Tag Archives: February 2025

Education, Essays, Publishing

Essay: ‘This Is A Golden Age For University Presses’

THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION (February 7, 2025): As part of my freelance work with Kent State University Press, I’m spending some of this winter drumming up awareness of Ghosts of an Old Forest, by Deborah Fleming, a retired professor of English at Ashland University. It’s a task made considerably easier by the success of Fleming’s previous book, also with Kent State. Resurrection of the Wild won the 2020 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, judged that year by Jelani Cobb, Daniel Menaker, and Judith Thurman.

Those are marquee names, and my Kent State colleagues got to celebrate at a ceremony emceed by Seth Meyers — not the kind of thing most readers typically associate with university-press publishing. But Kent State is not alone in its success, even among its small cohort of university presses in Ohio. Last fall the tiny University of Akron Press had the winner of the National Book Award for poetry with Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s Something About Living. (That ceremony was overseen by Kate McKinnon.) Ohio State University Press had a National Book Award finalist in the highly competitive nonfiction category back in 2020 with How to Make a Slave and Other Essays, by Emerson College’s Jerald Walter. Just in one state, the list of nationally recognized books from university presses is impressive. Expand out and you get much more, including Percival Everett’s Erasure, the inspiration for the Oscar-nominated movie American Fiction. It was originally published by the University Press of New England. Imagine the world without these books.

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Essays, Foreign Affairs, Opinion, Politics

Foreign Policy: ‘DeepSeek’s Lesson – America Needs Smarter Export Controls’

THE WIRE CHINA (February 5, 2025): Last December, the Chinese AI firm DeepSeek reported training a GPT-4-level model for just $5.6 million, challenging assumptions about the resources needed for frontier AI development. This perceived cost reduction, and DeepSeek’s cut-rate pricing for its advanced reasoning model R1, have left tech stocks plunging and sparked a debate on the effectiveness of U.S. export controls on AI chips.

Select Committee Chairman Moolenaar and Ranking Member Krishnamoorthi’s letter to National Security Advisor Waltz on DeepSeek. Credit: Select Committee

Some argue that DeepSeek’s efficiency breakthroughs mean the controls have backfired and must be lifted. But this view overlooks the bigger picture: DeepSeek’s success in fact underscores the need for smarter export controls. DeepSeek exploited gaps in current controls, such as exports of chips to China that matched U.S. performance despite the initial October 2022 rules, chip smuggling, inadequate oversight on chip manufacturers like TSMC, and slow regulatory updates that enabled stockpiling. 

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Book Reviews, History, Reviews

Book Reviews: “Humans In Shackles – An Atlantic History Of Slavery” (LSE)

Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery. Ana Lucia Araujo. University of Chicago Press. 2024.

Humans in shackles cover

LSE REVIEW OF BOOKS (February 5, 2025): At the close of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the eponymous revenant representing the deepest traumas of slavery’s violence has finally left the house she haunted. After a while, even her recurring footprints are forgotten: “by and by all trace is gone”. She is not simply forgotten but “disremembered and unaccounted for”. Howard University historian Ana Lucia Araujo’s hybrid trade-academic history of slavery makes specific reference to Beloved, the case of Margaret Garner that inspired it, and other horrific instances of infanticide from the Americas in a section that confronts the “combination of motherhood and slavery” as “haunted by tragedy” (323). This is just one example of the way in which Araujo’s book deliberately remembers and accounts for the individual lives, specific communities and broader cultural, social and economic structures touched, formed or devastated by chattel slavery and the Atlantic slave trade.  

Humans in Shackles has four distinct but related aims. First, it aims to decentre the United States and English-speaking Caribbean islands in the history of slavery, arguing that this imbalance neglects, in particular, the place of Brazil in the Atlantic slave trade. This attention to Brazil, where slavery was not abolished until 1888, reveals important archival gaps. For instance, despite the fact that around 5.7 million enslaved people boarded ships on the coast of West Central Africa, and that the majority of these people were transported to Brazil (estimates from the SlaveVoyages website), there are no published first-hand accounts by Africans boarding ships on this part of the coast.  

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Essays, Politics

Politics: ‘Ronald Reagan’s Road To Conservatism’

Ronald Reagan did not read his way to conservatism, as some people do. He experienced his way. The concerns and travails of middle Americans taught him that unaccountable government could be a grave obstacle to the pursuit of happiness, and the experience of dealing with Communists and bureaucrats strengthened his lifelong distrust of overbearing elites.

THE IMAGINATIVE CONSERVATIVE (February 5, 2025): In the autumn of 1948, as Harry Truman campaigned to remain president, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union produced a pro-Truman radio advertisement that aired on stations across the country. The fifteen-minute program had two principal speakers: a liberal Minnesota politician named Hubert Humphrey, on his way to being elected that year to the U.S. Senate, and an equally liberal motion picture actor named Ronald Reagan.

Speaking from Hollywood, Reagan lambasted the bête noire of liberals everywhere in 1948: the “do nothing,” Republican-controlled Eightieth Congress, which he held responsible for the nation’s current economic misery. It was “Republican inflation,” Reagan charged, that was eroding workers’ paychecks while the profits of giant corporations were soaring. In fact, said Reagan, the recent surge in consumer prices had been caused by these “bigger and bigger profits.” “Labor has been handcuffed by the [recently enacted] vicious Taft-Hartley law,” Reagan continued. Social Security benefits had been “snatched away from almost a million workers” by a recent bill in the Republican Congress. Meanwhile the Republicans had enacted tax cuts that benefited “the higher income brackets alone.” “In the false name of economy,” he concluded, “millions of children have been deprived of milk once provided through the federal school lunch program.”

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Essays, Foreign Affairs, Politics

Foreign Affairs Essays: ‘China’s Trump Strategy’

FOREIGN AFFAIRS MAGAZINE (February 6, 2025): In the months since Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election in November, policymakers in Beijing have been looking to the next four years of U.S.-Chinese relations with trepidation. Beijing has been expecting the Trump administration to pursue tough policies toward China, potentially escalating the two countries’ trade war, tech war, and confrontation over Taiwan. The prevailing wisdom is that China must prepare for storms ahead in its dealings with the United States. 

Trump’s imposition of ten percent tariffs on all Chinese goods this week seemed to justify those worries. China retaliated swiftly, announcing its own tariffs on certain U.S. goods, as well as restrictions on exports of critical minerals and an antimonopoly investigation into the U.S.-based company Google. But even though Beijing has such tools at its disposal, its ability to outmaneuver Washington in a tit-for-tat exchange is limited by the United States’ relative power and large trade deficit with China. Chinese policymakers, aware of the problem, have been planning more than trade war tactics. Since Trump’s first term, they have been adapting their approach to the United States, and they have spent the past three months further developing their strategy to anticipate, counter, and minimize the damage of Trump’s volatile policymaking. As a result of that planning, a broad effort to shore up China’s domestic economy and foreign relations has been quietly underway.

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