Leah Libresco's Blog, page 3

Hiding from Need at the Border and in the Womb

When we face a need that asks a lot of us, it’s tempting to try to make the needy person invisible. At Deseret, I’m talking about how both parties try to avoid acknowledging the humanity and reality of the one in need—Democrats averting their eyes from the child in the womb, Republicans from the refugee at the border.

The man walking through the water and the baby he holds are more alike than different. Whether a refugee is walking through Mexico or a baby is cradled in a suitcase — or, before then, in her mother’s womb — someone is on the way. Someone whose name we may not yet know, someone whose particular personality is yet to be revealed to us. Someone we know primarily through their need — they cannot survive unless we open the door to them and make them welcome.  

Within our own borders, politicians hide from another kind of abject need — not the baby in the suitcase, but the baby in the womb. On abortion, the parties’ rhetoric reverses. It’s the abortion-rights activists within the Democratic Party who describe a baby in the womb as a kind of parasite, a foreign invader with no just claim to shelter. It’s abortion opponents within the GOP who speak movingly about the dignity of the weak, but whose party fails to deliver substantial material support for refugees.

Read the rest at Deseret

The Colleges Cheated First

At First Things, I’m writing about Chat-GPT and cheating in college. The core problem—students only have a reason to cheat if they think they have no need to learn.

The cheating began with university administrators, when they started to substitute a credentialing process for an actual commitment to the formation of a particular kind of student. It’s no surprise that college administrators have already been caught using ChatGPT themselves—after all, many university mission statements are bland enough to be algorithmically generated from a few bullet points and buzzwords. They don’t exist to animate the mission of the university but to fill up enough column inches on a website.

At Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, administrators were even caught turning to ChatGPT to write a condolence note to the student body in the wake of a mass shooting at another school. The administrators apologized, but upon examining the note, it’s easy to see why they turned to AI. The bland corporatese of “we must reflect on the impact of such an event and take steps to ensure that we are doing our best to create a safe and inclusive environment for all” is the work of a human trying to erase any trace of humanity.

Read the rest at First Things

Cramming Child Care into CHIPS

At Deseret, I make the case against the child care benefit in the fine print of CHIPS, which would make child care a work-administered benefit at some semiconductor plants.

Making child care a work-linked benefit means repeating all the problems of the employer-linked insurance and retirement plans, and adding a more serious problem. Child care and early education are a flashpoint for political conflict. How we educate our children is an expression of our values and our world view. When an employer designs an on-site child care program or contracts with an existing provider, it means the HR department has to make a ruling about how children should be cared for. Choosing an educational philosophy requires more trust than an employee can reasonably place in their employer. 

The employer child care mandate isn’t in the bill because Congress was confident that your boss should weigh in on who takes care of your children. It’s a quiet acknowledgment, in the middle of the ostensibly ambitious CHIPS Act, that legislators do not believe America can build real support for parents.

Read the whole thing at Deseret

Embracing Amateurism in the Face of AI

As Chat-GPT and other machine learning models make it easier to generate text and art, I wrote in praise of doing something yourself, even if you do it badly, in Deseret.

When you choose to be bad at something, you get to experience the joy of being an amateur in the classical sense.

Today, “amateur” tends to mean “someone who isn’t good enough at something to be paid for it,” but its root is in the Latin amare, which means “to love.” An amateur works on a skill because she loves something about how grappling with the problem changes her.

An amateur birdwatcher has a new sense of who his neighbors are, even if he still scares off most of the birds with his footfalls. An amateur artist scrutinizes the planes of a face until the familiar seems strange, even if the resulting drawing is likewise strange. An amateur martial artist can’t win a fight yet, but she’s discovered new ways her body can move.

Read the rest at Deseret

Books I Hope to Read in 2023

2022 had the most babies and the fewest books read, both in total, and off of my “to read” list for the year. This was predictable.

I read 7/11 of my “to read” books, and 85 books/26k pages across the year. Nothing earlier than 1950, either, I think (though Goodreads gets this wrong if I read a recent translation of an ancient text sometimes).

I like to read outside my time, and happily, this year I’m guaranteed to, because I’ve signed up for a reading group through the Catherine Project where we’ll be discussing Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres by Henry Adams (1904) and The Autumn of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga (1919).

So, why keep assembling this list, if I expect I won’t get to all the books this year? Or at least, why not make the list shorter?

I like making this list because it’s always limited to books I already own, and putting them on the list gives me permission to prioritizing them. I don’t know how many I’ll read this year, but I know it will be more than if they weren’t officially on the list, and I look forward to what I’ll discover.

I’ve grouped the books for 2023 with the books that are most linked to Other Feminisms at the top, and then no particular order to follow.

Motherhood, A Confession by Natalie Carnes The Autonomy Myth: A Theory Of Dependency by Martha Albertson Fineman Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace by Sara Ruddick Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It by Richard V. Reeves Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion by Caroline Walker Bynum Saga of Saints by Sigrid Undset The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila: A Biography by Carlos Eire Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle by Shannen Dee Williams Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri The Falcon Thief by Joshua Hammer Silas Marner by George Elliot

As the list suggests, I tend to have more non-fiction than fiction coming into my house, and I’d love to know how you pick your fiction reading. I tend to long more for another reader, since I want to talk about the book. I considered signing up for Whale Weekly (a substack of Moby Dick readers) but this didn’t seem like my year!

The Best and Worst of Rings of Power

I wrote about Rings of Power for both First Things and Mere Orthodoxy. There’s potential in the show, but the first season fell far short of good storytelling. At First Things, I wrote about the moral muddle of its structure:

Tolkien’s stories aren’t mystery boxes. His characters have a very clear idea of what is asked of them, even if they have no idea how to accomplish it.  At the Council of Elrond, Frodo says, “I will take the Ring, though I do not know the way.” Tolkien’s heroes can take on what seem like hopeless duties—Frodo cannot guarantee that his quest will succeed, but, day by day, he chooses not to fail it. Instead of building the drama around Frodo’s long-term plans and stratagems, Tolkien treats each moment of temptation and choosing as epic in itself. In contrast, the veiled plots and many mysteries of Rings of Power mean the characters don’t know enough about their situation to know what to choose rightly, let alone how.

Read the rest at First Things

At Mere Orthodoxy, I got to talk more about one of the best parts of the story—the immortality of the elves.

Across the waters in Númenor, Galadriel’s visit to the island is as disorienting as the return of King Arthur might be for modern-day Britons. The people of Númenor have never seen an elf in the flesh, and their fluency with the language of the elves has become atrophied—a matter of scholarship or religion, not conversation. But, for Galadriel, the halls are familiar and the Númenoreans’ choice to break off friendship was recent and still rankles.

If the past is another country, Elves are its living ambassadors. For Men and Dwarves, their history speaks from living, foreign tongues. The Elves are, in essence, hyperobjects—“massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” in the coinage of Timothy Morton. Morton needed the term to describe ecological phenomena like climate change that are too large for humans to grapple with directly. We need statistics and other tools to image what we can see only as thin, MRI-like slices of the whole.

Read the rest at Mere Orthodoxy

The Race to the Bottom in Sports Gambling

At Deseret, I’m writing on the particular perversity of legalized sports gambling. States touting possible revenue from taxes aim to profit from the degradation of their citizens.

It’s as though a state instituted a tax on adultery, and then began promoting websites like AshleyMadison and held press conferences with prostitution rings. By advertising invitations to unfaithfulness, the state would be hoping the private sins of their citizens could fill a hole in the public budget. The more money adultery brought into state coffers, the more a state would be caught in a perverse bind of its own making. If marriages got stronger, the state would be poorer.

A state that relies on gambling revenue is similarly reliant on worsening the lives of its citizens. It plans to fix crumbling infrastructure by eroding the financial stability of its families, to fill potholes by laying pits in the path of its people.

Read the whole thing at Deseret.

My Favorite Books of 2022

This year began with a baby, had a move in the middle, and I’m now getting to discover what normal might look like in our new state. These were my favorite books I read over the course of the year, listed in roughly chronological order.

Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times by Elizabeth Wayland Barber

An interesting history of weaving, mothering, and friendship. I wrote about it on Other Feminisms here (“Women’s Work is Communal”).

Mothers have toddlers underfoot, and need a workspace that is relatively safe for marauding children (keeping the children safe from the work and vice versa). Mothers benefit from work that is somewhat interruptible, as a child demands attention or needs to nurse. And mothers have an easier time with shared work, when a group of women can watch children together or trade off baby- vs heddle-wrangling.

It’s given me a way of thinking about how we design work and chores, and I’m grateful for it.

Love’s Labors: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency by Eva Feder Kittay

Everyone told me to read this, and they were right. I drew heavily on Kittay for my Mere Orthodoxy piece “How to Value Caring Work.”

In Kittay’s view, care is never a private matter, something that can be contained in a single dyad or family. Dependency creates a chain of need, which extends out into the wider world. She takes the relationship of mother and child as paradigmatic: “The relation between a needy child and the mother who tends to those needs is analogous to the mother’s own neediness and those who are in a position to meet those needs.” Caring for a child makes the mother more dependent, and gives her a just claim on others, just as the baby has a claim on her.

Kittay terms this framework doulia. She adapts doulia from doula, a person who offers care to a laboring mother. In her broader term, she encompasses “a concept of interdependence that recognizes a relation — not precisely of reciprocity but of nested dependencies — linking those who help and those who require help to give aid to those who cannot help themselves.”

The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean

One of the books on my list that I read, and my husband half-read, since I read so many passages aloud. It’s non-fiction that is more outrageous than fiction could ever dare. Orlean profiles a man who believed he had found a loophole to let him poach a protected orchid legally. The book is a rollicking tale.

Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern by Jing Tsu

There are a couple genres of non-fiction that I love. One is “biographies of things that aren’t people” (e.g. Salt, Empires of the Sky, etc). Another is “how did all this get organized?” (e.g. Inventing Temperature, A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order, etc.). This is one of those.

The book is about how the Chinese language found ways to interlock with the industrialized and then computerized age. A particular highlight was the character-keyboard that the typist operated by playing chords of keystrokes.

Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U. S. Navy by Ian W. Toll

The book that will let you say to your loved ones, “Do you have fifteen minutes for me to read you this naval battle in full?” I loved it, and while I was reading it, I felt intensely torn—I knew from history class that we had won the War of 1812, but it’s very hard it to believe it ends up that way when you read about the war in detail.

Flying Blind: Boeing’s Max Tragedy and the Lost Soul of an American Icon by Peter Robison

Fascinating, detailed, and infuriating. The well-reported story of how Boeing adopted a GE-inspired focus on quarterly profit and loss… and hollowed out engineering and testing to chase short-term savings. The Boeing Max 8 killed hundreds of passengers, and, every step of the way, there was a Boeing employee or regulator trying to sound alarms.

It’s a cautionary tale both about regulatory capture and stagnation. The Max8 was a bad plane from the get-go, since, instead of being designed de novo, it was an attempt to make a new plane that could pass as an update of an old plane (and thus receive less regulatory scrutiny). They had to keep designing weird kludges to avoid building the plane right if that meant building it differently.

Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation by Erika Krouse

CW: Memoir by a sexual abuse survivor who works as a PI investigating a sexual assault and culture of abuse on a college campus.

Very well written and thoughtful. Krouse asks a lot of the people she interviews since she may need them to testify in a multi-year suit against a school with enough money to make the fight painful. She thinks hard about what kind of win could be worth it.

Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers by Mary Rodgers with Jesse Green

Best footnotes of the year. Mary Rodgers narrates her life in a voice that is both tart and wistful. The footnoting she and Jesse Green (theater reviewer for the New York Times) worked out gives her the freedom to tell stories as she remembers them, with some corrections running in counterpoint. A highlight was hearing her recount how the parts in Once Upon a Mattress were all tailored to the needs of it’s initial workshop cast (including a mute king for a tone deaf singer).

And if you’re interested, my list from 2021 is here.

The Cost of Evading Moral Argument

At Deseret, I’m writing about the hamstrung compromises we get when people disagree on moral grounds but fight on practical grounds. I’m writing specifically on the death penalty, but it’s only one, particularly painful example, of how America sometimes makes a controversial policy legal but impossible.

For years, the moral issue of the death penalty has been contested on practical grounds, leaving us with a system worse than a clear victory for either side. While other nations either permit or outlaw executions, America has expressed its mixed feelings by allowing states to attempt executions while hamstringing them on how.

This mess is the result of years of deliberate attempts to chip away at the feasibility of the death penalty. Without a clear path to outlaw executions in Congress or at the Supreme Court, the anti-death penalty movement has focused on making them impossible to carry out. Activists have targeted the suppliers of lethal drugs, putting pressure on companies to stop selling their drugs to states that will use them to kill, and asking European countries that have banned the death penalty to place export restrictions on the drugs. 

They have won a Pyrrhic victory with these tactics. Any veterinarian can put an injured dog to sleep, and several states have authorized doctor-assisted suicide that is intended to provide a predictable, painless death. But for the people we condemn to death, the killings are improvised and slapdash. 

Read the whole thing at Deseret

Reckoning With Reality

I got to write for National Review on why vocational education and home economics should be part of everyone’s education. These tracks are exercises in truth-telling and help make good citizens.

In effect, our goods are leased, not owned. Even if we’ve paid for them outright, they are designed to be beyond us and to require frequent recourse to the experts allowed inside. And, often, when we seek the experts, they tell us that repair is impossible or not cost-effective. The only solution is replacement. These experiences are an education in learned helplessness.

In contrast, a shop class, taught well, is an education in truth-telling. In Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew
Crawford explains that he loves motorcycle repair because it cannot be faked. No matter how much you feel that you are owed a working machine at the end of repairs, the motorcycle can’t be argued or bullied into compliance. Crawford writes: “In any hard discipline, whether it be gardening, structural engineering, or Russian, one submits to things that have their own intractable ways. . . . The tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.”

There’s a clarity to physical work that can be harder to achieve in the broader liberal arts. Repeated encounters with the “infallible judgment of reality” can help train away the squirmy impulse to hope, argue, or assert a falsehood into being true. In other classes, and in many white-collar jobs, the truth can seem secondary. You can succeed without solving the problem in front of you if you can instead tell a story about why the problem isn’t your responsibility. That is its own education and formation of character.

Read the rest at National Review