John Brown's Notes and Essays

  Credit... Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The New York Times , July 30, 2021   .  Ms . Villavicencio is the author of “The Undocumented Americans.” Villavicencio image (not from article) from Wikipedia This summer’s controversy over the underrepresentation of dark-skinned Afro-Latinos in “In the Heights,” the Hollywood adaptation of the Broadway musical, laid bare the cancer of colorism in Latinx communities in the United States. The reckoning was long overdue, a pain that goes back as long as our community has existed. And the mainstream media was enraptured. It created what I think of as  the spectacle —  el espectáculo. I haven’t seen as high a demand for Latinx voices since the Pulse shooting. “Latinidad” is the shared language, childhood references, music, food, inside jokes and idiosyncratic TV Spanglish among the Latinx in this country. It is the sameness that unites us no matter where we grow up, and no matter where our parents were from. But the idea of sameness can devastate

"Could he actually have used the government to overthrow the government and become dictator perpetuo ?" [jb - on this term,  see ] image (not from cited article) from --Ms. Dowd's concluding words in her latest (July 31, 2021) New York Times column re Trump and the January 6 attack on the Capitol by his "mob" (her term), " Why Do Republicans Hate Cops ?"

To English teenagers, as to those behind the Iron Curtain, it was clear only Americans could live as they wanted. Roger Bennett’s childhood bedroom.  PHOTO:  ROGER BENNETT Book review by Dominic Green [ jb: See Wikipedia ] ,  The Wall Street Journal ,  July 30, 2021 2:58 pm ET “What do they know of England who only England know?” asked Rudyard Kipling, that quintessential Englishman who was born in India, married an American, lived in Vermont and might have lived there longer had he not had a falling out with his brother-in-law. His point: Great nations make waves beyond their own shores. They have to be seen outside-in, as Kipling saw England from India; or inhabited inside-out, as Kipling did even after finally settling in England as a neighbor of Henry James, who had traveled in the opposite direction, taking notes on the character of both nations as he went. Roger Bennett [ jb: see Wikipedia ] has made what the airline pilots still call the “Atlantic crossing.” This is also the ti

Ride-sharing apps cut traffic fatalities by 4%, a new study finds.  image (not from article) from By The Editorial Board, The Wall Street Journal , July 30, 2021 6:36 pm ET; s ee also Warren Kozak, " Social Breakdown Starts With Skipping a Stop Sign ," The Wall Street Journal, July 25, 2021 4:31 pm ET  The value of ride-sharing apps has been proven in the marketplace, and residents of areas poorly served by old-fashioned cabs have a particular reason to be grateful. Now here’s a remarkable safety bonus: Uber “has decreased US alcohol-related traffic fatalities by 6.1% and reduced total US traffic fatalities by 4.0%.” That estimate comes from two professors at the University of California, Berkeley, who published  an analysis  this week at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Previous studies of ride-sharing and traffic fatalities showed a mixed picture, but they generally examined how the data changed, or not, as Uber rolled into different geographic markets, which is a

Image from article: Richard Foulser/Trunk Archive By David Brooks , Opinion Columnist, The New York Times , July 29, 2021 At least 27 percent of Americans are   estranged   from a member of their own family, and   research suggests   about 40 percent of Americans have experienced estrangement at some point. The most common form of estrangement is between adult children and one or both parents — a cut usually initiated by the child. A  study  published in 2010 found that parents in the U.S. are about twice as likely to be in a contentious relationship with their adult children as parents in Israel, Germany, England and Spain. The Cornell sociologist Karl Pillemer, author of “Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them,” writes that the children in these cases often cite harsh parenting, parental favoritism, divorce and poor and increasingly hostile communication often culminating in a volcanic event. As one woman  told Salon : “I have someone out to get me, and it’s my mother.