Word: bender
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...foreign shopping bender signals a major transformation in America's global economic role. For nearly four decades following World War II, the U.S. did the buying, savoring its role as the globe's foremost exporter of capital. U.S. investment power was so great that in 1968 French Economics Journalist Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber predicted that American multinational companies like IBM and ITT threatened to turn Western Europe into an economic province. Concern about foreign cash flowing into the U.S. arose briefly in the 1970s, when a weak U.S. dollar and the emerging clout of OPEC prompted fear of an Arab...
...Bender, a professor of American history at NYU, has a point to make about the way a class of intellectuals have monopolized ideas. In his view, New York is the only city in the globe that has had to grapple with issues like democratic culture. That is because other cities are either without culture, or too small to mount significant opposition to the intellectual factories known as universities. Bender shows that each New Yorker who rose to prominence had to reconcile abstract ideas with the events of world, had to make expertise and democracy walk hand in hand...
There are major gaps in Bender's discussion, however, notably on the Harlem Renaissance--covered in three pages--and jazz, which doesn't appear in a lengthy chapter on New York arts and music. Nevertheless, Bender generates enough confidence to be taken serious when he critiques modern academia or modern New York City--and in his conclusion he doesn't like the way either of these social institutions is evolving...
Because of fundraising successes like Harvard's own recent $350 million campaign, universities have the money to lure intellectuals to their campuses. And in the process, ideas about society are becoming less accessible to the layman. Metropolitan intellect, Bender argues, is at the same time growing more and more irrelevent...
Putting aside his pessimism, one can admire Bender for trying to defy his own sociological categorization. In New York Intellect, Bender is a historian who is relevent today, and an academic whose writing is clear and accessible to a lay audience...