Category: reason

Milwaukee Bucks rookie guard Sterling Brown pulled one of the dickish of dick parking moves by parking his car across multiple handicapped parking spaces in front of a Walgreens in Milwaukee in January.

The result was not a ticket and a good talking-to from a police officer, but a bizarre escalating confrontation fed pretty much entirely by police bluster that would have been comical had it not ended in Brown being suddenly Tasered and piled on by a pack of officers who were called to the scene for no reason.

The entire incident was caught on police body camera. That footage was released this week, along with an apology from Milwaukee Police Chief Alfonso Morales, who said the officers “acted inappropriately” and have been disciplined.

The incident is an illustration of how what should be simple, peaceful police encounters spin wildly out of hand because of the aggression of the officers. It also highlights exactly what people mean when they talk about disproportionate responses from police when they deal with them. Lastly, it underscores the value of police body cameras when making these points. The police officers initially claimed that Brown had threatened them, but Brown does nothing remotely threatening on the video.

Instead, the officer who confronted him, and was angry at him from the start, called in backup that brought in six other police vehicles and seven additional officers. Brown was surrounded in minutes by officers. Then after insisting he take his hands out of his pockets, they tackle him and Tase him.

Watch the video footage below:

Sterling was ultimately not charged with any crime and he played in a game that day with a banged up face. The Bucks organization put out a statement supporting Brown and calling his treatment “shameful and inexcusable.”

It’s very easy to imagine how differently this incident would have played out had it not been captured on camera. The very basic info that would have been released—that Brown had deliberately been an ass when he parked and that several police cars were called out to deal with him—would have purposefully stacked the deck against Brown in the public’s perception. That we could see for ourselves that the officer who responded was being a jerk for no reason and called in an absurd amount of additional police for no reason establishes some important context.

It’s also important to note when body camera footage protects police from unfounded accusations, as just happened in Ellis County, Texas. A state trooped pulled a woman over last weekend and arrested her after she failed a sobriety test. The woman, Sherita Dixon-Cole, accused the trooper of sexually assaulting her during the stop, and those accusations were pushed by the attorney she retained, Lee Merritt, who even scheduled a press conference to discuss what happened.

But then the Texas Department of Public Safety released two hours of the officer’s body camera video showing that nothing even remotely inappropriate happened during the course of her arrest and police detention. Merritt subsequently put out a press release taking responsibility for amplifying the case into a national story and apologizing for the trouble caused by the false accusation.

Body camera footage both alerts us to bad police misconduct but also shields police who behave appropriately from a host of false claims. Again, consider how these accusations might have played out for the officer in this case had the footage not been available. People were instantly believing the accuser based on nothing but her claims.

Halfway between Pittsburgh and Cleveland, Youngstown is the buckle on the Rust Belt.

It’s a town that rose with America’s steel and coal industries and, like so many other cities in that part of the country, began to fall from prominence when technology and cheaper foreign steel lessened demand for the American stuff. Donald Trump held a major rally in Youngstown during the summer of 2016, and returned there as president last summer for a victory tour. Blue collar hagiographies have been written about the days when the steel mills were running full tilt, and political journalists have safaried there in an attempt to understand the working class collapse and subsequent political uprising that’s often credited with getting Trump to the White House.

If there is any place in America that stands to benefit from the Trump administration’s decision to slap tariffs on steel and aluminum imports—a policy that will cause significant pain for millions of workers in thousands of other places—it should be towns like Youngstown. After all, Trump himself has proclaimed that “if you don’t have steel, you don’t have a country” as justification for the tariffs, which have been warmly welcomed by American steel manufacturers.

And yet, the tariffs are not turning things around in Youngstown. They’re not turning things around in most of the other major steel-producing cities of America, either.

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that employment in Youngstown is down 1.6 percent (a net loss of about 3,600 jobs) since March of last year. Across the 10 largest steel producing cities in America, hiring has been slow or nonexistent in the month following Trump’s tariff announcement, The Wall Street Journal reported this week, citing both BLS and Brookings Institution data.

“While many of the cities had already been experiencing anemic employment growth before the tariff announcement, some saw their jobs numbers worsen after it,” the Journal reports.

Even in steel towns that are growing—like Reading, Pennsylvania, and Canton, Ohio, both of which have seen modest employment growth in the past year—the uptick is smaller than across the U.S. economy as a whole, which has grown at a rate of about 1.5 percent since March 2017.

Trump’s steel tariff has caused a spike in prices since early March, which means American steel manufacturers are charging more. Those higher costs get passed along to steel-consuming industries and, ultimately, to consumers.

The employment data suggests that steelmakers have either held off on hiring additional workers—perhaps because it takes time to bring additional supply on-line, or perhaps because they worry that the tariff-caused spike in prices won’t last if the administration shifts trade policies again—or that those hires have not been significant enough to stop the decline of places like Youngstown.

It’s unlikely that steel protectionism will produce booming job growth for another reason. Steelmaking is a relatively small part of the American economy. According to 2015 Census data, steel mills employed about 140,000 Americans and added about $36 billion to the economy that year. Meanwhile, steel-consuming industries (the ones suffering the most from Trump’s tariffs) employed more than 6.5 million Americans and added $1 trillion to the economy.

Finally, Trump’s tariff policy overlooks the fact that it was technology, not trade, that drove the decline of steel towns like Youngstown. According to a study published by the American Economic Review in 2015, the steel industry lost 75 percent of it’s workforce between 1962 and 2005, even though the amount of steel produced by American mills actually increased during that period.

The population of Youngstown peaked at 170,000 in the 1930s. Today, fewer than 65,000 people live there. Tariffs won’t reverse the economic and cultural trends driving that 80-year decline, but they will do a lot of damage to other industries that could help fill the gap. A projection released by the Trade Partnership, a Washington-based pro-trade think tank, says Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs will cause 146,000 net job losses—five jobs lost for every job gained.

“If protectionism could bring back neighborhoods, and nuclear families, and life-long employment, it’d be well worth discussing,” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) said Wednesday during a discussion of trade issues at the Heritage Foundation. “It is fundamentally cruel to lie to people and say ‘by government policy, we’re going to make your communities stable again.'”

President Donald Trump appeared this morning on Fox & Friends, which is reportedly his favorite TV show this side of The Apprentice franchise. Here’s a clip from his interview with host Brian Kilmeade:

President @realDonaldTrump: “We have the worst immigration laws in the entire world by far.” pic.twitter.com/4d8madPW7w

— Fox News (@FoxNews) May 24, 2018

When discussing immigration policy, Trump repeatedly insists that “chain migration” allows for the fast and uncontrolled importation of huge numbers of family members. In today’s interview, he says, “Chain migration is a disaster. You look at what’s going on where someone who comes in is bad and has 24 family members yet not one of them do you want in this country.”

Note that Trump here is talking about legal immigration, not illegal entry. His defenders often say it’s illegal immigration that bothers them, but the fact is that the president, along with many leading Republicans, are working to reduce legal immigration by as much as 50 percent. The term “chain migration,” which originally described a well-observed pattern by which residents of one town or area in a foreign country ended up settling in a particular new town or region because they followed previous migrants, is designed to conjure up images of one new arrival in America (someone bad, in Trump’s formulation above) quickly and deviously smuggling in enough people to field a high school football team. Yet as Shikha Dalmia has written,

Beyond spouses and minor children, American law allows immigrants to sponsor only parents, adult children, or siblings—not aunts, uncles, and cousins. Moreover, they can do so only after they themselves receive green cards or become naturalized citizens.

It can take up to 45 years for an immigrant to show up in the United States, gain citizenship, and bring in the next single link in this chain. As a result, the U.S. annually admits only about 2 to 2.5 family members of immigrants per 1,000 residents, the same rate as Canada and Australia, countries with skills-based systems Trump says he favors. Dalmia further notes that fully two-thirds of immigrants sponsored by other immigrants are spouses and minor children.

Last December, the White House tweeted this chart, which is supposed to drive home the insidious nature of chain migration:

It’s time to end Chain Migration: https://t.co/kad5A8Slw7 pic.twitter.com/735JzAZIUa

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) December 18, 2017

If this is the ticking demographic time bomb that keeps Trump up late at night, he should rest easy. Dalmia again (via Katherine Mangu-Ward):

If a typical 26-year-old foreign woman were to get married to an American citizen, and then sponsor her 25-year-old sister to get a green card, that sister would be 40 years old before she could obtain permanent residency. If she’s a Filipina, her sister would be closer to 50 years old. If the sister then sponsored some other immediate relative, that person would have to go through a 15- to 25-year process as well. Over a half a century, then, most families could at best traverse two links in the alleged “chain,” hardly the kind of thing that would result in mass migration.

The White House chart is illustrating a process that would unfold over centuries, not months or even decades. The larger conversation about immigration is misleading in other ways, too. While the percentage of the U.S. population that is foreign-born is at a recent high (13.5 percent in 2016, a level not seen since the period between 1870 and 1920), the rate of growth in net migration of legal and illegal immigrants is slowing along with overall rate of population and the raw number of illegal immigrants has been declining for at least a decade (the illegal population was 11 million in 2016, down from a 2007 peak of 12.2 million). The number of illegal Mexicans, an early and sustained focus of Trump’s ire, also peaked in 2007.

While Trump’s description of chain migration and its effects on American population is false and misleading, it serves a clear political function. It’s a signal to his base that he gets it and is looking out for their interests, which include not simply making America great again but rolling back the supposedly still-growing tide of newcomers invading the country from non-traditional places such as China, India, and Mexico (currently the three largest sender countries, in decreasing order of immigrants).

His hammering on “chain migration” calls to mind Ronald Reagan’s oft-repeated story about a welfare cheat in Chicago. Though he never named her, Reagan is widely understood to be talking about a woman known as Linda Taylor (among other aliases). Drawing off accounts in the Chicago Tribune (which coined the term welfare queen), Reagan first told the tale in January 1976, during his run for Republican presidential nomination:

In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record…She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.

By October, reported Slate‘s Josh Levin in 2013, Reagan was claiming that she had “three new cars, a full-length mink coat, and her take is estimated at a million dollars.” He attributed his facts again to investigative reporting by the Tribune, wrote Levin, but “I can’t find anything in the Tribune to support the claim that Taylor’s take reached $1 million.” There’s no question that Taylor was a criminal—she was convicted in 1977 of ripping the government off of $8,000 in various welfare scams—but the distance between that and a million dollars is vast.The welfare queen was understood to be black, as was the “strapping young buck” whom Reagan claimed in other speeches was using food stamps to buy “T-bone steak…while you were waiting in line to buy hamburger.” Tellingly, outside of the South, Reagan referred to “some young fellow,” a less racially charged description. Did such a person exist? Perhaps, but the point wasn’t to be factually accurate but to connect with what he took to be his overwhelmingly white audience’s sense of outrage and solidarity against the Other.

This sort of fabulism and exaggeration is appalling when it comes from anybody purporting to traffic in facts. It’s all the more troubling when, in the cases of both Reagan and Trump, it’s being used to demonize ethnic and racial minorities whose political power and cultural standing is marginal at best. That presidents of all people stoop to such tactics in unconscionable and my first inclination is to call out the racism and xenophobia in Trump’s comments along with his made-up example.

But that’s a losing strategy, actually, when it comes to Trump. Among the many genius elements of his rhetorical style is his ability to tie his critics up in knots. Just last week, he artfully managed to get Democratic politicians to burn air time defending members of the violent MS-13 gangs as something other than “animals.” What’s the old saying? When you wrestle a pig, you both get dirty and the pig enjoys it. If you talk about factual inaccuracy and racism with Trump or his supporters, suddenly you’re going to be talking about racism plain and simple.

There’s no reason to play Trump’s game. He is wrong about chain migration, pure and simple, just as he is wrong more generally about the costs and benefits of immigration. The next time you see him (or his supporters), ask him (or his supporters) to produce his magical immigrant and the 24 relatives he has brought in via America’s glacially-paced immigration system. He (and they) won’t be able to, which should at least give them pause, if not the deeper shame they should feel about bullshitting all the time.

Related: “The 5 Best Arguments Against Immigration—and Why They’re Wrong”

Full text and supporting links here.

In 1882, President Chester Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, effectively barring all Chinese immigrants from entering the country. The ban did not come to an end until 1943.

Linda Chavez, chairman of the Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO), recalled this sad period of American history in her remarks at a National Press Club event in Washington, D.C., earlier this week. The event, which was co-hosted by CEO and the Federalist Society, highlighted a new CEO paper titled, “Too Many Asian Americans: Affirmative Discrimination in Elite College Admissions.”

While not as obviously discriminatory as the Chinese Exclusion Act, race-conscious admissions policies often put Asian applicants at a disadvantage, since they would be overrepresented (relative to their share of the U.S. population) at many campuses absent deliberate efforts to admit more black and Latino students.

Asian Americans are over-performers in the education system: despite making up just 5 percent of the U.S. population, they represent “30% of the recent American maths and physics Olympiad teams and Presidential Scholars, and 25-30% of National Merit Scholarships,” according to The Economist. When universities simply pick the most qualified students, Asian Americans are more likely than other groups to earn admission. When universities practice “holistic admissions”—a code word that indicates admissions officials are considering the racial background of the applicants in order to foster an ethnically diverse campus—Asian applicants need to score 140 more points on the SAT than white students in order to get in, according to research by Thomas Epanshade and Alexandria Radford.

The author of the new CEO paper, Althea Nagai, finds reason to be concerned about the impact of race-conscious admissions. She compared the percentages of Asian students at three elite private colleges: the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Caltech does not practice affirmative action; its Asian student population stands at 43 percent, having nearly doubled since 1990. MIT and Harvard, on the other hand, use race-conscious admissions in an attempt to achieve a racially diverse student body; consequently, the percentage of Asian students at both schools has remained relatively flat over the past two decades—26 percent at MIT, 17 percent at Harvard. Harvard, unlike MIT and CalTech, awards preferential admissions treatment to legacy applicants, which might explain why Asians constitute an even smaller percentage of Harvard’s student body. Legacy preferences likely benefit white students, at the expense of minority applicants.

“So-called holistic admissions and diversity goals enable discrimination against Asian American applicants, much as the Harvard plan of the 1920s, also using holistic admissions, did against Jewish applicants,” wrote Nagai.

The paper comes at a time when Harvard is facing a lawsuit for allegedly discriminating against Asian American applicants. Students for Fair Admissions, the advocacy group suing Harvard on behalf of Asian students who were rejected, recently persuaded a judge to compel the university to release some information relating to its admissions practices. More could be revealed at trial, according to The Harvard Crimson.

Chavez, who founded CEO in 1995, is both pro-immigration and anti-affirmative action—a combination that seems perfectly consistent to her as a conservative. And yet, in 2015, Chavez says she lost her gig as a pundit on Fox News after a producer claimed her pro-immigration conservativism was too “confusing” for viewers. That surprised Chavez, who had worked in the Reagan administration during the 1980s. Reagan, the political father of modern conservatism, was a supporter of immigration.

Tobacco kills 480,000 people a year in the United States. Yet when an innovative alternative that delivers nicotine and eliminates 95 percent of the harm of smoking is available, observes Veronique de Rugy, government busybodies launch a dumb attack on this revolutionary lifesaving technology. All in the name of the children, of course.

View this article.

Setting up a high-stakes nuclear summit turns out to be more difficult than you might think.

President Donald Trump recently announced that he would hold denuclearization talks with North Korean leaders. But yesterday North Korea responded by saying that it might not consider denuclearization at all. And yesterday, a senior envoy for the closed-off country threatened to back out of the meeting, while warning that the United States might end up facing off with North Korea in a “nuclear-to-nuclear showdown,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

In the statement, Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Choe Son Hui also called Trump’s Vice President Mike Pence a “political dummy.”

Trump, meanwhile, has indicated that the meeting may not happen has planned—and has given some ground on his initial push for immediate denuclearization, indicating that it might be acceptable for North Korea to dismantle its weapons program in phases.

It’s not all schoolyard insults and threats of nuclear annihilation, however. North Korean officials invited American news media to witness the explosion of some tunnels the country claimed were connected to its nuclear tests, saying that because it had built functioning nuclear weapons already it could wind down its test program. However, it’s not entirely clear whether the demolition represented a real commitment or something staged for the cameras. According to CNN, “There were no international experts in the invited group and no one was present who was able to assess the explosions in order to tell if they were deep enough to destroy the tunnels.”

FREE MINDS

President Trump is pleased with the NFL’s new national anthem rules. The NFL will now fine players on the field who refuse to stand for for the anthem. Trump thinks that’s a good idea. He also suggested that players who don’t follow the new rules “shouldn’t be in the country.” NPR reports:

President Trump praised the NFL’s decision to mandate that players either stand for the national anthem or stay in the locker room in a TV interview that aired Thursday.

And he questioned whether players who choose not to stand “proudly” should be in the country at all.

“Well, I think that’s good,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News. “I don’t think people should be staying in locker rooms, but still I think it’s good. You have to stand, proudly, for the national anthem or you shouldn’t be playing, you shouldn’t be there, maybe you shouldn’t be in the country.”

FREE MARKETS

Health insurance premiums under Obamacare to keep rising. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicts that typical health insurance premiums under Obamacare will rise by about 15 percent next year—and 10 percent each year after that through 2023. The new CBO estimate also dramatically slashed the number of people it expects to go without health insurance because of the elimination of the individual mandate penalty, dropping the figure from about 13 milllion to 8.6 million.

QUICK HITS

• President Trump is still tweeting about “Spygate” this morning.

Clapper has now admitted that there was Spying in my campaign. Large dollars were paid to the Spy, far beyond normal. Starting to look like one of the biggest political scandals in U.S. history. SPYGATE – a terrible thing!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 24, 2018

• You may be getting a bunch of privacy-related emails from web companies. That’s a response to the European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation rules, which go into effect this week.
• Disney has been attempting to acquire large parts of 21st Century Fox (which owns, among other things, movie rights to some Marvel comics characters that Disney doesn’t). Now Comcast may be trying to buy Fox too.
• Trump’s son in law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, got his security clearance revoked. Now he’s got it back.
• On Trump’s orders, the Commerce Department has begun an investigation into imported vehicles that could lead to new tariffs on foreign cars.
• Nate Boulton, a Democratic candidate for governor in Iowa, has been accused by three women of sexual misconduct.
• Looks like California will take an aggressive approach to regulating self-driving cars.

American presidents have spent countless hours negotiating with adversaries to reach mutually bearable compromises on matters of security. The Trump administration, however, doesn’t believe in negotiating or compromise. It believes in making demands and issuing threats to force the other side to capitulate.

But foreign policy does not always turn out the way that the White House wants, observes Steve Chapman. When the Bush administration invaded Iraq, it promised a quick and easy triumph, only to find itself in an endless bloody slog. If Trump fails to get his way and opts for war, the consequences could be disastrous in the case of Iran and apocalyptic in the case of North Korea.

View this article.

No one warned ThankGod Ebhos that he was going to die that night, but he knew without words. For 19 years, as he suffered on death row in Nigeria’s notorious Benin Prison for the crime of armed robbery, Ebhos had waited for this moment. So when the sound of his cell door opening awoke him from a restless sleep on June 24, 2013, the smell of freshly oiled gallows told him what the prison guards did not.

Without a word, the guards forced Ebhos and four others out. All were set to die that night. Since he was No. 5, he watched as, one by one, each of the men before him gasped for life and died at the end of the executioner’s rope. (The prisoners were killed despite the fact that each had an appeal pending at the time.) When Ebhos was up, the guards put a black bag over his face, chained his hands behind his back, and tied a bag of sand to his feet. They put the noose around his neck.

Then someone spotted a clerical error, writes Jillian Keenan in the latest edition of Reason.

View this article.

Mitchell Ballas has been suspended from Montana’s Big Sky High School for wearing a sweatshirt with a Confederate flag after being told not to. Principal Natalie Jaeger says some students have complained that the Confederate flag makes them feel anxious and afraid.

Like a lot of people born at the very end of the Baby Boom, my first exposure to Philip Roth was not from his own books, but in the pages of Mad magazine. In the early ’70s, it seemed like every issue had one of more gags related to Portnoy’s Complaint, his best-selling novel in which the eponymous character describes masturbating with a piece of liver. A Mad anthology featured a parody of the film version Goodbye, Columbus, lazily titled Hoo Boy Columbus!, if I remember correctly. By the time I got around to reading that powerful short-story collection about Jewishness, class, and assimilation, I already knew all the key plot points of the titular novella.

With Roth’s passing, an entire era of American letters closes up shop for good. Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1933, Roth came of age when being a novelist meant you could be or were even expected to be a culture hero, too. Especially if like him, you were partial to dropping turds in the cultural punch bowl or, like Norman Mailer or Gore Vidal, a raging narcissist who mistook the ability to write a sharp sentence for seriousness of thought on every topic du jour. Nowadays, our “great” writers are either pursuing trivial pursuits (Jonathan Franzen’s most-heartfelt cause seems to be preserving bird habitat in Central Park) or toiling in relative anonymity, displaced by other forms of media, especially TV shows such as The Wire, The Sopranos, or Mad Men that do the cultural work once reserved for literature.

Along with Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, Roth was part of the post-war Jewish triumvirate of ethnically and literarily serious novelists, what Bellow once called the “Hart, Schaffner, and Marx” of American letters (HSM was an upper-middle-class men’s clothing brand back when such things mattered). Like other writers of his background (especially from Newark, which also birthed such unassimilable heroes as Milton Friedman and Leslie Fiedler), Roth could be deliberately and offensively Jewish even as he cultivated a Henry James shtick, consciously toggling between worlds stinking of gefilte fish and organ meats and made boring and tedious by reserved, WASPish decorum. He’s certainly not the last American writer of Jewish heritage, but he may well be the last Yid. Roth’s specific ethnicity (and that of other white ethnics who were Italian and Irish) just doesn’t matter that much anymore. Everybody these days is an insider/outsider, the symbolic role played by many of his characters, and in a world of post-colonial identity politics and intersectionality, being Jewish, male, and first-generation college doesn’t cut the mustard, Kosher or not. The same is true of his sexual fixations, especially in books such as Portnoy’s Complaint. I was born 30 years after Roth but even by the time I started reading “serious” literature and entered grad school for English in the late 1980s, his sexual revolution seemed as distant to my times as that of the Founding Fathers.

So is there something we can take from his ouevre, his life, his example? The shelf of books, fiction and memoir, he wrote isn’t just voluminous, it’s groaning under the weight of great passages and deep insights into the human condition, if we still believe in such a quaint, universalistic notion. Even his sillier works, such as The Great American Novel, a satire of a fictional baseball league set during World War II, rewards perusal. He introduced Americans to “writers from the other Europe” in a series of books written by authors trapped behind the Iron Curtain or exiled from it (a conventional political liberal, he was a great American defender of free speech in all its forms).

Much more to the point than any single work of Roth’s is the constant searching, seeking, and maturation he displayed throughout his career. In the wake of the Kitty Genovese murder, he wrote in 1961 that “we now live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist lies helpless before what he knows he will read in tomorrow morning’s newspaper.” Like many serious writers (well, at least many serious male writers, such as Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, and John Barth)—he retreated somewhat into writing about writing (so-called metafiction or surfiction) and broad satire. To his credit, he moved past that stage and, like Bob Dylan in music, created at least one work that “mattered” every few years until he hung up his spurs in 2012. Later works such as 1997’s American Pastoral, 2000’s The Human Stain, and especially 2004’s The Plot Against America show a man trying to make sense of a world that he was raised to inherit but that had gone missing due to the vagaries of history. The Plot Against America is an alternative history in which Charles Lindbergh becomes an isolationist president in 1940; a savage if somewhat mistaken take on George W. Bush unilateralist foreign policy, it’s far more relevant to Donald Trump’s presidency.

“Lord have mercy on us, we want a ‘great’ writer,” wrote Leslie Fiedler back in 1951.

It is at once the comedy and tragedy of 20th-century American letters that we simply cannot keep a full stock of contemporary “great novelists.”…From moment to moment we have the feeling that certain claims…are secure, but even as we name them they shudder and fall.

Fiedler’s humorous ire was directed at F. Scott Fitzgerald, who is U.S. literature’s equivalent of a one-hit wonder (maybe one-and-a-half). But the charge is true of Roth’s rough contemporaries, such as Thomas Pynchon, who stopped “mattering” shortly after the publication of Gravity’s Rainbow over 40 years ago. Don DeLillo is younger than Roth, but close enough for comparison. After spending the 1970s and ’80s writing books about terroristic violence, including one novel that ends with the destruction of the World Trade Center, DeLillo failed us all after 9/11 by taking years to write a minor work that escaped from Ground Zero as quickly as possible.

Roth, like Toni Morrison (born in 1931), kept at it, long and hard, trying to make sense of a world that escaped the conditions into which they were born. For all of us who expect to live long lives and who are doing work that isn’t merely remunerative but expressive of what we believe and hope for, we need to “read” Philip Roth’s career more than any of his individual books. Like all of us, he never fully transcended his roots even as he hacked at them ruthlessly, lovingly, and obsessively. He couldn’t quite make it into a world that was post-racial, post-feminist, post-everything. But he kept trying, which is no small victory over the Conqueror Worm.