Modernist America

In Modernist America, Richard Pells “ponders the similarities between the austerity of the International Style and the unadorned utility of a Walmart store,” writes Steven Watson in The Wall Street Journal (6/7/11).

The book’s premise, says Steven, “is that 20th-century Modernism was something of a transatlantic tennis game. Europe influenced American culture and America, after adapting and embellishing Modernism, marketed it back to the world.” Actually, he notes, the idea that “form follows function,” generally credited to the Bauhaus movement in 1920s Germany, originated with Louis Sullivan, an American, in 1896.

The book provides “a dizzying broad survey of architecture, literature, design, film, advertising and much else.” As Richard writes: “The new culture turned out to be neither highbrow nor European … Instead, America transformed what was once an avant-garde and parochial project, appealing largely to the young and rebellious in Western society, into a popular culture with global appeal.”

This “was a response to modern life itself. Its forms included urbanization, the speeded-up nature of the news and ever more novel kinds of entertainment.”

While Steven criticizes Richard for perhaps applying too broad a definition of Modernism, he says, “it is hard to argue with his theory that America’s cultural dynamism essentially became the most efficient way for the Western world to broadcast its changing values back to itself.”

Join The Club

Tina Rosenberg explores “how social networks can address some of the world’s most recalcitrant problems in Join The Club, as reviewed by Jeffrey D. Sachs in the New York Times (5/22/11). Her premise is that “the search for status and peer approval is the most powerful motivator of our personal behavior and that it can be employed to remedy social ills.”

For example: “In Jamkhed, an impoverished district in western India, the training of women to become community health workers broke down the normally high barriers between Indian castes.” The newly-trained “low-caste women” earn new respect and, as a result, “the villages change.”

In the United States, Hispanic and African-American students exceed expectations “when they enter an innovative setting that encourages collaborative learning.” As one analyst reported, good grades depended on making friends to study with.”

The limitation is that such initiatives tend to be short-term and tactical, and on a small scale. The group study program, for instance “has not caught on widely in American universities” and the “community health workers … are still not deployed in most poor regions and countries.”

The problem is that “economic and political relationships often trump the interpersonal.” And yet, the author “reminds us that the success of a society depends on the strength of communities, because the development of our best traits … depends upon our close interactions with others.”

Emus Loose in Egnar

“Small-town journalism is where most of the profession’s quirky grandeur lies,” writes Daniel Akst in a Wall Street Journal review of Emus Loose in Egnar by Judy Muller.

The book, according to Judy, “is about a different kind of bottom line … one that lives in the hearts of weekly newspaper editors and reporters who keep churning out news for the corniest of reasons — the belief that our freedom depends on it.”

It’s about “the passionate lunatics who … labor to keep politicians honest while coping with anger, threats, pleading, exhaustion, poverty, and often, instead of gratitude, the cold shoulders from neighbors at the checkout line at IGA."

Of course, there’s the lighter side, otherwise known as the Police Blotter. One paper reported a call from a man who needed help “getting his overweight dog up the basement steps.” Another reported that “someone swerving all over the road near Romero’s Fruit Stand was eating tamales while driving.”

The book’s title is itself based on a report about “emus that escaped from a local farm.” Small-town papers are a place where, as one editor put it, “the future of print is print” … although it’s hard to imagine that America’s 8,000 newspaper weeklies won’t “have to adapt to the digital revolution like everyone else.”