "The Danger of a Single Story,"  Adichie's talk highlights the dangers of stereotypes that crystallize in people's minds after being exposed to media that presents a singular narrative about a culture, people, and/or place. For example, the overrepresentation of stories from or about Africa that speak to disease, poverty, and war that tend to overshadow other stories from the same continent that speak to its cultural, economic, ethnic, lingual, political, and social diversity and vibrancy. In other words, people and places are not monolithic; there are nuances to their histories and stories that are hidden or minimized when singular narratives repeated over and over overpower these shades of gray.

Coming from an avid consumer of literature and history alike, these shades of gray are more interesting and enlightening in the ways they challenge those powerful narratives out there and reveal something about those that perpetuate these stereotypical messages. Adichie presents all of this in an accessible way relevant for anyone, regardless if you're a bibliophile or not.

Check it out! See the link below in the references section or above.

Stay safe and stay well!

Works Cited:

Adichie, C. N. (2009). The Danger of a Single Story [Video file]. Retrieved from  https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare.

Questions of Hegemony, Meritocracy, and Technological Redlining

[Happy New Year everyone! This essay is a piece I wrote for one of my library school courses about algorithmic bias. I thought I'd share it with you. While not written optimistically, I have come to realize since that as an aspiring librarian, I have a responsibility to try and help correct some of the flaws inherent in our knowledge organization systems.]


There is a growing body of multidisciplinary research within critical information and technology studies which suggests that technology and technological progress are not isolated from the socio-historical contexts they are situated in (Allen, 2019; Noble, 2018; Wajcman, 2010). The algorithms of “big data” that have come to govern most of our lives, from those underlying search engines to housing selection are no exception (Allen, 2019, p. 219; Noble, 2018, p. 27). Multiple scholars have found that algorithms are complicit in “technological redlining,” a carry-over of gendered and racialized discrimination onto the “cybertopia” of the Internet meant to be a liberating project (Allen, 2019; Noble, 2018, p. 1, 47; Wajcman, 2010).

In this post, I will further explore the concept of technological redlining as it relates to hegemonic and meritocratic ideas in my examination of the introduction and first chapter of information studies scholar Safiya Noble’s book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (2018) and legal scholar James Allen’s journal piece “The Color of Algorithms: An Analysis and Proposed Research Agenda for Deterring Algorithmic Redlining” (2019). Both scholars have contributed greatly to an understanding of the harms resulting from unregulated proliferation of algorithms and have called for greater awareness among the public and policymakers who consume and produce information largely mediated by these algorithms.

Beginning with Algorithms of Oppression, Noble makes it clear that algorithms are a technical product reflecting the privilege and biases of its designers, a dominant group in tech that believes in the meritocratic idea that popular technologies acquired their status through an impartial, yet democratic, process of technological development involving the best ideas and practices (Noble, 2018). To do this, she conducts a case study inquiry on commercial search engine algorithms (focusing on those employed by Google), by searching various terms related to group and individual identity, and then contextualizing her interrogation of the value judgments and ideas represented in the results within the wider intersectional critical literature. The results were shocking, often bringing up derogatory, pornographic, racist, and sexist content about women and people of color (Noble, 2018).

For example, she highlights the differences in the search suggestions that are brought up by Google’s auto-suggestion algorithm in searches beginning with the phrases “why are black women” and “why are white women.” For the former, suggestions to complete that sentence are “angry,” “loud,” “mean,” “attractive,” “annoying,” and “insecure.” As for the latter, suggested terms were “pretty,” “beautiful,” “mean,” “easy,” “insecure,” and “fake” (Noble, 2018, p. 21). Note the primary positioning of both white and black women as sexual objects. Conversely, a search for “professor style,” a professional identity term, brought up mostly pictures of white men in very similar suit-and-tie and khaki outfits (Noble, 2018, p. 23).

Noble argues that these racist and sexist interpretations manifested in most image results retrieved from the above terms associating women with reproduction, sex, and the domestic sphere, and men with the public and professional sphere, are nothing new. For Noble, this is further evidence of a larger pattern of “technological redlining” and “algorithmic oppression” in that harmful stereotypes are merely being reproduced and transmitted within newer modes of communication such as the Internet (Noble, 2018, p. 1, 4). Not coincidentally, such historically marginalized groups like women and people of color often do not have the economic, political, and social clout to stave off the damage that results from being associated at an individual or group level with these popularized portrayals. “Code is a language full of meaning” that imbues technology with the subjective understandings of its creators, rendering normalized narratives about its impartial nature inaccurate (Noble, 2018, p. 26).

While Noble’s methods of exposing the otherwise invisible power relationships evident in Google’s search algorithms using a black feminist lens are largely qualitative in nature, her insights are nevertheless erudite and evocative in highlighting the power a dominant minority with specialized skill sets holds over a dependent and less technologically literate majority.

Complementing Noble’s arguments about search engines being symptomatic of tech’s larger complicity in preserving and promoting the very oppressive system of social relations they purportedly avoid reifying with their “neutral” algorithms is James Allen’s treatment of housing algorithms. While Noble conducts her own case study to demonstrate the arguments made by techno-feminist critiques against the harms stemming from the normalization of gendered and racialized stereotypes, Allen conducts an extensive literature review, before concluding with a substantive section on possible solutions to the problems treated in his analysis. Moreover, Allen examines Noble’s “algorithmic oppression” more specifically as “algorithmic redlining,” defined as “sets of instructions” that “carry out procedures that prohibit or limit people of color from procuring housing or housing finance, particularly in non-minority neighborhoods” and threaten the “autogenerating” of discrimination (Allen, 2019, p. 222-223, 230; Noble, 2018, p. 1).

Echoing Noble’s assertions that people must critically examine how their data is used in machine-learning algorithms, Allen finds that most of these algorithms, meant to provide an efficient means of assuring for the greatest amount of people possible equitable lending and affordable housing, draw upon a wealth of discriminatory historical data generated during and reflecting past periods of segregation combined with present data-mining pertaining to additional factors such as ethnicity and residential location. For example, in the determination of creditworthiness, which is a critical first step in securing lending, many eligible for these funds are either denied or given disadvantageous interest rates because of a high concentration of risk factors in their data profile, such as having lived in a majority-minority neighborhood.

Both Allen and Noble advocate for algorithmic literacy among the public and policymakers and more transparency in algorithmic design. Allen pushes more specifically for the updating of past reforms, such as the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), and their accompanying equivalents in Internet and intellectual property rights law (Allen, 2019). Essentially, there must be a higher bar for the disclosing and auditing of both the data used by algorithms and their conclusions, along with strictly enforced human oversight of algorithms throughout the process of decision-making (Allen, 2019).

Overall, both scholars provide valuable insights into how power is negotiated between those hegemons who know how to manipulate code in various contexts and those who do not, but do not go much beyond establishing their research agendas to elucidate the exact technical mechanisms needed to minimize algorithmic bias nor specifically address how women and people of color in tech negotiate a culture of meritocracy that undervalues their work and achieve positions that allow them influence in the development process. No doubt, this is due to the self-reinforcing nature of algorithms, in that they draw upon the fallibility of their creators and the data gathered about people by governments and private entities to make decisions (as well as its own past decisions) paired with the shield granted the code of the algorithm by proprietary or intellectual property rights law (Allen, 2019; Noble, 2018). Therefore, it is difficult to advocate for specific mechanisms to fix a code if one cannot access it. All in all, it is apparent that reforms are needed at multiple levels of society, but the growing prevalence of algorithms and their profitability combined with the need of addressing the larger structural systems in place that fostered their creation make the prospect of meaningful reform highly unlikely. 

Works Cited:

Allen, J. A. (2019). The color of algorithms: An analysis and proposed research
agenda for deterring algorithmic redlining. Fordham Urban Law Journal, 46(2), 219-270. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.library.wisc.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,uid&db=lft&AN=136193121&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com.

Wajcman, J. (2010). Feminist theories of technology. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 34(1), 143–152. Retrieved from https://academic.oup.com/cje/article-abstract/34/1/143/1689542?redirectedFrom=fulltext.

Book Review: Carl Hulse's "Confirmation Bias"

"Mitch McConnell made a snap decision one night in 2016," writes veteran New York Times Washington correspondent Carl Hulse in his latest book, Confirmation Bias: Inside Washington's War Over the Supreme Court, From Scalia's Death to Justice Kavanaugh. "The consequences will reverberate for decades" (Hulse, 2019, p. 290). The night in question was February 13, 2016. Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead at a resort ranch in Texas, news that soon began to make the rounds in Washington and the nation at large. A rarefied hero in conservative legal and political circles, possessed of an originalist bent and considerable intellect, Scalia's death was mourned bipartisanly before grief was subsumed by the political implications.

It was the last year of the Obama presidency, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) was determined to have a conservative installed in that now vacant seat. Chances are, Obama wouldn't do it. So McConnell hedged his bets on a Republican winning the 2016 election, and made the unprecedented decision to stonewall President Obama's nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to fill Scalia's seat.

How did we get to that point, the point where one party was willing to set aside bipartisan advice-and-consent in the ever important process of appointing and confirming a qualified individual to life service on the highest court in the land?

The story goes back three decades to the 1980s, with the contentious federal court confirmation hearings of the Reagan years after notable conservative successes at filling influential court seats. Then there was the hearing for Supreme Court Justice nominee Judge Robert Bork in 1987, in which Senator Edward Kennedy's opening day speech painted a dystopian future for women and minorities if Bork's conservative legal philosophy was allowed to reign supreme.

A concerted Democratic effort to block Bork on a more partisan basis had inadvertently been started, leading to the defeat of Bork's nomination and the entry into the political dictionary of a new verb, "borked," to describe a form of political obstruction via character assassination and other underhanded tactics more common to election fights rather than the process of appointing impartial legal minds to the federal judiciary (Hulse, 2019, p. 58).

It turns out, the Bork fight was a warm-up for both camps, who recognized the increasing urgency of the judicial fights in leaving long-lasting ideological legacies on the courts. Republicans would build up considerable organizational muscle for the pushing of conservative legal minds into the courts via prominent think-tanks and advocacy groups like the Federalist Society (est. 1982) and the Judicial Crisis Network (est. 2005). However, liberals of a more institutionalist bent would be late to the game, founding in 2018 the Demand Justice organization to counter the Judicial Crisis Network by pushing for more progressive judicial minds.

Meanwhile, partisan court appointment principles would come to be ingrained in the system when in November 2013, frustrated Democrats altered procedural rules to allow for the bypassing of the filibuster (a 60-vote threshold needed to be overcome before an appointee was voted upon) in the case of judicial appointments lower than the Supreme Court level to overcome stalwart Republican opposition to Obama federal court nominees. This cap would be removed for Supreme Court picks in May 2017 to confirm Trump's first Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, and later, his second, Brett Kavanaugh, on simple majority, largely party-line votes. Armed with both the 2013 and 2017 rule changes, and the considerable expertise and resources of the Judicial Crisis Network and the Federalist Society, Republicans approved slews of conservative candidates at the federal level with ease, a rare success of the Trump administration where other policy fights have not been as successful.

In his concluding remarks, Hulse warns that the rule changes of 2013 and 2017 have set in motion a toxic cycle of partisan legislative agendas getting altered or thrown out when the other party takes power, severely hampering the ability of the federal government to sustain meaningful policy initiatives and other governing projects with the aim of protecting American citizens (and the government is already struggling to do that on limited budgets and personnel resources; see my post reviewing The Fifth Risk for a lengthier discussion of federal organizations under the current administration). Moreover, the courts mediating those fights are increasingly seen as untrustworthy, merely a partisan extension of the other two branches, with the large numbers of Trump appointees tilting the balance to the right for decades.

How will this shift in the ideological balance ultimately impact rulings on key Trump policies increasingly challenged by liberal legal advocacy groups, such as those regarding immigration or regulatory rollback?

Stay tuned!


Works Cited:

Hulse, Carl. (2019). Confirmation Bias: Inside Washington's War Over the Supreme Court, From Scalia's Death to Justice Kavanaugh. New York: HarperCollins.

Book Review: Michael Lewis's "The Fifth Risk"

How important is a presidential transition? Turns out, it's pretty important. Not only does a successful one demonstrate the importance of the peaceful hand-over of power between political factions, but also enables a new administration to continue mostly uninterrupted the ongoing work of the federal government to protect its citizens from a myriad of threats, whether climate change, food-borne illness, or destitution. That is why the nominees of both major political parties are required to make plans on how to fill the necessary governmental posts before the outcome of a presidential election is made known, so that no matter who wins, the important services continue to be provided. So what happened with the latest presidential transition? Moneyball author Michael Lewis takes an inside look at the impact of the Trump administration's transition on the federal government in his latest book, The Fifth Risk (2018).

To many Americans, the federal government is an opaque, unwieldy many-armed bureaucratic beast whose successes go largely un-lauded, with the majority of the work done in places where "the cameras never roll," while its failures are widely publicized and politicized (Lewis, 2018, p. 95). Composed of "two million federal employees" overseen by "four thousand political appointees," it admittedly is a sometimes dysfunctional enterprise, with cyclical turnover happening at the end of a president's term not necessarily incentivizing efficiency (Lewis, 2018, p. 37).

Yes, it has faults, but Lewis argues that politics is only a tiny part of the big picture of its continued problems, pointing to the process as being the bigger issue, in who and how a new administration chooses to learn (or not) about the missions of each agency in the critical approximately 75 day period between election and inauguration and beyond. Is the administration choosing to tackle the problem of the "fifth risk," by engaging in long-term planning in response to long-term issues rather than trying to solve them with short-term band-aids (Lewis, 2018, p. 75)?

So, it should be no surprise that the current administration's "drain the swamp" transition did not go at all smoothly, with no concrete plans drawn up and then executed by then President-elect Trump's administration to fill the necessary vacancies or even learn about the work each agency has done. Exhaustive briefings by Obama appointees went unattended for the most part, with few Trump appointees showing up; if they did, they were largely unqualified and uninterested in core agency missions.

To help administrations speed up the process, federal laws have been amended to require only 1,200 positions be confirmed by the Senate. Nevertheless, not even after two and a half years under the current administration have all positions been filled. Today, of 731 top executive positions needing Senate confirmation of nominees, including "cabinet secretaries, deputy and assistant secretaries, chief financial officers, general counsel, heads of agencies, ambassadors and other critical leadership positions," 486 have been filled and 99 have nominees, while 141 posts remain empty with no nominee (Washington Post & Partnership for Public Service, 2019). It almost seems like running the government smoothly isn't a priority and willful ignorance is the rule, not the exception.

What happens when the latter is the case?

By looking at the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, and Energy through the stories of earnest public servants, Lewis makes clear that most of the administration's picks slated to fill critical positions in these agencies follows a pattern of short-term self interest that is hampering efforts to identify and make plans in the face of continuing or emerging threats. Publicly accessible data has been going missing on government websites, from information about animal abuse, climate change, and violent crime. Many Trump picks seem more interested in weakening their respective institution in favor of private interests, not knowing or caring for the critical work being done to minimize risk for American citizens on many fronts that the private sector just isn't incentivized to take-up (think the development of experimental vaccines to preventing terrorists from stealing nuclear materials).

For instance, within the Department of Commerce, Trump's appointee to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), whose work includes addressing climate change and national weather forecasting, is Barry Myers, former CEO of private weather company AccuWeather. Myers, whose business relies on government-collected weather data, has been calling for the removal of publicly accessible weather data in favor of charging people for access to that same data. However, Myers has not been officially confirmed.

What then is the way forward? Yes, there are many positions that could be cut in the name of efficiency, a smart approach to make the government more nimble in the face of current threats, many long-term problems of immense scale, like climate change. But to do that, first you need to learn an agency and its functions, promote its programmatic and organizational strengths and minimize its weaknesses, something not high on the Trump administration's list of priorities.

"It's what you fail to imagine that kills you," Lewis warns in the conclusion of The Fifth Risk (Lewis, 2018, p. 219). That's what is troubling about those 141 empty posts, the deliberate ignorance of the existence of tools (personal or technological) to address and solve problems. A problem doesn't just go away if you don't acknowledge its existence. Sooner or later, this attitude tends to come back and bite everyone.


Works Cited:

Lewis, Michael. (2018). The Fifth Risk. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Washington Post, & Partnership for Public Service. (2019). Trump Nominations Tracker: Tracking How Many Key Positions Trump Has Filled So Far. Retrieved August 16, 2019, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-administration-appointee-tracker/database/?noredirect=on.

Book Review: Katharina Pistor's "The Code of Capital"

The rule of law. That should be a familiar phrase for anyone who lives in a democratic society, where law is supposed to be a leveling influence, backed up by the power of the state, protecting citizens from abuses of power from both the public and private sectors alike. It is an idea firmly embedded in our society, from governmental institutions (think Law and Order) to the boardrooms of corporations that drive the global economy. In the latter private sector, rule of law is sacrosanct, giving legitimacy to the transactions they conduct on a daily basis in the form of all-important capital. What exactly is capital, and what role does the law have in a capitalist economy? Columbia Professor of Comparative Law Katharina Pistor's latest work, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality (2019), answers these questions and more in her exploration of the legal mechanisms used to help generate wealth for private sector entities and clients.

It just so turns out that lawyers are very crafty at finding loopholes within the legal regimes that private entities run on in the form of bankruptcy, collateral, contract, corporate, and trust laws and property rights. Their job is to maximize monetary returns for their clients. How do they do this? By incrementally pushing and stretching the limits of said law, just short of the red-line drawn by past case law, where it can be claimed, if challenged in court or in private tribunals, that it is still technically legal, whether based on past court precedent or the absence of an expressed prohibition of a certain practice.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, what is capital, and where does it come from? Capital is the combination of "an asset" and its protecting "legal code," with assets taking the form of anything from an object (such as land or a house) to a skill or idea (for example, the idea of the internal combustion engine or the discovery of a cancer-causing gene) with the potential to be commodified and monetized (Pistor, 2019, p. 2). To get from land to money, or from a cancer gene to a windfall, the key is the legal mechanism used, drawn from the above listed areas of law, that can generate wealth and weather the downturns by conferring on assets the coveted traits of "priority, which ranks competing claims to the same assets; durability, which extends priority claims in time; universality, which extends them in space; and convertibility, which operates as an insurance device that allows holders to convert their private credit claims into state money on demand" (Pistor, 2019, p. 3).

In other words, the key to generating sizable wealth is the ability to protect one's accumulated assets from a hoard of creditors, or conversely, to recover one's assets in the case of another party not being able to hold up their end of the bargain (think defaulting on a loan, for example). And also, to being able to translate said asset's market value into one's currency of choice.

Better yet, the legal shield provided by lawyers, whom Pistor calls the "master of the code," are often backed up by state powers internationally, because recognizing the law an asset was protected by in one country in another provides the impression of legal certainty for asset-holders. Because of this relative legal stability, these investors are more likely to invest in another state's economy and potentially expand their tax revenues, granting upon its population greater prosperity (Pistor, 2019, p. 20). Sound familiar?

However, when states recognize an asset's home legal coding (primarily taking the form of law found in England and the United States), or even go further in adding other sweetening incentives for businesses, growing economic inequality is often the result. Clients and their lawyers are in the game of maximum returns, and as a result, states trying to regulate the excesses of such practices are often playing a game of whack-a-mole, as lawyers rediscover centuries-old feudal economic law or a more innovative legal method to evade taxes and continue to grow their personal fortune.

Moreover, because capital exists largely in law (i.e. is a construct), legal mechanisms often make assets artificially more valuable than they really are. This can be devastating when these assets are found to have been over-valued, with a resulting market adjustment to an asset's actual value often conferring increased clean-up costs on the general public over the asset-holders themselves, who often can cash-in in advance when they see the economic-writing-on-the-wall and escape with minimal losses.

What are we to do when this kind of legal coding has become deeply intertwined within the international financial and political systems? As in my previous posts, looking at books whose authors have increasingly defended the liberal system of incremental reform over calls for the sudden overthrow of the system, even as it becomes ever more unpopular, Pistor advises a similar approach. Despite her largely frustrated undertone to her even-handed look at the current economic landscape, she advocates for a slow-burn course of action that would require a leveling of the playing field for everyone below the rich and powerful, including boosting access to the lawyers and legal mechanisms the privileged use, as well as increasing oversight of current practices to ensure that they are contributing more to greater societal prosperity than to personal fortunes.

Absent concerted reforms now and into the future, Pistor warns of revolution or "the further erosion of law's legitimacy" to a public growing increasingly frustrated and desperate, seeking scapegoats in foreigners or immigrants when the fault really lies with the excesses of today's economic kingpins (Pistor, 2019, p. 234). And that is a dangerous future for all of us.


Works Cited:

Pistor, Katharina. (2019). The Code of Capital: How The Law Creates Wealth and Inequality. New York: Princeton University Press.

Book Review: Jill Lepore's "This America"

Back in the spring of this year, I had the pleasure of reading Harvard historian Jill Lepore's highly ambitious, yet riveting single-volume of American history, These Truths: A History of the United States (2018). In These Truths, Lepore takes a critical look at the American project and asks if it has lived up to its "truths," or the tenets of "equality, sovereignty, and consent" of a country's citizens before the law, and their accession to a governmental authority to protect those rights, respectively (Lepore, 2018, p. 787). Of course, the government didn't initially look out for all of its citizens, namely Native Americans, African-Americans, women, immigrants, and those in the LGBTQ community. Essentially, American history has been the story of America's gradual rectifying of past injustice (mind you, not exactly a linear process), with much work remaining today to ensure the continuance of such rights and protections for as many as possible.

Coinciding with this ongoing reckoning, starting in the 1960s, intellectuals and scholars soured by the many examples of American hypocrisy in protecting the rights of certain classes of citizens over others, and in regards to the scourge of twisted nationalism that produced Nazism and countless other atrocities, increasingly trended towards discarding the ideas of nationalism and the nation-state altogether. In her follow-up to These Truths, This America: The Case for the Nation (2019), Lepore warns against this wholesale ignoring of nationalism, arguing that within this scholarly vacuum, reactionary forces can (and will) fill that void with a dangerous redefinition of nationalism that threatens the very liberal-democratic foundations of the country.

How did we get to this point?

Part civics primer as well as a call to action, This America first takes us back to the 18th and 19th centuries, when the idea of a nation-state as we understand it in modern times, a collective of individuals bound together by common laws into a "political community," became cemented through its inseparability with nationalism, one's sense of pride in their country and people (Lepore, 2019, p. 26). Laws and a government aren't enough to bind together diverse groups of people. You need a national origin story, you need national histories. In the case of the USA, that came to be a story about a nation that fought a bloody revolution to secure for itself the universal values of equality, liberty, and freedom from a tyrannical regime, and then went on to continue that fight on behalf of the rest of humanity through its foreign policy of spreading the blessings of democracy (with, to put it mildly, mixed results).

However, there is a duality that remains within American nationalism, a dark side, one that is "less a love for your own country than a hatred of other countries and their people and a hatred of people within your own country who don't belong to an ethnic, racial, or religious majority" (Lepore, 2019, p. 23). To best fight these ever-present demons, most recently manifested in Trumpism's animosity towards immigrants and globalists, Lepore argues that since nation-states remain a central organizing principle of geopolitics today, the state's liberal democratic institutions remain the best tool for protecting its citizens' rights, and in concert with the nation's intellectuals, can be a powerful advocate of a more positive vision of Americanism.

What is this more positive vision of American nationalism? One that recommits to the liberal project of the expansion of "equality and liberty, tolerance and inquiry, justice and fairness," within the national consciousness and governmental institutions alike, a nationalism that must reckon with its past while boldly striding forward into a future requiring innovative solutions to the big issues of our day, such as environmental degradation, climate change, mass migration, and income inequality (Lepore, 2019, p. 137). As long as the metaphorical better angel is able to hold greater sway within American social life and politics can the evils of nationalism be kept at bay, and the body politic retain its relative stability.

In her conclusion, Lepore calls for no less than a vigorous re-commitment to the embattled liberal American project. While no doubt a massive undertaking on both the part of citizens and the government in an era where liberalism's center-of-the-road approach has been maligned from all sides as enabling the status quo, Lepore says that it will be worth it. That through the fruits of our labors, our nation can achieve more of what W.E.B. DuBois called "great and beautiful things" and continue to bend the proverbial arc of history closer to justice for all, away from the "hideous mistakes" and the "frightful wrongs" of the past (Lepore, 2019, p. 137).


Works Cited:

Lepore, Jill. (2018). These Truths: A History of the United States. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Lepore, Jill. (2019). This America: The Case for the Nation. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation.