Between the ages of 16 and 26, male development often evolves and explodes into such problematic behavior as binge drinking, fraternity hazing, and female-directed abuse—particularly on college campuses.  To better understand these trends, Michael Kimmel, Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook University and leading gender scholar, has just published Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. Drawing from hundreds of interviews with 16-to-26-year-olds across the country—and traversing locales from high schools to frat houses to sports bars—Guyland is a riveting look inside the intriguing incubators of modern manhood.

Kimmel is the author of several popular and acclaimed Oxford textbooks, including Manhood in America, Second Edition, which provides an engaging cultural history of masculinity by examining such cultural constructs as advice books, magazine columns, political pamphlets, and popular novels and films. In addition, he is author of the best-selling The Gendered Society, Third Edition; coeditor of The Gendered Society Reader, Third Edition , and Sexualities: Identities Behaviors, and Society; and editor of Classical Sociological Theory, Second Edition .  Below is an excerpt from the epilogue of Manhood in America which put Kimmel on the path to deconstructing Guyland. Be sure to tune in to the Today show (NBC) on Wednesday, August 27th to see Kimmel talk about Guyland.  He will also read from Guyland on Tuesday, September 9th at 7:00 PM at the Borders Store at Columbus Circle.

The presidential election of 2004 revealed a nation deeply divided about politics, war, and economic issues. Red and blue states possess different visions of what America is and what America should be. And it’s equally true that there are two disparate visions of American masculinity. As this new century unfolds, the pace of change accelerates, and the world grows ever more integrated, it remains to be seen what ideals of manhood will prevail both in the short run and in the longer run.

Personally, I believe that in the twenty-first century, we need a different sort of manhood, a “democratic manhood.” The manhood of the future cannot be based on obsessive self-control, defensive exclusion, or frightened escape. We need a new definition of masculinity in this new century: a definition that is more about the character of men’s hearts and the depths of their souls than about the size of their biceps, wallets, or penises; a definition that is capable of embracing differences among men and enabling other men to feel secure and confident rather than marginalized and excluded; a definition that is capable of friendships based on more than common activities (what among toddlers is called “parallel play”) or even common consumer aesthetics; a definition that centers on standing up for justice and equality instead of running away from commitment and engagement.

We need men who truly embody traditional masculine virtues, such as strength, a sense of purpose, a commitment to act ethically regardless of the costs, controlled aggression, self-reliance, dependability, reliability, responsibility—men for whom these are not simply fashion accessories but come from a deeply interior place. But now these will be configured in new and responsive ways. We need men who are secure enough in their convictions to recognize a mistake, courageous enough to be compassionate, fiercely egalitarian, powerful enough to empower others, strong enough to acknowledge that real strength comes from holding others up rather than pushing them down and that real freedom is not to be found in the loneliness of the log cabin but in the daily compromises of life in a community.

Recall again the postscript to that vicious campaign of 1840. Taking the oath of office on one of the most bitterly cold days in the entire nineteenth century, William Henry Harrison refused to wear a topcoat lest he appear weak and unmanly. He caught pneumonia, was immediately bedridden, and died one month later—the shortest term in office of any president in our history. Believing your own hype may be dangerous for your health let alone the health of the nation.

The deep divisions between red and blue America parallel the deep divisions in red and blue gender politics. On the one hand, it appears that about half the country subscribes to older, more traditional notions of masculinity; the other half subscribes to a version that is more protean and responsive to social change. While it’s surely a caricature to suggest that one side swills burgers and beer (not microbrew) while watching NASCAR and the other sips chardonnay and nibble imported brie, every cultural arena does present us with a variety of images from which to choose. The increased polarization of the nation does lead these images to equally become more polarized.

So, for example, where once Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant could capture the same audiences as Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum, today one is unlikely to find many fans of the fey Leonardo di Caprio or the earnest Toby Maguire at a film starring The Rock or Vin Diesel. Yet these new iterations of the last action hero are cartoons of hypermasculine inarticulateness; they make Arnold Schwarzenegger or Bruce Willis seem positively emotional. And their young male audiences are as likely to laugh at their verbal grunting as they are to marvel at the special effects.

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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com.  In the article below he looks at Senator Barack Obama. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

The talk of town these days is that Senator Barack Obama is either just too cerebral, or refreshingly so.

Assessing the Senator’s weak performance at the Saddleback Faith Forum, Michael Gerson wrote in the Washington Post, “Obama was fluent, cool and cerebral — the qualities that made Adlai Stevenson interesting but did not make him president. ” Yet to others, cerebral is good. “Obama’s cool, cerebral style may be just what we need,” wrote Eleanor Clift of Newsweek.

It has occurred to me that people who agree or disagree with my thesis about The Anti-intellectual Presidency have tended to be divided on the question of whether or not a president’s political judgment should be based on intellection or intuition. This division may appear to some to map crudely along partisan lines: some liberals and Democrats tend to value reliance on the intellect; some conservatives and Republicans prioritize instinct. I think there is more agreement than meets the eye.

Insofar as there is a partisan disagreement, populist Republicans are probably right that as a general political rule, visceral trumps cerebral. The Obama campaign is starting to recognize this, with their choice of vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden, someone who speaks with passion and sometimes, apparently, without much prior thought.

But I don’t think many people are against intellection as a method for decision-making. It is surely a strawman argument that President Bush does no thinking and that Karl Rove was the brain behind his decisions. The key is that Bush pulls off the semblance of intellectual diffidence, even though he must do a lot of thinking behind the scenes. Like others have said of President Dwight Eisenhower, President Bush has mastered the highest political art that conceals art itself.

Now, there is still an argument to be made for judgment to be based on intuition rather than intellection, but it is a weak one. “Go with your gut” may be a familiar refrain, but even if intuition is less error-prone than intellection, there is one reason that recommends against its excessive use. Intuition is non-falsifiable. No one can prove what he feels in his or her gut. So when President Bush told us that he looked into Vladamir Putin’s eyes and saw a soul, we could only take his word for it that he saw what he saw. We couldn’t test the claim; we couldn’t even debate it. This can’t be what democracy is about, because democracy is conducted with the deliberation of public reasons, not the unilateral assertion of private emotions.

If I am correct, then no one disagrees with the importance of intellection as a decision-making method, even as there is disagreement on the political utility of projecting or hiding such intellection. The disagreement is about the image, but we can scarcely deny the importance of the process of intellection. Because they have failed to make this distinction between image and process, those who disagree with the appearance of intellection have also wrongly concluded that the process of intellection should have no place in leadership.

Anti-intellectualism is politically powerful, but it is in the end self-defeating. Suppose I feel in my gut that intellection is key to decision-making. How will someone who disagrees with my gut instinct prove my intuition wrong? Only by argument, debate, intellection.

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David Domke is Professor of Communication and Head of Journalism at the University of Washington.  Together with Kevin Coe he wrote The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America. To learn more about the book check out their handy website here, to read more posts by Domke and Coe click here. In the post below Domke examines the role of race in the Presidential election.

The consensus among political journalists and pundits is that if race becomes a salient matter in the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama is in trouble. The thinking goes something like this: if white voters are reminded that Obama is black, or start to think through a racial prism, the nation’s first African American major-party presidential candidate will lose.

In the words of NBC News political director Chuck Todd: “Anytime race is THE topic du jour in the campaign, it’s a bad day for Obama. Period.”

I disagree.

Let’s review the three most racialized moments in the campaign.

First there was the tit-for-tat in late January, as the Democratic Party approached the South Carolina primary. Obama had won the Iowa caucuses, Clinton had won in New Hampshire and Nevada, and in the days before the Palmetto State’s voting, the Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns traded accusations that each was bringing up race for political advantage. When Obama won a landslide victory, Bill Clinton dismissed it as Jesse Jackson redux, drawing significant criticism for the comparison. Was Obama damaged by all of this? Not hardly. Bill Clinton, however, has yet to recover.

Next there was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright remix of God bless America, in which Wright presented an image of an angry-at-America, angry-at-whites black man. The political and media punditry quickly sounded the death knell for Obama’s candidacy, and indeed Obama sank in the polls. The Gallup Daily Tracking Poll in mid-March showed him leading Hillary Clinton 50% to 44% before the Wright videos emerged, and five days later it was Clinton up 49% to 42%. But within days Obama was back in the lead, following his profoundly adult speech on race in Philadelphia.

Most recently we had the he said-he said showdown between John McCain’s and Obama’s campaigns, beginning with McCain’s “Celebrity” advertisement linking Obama with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Some say that tying Obama to young, sexualized white women was an attempt to prime racial stereotypes about black men. For his part, Obama said that the McCain campaign was trying to tell everyone that Obama “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills.” The Obama side later acknowledged it was a ham-handed attempt to highlight race without saying so explicitly.

The McCain camp immediately jumped on it, saying that it was the Obama camp who was playing the “race card.” Sensing an advantage, the McCain campaign has subsequently gone all-in with its advertising strategy, and has now released a web advertisement that declares “Hot chicks love Obama.” ABC News’ Jake Tapper put the count of white women at a minimum of 4. Subtle it ain’t.

Since the McCain-Obama back-and-forth began, the Gallup Daily Tracking poll has shown an interesting pattern. On July 30, when the Celebrity ad was released by the McCain campaign, Obama led McCain 45% to 44%. On each of the following two days the candidates tied at 44%, but nearly every day since Obama has gained ground—and as of Wednesday he led, 48% to 42%. If Obama was hurt by the racial dynamics, these numbers don’t show it.

So how to explain all of this?

I’ll offer two lines of argument.

1. Obama is hurt by race when it is a below-the-radar subtext, but he benefits when it is brought explicitly into the light of day. This is exactly what research in political psychology suggests: that only subtle, implicit racial messages work in today’s U.S. politics. The evidence suggests that most Americans don’t want to act upon their embedded racial prejudices, so when these biases become apparent to them, voters take intentional steps to act differently.

In South Carolina, Bill Clinton’s claims that Obama’s race helps him among black voters and Clinton’s reference to Jesse Jackson made race explicit, and subsequently Obama benefited. With Jeremiah Wright, Obama was hurt in polls when people simply saw Wright’s rants, but then Obama bounced back after his “More Perfect Union” speech directly addressed racial divisions. And in the aftermath of the salvos with the McCain camp two weeks ago, the news media are now giving closer scrutiny to the racial dynamics of the campaign. Such scrutiny, this pattern suggests, will help Obama.

2. There are two political groups that are determined that Obama will not suffer the same fate as Democratic Party nominee Michael Dukakis in 1988, when the George H. W. Bush campaign rode the infamous “Willie Horton” ad to victory.

The first are African American voters, whose support for Obama is at unprecedented levels for a Democrat. In response to the Wright flap, for example, media reports suggested that blacks often rallied to Obama’s side.

Second, the “swiftboat” experiences of John Kerry in 2004 has put the Obama campaign and supporters on high-alert against what it considers unfair criticisms, subtle or otherwise. The Obama campaign launched its site in June, “Fight the Smears,” and on Wednesday Kerry himself launched a site, “Truth Fights Back.” Both of these sites, ironically, draw upon Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign’s war-room approach of instant responses. These kinds of tactics ensure that the Obama campaign will weigh in quickly with its viewpoints, and can go on the offense whenever race comes up. That makes certain that they’re significant players in defining the debate.

These factors have made race a complex factor in this presidential campaign—which is as we might expect, given its deep, embedded, and often-contradictory positioning in American culture at large. The evidence simply doesn’t suggest that Obama is always hurt when race is part of the campaign. In fact, it appears to be exactly the opposite, so far.

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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com.  In the article below he reflects on the candidates actions at the Faith Forum. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

Watching John McCain at the Faith Forum with Pastor Rick Warren, one could come away thinking that he is in full pander mode. The party maverick in him has been fully exorcised. Now he delivers the punch lines, one after another. General Patraeus is his hero, activist judges should not be on the bench, life begins at conception. For fellow partisans, he delivered a conservative homerun; this weekend. Many wise political observers concur that McCain was ruthlessly on message, and Obama was congenial, though a little too thoughtful.

For one reason, this was to be expected. McCain was with a sympathetic audience, so he could deliver the lines they wanted to hear without qualms. Comfortable as Obama purports to be with his faith, he is a Democrat, and every Democrat must equivocate before an evangelical audience.

But, it could still be asked - why was McCain so dedicatedly on message? If he already has the evangelical vote (which for the most part he does), why is he delivering the punch lines? One would think that someone who already has his base would be trying to woo the other side. Conversely, why is Obama setting himself up for a difficult, if not a losing, battle? Why is he so significantly less risk-averse than McCain?

Obama is trying, and McCain is securing, and I think this says a lot about the electoral dynamics of the 2008 elections. Obama is going for big game here - he is trying in Virginia and Georgia (all 50 states, as Howard Dean attests), so heck, why not try with evangelicals - and we should not underestimate the either the scope or the riskiness of his ambition, especially given the unsettled score with Clinton supporters within the Democratic party. McCain, on the other hand, is making comparatively only perfunctory efforts to reach the median voter - who, as we know in a two-party system ultimately decides elections - suggesting that he does not think he has secured his base.

McCain is delivering the lines his base wants to hear because he cannot afford another crack in the faltering Republican armor. He may have been entirely authentic in his professions this weekend, but it is still revealing that he did not (and perhaps could not) choose to take the strategic path of trying to increase his lead among independents. Obama’s relative equivocation on faith and conservative issues probably did not impress most evangelicals, but most Americans are not evangelicals.

Many liberals think that McCain was in full pander mode this weekend. Maybe he was, or maybe he was being authentic, but I am surprised that McCain isn’t trying harder to reach across the aisle to coddle the independent voter who may not buy every one of his conservative punchlines. Revealed preferences seem to indicate that he doesn’t think he has a choice. Here’s the danger: for all of McCain’s determination and perceived obligation to deliver an ideologically pure message, it may not resonate as strongly as it certainly did in 1980. Because it’s 2008.

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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com.  In the article below he reflects on the Presidential candidates.  See his previous OUPblogs here.

We like to think that we are agents of our will, autonomous individuals with the power to make our mark on and even write history. Political campaigns operate under the assumption that strategy matters. A wrong word, a lapel pin, a mole on the face, a former pastor, a wife’s comment, even the use of a laptop - any of of these can make or break a candidate.

And so, looking at the polls today, we might conclude that Obama has run a near-flawless campaign, and McCain has made one one mistake after another and has had the worst luck.

But elections are about fundamentals, and the life cycles of political regimes. Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter could have been consummate politicos in 1932 and 1980, but voters were just not prepared to give these men and the parties they represented a second chance.

The truth is not everything has gone Obama’s way this year. He had to deal with Jeremiah Wright’s, Michelle Obama’s, and Jesse Jackson’s poorly worded comments, for instance. Right now, he is still working on finding a cogent equivocation for how the “surge” in Iraq worked but that he opposed it when it was first proposed. But the point is that he nevertheless appears to have cruised through these problems.

I don’t think the fact that Obama is probably a more artful politician than McCain explains the striking contrast in their fortunes as they now stand. It almost seems like McCain stumbles at every turn, and Obama can do no wrong. Even when it comes to justifying his initial opposition to the “surge,” it seems like Obama’s anti-war supporters have already decided that the good news came too little and too late. (As was Herbert Hoover’s decision only in 1931 to provide direct government assistance to thousands of Americans without work; as was Carter’s anti-inflation program in 1978. Incidentally, both Hoover and Carter,
like McCain, were characterized as having been really unlucky too.)

In every election in which the electorate collectively sighs, “too little, too late,” and the standard bearer of the incumbent party keeps running into what appears to be a string of bad luck, then his / their time is up. The question is, will 2008 be the last hurrah of the conservative regime founded by Ronald Reagan that is rapidly losing its legitimacy (as were the election years of 1928 and 1976 were for the regimes respectively founded by Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt), or is the country unequivocably ready to move on? Every political regime, liberal or conservative, like every empire, has its rise, its crest, and its demise. The relevant question is where does 2008 fit in the life cycle of the current conservative regime.

Strategic blunders may not have as much explanatory power as we think. After all, we are usually more forgiving of the boy who cried “wolf” once than when he did it thrice - the political impact of a blunder depends on whether or not our patience has been worn thin. Luck is the error term we put in an equation to explain what will and actions fail to explain. What precedes both will and luck are electoral fundamentals and the life cycle of political regimes.

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Oh the overture- that magical moment at the beginning of play when you settle in and get ready to be entertained. Well, Thomas S. Hischak, author of The Oxford Companion To The American Musical: Theatre, Film and Television has highlighted the 15 best overtures below.  Hischak is a Professor of Theatre at the State University of New York College at Cortland. He is the author of sixteen books on theater, film, and popular music as well as the author of twenty published plays. In The Oxford Companion To The American Musical Hischak offers over two thousand entries on musicals, performers, composers, lyricists, producers, choreographers and much more.

Does anybody remember musical theatre overtures? You know, those medley of songs you only hear now at the beginning of revivals. They don’t write them anymore. Audiences today seem too impatient to sit through eight to twelve minutes of music when they are anxious to get the show on the road. But in the past the overture to a Broadway musical was a glorious thing. They got your adrenaline going as you heard tidbits of the score, sometimes recognizing a popular tune that was on the radio or other times discovering new hit songs for the first time. When they stopped writing overtures for Broadway, somewhere in the 1960s, they took away an opportunity for anticipation and recognition and found nothing to replace it with.

Overtures go back to opera and were standard with operettas before musical comedies found the value of warming up the audience with selections of the score. Rarely was an overture put together by the show’s composer. Usually the music arranger selected what melodies were to be fashioned into an instrumental sampling and the orchestrator figured out how to blend the various tunes together in an effective manner. The best overtures gave the audience the flavor of the show, be it lush and romantic, as with “Brigadoon,” exotic and mystifying as in “Kismet,” or silly and playful, as with “No, No, Nanette.” Perhaps it was “Carousel” in 1945 that signaled the waning of the Broadway overture. Rodgers and Hammerstein opted for a musical prologue to set up the story and characters of “Carousel” and it was so effective that others started to consider alternatives to the traditional overture. In the 1960s, such hits as “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Cabaret,” “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” and “Hair” all did very nicely without an overture. By the 1970s you only heard overtures in musical pastiches such as “On the Twentieth Century” and “Annie.” By the new century an overture in a new musical was a very rare thing indeed. Mel Brooks wrote and recorded one for “The Producers” and it got laughs when “Springtime for Hitler” was heard. But audiences were too anxious to sit through the whole overture so it was reduced to a musical introduction and the curtain went up.

All the same, I still cherish the traditional musical theatre overture and salute the ones that were so potent that they became showpieces in themselves. I’ve narrowed down my favorites to fifteen. These deserve attention because they did what a great overture should do: prepare the audience for a very specific theatre experience. In chronological order, they are:

1. “Very Good Eddie” (1915) A musical rarely done today, but recordings of this early Jerome Kern musical reveal that the great musical comedy overture was already in place by World War One. Like the show, the overture was contemporary, refreshing, and sparkling.

2. “Oh, Kay!” (1926) The number of Gershwin brothers’ hits in this musical make it my favorite of their many overtures. When the mood of an overture can shift from the silly “Do Do Do” to the heartbreaking “Someone to Watch Over Me,” it is quite an accomplishment.

3. “Show Boat” (1927) Kern’s greatest score easily lends itself to a superb overture. But it is brilliant on many fronts. Notice how the somber “Ol’ Man River” is played fast and upside down for the rhythm section. Who else but Kern would do that, knowing most listeners would never notice?

4. “On Your Toes” (1936) My favorite Rodgers and Hart overture because the battle between classical music and jazz, essential to the plot and score, is right there in the overture.

5. “Annie Get Your Gun” (1946) It not only has more hit songs than any other Irving Berlin show, but this overture holds together so well it feels like a medley of the Best of Broadway all in one composition.

6. “Kiss Me, Kate” (1948) Cole Porter’s best score is well served by this flowing overture that easily switches from operetta schmaltz to brassy big band.

7. “South Pacific” (1949) The Rodgers and Hammerstein overture that is the most effective, in my opinion. From those ominous three notes of “Bali Hai” to the melodic romance of “Some Enchanted Evening,” this overture is a masterwork.

8. “Damn Yankees” (1955) Perhaps the quintessential musical comedy overture of the 1950s, this medley bursts with energy and joy. It does what Bob Fosse’s choreography does in the show: reject gravity and seriousness.

9. “Candide” (1956) The original show may have been an undeserved flop but the overture was a hit and is still played in concerts around the world more than any other Broadway overture. It’s easy to see why. The piece is a musical feast.

10. “My Fair Lady” (1956) Although it uses the show’s least famous song, “You Did It,” as its musical signature, this overture is a masterpiece of mood setting and anticipation. Maybe the arranger thought “You Did It” would be a hit. Regardless, it works marvelously in the overture.

11. “The Music Man” (1957) Marches were always a standby in operetta but no other musical comedy uses them so effectively as in the Meredith Willson score. That influence is heard in the show’s rousing overture as well.

12. “Gypsy” (1959) Legend has it that the audience stood and cheered at the first performance of this riveting overture. I tend to believe it because the overture still packs a wallop. In the opinion of many, this is the greatest Broadway overture of all.

13. “Hello, Dolly!” (1964) Jerry Herman wrote a conventional score for this hit show and, just as the old-fashioned quality of the songs are irresistible, so too is the overture.

14. “On the Twentieth Century” (1978) When train smoke gushes out of the orchestra pit during the opening chords, you know some one still loves the overture in the 1970s. Cy Coleman’s music is a carnival of sounds and it’s all heard in this wonderful medley.

15. “Nine“(1982) No one was writing overtures by the 1980s but Maury Yeston used the old convention in a new way: the medley was vocalized by all the women in the cast. Like much of the show, it was a gimmick but one that was very pleasing.

Honorable Mention: “The Fantasticks” (1960). Harvey Schmidt’s overture for this long-running Off-Broadway classic is unique. It is the only theatre overture I know of in which none of the songs from the score are heard in the overture. Instead Schmidt composed an instrumental piece that bubbles with the charm and playfulness of the score to follow.

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I don’t know how I would survive without my mobile phone. Is that awful? Ever since I got my first one when I was at university, I seem to be incapable of remembering anyone’s phone numbers. I don’t have to - they’re all stored in my phone. The best thing about mobiles, though, is being able to send texts. For a punctuality-obsessive like me there can be no more excuses for not letting me know when you’re going to be late! But with only a hundred and sixty characters, messages have to be brief, and over the years it seems that a texting language has developed. This is inevitably bad for literacy when children do much of their communicating through an abbreviated language… or is it? In his new book Txtng: The gr8 db8 language expert David Crystal argues that this is very much not the case at all. In his blog post below, Professor Crystal tells us why there’s really nothing to worry about.

How on earth does one stop an urban myth? Is it possible? The false picture of texting has so taken hold that I’m beginning to wonder. Here’s an example. Txtng came out on 5th July. On the 6th there was a report in Scotland on Sunday headed ‘Professor spreads the word on joy of text’. That sounds good, and the report did summarize quite well the six main points.

- Text messages aren’t full of abbreviations - typically less than ten percent of the words use them.
- These abbreviations aren’t a new language - they’ve been around for decades.
- They aren’t just used by kids - adults of all ages and institutions are the leading texters these days.
- Pupils don’t routinely put them into their school-work or examinations.
- It isn’t a cause of bad spelling: you have to know how to spell before you can text.
- Texting actually improves your literacy, as it gives you more practice in reading and writing.

At the end, the reporter asked for a reaction from the Headteachers’ Assocciation of Scotland. This is what the spokesman said: ‘Because of the rate in which text-speak is taking hold I shudder to think what letters will look like in 10 years’ time.’

The spokesman obviously hadn’t paid any attention at all to the report. The reaction I would hope to see is something along the lines of: ‘It’s reassuring to hear that things aren’t as bad as we thought they were’. Or even: ‘Well let’s explore ways in which we can utilize the potential of texting for improving literacy in our schools’. But no.

I struggle to find an analogy. It’s a bit like someone saying: ‘an aeroplane landed on a motorway a few years ago, and everyone worried about it happening again. It’s a real problem now, and it’s going to be even worse in 10 years’ time.’

To which the answer is: it isn’t a problem, actually. You’re imagining it. Look at the facts before you comment. It’s a risk, certainly, and we need to be alert. But there are no grounds for panicking.

A few years ago, it would have been difficult to say this about texting, because there were no facts. Things have changed now. The research is building up. My book went to press just a few months ago, and already since then I’ve come across further research findings which reaffirm its conclusions. For example, a recent article (in New Scientist for 15 May 2008) reported a study by Sali Tagliamonte and Derek Denis of the University of Toronto which confirmed that abbreviations are far less frequent in electronically mediated communication than people suppose. For every one instance of u, there are nine of you, they found. That’s exactly what I would expect.

It’ll take quite a while to get rid of the myths about texting. The trouble is that they are well established on the Internet. That hoax essay from 2003, in which a pupil was supposed to have bemused her teacher by writing an essay entirely in textisms, is still doing the rounds. Someone sent me a copy just yesterday as ‘evidence’ of the terrible state we’re in. If it was a regular happening, or (more to the point) if teachers were letting this happen, we might have cause to worry. But it isn’t. They aren’t. And we shouldn’t.

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Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry, and will be published in August. In the article below he looks at subversive British music.

London, a city built to stay warm, can breed tension in the heat of the summer and no less so when rock ‘n’ roll reverberates in the streets. When Cliff Richard entered EMI’s London Abbey Road recording studios fifty years ago on 24 July 1958, the idea of British rock was an oxymoron. Only ten years later, almost to the day, the Rolling Stones and Decca would clash over the right to incite open rebellion. Between these two events, British rock went from a naïvely enthusiastic attempt at seduction to an arrogant challenge to the social order.

With a transit strike, simmering racial tensions, and Cold War fears, London in the summer of 1958 nervously sipped the caffeine of anxiety. Cliff Richard’s convincingly swarthy interpretation “Move It” captured the awkward but subversive challenge of guitarist Ian Samwell’s song articulating adolescent impatience. Bandleader, arranger, and producer Norrie Paramor had been seeking an authentic British rock performer for several years, with only minor success. On this day, they would change their lives, the lives of British teens, and the life of British popular music. “Move It” proved that the British could rock ‘n’ roll.

Five years later on 25 July 1963, the Rolling Stones released their first single, a primitive cover of Chuck Berry’s “Come On.” Two years after that, on 23 July 1965, Beatlemania peaked with “Help!” But by the summer of 1968, a different wind blew through London. The adolescent innocence and exuberance that had percolated through the fifties and early sixties was evaporating. The previous year’s summer of love had seen singer Mick Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards tried and convicted of drug possession and temporarily thrown in jail, only to have their convictions overturned when even the conservative Times of London questioned the court’s procedures. A year later, as American cities writhed in the wake of assassinations and war protests, the Rolling Stones sought to redefine themselves.

They had severed ties with manager-producer Andrew Oldham and had abandoned the psychedelic pop that had dead-ended with the album Their Satanic Majesties Request. Earlier in the summer of 1968, American Jim Miller had helped them reclaim their edge with “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”; and now in July they pushed the limits of Establishment patience with “Street Fighting Man.” Proof of a successful return to their roots came when a number of radio stations immediately banned the disk. Mick Jagger hoped that Decca would release their new album, Beggar’s Banquet, on his birthday, 26 July, but the company rejected the toilet-graffiti cover, if not the subversive message of its songs. That summer, the Rolling Stones pushed all the corporate buttons.

The truth of guitar, bass, and drums spanned the ten-year musical expanse between Cliff Richard’s “Move It” and the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man.” From adolescent defiance to civil disobedience, British rock found its voice and articulated a generational challenge.

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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com.  In the article below he reflects on the way Obama and McCain define leadership.  See his previous OUPblogs here.

The world is watching as Senator Barack Obama tours the Middle East and Europe, but the only audience he cares about right now, are American voters, and in particular those who are still not sure that he will make a better commander-in-chief than Senator John McCain will. Foreign audiences are merely another funnel through which a campaign message can be directed to domestic ears.

That is why Obama is bringing along a star-studded cast from the American media establishment to Europe to help him disseminate his message. Even before he arrived in Afghanistan, Obama’s campaign had already received more attention from the media and foreign governments than the sum of attention that Senator McCain received when he visited Europe and the Middle East this Spring. Rightly or not, the media, the world, and liberals are hungry for a message that they have not heard from White House in a while. What remains to be seen is whether independent voters will take to the message.

What precisely is the take-home message the Obama campaign intends to transmit with these visits? Obama knows that he may or may not be perceived to be the the best candidate for dealing with terrorism; but he wants independent voters to know that even as a candidate for the presidency, he is already beginning to restore America’s image abroad. That is why Obama had originally planned to speak at the Brandenberg gate in Berlin, to remind his audience of the historic relationship between Europe and America that has been compromised of late. His of course, is the liberal understanding of global leadership that prefers to negotiate from a position of mutual respect than from a position of strength. Obama wants to remind or convince us that the President is more than a Commander-in-chief but also an ambassador to the world; the President is more than the terrorism tsar but also a leader and role model to the free world. He is attempting to reconfigure (or return) an essentially realist, even macho conception of presidential leadership to a more idealist, cosmopolitan one because only on these grounds can he try to erode Senator McCain’s perceived advantage on foreign policy among independent voters. If Obama can change the job description of the Oval Office to one that he will snugly fit, he wins.

For his part, Senator McCain will and must continue to resist this redefinition if he wants to keep probably the only trump card he wields in this election. This is why, for all the dangers of being associated with a third Bush term, Senator McCain is rearticulating the Bush understanding of presidential leadership, even to the point of caricature. In refusing to speak of a time table for withdrawal in Iraq when even the administration has ventured to consider a “general time horizon“, McCain is proposing a return to ostensibly original commitments pure and unwavering (from which even President Bush appears now to be departing). This is the archetypically conservative perspective that holds that once started, America’s missions aboard deserve our full and unmitigated support. Conveniently, this ideology which explains McCain’s principled commitment to Iraq also melds with his campaign’s claim that he is experienced and trustworthy, a strategy that incidentally was not productive for Hillary Clinton when she tried to play the “experience” card against Obama only because liberals do not assume the wisdom of President Bush’s commitment to Iraq, and they certainly do not accept the conservative creed that tried and tested is always noble and worth preserving.

The reason this year’s presidential election is historic is because more than any election in recent decades, it is about competing definitions of leadership and whether extant understandings of leadership are relevant or obsolete. The risks for Obama are not that he should appear too presumptiously presidential in these foreign visits, but that he should give Americans a preview of a type of presidential leadership they are not willing or ready to accept in our troubling times. McCain is hoping not so much to escape anti-Bush sentiments but to exploit them to say that while even this President flinched and wavered, he shall persevere. This shall be an election about the very meaning of leadership. Let the voters decide.

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Glamour is one of the most tantalizing and bewitching aspects of contemporary culture. But what exactly is it? Where does it come from? How old is it? And can anyone quite capture its magic? Stephen Gundle has just written a book - Glamour: A History - that looks at the phenomenon and answers these questions along the way, looking at everything from Paris in the late 18th century through to Paris Hilton today. In a specially written essay for OUPblog, Professor Gundle looks at who truly is glamorous or not.

In December 2007, UK Vogue published a list of over seventy people it deemed to be glamorous. Virtually everyone mentioned was British or British-based, the vast majority were women and, while there were some actors, many of those listed were aristocrats or socialites. Even Queen Elizabeth II was included. The press picked up on the list and commented on the presence of significant numbers of women of a certain age (from Helen Mirren to the elderly Dowager Duchess of Devonshire). No-one seemed to find the list to be in any way strange. Yet I thought it very odd for a number of reasons. There were no Hollywood stars, no pop musicians of any sort, no sports stars and no footballers’ wives. There was no Paris Hilton and no Victoria Beckham, no Joan Collins or Sophia Loren, no Catherine Deneuve, and no Beyoncé or P. Diddy. In other words, a host of people commonly thought of as glamorous were missing. Why was this? Was it because Vogue considered itself to be above popular culture? Was it because, being the British version of an international magazine, it felt obliged to focus mainly on British subjects?

Vogue’s idea of glamour seemed to be largely one of taste and style rather than razzamatazz and entertainment. This matched the glossy magazine’s traditional role of tastemaker and style leader closely linked to the social elite. Its editor evidently sees glamour as a positive quality to be defended from the hoi polloi. It is not for appropriation by upstarts and publicity-seekers, whether they be new-fangled or old hands at the game. Victoria Beckham, for example, while clearly being linked directly or indirectly to the alluring milieux of girl-band pop, fashion and big-money sport, was probably excluded because she was not regarded as having taste or any individual style.

Glamour depends to a certain extent on point of view. If you belong to the sophisticated metropolitan elite, you are unlikely to be dazzled by the brash label-mania and super-grooming of Victoria Beckham. But if you are a teenage girl your attitude may be different. The same teenage girl would almost certainly not find the Queen or the Duchess of Devonshire to be exciting or seductive. This does not mean though that glamour is an entirely subjective phenomenon without any specific meaning.

It was probably Princess Diana who first muddied the waters. When she married Prince Charles in 1981, she was a blushing English rose. By the time of her death, and following her separation from her husband, she had turned into a woman of glamour: she was a toned, tanned, semi-magical figure who had embraced international fashion and who knowingly deployed her beauty and sex appeal. Supremely photogenic, she was a compelling presence in person and in the media. Although Diana first came to prominence as a fairytale princess, it was only when she stepped outside the frame of royalty to develop a personal allure based on beauty and style that she became glamorous. Her personal narrative was part of her glamour but this became increasingly unconventional.

Historically, glamour belongs more to the bustling visible world of publicity and ostentation than to the rituals of the established wealthy. Contrary to what is sometimes assumed, it has little to do with royalty. The splendour of the courts of Elizabeth I or Louis XIV served to establish internal and external prestige. Magnificence bolstered dynastic prerogatives and was certainly not intended to arouse the wonder and envy of the common people. Even the coronation of Elizabeth II, a splendid event that secured the success of television in the UK, was designed to assert tradition and win the loyal deference of the new queen’s subjects.

The point about glamour is that it captures our dreams and enchants us because it is enviable and imitable. Its exclusivity, paradoxically, it combined with accessibility. Glamorous figures therefore are not royals, aristocrats, and the established rich precisely because they are different from everyone else. Rather bearers of glamour are typically self-made outsiders and ambitious self-promoters. They are people who depend on publicity and who are the projections of mass dreams. The most glamorous role in the twentieth century was the Hollywood film star: the girl or boy from nowhere who was turned by the corporate magic of the major studios into glistening, golden icons whose lives were presented as opulent, perfect, and enviable. In fact, the magazine Glamour, which was founded by Condé Nast in 1939 as a mass market sister to the more elite-oriented Vogue, always featured a star on the cover.

Glamour is not timeless but nor is it a recent phenomenon. It came into being in the era that saw the old landed order dominated by the aristocracy displaced by a rising entrepreneurial class. Whereas Marie Antoinette’s notorious extravagance at Versailles aroused feelings of hatred, Napoleon’s parvenu opulence was centred on Paris and harnessed to the public good. His court was not a closed affair but a relatively open social milieu that prized female beauty and brash materialism. It was Walter Scott, writing in 1805, who first brought the Scottish word glamour into mainstream English and used it to mean a magical power capable of transforming the ugly into the beautiful, and the simple into the magnificent. It was a concept that fitted the modern age of democracy and mobility. In the bourgeois era, the city took over from the court and opulent display became public and commercial. The values of beauty, sex appeal, wealth, theatricality, movement and leisure that form the core of glamour were first joined at that time to create dazzling and seductive visions that were geared to consumption. Glamour took shape as a blending of high and low inputs that unleashed dreams and harnessed aspirations. It was a powerful commercial tool that drew on the buzz of fashionable people and places, theatres and also on prostitution. It was classy but also fast and a touch sleazy. It came to be thought of mainly – although not exclusively – as female precisely because the world of appearances, beauty and fashion was associated in the nineteenth century mainly with women.

For much of the twentieth century, glamour was rare and remote from everyday life. Hollywood captured the dreams of all but it was only with the postwar consumer boom that most people could start to make their homes and lifestyles reflect something of the fabulousness of the stars. Today, many of the things that once seemed intensely desirable – air travel, beauty salons, grand hotels, designer clothes, and even celebrity – are far more accessible. So maybe, by reserving the glamour label for a few hand-picked names, Vogue was trying to restore some of its mystery and rarity. But it is a characteristic of our age that the mass media and mass consumption have shattered many old privileges and hierarchies. By hitching glamour to a local elite, the magazine not only denied the concept’s origins, but was also out of step with the contemporary mood. In the glamour contest between the Queen and Victoria Beckham, I vote for Victoria Beckham.

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