Stanford University Press Blog

SUPcats

They're like LOLcats, but more dignified (sort of).

The world of academic publishing is home to many unsung heroes—copy editors, indexers, peer reviewers, sales reps (among many others)—all integral to the business of book-making. SUP, like many other university presses, runs a lean operation and as such relies on support networks that often live outside the four walls of the Press' headquarters. Today we express our gratitude for a frequently overlooked constituency of the Press—a group whose importance to our mission cannot be overstated. Today, we would like to thank our cats. 

Our cats are integral to the publishing process at every stage—starting with acquisitions.

Russia’s Tomorrow, Today

As the space for debate in Moscow shrinks, the options for the country’s future look ever narrower.

by SAM GREENE

A view of the Kremlin from the Bolshoy Kamenny Bridge. Photo by Pavel Kazachkov. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The news and the invitation were waiting for me, both, when I got off the plane from London to Moscow. I saw the invitation first—from a long-time colleague, to attend a workshop on the future of Russian politics later this month at Memorial, the venerable Russian historical society and human rights organization. I saw the news two hours later: 17 days after that workshop, Russia’s High Court will hold a hearing on the government’s demand that Memorial be liquidated.

That is the condition of life in Russia these days: two hours in which an invitation takes on a funerary pallor, 17 days in which the world becomes immeasurably smaller. Rarely has the distance between today and tomorrow been so great and so fraught as it is now.

Putin's intolerance of independent rights groups extends even to Memorial, which documents Soviet atrocities. http://t.co/Hk6LSRIdho

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) October 18, 2014

Tweet from Ken Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch.

The Cultural Schism of Climate Change

How science takes a back seat to identity politics in the U.S.

by ANDREW HOFFMAN

"Climate Change?!" by Eric Wüstenhagen. Creative commons image via Flickr.

In January 2014, the Eastern and Southern United States were plunged into extraordinarily frigid temperatures that stranded air travelers, stressed power grids, closed schools, and killed more than 20 people. In all, the lives of more than 187 million people (roughly 60% of Americans) were affected by the record-breaking cold. Meteorologists identified the “Polar Vortex” as the culprit; a large cyclone, first studied in 1853, that circles at the poles of the Earth. And, much to their dismay, they watched it become yet another flash point in the rhetorical war over climate change.

Climate change has been transformed into a rhetorical contest more akin to the spectacle of a sports match.

On the one side, Rush Limbaugh called the Polar Vortex an invention of the liberal left to further promote the “global warming agenda.” Fox News referred to it as the “so-called” Polar Vortex and aired multiple pundits claiming that global warming cannot be true because it was so cold. Under a regular blog called “Planet Gore” (named for former Vice President Al Gore), the National Review mocked “alarmists” for a tendency to believe that “There is absolutely nothing that ‘global warming’ can’t be linked to if you try hard enough.”  Adding fodder for the war, a Russian research vessel became stranded in the Arctic while studying, among other things, global warming. That led Donald Trump to enter the fray:

On Prosperous Sustainability

What’s holding us back when it comes to creating green climate policies?

a Q&A with JOHN ZYSMAN

A certain ennui seems to haunt the climate change conversation—that is, when it’s not being framed as a controversial debate. Myopic politicians are not necessarily the only ones at fault in this; though there exists a sizeable and passionate constituency of popular activism surrounding environmental policy—and global warming in particular—many American voters express ambivalence about the issue. A March 2014 Gallup poll found that climate change was not an issue of paramount concern to most Americans—only 24% claimed that they were very concerned, a decline from previous years. In fact, Americans were generally more concerned about the cost of energy than the quality of the environment, and topping the list of the nation’s worries was the economy.

This post is part of a featured series. See other posts in this series:

Confronting Climate Change

⇨

Taking into account not only this context, but also the history of how new energy technologies have emerged and overtaken markets in the past, it becomes clear that if green energy is to prove itself to be more than a pipe dream in the 21st century it needs to prove itself as an economically viable alternative to the existing “brown” energy technologies. This raises the question succinctly presented in John Zysman and Mark Huberty’s 2013 book: Can Green Sustain Growth?

Their book explores how we can move from merely touting the values of a green economy to actually ushering in substantive paradigm shifts that make sustainability a reality. Below, co-author John Zysman, fields some questions about the challenges that lie ahead.

Satire and Solemnity in the People’s Climate March

A massive environmental demonstration in New York is accompanied by parody.

by ANGELIQUE HAUGERUD

Photo by Elizabeth Stillwell, creative commons image via Flickr.

On a warm September afternoon, just two days before a United Nations climate summit, satire brought surprise and play to a massive public demonstration of concern over climate change. In New York City an estimated 311,000 demonstrators, including former Vice President Al Gore and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, gathered in protest, in solidarity, and occasionally in costume, for the largest climate march in history.

This post is part of a featured series. See other posts in this series:

Confronting Climate Change

⇨

“I spent the day in the key of clown, in the mode of satire,” said activist and performance studies scholar Larry Bogad. Bogad is a performer and strategist with the Billionaires, a satirical activist network I’ve studied ethnographically who use parody and street theatre to protest surging wealth inequality, the role of big money in politics, and what they view as the de facto disenfranchisement of the American electorate. Not since August 29, 2004, the eve of the quadrennial Republican National Convention, had the city’s streets been filled with so many protesters. During that historic 2004 march, organized by United for Peace and Justice and many other groups, I joined the Million Billionaire March down Fifth Avenue after watching media hordes interview and photograph elegantly attired Billionaire satirists playing croquet and badminton on Central Park’s Great Lawn in whimsical riposte to the city’s denial of a permit for thousands to protest in the park. Ten years later, official permissions for the climate march had proceeded more smoothly and the Billionaires mingled with other groups in a family-friendly celebratory demonstration. 

Time For A Post-Kyoto Protocol

To spur green development international pacts need to engage with finance and trade.

by JOHN MATHEWS

A wind turbine farm. Photo by Joshua Winchell. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.

This week in Bonn delegates gather for another conference on climate change—after the UN Secretary-General’s conference staged last month in New York, and prior to the Conference of the Parties under the now defunct Kyoto Protocol meeting in Lima at the end of the year. The Lima meeting is the last chance to formally set an agenda for the Conference of the Parties to be staged in Paris at the end of 2015, where the world will have the chance to create a new instrument to curb global warming.

The Kyoto Protocol was deeply flawed—and not just because the US never signed up.

The Bonn conference is billed as a meeting of the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP)—a mouthful that signals further talk and little action to do something significant on climate change. The “Durban Platform” arose from the Conference of the Parties that met to decide the future of the Kyoto Protocol in 2012, when the protocol was due to expire. The Durban platform was a compromise that saw parties agree that a successor protocol would be legally binding; that it would involve China and India as well as the United States (which had never ratified the Kyoto protocol); that its terms would be defined by 2015 and that it would come into effect by 2020.

Confronting Climate Change: A Blog Series

How do we overcome the challenges preventing us from addressing climate change?

As delegates from the United Nations gather in Germany to set an agenda for addressing climate change, the Stanford Press blog features thoughts and reflections from scholars on how we are currently confronting the dilemma and what challenges lay ahead. See the full lineup for this week’s series below.

Time For A Post-Kyoto Protocol ⇨

To spur green development international pacts need to engage with finance and trade.

by JOHN MATHEWS

Tuesday

Satire and Solemnity
in the People’s Climate March ⇨

A massive environmental demonstration in New York is accompanied by parody.

by ANGELIQUE HAUGERUD

Wednesday

On Prosperous Sustainability ⇨

What’s holding us back when it comes to creating green climate policies?

a Q&A with JOHN ZYSMAN

Thursday

The Cultural Schism of Climate Change ⇨

How science takes a back seat to identity politics in the U.S.

by ANDREW HOFFMAN

Friday

Portraits of the Artists

Michael Krasny offers his impressions of 7 influential contemporary American writers.

Forum host and professor of English, Michael Krasny

“I was mad for literature,” writes Michael Krasny, host of NPR’s award-winning radio program, Forum. These words form the opening line of his memoir—a memoir that traces a life stretching from Buckeye State fraternities to Bay Area literati, telling of Krasny’s coming of age during the heady 1960s and vividly describing his journey from a student of literature to that of a struggling novelist, an educator, and—somewhat accidentally—a radio host.

As Krasny creates a portrait of himself, with his writerly struggles, his love of literature, and his quest—always—to make himself in the image of his role model, 3-time National Book Award winner, Saul Bellow, he also offers portraits of the many poets, playwrights, authors, and essayists with whom he crossed paths over the course of his career. Punctuating the chapters of his life, Krasny offers commentaries and observations on some of the leading literary luminaries of the century—from Joan Didion to V.S. Naipul—exceptional writers and thinkers, who had occasion to step into his studio and under his inquiring gaze. 

Tonight at the Bankhead Theater in Livermore, Michael Krasny will share some of his insights and behind-the-scenes accounts of a life enamored with literature and studded with celebrity authors. In anticipation of this event, gathered below, are a handful of portraits of some of the most influential contemporary American writers, as described by Krasny in his biography, Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life.

The Specter of Capital in Cosmopolis

The allegorical import behind Don DeLillo's 2003 novel.

by JOSEPH VOGL

A screen capture from the 2012 film adaptation of Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis.

It happened in New York on an April day in the year 2000. The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were still standing. The American economy had been growing non-stop for more than a hundred months; the Dow Jones Industrial Index had just climbed above 11,000 points to reach an all-time high, while electronic trade on the NASDAQ was rally­ing steadily. After a sleepless night, a twenty-eight-year-old billionaire fund man­ager decides to leave his apartment on Manhattan’s East Side to go to a hairdresser on the shabby West Side, his part of town as a child. He rides down in one of the private elevators and climbs into his white armor-plated stretch limousine and heads to Forty-seventh Street, passing one high-rise apartment building after another. As the night wears on, our protagonist gets caught up in a series of adventures and compli­cations that may rightly be called an odyssey.

With this strange story, Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel takes us right into the arena of the modern financial market.

On the way, the fund manager meets his wife and one or other of his mistresses. There is a report that the IMF director has been mur­dered, and likewise a Russian oligarch, a media entrepreneur, who had been a friend of this young billionaire. Crawling through the traffic, the limousine crosses Park and Madison Avenues, drives through the old Jewish neighborhood and reaches the Broadway theater district, only to be trapped in the chaos of an anti-globalization protest. A bomb explodes at the entrance to an investment bank; as a young man sets himself on fire, our speculator looks on, unaware that he himself will soon fall vic­tim to a pie attack. Suddenly, and for no particular reason, he kills his chief of security and reaches his childhood hairdresser’s near the docks. Then, equally inexplicably and abruptly, he leaves the hairdresser, gets involved with three hundred naked extras in a late-night film shoot, and coincidentally runs into his wife for the last time. An ex-colleague is waiting for him in a deserted ruin, and this man, he must finally under­stand, will be his murderer.

Botching the 8th Amendment

Does the death penalty constitute "cruel and unusual" punishment?

by AUSTIN SARAT

Lethal injection room. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.

2014 has been an extraordinary year for America’s death penalty. From the near miss abolition in New Hampshire to a California judge declaring the state’s death penalty unconstitutional; from a series of high profile botched executions to the April publication of a study estimating that 340 people may have been put to death unjustly since 1973 (a study, tellingly followed by the exoneration of two death row inmates)—capital punishment has been very much in the headlines. President Obama has even acknowledged that “In the application of the death penalty in this country, we have seen significant problems—racial bias, uneven application of the death penalty, you know, situations in which there were individuals on death row who later on were discovered to have been innocent because of exculpatory evidence. And all these, I think, do raise significant questions about how the death penalty is being applied.”

Comments like those of the president, headlines like the ones we’ve seen this year, indicate the turmoil that has come to surround the death penalty. Of late it seems the conversation about capital punishment has taken a sharply different direction. More and more Americans seem to be asking not what the death penalty does for us but rather what the death penalty is doing to us and to some of our most cherished values.

A New Era of Political Exclusion

Should wealth be permitted to amplify individuals' democratic participation?

by TIM KUHNER

In 1972, milk producers pledged $2 million to the reelection campaign of sitting president, Richard Nixon. In response, Nixon’s administration provided price supports worth over two hundred times that amount. Clement Stone, Nixon’s top individual campaign contributor, also gave $2 million. Meanwhile, the average contribution of Nixon’s largest ten donors was $400,000 each. The record from the Watergate Scandal documents the corruption that resulted, including the selling of ambassadorships and public acts to large campaign contributors. Never once since Watergate had it been legal for any single donor to donate such large sums to candidates and party committees—until this April that is.

Going forward, an ever-tinier sliver of wealthy Americans will control the financing of campaigns and political parties.

Handed down on April second of this year, McCutcheon v. FEC strikes down the federal limit on the total amount of money that any particular donor could give to candidates, PACs, and party committees. The Federal Election Campaign Finance Reform Act— Congress’ response to the Watergate Scandal—prohibits any donor from giving more than $5,200 to any one candidate, $32,400 to a single national party committee, $10,000 to any state or local party committee, and $5,000 to any particular PAC. Beyond those “base limits,” the Watergate reforms also implemented “aggregate limits,” prohibiting any particular donor from giving over $123,200 total to all candidates, PACs, and party committees.

Copyright in the Digital Age

What do new cord-cutting technologies mean for copyright law?

by JESSICA SILBEY

Aereo's digital antennae allow subscribers to stream broadcasts transmitted over public airwaves.

In the newest iteration of DVR technology, Aereo—a newly launched tech company in New York City—has come under fire for selling a service that allows subscribers to watch television programs over the Internet. Aereo’s unique business model consists of leasing antennae to subscribers who can then retransmit television broadcasts (hours or even just seconds after their original air-time) to their internet-enabled devices, whether a laptop, tablet, or smartphone. As of 2012 the service offered the retransmission of programming from twenty-eight channels, including all major broadcast channels. 

Alarmed by this latest innovation in the cord-cutting online TV trend, a slew of broadcasters, including such heavy-hitters as CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox, sued the nascent company for copyright infringement. They construe Aereo’s business model as analogous to that of a cable company—as a redistribution channel for media to the public—the only problem is, unlike the cable company, Aereo does not pay a license to television producers or broadcasters to retransmit that media, and in their view, is in violation of their copyright claims. Aereo, however, argues that its service is more akin to existing DVR, VCR, and DVD technologies—other equipment-based technologies whose “record” and “play” functions, under the current law, do not constitute copyright infringement.