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:

Click here for more.

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. [Read more]