Leah Libresco's Blog, page 2

Colleges Must Offer Formation, Not Amenities

Colleges donors are starting public fights with college administrators. At Deseret, I argue that’s a good thing. Colleges should be contested spaces—they need to offer values-informed formation, not a generic education.

It will be tempting for schools to keep spending on extraneous amenities to capture students, especially if they see them primarily as customers, not learners. Adding a lazy river or a climbing wall adds to the college experience without clarifying or serving the college’s mission. When the enrollment cliff comes, schools that compete on the basis of amenities will be stuck in a Red Queen race — where schools keep spending and spending, just to stay in the same place. That may lead schools feeling more beholden to donors, as they compete on what they can buy for their students. But the schools that make it through the crunch will be those with a stronger claim about what they offer.  

The schools that survive the enrollment collapse won’t be the ones with the most tricked-out theme parks, nor will they be academically excellent in a generic way. The surviving schools will have made a strong choice about their school’s identity and aims and will be prepared to cultivate or turn away donors accordingly. 

Read the rest at Deseret

Books I Hope to Read in 2024

Last year, I read all the books I put on my to-read list! (I last accomplished this feat in 2020, when I had a baby… and a pandemic).

Overall, my reading has suffered the predictable consequences of having two children (and not counting all the bedtime picture books). I read 88 books and a little over 26k words, about on par with last year… a long way from 172 books the year before my first daughter was born. Only one pre-1900 book: George Eliot’s Silas Marner.

I like this making this list because it helps me give myself permission to prioritize these books over other articles, magazines, and new releases. And, as always, my list is limited to books I already own at the beginning of the year.

Perhaps giddy with last year’s victory (and ignoring two secret projects in project), I’m adding two ambitious books to this year’s list: a series of essays by Daniel Tammet in French (it’s not available in English) and THE POWER BROKER. You tell me which is more foolhardy.

Here they are, alphabetically by author, except for Caro, balanced on top of the stack.

The Power Broker by Robert Caro The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World  by Ran Abramitzky The Concept of Woman, Volume 3: The Search for Communion of Persons, 1500–2015 by Sr. Prudence Allen The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul Origen’s Revenge: The Greek and Hebrew Roots of Christian Thinking on Male and Female by Brian Patrick Mitchell Lifesigns: Intimacy, Fecundity, and Ecstasy in Christian Perspective by Henri J. M. Nouwen The Uncontrollability of the World by Hartmut Rosa Fragments de Paradis by Daniel Tammet Encounters with Euclid: How an Ancient Greek Geometry Text Shaped the World by Benjamin Wardhaugh

My Favorite Books of 2023

It’s been a turbulent but mostly good year, with some pileups of new projects, two sisters old enough to play together, and a new job on the horizon for the new year. No novels on my best of the year list, which makes me a little sad, but a lot that I enjoyed on the non-fiction side!

These are my favorite books I read for the first time in 2023, listed in chronological order (with one exception).

The exception is my favorite book tout court from 2023

You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America by Paul Kix

I’ve been the person to clarify that Rosa Parks didn’t make a spontaneous choice to sit in the “white only” section of the bus and that she didn’t refuse to move because she was tired. She was an activist, deliberately engaging in planned civil disobedience.

In Kix’s day-by-day chronicle, he explore the many behind the scenes choices and setbacks when King went to Birmingham and faced down Bull Connor. I appreciate books like this that show the density of history, especially history that gets quickly summarized as though the triumph of non-violent resistance was inevitable.

It’s particularly notable how much King’s pattern of non-violent resistance depended on being met with violence. His attempts to organize fizzled in some cities where the mayors and police never sent out the dogs or the water cannons—one even reverently removed his hat before arresting King, to defuse his protests with a show of respect. A great deal of the Birmingham strategy depended on finding people who were willing to be beaten bloody and the moral question of whether to allow children to put their bodies on the line for freedom.

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong

I put off reading this for a while because so many people had recommended it so strongly, and sometimes this puts me off—it feels like I’ll let friends down if I don’t like it. But it was splendid. The book is about senses animals possess that we don’t share, and one of my favorite running themes was the methodological puzzle of how to make sure you’re varying something that you can’t yourself perceive directly.

It’s one thing to tape and play back audible bird calls, but in a particularly vivid and low-tech example, scientists observing elephants would wait for them to pee, then move in with shovels, a wheelbarrow, a truck to move the peed-on dirt somewhere else where a new elephant would encounter it and they could see how it responded to whatever message it might convey.

Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equit y by Claudia Goldin

I read this earlier in the year, before Goldin won her Nobel in economics, which left me thrilled by the news. Her book for laypeople on the economics that shape women’s involvement in the spheres of work and home was fascinating, and I drew on it for an essay at Deseret.

Greedy jobs lose their teeth when the work becomes genericized. If different workers can be treated as interchangeable by clients and employers, the pay goes down, but the pressure for the job to be totalizing also eases off. […] I closed the book with a bigger, unresolved question about balancing life at home and on the job. It seems like the easiest way to safeguard room to be a person at home is to accept being a widget at work. 

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell

This was probably the weirdest book I read this year. It’s listed as a biography, but it felt like it went beyond the genre. Rundell engages deeply with history, theology, and philosophy while exploring the life of poet, minister, and sometimes scandal-causer John Donne. I knew several of his poems without knowing anything about the man, and this was an electric read.

Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better by Jennifer Pahlka / Fragmented: A Doctor’s Quest to Piece Together American Health Care by Ilana Yurkiewicz

I’m grouping these two, because both are by women who look at painfully broken systems and respond to them with compassion. Both Pahlka and Yurkiwicz are attentive to the way government and medicine can fail the most vulnerable, and the moral injury that inflicts on the people working for or administering the tottering system.

I reviewed Recoding America for Deseret and Fragmented for National Review.

How to Read a Tree: Clues and Patterns from Bark to Leaves by Tristan Gooley

I read this because of Mrs. Psmith’s review, and it’s enriched my biking and walking around my neighborhood. (It also answered “Why is the tree out front sending up all those spindly mini-tree-shoots?”) It meant when I walk, I have questions in mind and a reason to look once, twice, three times at a tree, to see what story it tells about the history of this space.

(Don’t read this mom!)

This is the book from the list that I’m wrapping to give someone else at Christmas.

And if you’re interested, this was my best-of list for 2022.

Making Repair Beautiful

When Plough announced an issue themed around repair, I knew I wanted to interview Grace Russo about her practice of visible mending.

When Russo began repairing her clothes, it changed what kinds of new clothes she wanted to buy. When she looked at something on the rack or at a thrift store, she didn’t just consider how the outfit looked then, but how it would change as it aged and weakened. What kind of mending would it need and what kind of repairs could it support?

She looked for thicker cotton fabrics that could stand up to strong stitches. She avoided clothes made of stretchier synthetic fabrics – she didn’t like the idea of wearing petroleum products, but more than that, they didn’t take repairs gracefully. She even wound up checking online reviews of clothes to see what kind of seam was hidden inside a dress before ordering it. A straight stitch in a stretchy maternity outfit was much more likely to rip than a zigzag.

As she looked at each seam, imagining how she might one day pass it back through a machine, she had a stronger sense of the hands that had already guided it, inch by inch, into its present form. Until she took up sewing herself, Russo imagined that a lot of clothes manufacturing was automated in the ways spinning thread had been. But there are almost no sewing machines that work alone. The needle is pumped up and down by a motor, but human hands guide the cloth around its turns. There is nothing woven that we put on our bodies that hasn’t passed through someone’s hands, usually half a world away.

Read the rest at Plough

The Gospel Comes with a Children’s Potty

I made my Christianity Today debut to argue that churches should welcome children by design… and that means building child sized toilets into their bathrooms.

I can see how much easier it is for her to use the child-sized, real-plumbing toilets at her school, but we don’t have the same option at church or at home. It’s made me take a speculative look at the bathroom in our house, wondering what it would cost to install one and how many children I’d need to have for it to be “worth it.” I’ve seen grab bars for stability in other families’ bathrooms, even when no one in their home is currently injured or elderly, and I think a small toilet would be a similar sign of welcome. A hospitable home is one that can accommodate a variety of guests, with a range of bodily abilities and needs.

After her preschool, church is the most child-dense place my three-year-old goes. And a church will keep hosting children for as long as it’s open, while I expect I’d have to remove a child-sized toilet from my home if we decided to sell. We’re happy to have a lively, family-filled parish that’s very welcoming of children’s joy (and their noise). So if there’s no accommodation here, why not?

Read the rest at Christianity Today

Putting a Price on “Unpaid Work”

At Deseret, I responded to Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek’s After Work: The Fight for Free Time, and its thought-provoking ideas about how to value “unpaid work.”

Labor-saving innovations don’t make as much sense when the work process is valuable, not just the output. When work is evaluated for the formation it gives us, it’s easier to differentiate drudgery from laborious but humane work. As Jon Askonas notes in “Why Conservatism Failed,” his essay on technology and tradition for Compact magazine, technology is the most corrosive when it breaks the chain of apprenticeship to mastery. It’s easy (and usually cheap) to outsource entry-level work to computers or off-shore workers, but, as Askonas observes, “these technologies knock out the bottom rungs of skilled practice that allow for the development of mastery in the first place.”

Parenting is one of these kinds of work. Caring for a child obviously means shepherding a child along his or her own progression toward mastery — of the body, of emotions, of conscience. But the parent often goes on a parallel journey.

Read the rest at Deseret

Piecing Together Our Broken Medical System

I loved reading Ilana Yurkiewicz’s Fragmented: A Doctor’s Quest to Piece Together American Health Care, and I’m glad to have gotten to write about it for National Review.

The range of treatments that doctors can offer has gotten more and more advanced. Robotic suturing tools allow surgeons to conduct delicate surgery through minimally invasive laparoscopic procedures. CAR T-cell immunotherapy can be precisely tuned for individual cancers, teaching patients’ immune systems to kill their tumors. But when it comes to medical record-keeping and continuity of care, many doctors like Yurkiewicz find they’re operating in an era of oral history or as archaeologists.

In her practice, Yurkiewicz reconstructs a patient’s medical history as though she were piecing together potsherds at a dig site. She asks other doctors to mail her CD-ROMs of medical images (and then borrows a disc drive to be able to view them). She pores over pages of blurry, out-of-order faxed records. And often, she turns to the patient as her co-investigator, asking questions such as, “What did the testing show? Was it a loud machine where you lie flat, or did someone use a probe coated with cold gel?”

Read the rest at National Review.

“Father” Is Not a Part-Time Job

Can you unbundle fatherhood from marriage? That’s the topic that Richard Reeves and I are (politely) skirmishing over at Fairer Disputations. Reeves would like to see more support for and ideals of fatherhood where fathers live apart from their children and are not married to their mothers.

Men need to know what they can uniquely contribute to their family. The abiding presence of a father isn’t replaceable by their paycheck, their banked sperm, or their weekend visits. Men and women both are impeded in knowing themselves and the full potential of their relationship when fathers are treated as trivial.

Read the rest at Fairer Disputations

Reeves got to offer a rejoinder, which turns on this point:

Two out of five children are now born outside of marriage, and there’s little sign of that number dropping. Whether we like it or not, we have to find a way to reboot fatherhood for the world as it is, rather than the world as it was.

Read Reeves at Fairer Disputations

I hosted a follow-up discussion, bringing in Melissa Kearney’s Two Parent Privilege at Other Feminisms.

Why Government Can’t Talk to Citizens

Whose to blame when government services don’t work? I got to review an excellent book on the last mile of policy for Deseret.

Social studies students learn how a bill becomes a law, but Jennifer Pahlka would argue that you can’t stop the story at the president’s signature. The administrative infrastructure and vendor contracts that determine how a federal, state or local law is put into practice often act as an inadvertent, unconstitutional veto. Often, as the first people who tried to register for Obamacare discovered, the web developer has as much power as the congressional committee in determining what government does.

Pahlka is the founder of Code for America and the author of “Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better.” […] Her new book is a chronicle of the secret gridlock that can cripple even the most enthusiastically bipartisan policy. The government, culturally and legally, has a preference for contracting out the software that underpins our public policy. As Pahlka shows, this means our government often winds up serving its vendors, not its citizens.

Read the rest at Deseret.

The Narrowness of Barbie Feminism

I was rooting for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, but I was ultimately disappointed by the movie. I got to review it for The Dispatch.

Gloria comes off as the Betty Friedan of the film, giving voice to the problem without a name. She offers her lecture on the impossibility of being a woman to each brainwashed Barbie in turn, like an ideological inoculation, and her frustration and exhaustion call them all back to themselves.

The message resonated with Hari Nef, a transgender actress who plays Doctor Barbie. In an Instagram post promoting the film, Nef said that the experience of being a woman badly is the most universal experience of womanhood. Nef and a group of transgender friends call themselves “the dolls” because, as Nef explained, “underneath the word ‘doll’ is the shape of a woman who is not quite a woman—recognizable as such, but still a fake.”

Read the rest at The Dispatch

I think the movie was muddled rather than just bad, so I made sure to highlight a more positive take on the film from Helen Andrews in a post for Other Feminisms.