What we've been up to

From the new issue non-thematic section: After World War II, the Hasidic Jewish sect known as Satmar settled in New York. In subsequent decades, the group established flourishing, increasingly powerful, and largely closed off Yiddish-speaking communities in Brooklyn and in an autonomous upstate village. In "The Satmar Option: Hasidic Judaism and the Future of Religious Liberty," Rita Koganzon, assistant professor of political science at the University of Houston, considers the history of these communities, the heated conflict they have had with neighbors and municipal governments in recent years, and how they have been represented (and misrepresented) in the press. Koganzon finds in the Satmar an important confrontation with postwar liberalism—one that forces us to rethink what we thought we knew about religious pluralism in the United States.

"The reality of religious life in the twenty-first century, and of the controversies around it, is that religious dissenters from secular modernity remain embedded in cities and suburbs and entangled in the same web of civic and cultural institutions that shape the lives of everyone else. And they aren't trying to escape them. To the contrary, even those who previously sought complete independence from state oversight, like religious homeschoolers, now seek rights of participation instead—for homeschooled students to join public school sports teams, for example, or, in the case of religious schools, for the state to cover costs with 'secular purposes,' like busing and technology."

From the new issue's Notes & Comments: There is a popular narrative about social media. It goes like this: Television dominated popular entertainment for decades but, with the rise of the Internet and smartphones, social media and streaming have replaced it. That narrative is not only incorrect, writer Jeff Hewitt argues in "TikTok Extends the Wasteland," but it also causes us to misunderstand how we use TikTok, the social media platform most popular among young people, and how it uses us. Hewitt explains how TikTok extends and intensifies the damaging language and logic that created what Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton N. Minow in 1961 called television's "vast wasteland."

"The techno-utopians who first championed the Internet-as-opposition failed to understand that television is not just the shape-shifting screen in our living rooms. Nor is it the newest programming on Netflix. Rather, television is a manifestation of what French philosopher Guy Debord called the 'society of the spectacle.' Six years after Minow's polemic, Debord argued that mass media had become the driving force in modern life: 'The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.' Understood in this way, television is not legacy media, but entertainment as ideology—a way of understanding the world through televised means. If the first age of television was the TV set's emergence in the 1950s, and the second and third were the explosion of cable in the 1980s and the arrival of big-budget, cinematic programming in the 2000s, ours is a fourth age of television, in which televised performance is no longer something to be watched but something to be lived."

New Web Feature: It is typically a bad career move to make enemies with those who are at the top of one's profession. That is particularly true when you are just starting out in journalism, a field in which careers are made by reputation. In "Who's Afraid of Barbara Wawa?" writer James Conaway tells another tale from the freelancing life, this one about his assignment from the New York Times Magazine to profile Barbara Walters, then quickly becoming a star on broadcast news—and one of the first women to do so. His profile did not win him many friends.

"We celebrate the night I get the assignment by eating yet another pheasant and discovering who this Barbara Walters is. Living in Europe for four years meant being cut off from American culture, particularly from the morning talk shows and particularly what proves to be a brassy, promotional Today Show ranging from chat about the newest books to interviews with the president of the United States.

"By the time we get the ancient television set to work the next morning, I know Barbara Walters has interviewed such exalted people as Richard Nixon, Prince Philip, and Henry Ford. Eight million Americans watch her every day, and her thumb on the pop cultural scale often means the difference between improbable success and ignominious failure.

"What I see on the screen is a 40-year-old woman with a curiously rigid upper lip and an accent that seems to have foundered somewhere between Boston and the Bronx. Today is in its twentieth year and Barbara's the only woman in television to occupy such an exalted spot. Even I get that this is a big deal."

Read more from the summer issue:

"The Far Invisible: Thomas Pynchon as America's Theologian" by Alan Jacobs.

Johann N. Neem reviews Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer.

Jay Tolson introduces "Theological Variations."

"The Wages of Estrangement: Paul Tillich on Sin—and Paul Tillich's Sin" by Charlie Riggs.

Recommended Reading

From the archives: This past week we released from the paywall Johann N. Neem's review of Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About our Past. Neem offered a critical assessment of the dangers that arise when some of the most prominent historians in the profession attack the political right without asking about the left. The essay was read widely and sparked some heated conversation on social media.

Neem, professor of history at Western Washington University, has studied the role that history plays in how we imagine America—and how it shapes our political culture. For last summer's issue on "The Use and Abuse of History," Neem considered the historiographical fight that pitted 1619 against 1776. Proponents of the 1619 Project make racism and slavery central to the American story while supporters of the 1776 Commission prefer to make liberty and the Declaration of Independence the main motif. Neem argued in "A Usable Past for a Post-American Nation," that this history war hinges on one significant question: whether American history is something we might use or whether it's something we should leave behind.

"Somewhere along the line, an influential group of scholars and educators lost faith in America. They determined that the American project was inherently corrupt and possibly unsalvageable. To be sure, conflicts over American history are nothing new. They have been raging for decades. But there has been a shift in the last few years, and the stakes have been dramatically raised. Today, we are not debating how to tell America's history but whether we need a new narrative that prepares the way for a post-American nation that will better serve our diverse population. A new nation requires a new history and a new founding myth. It also needs to find a new way to tell the story of the past 250 years."