A good while back, SteelyKid picked up the graphic novel edition of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, and loved it. At a couple of past movies, she recognized the trailers for it, and bounced up and down excitedly. So we planned to take the kids to see it this weekend, and then she bizarrely refused– said she didn’t want to go because she already knows the ending, and was happy at the trailers just because she recognized it. Go figure.

The Pip insisted that he wanted to see it, though, and SteelyKid had an sleepover event last night with her Girl Scout troop, so when Kate took her off to the science museum for the overnight, I took The Pip to the theater. The non-spoiler review of the movie is: It’s too slow and talky for a six-year-old like The Pip, but visually spectacular, as you would expect from the trailer.

I also re-read the book recently, largely because of the movie trailers, so what follows (after a bit of spoiler space) will be a comparison of the two.

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I went back and re-read the book because the first trailers for the movie were so visually sumptuous, and that was not my memory of the book at all. I didn’t think I could’ve missed such a spectacular feast of color and grand sweep of landscape, but, you know, it had been something like 35 years since I read the book, and I can be kind of oblivious, so maybe…

In this case, at least, my memory turned out to be right. It’s really not a book with spectacular visuals. There’s one sequence where Mrs. Whatsit transforms and they fly around a cool planet, but the bulk of the book is in very ordinary settings.

Sadly, while my memory was right about that point, it was wrong about a lot of the rest of the book. While I remember loving the book and its sequels (especially A Swiftly Tilting Planet), this really didn’t age well for me. The writing is very clumsy in places, the characters speak like no human child has ever spoken (this is intentional with respect to Charles Wallace, but the relatively normal Meg and Calvin have such awkward dialogue as well that it’s almost hard to tell), and the pacing is weirdly erratic, lingering over scenes that really don’t deserve it, then rushing through the conclusion.

In a lot of ways, that’s a good thing for the filmmakers, because it gives them a lot of freedom to tweak the look, and room to improve. Having real faces to go with the story helps– Meg and Calvin are still saddled with some rather leaden dialogue, but the young actors (Storm Reid and Levi Miller) do everything humanly possible to put it across, and mostly succeed. I’m not sure about some of the material added to even out the pace– the fall-and-rescue in the sky of Uriel, say, or the bit where they’re chased through the woods by a storm monster– but it basically worked.

A few of the other changes, though, I think actually undercut some of the things that worked well in the book. In the book, Mrs. Whatsit appears as a “tramp,” a frumpy old woman wearing multiple layers of clothes, and Mrs. Who comes off as grandmotherly. This fits well with the theme of finding strength in unlikely places, and also puts a different spin on the initial interactions with them.

The “Misses” in the movie are all fabulously glamorous from the very start, even if Mrs. Whatsit comes off as not all there, and that, to me, is a choice that doesn’t really fit. Especially not the decision to make Mrs. Which a towering Oprah with glittery make-up. That aesthetic decision, while undoubtedly a blast for the art directors, goes against a lot of what was good from the book. When the characters are so glamorous and obviously supernatural from the very start, it doesn’t require much of a leap of faith to go with them, and the fact that they’re never particularly hidden makes it harder to see why they would want anything to do with Meg.

To some extent, this is probably because the books are explicitly Christian in their approach– to a greater degree than I remembered– while the movie is trying to side-step that a bit. The whole strength-in-apparent-weakness thing is of a piece with the particular Christian ethic of L’Engle’s work, as is the “gift” of Meg’s “faults.” Neither of those sits as easily with a gigantic glittering Oprah grandly speechifying about finding “warriors” and Mrs. Whatsit disparaging Meg for three-quarters of the movie.

I also don’t know that the movie’s showier version of Camazotz works as well. The scene where all the children on a suburban street are bouncing balls perfectly in unison is probably the standout image of the book, but it works in part because Camazotz has the superficial appearance of something wholesome, and it takes them a moment to realize that something is off. The movie overplays the menace of the scene from the very start, in part because the rapid scene shifts make it clear that nothing there can possibly be good. Having the one child who’s a bit off with the bouncing (and his terrified mother) is also important to the scene in the book, but wholly absent from the film, and I think that loss hurts.

(Also, putting my physics-nerd hat on, the technobabble scenes at NASA are excruciating. The attempts to inject science in the book are also awkward, but there they at least have the excuse that it’s all from the kid point-of-view. The decision to show a bit of the adult perspective makes some sense for the film, but oh, my God, are those scenes bad from the perspective of someone a professional physicist…)

Anyway, this is probably overthinking things to a significant degree. It’s a movie adaptation of a book for kids, so I’m not really the target audience. Sadly, neither was The Pip, who’s a bit too young to be interested in the middle-school social issues and doesn’t quite have the attention span for the talkier bits of the plot. It would’ve been nice to have SteelyKid there, because she’s much closer to the target audience. But, you go to the movies with the kids you have, not the kids you wish you had…

I think Timothy Burke from Swarthmore is one of the best and smartest old-school academic bloggers around. He doesn’t post all that often, but he reliably posts thoughtful stuff– even when I don’t agree with him, he always makes me think.

Such as, for example, in yesterday’s post about the limits of a reductionist approach to “social problems.” I have a lot of sympathy for this view, and I agree that there are many cases where attempting to apply single-factor social-science methods to complex problems is a waste of time at best, and counterproductive at worst. This is only partly because a lot of social science with obvious applications to policy matters is garbage– in many cases, I think he’s right that the whole approach is flawed.

At the same time, though, I think there are problems with the more holistic academic-style approach he’s advocating. There are things to learn from taking a broader look at context, and so on, but that approach runs a very real risk of collapsing into a certain kind of paralysis.

It’s not a big risk for the specific topic of social media effects that is the proximate cause of his post, but it gets worse as the bigger. Putting current problems in social and historical context is a good and useful thing to do, but too much of that is a problem. The obvious failure mode is, essentially, the procrastinatory event horizon that every writer flirts with and fears crossing, where you get so wrapped up in trying to understand the context that you lose track of what you were supposed to be doing in the first place.

Less directly, context-seeking can also lead to a kind of pit trap of despair, where the current issue at hand becomes seen as the result of vast implacable societal forces that can’t possibly be overcome. When you start blaming the electoral weakness of Democrats entirely on the systematic racism baked into society, you can end up in a place where regaining control of the legislature seems to require Solving the Problem of Race in America, at which point it’s tempting to give up and go hide in a blanket fort in the basement.

This is one of the things that I think is refreshing about the survivors of the Parkland school shooting: gun control is an issue where a sort of sense of futility set in long ago for a lot of folks on the Democratic side. There’s a kind of cynical narrative that takes hold, that takes the routine cycle of brief outrage fading in the face of massive infusions of cash from the NRA is an inevitable part of the context of America, and nothing can really be done. Those kids are impressive because they’re shaking that off in a way that a lot of people who’ve been watching this for much longer can’t.

Both of these traps have the same issue at the core: losing sight of the fact that the point of the process is making policy in the here and now. I’m all in favor of a somewhat more deliberative process than we’ve all too often had, one that takes broader issues into account. At the same time, though, there isn’t time for endless noodling around: decisions need to be made, resources need to be allocated, progress (or lack thereof) needs to be assessed.

And for all the flaws of the reductionist and technocratic approach, that’s the one thing they’re good at: they identify a specific course of action, justified by some relatively public reasoning, and they go after that immediate goal. There are unquestionably flaws in this process– the justifications can be cherry-picked from a vast pool of dubious and self-contradictory research, and there’s a temptation to choose the most easily implementable course of action rather than an optimal course that’s harder to achieve– but the folks on the technocratic side are always aware that concrete decisions need to be made in a timely manner.

The solution to this policy-making problem can’t just be pointing out where the technocratic process fails, it has to include putting forth better options to enable better decisions. Because, again, decisions need to be made and resources need to be allocated, and those things need to be done now.

This also means promoting specific short-term policies that have a chance of being implemented in the near-ish future. One of the most infuriating strategies of academics and some online activists in policy debates is to define a grand, big-context goal– we need to abolish the Electoral College, or repeal the second amendment– without any hint of a plan for how we might get from here to there. Grand reforms are a great long-term goal, but you get there by a series of short-term steps, and spelling those out is an essential part of the process.

This kind of soaring vagueness is sometimes merely a matter of a kind of political naivete, a disconnection from the details of politics and policy. At times, though, it seems more corrosively cynical, a play that allows people to advocate for grand changes that are unquestionably Good an Just, while keeping their distance from any specific policy proposal that might fail in the real world and compromise their standing.

This game where you set grand goals but remain aloof from actual policy-making is everywhere in academia, and it’s one of the most infuriating parts of academic politics. Every faculty has That Professor (sometimes several of them), the one who excels at denouncing whatever course of action is on the table, and demanding that Something Else be done, but somehow never ends up on the committee that has to hash out the Something Else. And when the next proposal comes up for debate, That Professor is right there to poke holes in it and loudly demand better.

This is also a pathology that I see in a lot of left-wing politics, particularly the online sort– the declaring of grand and long-term goals, while simultaneously disdaining the messy and compromising work of coming up with sort-term steps. This is, I think, one of the reasons why right-wing groups have had so much more success than progressive ones over the last decade or two. There’s a lot to hate about the Tea Party, but I have to give them credit for both defining grand transformative policy goals and identifying concrete candidates to vote for and laws to promote. I hate both their long-term goals and their specific candidates, but they played the game very well, far better than most of the people I actually agree with politically.

I think there’s a sense in which the current political moment is forcing that to change, mostly by bringing people into the process from outside the rarefied debates that have been running for years in liberal politics. There’s a lot of on-the-ground political energy at the moment from people who are less invested in long-term transformation than they are in stopping or reversing specific policies right now. That’s probably the most hopeful development of the first year of the Trump Administration, and I hope those people can bring the concrete action– however imperfect it may be– that we need to move us, incrementally, toward the lofty goals that many have long been advocating but not implementing.

So, yes, I agree that policymakers ought to step back a little from quick-fix technocratic solutions, and take a broader and more deliberative look at a lot of the problems we’re facing in proper context. At the same time, I think a lot of deliberative academics and progressives need to get into the game and commit to backing more concrete and specific policy actions. The ultimate goal is good policy, and getting there will require not only that technocrats be a little more academic, but also that academics be a little more technocratic.

In comments to my post about quit-lit and the impossibility of responding to many pieces these days, thm left a comment (yes, people still do that…) making an analogy that had never occurred to me: in a sense, academics are like athletes or musicians:

What I’ve been thinking about recently is the extent to which we should consider physics, or history, or any academic discipline, to be akin to areas widely acknowledged to be the domain of expert performance, such as athletics or music. Things where success usually involves a huge chunk of one’s youth, in an obsessive, immersive environment. Where there are more with aspirations than there are jobs. And where there’s a distribution of talent that spans orders of magnitude from the most talented and famous to vanishingly nothing for those who haven’t studied.

That hadn’t occurred to me, but there are some things I really like about it. And I especially liked the point about sympathy:

As a society, we have do have some sympathy for, say, the minor league ballplayer who never makes it to the majors, or the cellist who never gets a job in an orchestra. But it’s limited sympathy, because everyone knows the odds.

A big categorical difference between academics and athletics or music is that the moment of reckoning comes about a decade later in life.

To some extent, this analogy hinges on how well you think “everyone knows the odds” applies to a scholarly career. “Nobody told me the odds” is central to a lot of complaints about academia, particularly in quit-lit, and that’s probably the weakest point. Then again, anyone who follows sports at all undoubtedly knows several examples of athletes who had talent and knew they’d make it to the big time only to be derailed along the way by injury, or personal demons of one sort or another. So while academics might not be as fully aware of the risks as they should be, I’m not sure athletes are all that much better informed.

I like the point about the timing, as well, for athletics, at least. It’s not all that hard to come up with examples of people who stuck with the pursuit of a musical career for years longer than they should’ve. Those are interesting cases, because in popular culture at least, there’s a sort of perverse admiration for a lot of those people and their stubborn refusal to let go of their dreams.

Of course, that then carries over into a lot of the arts– we celebrate the struggle of people in creative endeavours in a way that’s frequently problematic. I follow a lot of writers on Twitter, and the nobility of the suffering Artist is a trope that gets smacked down about once a month on average. I suspect there’s a bit of a similar dynamic at work in a lot of academia, and maybe that’s an analogy worth pursuing.

(There’s also probably something to explore in the analogy to art in terms of the original piece that prompted this, in terms of the value attached to the end product. Is most scholarly production best thought of in science-like terms, where each work is a step in a cumulative process of constructing knowledge, or art-like terms, where any individual piece may be beautiful but few if any are truly essential?)

I’m also a little uncomfortable, as always, with the invocation of talent in this. That is, it risks playing into the myth that those who succeed have some special innate qualities that ensure their success. This underplays the role of hard work, discipline, and luck in “making it” in whatever field. Again, as a college basketball fan, I’ve seen countless examples of players who had talent enough to re-write the collegiate record books, who never made any impact in the pros for one reason or another.

Which, of course circles around to another thing that’s frequently problematic, namely telling junior academics to “just keep working hard.” This regularly gets slammed in academic Twitter, almost as regularly as the “suffer for your Art” thing on writer Twitter. That’s occasionally unfair– I think it’s often misreading something that is, in fact, the only practical advice you can give– but then we’re back to the “it’s impossible to respond to this” problem.

Anyway, a good comment, and one that provided some interesting angles to think about. So it’s worth giving whatever dubious signal boost I can by promoting it to a top-level post on a blog that nobody reads…

A recent blog post by Erin Bartram has been drawing a lot of attention, as it’s both an example of “quit lit” (essays about why a person is leaving a particular field) and a critique of same. It’s a really good piece, far better than most “quit lit” essays, and says some thought-provoking things about academia and relationships within academia.

It’s also, as I noted on Twitter, kind of impossible to write a response to, for reasons nicely summed up in the last two bullet points of the screen shot that heads the IHE article:

• Yeah, this is a highly emotional piece of writing and paints with a broad brush and you might disagree with a lot of the ways I’ve characterized academia.
• No, I don’t care that you disagree. My feelings, thank heavens, are not subject to peer-review.

It’s a very raw and emotional piece, and that raw emotion makes it feel like it would be rude to even attempt any response that isn’t just total agreement. Even partial agreement necessarily involves disagreement on some points, which would feel like disparaging or denigrating an honest statement of feelings, saying that the author is wrong to feel that way. And that’s Just Not Done.

This is a thing I see happening a lot of late, with pretty much any emotionally charged topic. If anything, this is a more genteel example than most, in that she acknowledges the likely existence of disagreement and just states that she’s not interested in hearing about it. In many cases, any expression of disagreement is treated as an outrage.

That reaction seems to be a nearly inevitable consequence of the ever-increasing entanglement of personal and political. Every thinkpiece about an issue of broad importance is also a statement of personal feelings and experience. In which case even a “Yes, but…” response looks like an attempt to gainsay those feelings and experience. And you’d need to be an asshole to do that.

So, the very pieces that ought to generate the most discussion by their nature also preclude responses, save by assholes, or those willing to be seen to be acting like an asshole, which may be a distinction with little difference. And, of course, those responses are generally the least useful responses imaginable.

I don’t have any idea what can be done about this, but it seems like a major obstacle to any sort of productive policy-making. Systematic change is undoubtedly necessary in academia and many other sectors of society, but making that change will necessarily involve bringing together people who are not in total agreement about everything, and hammering out some sort of policy that’s acceptable to a wide range of people. And when even “Yes, but…” is rude, it’s almost impossible to craft a compromise.

At the same time, it’s unrealistic to expect people to be completely dispassionate about policies that affect them in a deep and personal way. These are emotional issues, and individual responses will inevitably have an emotional component.

(And please note that I’m not claiming to be personally brave in writing this– you’ll note that I’m very carefully avoiding saying anything about the content of the original essay. If you’re reading along and thinking that I’m doing the exact better-part-of-valor thing that I’m saying is part of the problem, yep, that’s a fair cop. I don’t have a particularly coherent “Yes, but…” response to that piece to share, in large part because I know that generating one would be a waste of effort because I doubt I’d dare to share it.)

Anyway, this seems like an intractable problem. It also seems like a problem that ought to get more thought and discussion than it does. How can we both accept and validate the strong emotion that comes from personal involvement while also channeling that in a way that allows and even drives the crafting of policies that will be broadly acceptable, without requiring complete agreement?

In a lot of ways, one of the best discoveries that’s come from blogging (other than, you know, the part where people pay me to write stuff) was Confessions of a Community College Dean (he now publishes his stuff at Inside Higher Ed, too, but I’m an old-school blog hipster and so always link to the Blogspot site that I discovered before it was cool). I don’t remember how I first got pointed to this, but I’ve been reading him for a long time, and it’s been really eye-opening, both for getting the administrative perspective on a lot of situations, and for getting outside the elite college sector where I’ve spent more than half of my life. (As of last year, I’ve had a Ph.D. for longer than I lived at home with my parents, which is a great “Damn, I’m old…” realization.) He’s really changed my perspective on a lot of questions around higher education.

In some other ways, it’s also been one of the worst discoveries– in the immortal words of David St. Hubbins, it’s too much fucking perspective. Reading “Dean Dad” over the years (as well as a bunch of other academic blogs, many of which I found via his posts) has made me acutely aware of a lot of really bad trends in other sectors of academia. A lot of these are things that I’m personally insulated from by a thick bubble of institutional privilege. But I’m not fool enough to think that just because we’re temporarily insulated from these problems that we’re immune to them, and some of these are pretty scary.

And, you know, there are a lot of days when I wish I wasn’t aware of those issues. It’d be really nice to sail serenely along thinking that the biggest issues we as faculty need to be aware with are things that only affect the elite of the elite, who operate near the top of the various bullshit artificial status hierarchies created by college ranking schemes.

Of course, that’s a terrible idea. I’m fairly certain that I’m a better person for having gained that wider perspective, and for making an effort (not always successfully) to keep the broader realities of higher education in mind. But man, there are days when my life would be easier and happier if I could ignore all that stuff…

For reasons I can’t quite comprehend, a number of the organizations from which I get my news feel it’s critically important that I stay informed about the antics of a colossal douchebag named Logan Paul, who has apparently attained infamy as a YouTube star. I’m not linking to the stories or his stuff, because life is too damn short. Really, the only reason I’ve typed his name at all is that seeing this come around yet again made me realize that I was right about an old argument, and that it kind of sucks.

Way back in the early days of blogging, there was a lot of chatter about how This Changes Everything, with lots of invocations of how blogs were displacing the mainstream media and completely overturning the existing order of the commentariat. I remember seemingly endless discussions and debates about the changes blogs and other emerging media would bring, almost exclusively focused on the journalism aspect.

My take at the time was that the effect of new media on journalism was actually far less significant than the effect of opening up space for other forms of expression. I thought then– and mostly still do– that the specific form that political punditry would take was less important than the way that free and easy creative tools would change the relationship between people and culture on a wider scale. It was much less significant, to my mind, that the Internet offered everybody a chance to be a political columnist than that it offered everybody a chance to create stuff and share it with a potentially huge audience with minimal effort. The idea that anyone with access to the Internet could create anything they want and share it with the world instantly seemed to me to have a greater transformative potential than anything going on in the political-commentary space.

And, to a large extent, I think that’s been borne out. Some political punditry has sifted to new-media spaces from more traditional outlets, but more than that, the brave new-media world of bloggers mostly got co-opted into fairly traditional pundit channels, drawing regular paychecks for writing vapid opinion pieces in a form that would be more or less recognizable to a journalist from the 1970’s, though he might need his grandkids’ help in getting to the columns in question.

The changes to arts and entertainment, though, seem vastly greater to me. SteelyKid has a cheap Android tablet of her own, and most of her evening media consumption is not from TV networks (though we go through phases where she’ll get fired up about some show for a while), but rather a dizzying web of YouTube channels of young-ish people making videos that I often find nearly incomprehensible. There are whole categories of “shows”– video game play-throughs, “unboxing” shows where people show themselves opening gifts and putting toys together– that I don’t think anybody would’ve conceived of prior to YouTube making it trivial to put video online for a mass audience. And yet, this stuff draws huge audiences of kids.

Of course, the down side of making it easy for anybody with access to the Internet to create and share whatever takes their fancy is that some people are unbelievable douchebags, and unfortunately their douchbaggery makes them more inclined to make and post nonsense. Which leads inevitably to the steady trickle of “YouTube stars” who turn out to be thoroughly awful human beings. Connecting these people to a receptive audience might be considered transformative, but not in a good way. Which is why I say it sucks that I was right about this aspect of new media…

(That said, I don’t think the fraction of YouTube stars who are walking piles of hot garbage is any higher than the fraction of celebrities created through more traditional movie-TV-and-music channels who turn out to be hot garbage. It’s just that the space of potential YouTube stars is much bigger, and the concept remains somewhat novel, so the absolute number of them who get news coverage for milkshake-ducking themselves is large.)