Tom Wolfe: Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970)

Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, Tom Wolfe’s fourth book of social commentary, consists of two devastatingly funny essays, closely related in theme and substance, dealing with political stances and social styles in a status-minded world. In “Radical Chic,” Wolfe describes an intriguing phenomenon of the late Sixties: the courting of romantic radicals-Black Panthers, striking grapeworkers, Young Lords-by New York’s socially elite. He focuses primarily on one symbolic event: the gathering of the radically chic at Leonard Bernstein’s duplex apartment on Park Avenue to meet spokesmen of the Black Panther Party, to hear them out, and to talk over ways of aiding their cause. Tom Wolfe re-creates the incongruous scene-and its astonishing repercussions-with high fidelity. But he gives us more than just a wry account of life among the Beautiful People; he also provides a historical perspective on that impulse of the upper classes to identify themselves with what they imagine to be the raw, vital lifestyle of the lower orders.

In the companion essay, Wolfe travels west to San Francisco to survey another meeting ground between militant minorities and the liberal white establishment: the newly emerging art of confrontation developed by young blacks, Chicanos, Filipinos, Chinese, Indians, and Samoans in response to the bureaucracy that grew up in and around the poverty program. Wolfe’s account of the performances of such masters as the Mission Rebels, the Youth for the Future, and the New Thang, and the responses of the catchers of the flak, including the Mayor himself, makes for uproarious farce. But the points he makes about racial and ethnic game-playing in America’s class wars are inescapably valid.

Radical Chic article first published in the Jun 8, 1970 issue of New York
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970
ISBN 9780312429133

commentary (Michael Bracewell, Frieze)

wikipedia
author
publisher (reissued by Picador, 2009)

PDF (no images, altered paging)
PDF (original article, incl. images)
View online (original article, HTML)

Sheila Jasanoff: Science at the Bar: Law, Science, and Technology in America (1995)

Issues spawned by the headlong pace of developments in science and technology fill the courts. How should we deal with frozen embryos and leaky implants, dangerous chemicals, DNA fingerprints, and genetically engineered animals? The realm of the law, to which beleaguered people look for answers, is sometimes at a loss—constrained by its own assumptions and practices, Sheila Jasanoff suggests. This book exposes American law’s long-standing involvement in constructing, propagating, and perpetuating a variety of myths about science and technology.

Science at the Bar is the first book to examine in detail how two powerful American institutions—both seekers after truth—interact with each other. Looking at cases involving product liability, medical malpractice, toxic torts, genetic engineering, and life and death, Jasanoff argues that the courts do not simply depend on scientific findings for guidance—they actually influence the production of science and technology at many different levels. Research is conducted and interpreted to answer legal questions. Experts are selected to be credible on the witness stand. Products are redesigned to reduce the risk of lawsuits. At the same time the courts emerge here as democratizing agents in disputes over the control and deployment of new technologies, advancing and sustaining a public dialogue about the limits of expertise. Jasanoff shows how positivistic views of science and the law often prevent courts from realizing their full potential as centers for a progressive critique of science and technology.

With its lucid analysis of both scientific and legal modes of reasoning, and its recommendations for scholars and policymakers, this book will be an indispensable resource for anyone who hopes to understand the changing configurations of science, technology, and the law in our litigious society.

Foreword by Richard C. Leone
Publisher Harvard University Press, 1995
Twentieth Century Fund Books/Reports/Studies
ISBN 0674793021
303 pages

publisher
google books

PDF

Vladimir Mayakovsky: My Discovery of America (1926/2005) [Russian/English]

Touring the United States in 1925, the Russian Futurist poet and propagandist Vladimir Mayakovsky observed at first hand what he considered to be the model for Soviet technological development. Writing in his typical declamatory style, he found much to celebrate in the modernised, industrialised America of the 1920s – creativity and advancement, a ‘primitive futurism’. But he also decried the social injustices of uncaring capitalism, losing no opportunity to propound his own political beliefs.

Presented here in full for the first time in the English language, My Discovery of America forms a series of humorous sketches, thoughts, jottings and poems, the significance of which resounds from the early twentieth century through to our own times.

First published as Мое открытие Америки in Russian in 1926
With an introduction and translated by Neil Cornwell
Foreword by Colum McCann
Publisher Hesperus Press, 2005
Modern Voices series
ISBN 1843914085, 9781843914082
138 pages

publisher
google books

View online (HTML) [Russian]
PDF (PDF) [English]