Language arts: In the wake of the 2024 election, Democrats have distanced themselves from the causes of transgender Americans. Many worry that even tepid advocacy for transgender issues alienated the party from working class Americans. Hudson Ozaki Kottman, however, proposes an alternative theory. Voters are not really disdainful of the rights of trans people but rather of the left-wing culture that the discourse around trans advocacy has become fixed within. This discourse, Kottman argues, “is characterized by fast-changing PC terminology.” Constant language policing smacks of purity politics passed off as magnanimity. Kottman writes that such language policing “is an act of signaling” that shows that someone adheres to progressive values. It is no surprise that this struck many voters as condescending, but Kottman writes that “the particular culture that has developed around pronouns is not logically inevitable.” It is the present trans discourse, Kottman argues, that Democrats need to abandon—not trans people.
Declan Rexer, managing editor
Critical perspectives: Ask a graduate student in literature if they’re optimistic about their academic job prospects. They won’t be. As jobs inside the academy dry up, the University of Chicago Program for Public Thinking wonders: where will the next generation of literary critics work, write, and study? This Thursday, April 3, the Program brings together critics, scholars, writers, and editors for a one-day conference on “The End of the University and the Future of Criticism.” “Who is criticism for?” “Can criticism survive outside the university?” These and other questions will come up for a discussion that promises to range from political attacks on higher education to the finer points of hermeneutics. Guests will include New Yorker critic Merve Emry, Point editor Jon Baskin, scholar Michael Clune, and novelists Jordan Castro and Brandon Taylor, among others. The event is free and open to the public.
Noah Glasgow, senior editor
Inglorious war: In December 1942, Eugene Sledge, the son of genteel Southern parents, intentionally failed out of an officer training program and enlisted in the Marine Corps. After basic training, he was designated an infantryman and assigned to a mortar section in K Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines. From there, he shipped out to the Pacific as part of the Mariana and Palau Islands campaign. A committed diarist, he documented his wartime experiences by keeping notes in his pocket-sized copy of the New Testament. These notes later supplied the substance of his classic wartime memoir With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa.
With the Old Breed brings to life the horrors of the Pacific Theater, a sunbaked hellscape where American troops clashed with Japanese forces in vicious battles of annihilation. Writing in plain, forceful prose, Sledge describes the nightmare of close infantry combat in vivid and bloody detail: the terror of nighttime infiltrations, the stench of rotting bodies, the mud and the flies, and the psychological torment of sustained shelling, to name just a few. Without resorting to moralizing or false heroics, Sledge allows the events to speak for themselves. In the process, he shows war as it actually is: in his words, brutish, inglorious, and a terrible waste.
With the Old Breed brings to life the horrors of the Pacific Theater, a sunbaked hellscape where American troops clashed with Japanese forces in vicious battles of annihilation. Writing in plain, forceful prose, Sledge describes the nightmare of close infantry combat in vivid and bloody detail: the terror of nighttime infiltrations, the stench of rotting bodies, the mud and the flies, and the psychological torment of sustained shelling, to name just a few. Without resorting to moralizing or false heroics, Sledge allows the events to speak for themselves. In the process, he shows war as it actually is: in his words, brutish, inglorious, and a terrible waste.
Will Dudley, contributing editor
Strike a chord: In Compact magazine, theology professor Grant Kaplan reviews The Catholic Beethoven by Nicholas Chong. The Catholic Beethoven challenges the “habitual attempts” to distance Beethoven from Christianity to assert that he was a “quintessentially modern” composer. Though Beethoven was not a practicing Catholic, Chong argues that Beethoven’s religious works were influenced by Enlightenment Catholicism—the effort of post-Protestant Reformation Catholics to include enlightenment themes like freedom of religion and “broad faith in human rational capacity” in their faith. In his book, Chong cites the influence of Catholic priest Johann Michael Sailer on Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis.” To “encounter the rote words of the creed,” Beethoven composed music “specifically designed to make this dead text come alive.” And yet, Kaplan argues, Beethoven “had artistic reasons to seek to make a mark in a genre where everything had seemingly been attempted.” As opposed to Bach, who claimed that he composed music to glorify God, perhaps we should not accuse Beethoven’s religious compositions of containing a single motivation.
Elizabeth Eck, editor in chief
Image: Edvard Munch, Melancholy, oil on canvas, 1892 (National Museum, Norway).