Mini-Blogwatch
Elliot, reporting on the 2007 Winnipeg Folk Festival:
… The best part of the evening main stage session was definitely the last act, California-based Michael Franti & Spearhead. The man was bouncing all over the place and got the audience doing the same, with scarcely a pause between songs. His music is a blend of reggae, hip-hop, rock, and who-knows-what, with a strong dose of social commentary and some spirituality. He told a story about performing recently at Folsom Prison (the first person since Johnny Cash to do so, apparently). The one song, he said, that unified all the prisoners, black, white, Latino, was the Sesame Street theme song. From this he launched into a rockin’ Sesame Street medley. “C is for Cookie…”
Kieran Healy, reviewing the book The Age of Independence.
Rosenfeld begins by asking why American society has seen such a rapid increase in and tolerance for same-sex and interracial couples over the past thirty years. It’s clear to most commentators that much the same thing is happening to the acceptability of same-sex unions as happened to interracial unions in the 1960s and ‘70s. Why? There’s a conservative narrative to the effect that the country is going to hell. There’s a whig narrative that fundamental rights are finally and inevitably being recognized. But why is this happening now, when such public unions were successfully repressed for such a long time? Rosenfeld’s idea is to connect these changes to the emergence of a new life-course stage, which he labels the Age of Independence.
Since around 1960, increasing numbers of young people have left home but without themselves starting families soon afterwards. Instead they go off to college by themselves, and then perhaps move to work in a city, surrounded by people much their own age and, like themselves, unmarried. This is the Age of Independence….
From the point of view of social organization, its defining feature is a weakening or elimination of methods of social control used by parents and their proxies to control the social and sexual behavior of their children….
Police Don’t Overreact to Strange Object.
The fires of Buliisa. An analysis of a herder/farmer dispute in Uganda.
There’s still a chance, given the will, for the Buliisa crisis to become a victory for the rule of law, but it also has the makings of a prolonged ethnic-territorial conflict.