Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber quotes this self-description by the sociologist Charles Tilly, who died this morning:
Among Tilly’s negative distinctions he prizes 1) never having held office in a professional association, 2) never having chaired a university department or served as a dean, 3) never having been an associate professor, 4) rejection every single time he has been screened as a prospective juror. He had also hoped never to publish a book with a subtitle, but subtitles somehow slipped into two of his co-authored books.
I believe this is what happens when the Stanford Band infiltrates the Development Office:
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Of the several things this poster leaves one to wonder at—like the fact that there’s a union for college students in France, or the kind of argument it deploys—perhaps the most amazing is that it worked: on Feb. 15 it was announced that 620 million euros were being set aside for new college housing.
Ian Fisher has a good article about Italy in today’s New York Times. He writes of a national sense of malaise, or malessere, “a collective funk—economic, political and social—summed up in a recent poll: Italians, despite their claim to have mastered the art of living, say they are the least happy people in Western Europe.” I’m generally skeptical of claims to national feeling, but what Fisher describes accords exactly with what I saw living in Bologna last year. Even though my time there spanned several hopeful moments—the eviction of Silvio Berlusconi from Palazzo Chigi, the arrest of Bernardo Provenzano, Italy’s World Cup victory—the two words my Italian friends and acquaintances couldn’t seem to avoid in describing their country were cazzo and merda.
Fisher lines up the usual suspects for this national funk, including political stagnation, organized crime, and the move to an nondepreciable euro. But the single factor I heard blamed most often was Italy’s gerontocracy. (Remember that I was talking mostly to twenty- and thirty-somethings.) The effects of that gerontocracy on the youth are captured neatly in a single statistic cited by Fisher: he writes that “70 percent of Italians between 20 and 30 still live at home, condemning the young to an extended and underproductive adolescence,” and goes on to quote Mario Adinolfi, a 36-year-old blogger and “aspiring lawmaker”:
The generational problem is the Italian problem…. In every country young people hope. Here in Italy there is no hope anymore. (more…)