Some More Noted Things
David Wallace-Wells,"Little Big Man," Washington Monthly, n.d., on size-ism as an historical issue. W-W claims that the wage disparity between tall and short people is comparable to wage disparities by gender and race. See also: David Beito,"On Greatness and Tall Economists," Liberty & Power, 6 December.
Russell Jacoby,"Hannah Arendt's Fame Rests on the Wrong Foundations," CHE, 8 December, argues that her reputation is strong because the competition is so weak.
Scott McLemee,"Beyond the Context of No Context," IHE, 6 December, introduces those of us who don't know him to George Trow and tells us why Scott reads and re-reads his work.
Finally, Kenneth W. Stein, the William E. Schatten Professor of Contemporary Middle Eastern History, Political Science and Israeli Studies at Emory University, began his career as the first executive director of the Carter Center here in Atlanta. Subsequently, President Carter and Stein co-authored a book, The Blood of Abraham (1984), and Stein has been a key link between the Center and the University. That, apparently, will be no more.
Although he continues at Emory, in response to Carter's new book, Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid, Stein has severed his connections with Carter and his Center. In an e-mail to many people this week, he charged that
President Carter's book on the Middle East, a title too inflammatory to even print, is not based on unvarnished analyses; it is replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments. Aside from the one-sided nature of the book, meant to provoke, there are recollections cited from meetings where I was the third person in the room, and my notes of those meetings show little similarity to points claimed in the book. Being a former President does not give one a unique privilege to invent information or to unpack it with cuts, deftly slanted to provide a particular outlook.
Hat tip to AJC. There's much more here, here, and here.