These sorts of elaborate rebuttals, like the article or the art project it references, aren't that different from the works of outsiders that they seek to prove wrong. It seemingly is the case that Appalachia attracts a kind of journalist-meets-artist who finds plenty of material for a culture-tinged exposé of somewhat-thoughtful poverty and hardship porn, but a curated photoset of Sides of Appalachia You May Not Know is aimed at the level of The New Yorker, and not something relatable to everyday folk in the suburbs or the Midwest. It does little to dissuade the notion that Appalachia still has an odd mystique, which is a disservice to region.
The fact is, Appalachia is largely "just" economically depressed region like Northwest Kansas or the Mississippi Floodplain or the drive from Tucson to El Paso, where most jobs are retail and government and the best jobs are in mineral extraction or transportation or industry, but far fewer than in times past. Transportation is a pain but yet it's crisscrossed by critical routes, and life there is pretty normal for rural America. Really, there's only a handful of areas in the US where you can ride the a boom if you time it right, everywhere else things are just okay. In some places you have fewer options. People try to get by, or try to leave. It's odd how much Appalachia has gripped the popular imagination, and how outsiders and a few well-positioned insiders perpetuate it.
I grew up in the Deep South, a related cousin to Appalachia. I spent more than 30 years in the south. I have spent a lot of time in Appalachia, hiking, meeting locals. It isn’t a stretch to say “I get it”. I read Hillbily Elegy. This piece does little to change my mind about my own view point. There are parts of the culture that are worthwhile and valuable (to me) and parts I can leave quite easily. For me it is the almost resentful pride in their own ignorance of the rest of the country, and even the world, that was so hard to accept. You can paste over that, all these layers of complexity and beautiful mountain vignettes, but under that there are elements that are difficult to accept for me. There is a lot of stubborn pride for heritage that does the culture no good and I never understood it. Also, Appalachia is not unique to most other rural areas, they just have nicer scenery. Poverty is what it is and it does what it does to people. You either get out of it or it eats you. There is nothing romantic about it. There is no great stoic philosophy providing Appalachian poverty with any special resistance to poverty and being mostly ignored by the rest of the country. I don’t know, it isn’t some terrible reality to suffer through, but it is more tragic than anything else. Maybe this is the inevitable view point I have adopted as I have become more outsider to the culture I was raised in over the years. It isn’t all bad, I will still visit, hike, and enjoy the natural beauty there, but the people suffer like any other under-educated poor people do. There is no number of voices and view points that can change that. I appreciate what the author is trying to do, they must surely understand the culture well, but it is a big miss for me.
> Poverty is what it is and it does what it does to people. You either get out of it or it eats you.
Perhaps the people with the compulsion to leave have already done so? Kind of what is being call "The Big Sort", where (politically) like-minded people seem to be congregating to the same neighborhoods:
Something similar happening to the ambition-minded?
(Someone once remarked / joked that perhaps America is so stereotypically optimistic is perhaps all the people who left the Old Country for the New World were probably the more adventurous, go-go types, and those that stayed behind were more chill.)
This is my take. For all the talk of international brain drain, we don't have a narrative for the more local equivalent.
Similarly, we worry about disrupting natural biomes through deforestation or overfishing, but we don't think about sustainability applied to human communities, with a few exceptions (reservations get some attention, though not sufficient attention).
What do we do? For one, I don't think it's hard to make an ethical case for remote first workplaces.
More remote work isn't going to make a significant number of people want to stay in these uneducated, economically-depressed locales. They aren't just leaving for the work, they're leaving to get away from the local culture.
There are generally some more educated pockets within these regions that are actually quite desirable, but lack economic development. These spots, like Asheville NC (the place I ultimately would like to settle down in) are unfortunately quite expensive due to low housing supply and people from out-of-state moving in. But I've got a remote gig now, so I just need to save up more. Personally, I will be happy to be part of a culture that values friendliness, ingenuity, sweet tea and banjo music.
Fwiw, I tried moving away to Seattle, but despite my educational attainment and liberal leanings, I found that I just prefer NC. There's something to be said for living somewhere you don't feel like an outsider. After 5 years in Seattle, I still couldn't lose that feeling.
I've lived in Appalachia my entire life (West Virginia, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and New York).
Although I can't generalize about the people of either the Midwest or Appalachia, there are some big differences between rural Appalachia and some other rural places.
1) Landscape. Due to the difficulty of building roads, some Appalachian places (closer to WV and KY) were extremely isolated until the 20th century. This affected culture, education, wealth, and industry. It's a huge factor in the region even today.
2) Agriculture. In most of Appalachia, you can't have a massive corn plantation. You rarely see a large field of anything at all. Most of the exports are capital-intensive and extractive (mining or timber), and the result is that there's a pattern of wealthy outsiders plundering the resources and leaving locals with little of the gain.
3) Stereotypes. A strong Midwestern accent (from, let's say, rural MI or PA) does not have the same connotation as a strong Appalachian accent (from KY or WV). The stereotypes of the regions just aren't the same, and they do affect people applying for jobs.
> The stereotypes of the regions just aren't the same, and they do affect people applying for jobs.
I've been around motorsports most of my life and I used to see this all the time at racetracks in America. Even in NASCAR country, lots of people assume the "good ol' boy" accent means a person is just a shade-tree mechanic even if they're the most well-educated person in the garage.
Heh, funnily enough, a few years ago I was at a rodeo with some friends, and this was in rural Oregon. One of the announcers was a radio personality on some country station in the Portland area (I think -- something like that, at least).
For most of the rodeo he spoke with a thick drawl, obviously going for the "good ol' boy" vibe.
A few times, he slipped up and spoke with a very plain Portland/PNW accent. It was jarring when I heard it but he went right back to the good ol' boy accent and I don't know how much anyone else noticed. But it came across like it was all an affectation, for the reasons you described.
Honestly, I do this a lot when I'm back visiting relatives who live in the southern US; my neutral accent goes out the window and I add a little twang, speak more slowly, and say things like "thank you ma'am" a lot. It's kinda second nature since I went to school in a rural-ish area (University of Florida) and it makes a shockingly big difference in how people treat you sometimes.
Grew up in WV and return all the time to visit family. This is 100% true. I have vivid childhood memories of being on my grandfather's tractor on a hillside & being terrified that the contraption would roll over.
(He also occasionally herded his cattle by sticking his head through the roof of an ancient VW Beetle. But that's another story.)
There is seriously not that big a difference between the reading level of random comments on the internet and the reading level of the New Yorker, or of the average thinkpiece. Self-styled intellectuals love to pretend that they are writing in a sophisticated secret code language, but that hasn't been true since they quit Latin.
The New Yorker is a classic example of higher level English that is far above the level of “random comments on the internet”.
The typical New Yorker article is CEFRL C2 [1] or ILR 3/3+ [2]. Most internet comments are at CEFRL A2 or so, with some (often faulty) more thoughtful responses at B1 or B2.
Said another way, your median high schooler can read and understand a typical internet comment, but the median high school student cannot read and comprehend a typical New Yorker article.
There are three aspects of writing in the New Yorker that elevates the level:
1. Vocabulary level. Often this is used to add color, and it typically does so well.
2. Complex structure at passage level with appropriate cohesive devices. This loses a lot of people, but makes the article linguistically rich.
3. There can be a great deal of inference and/or tone in New Yorker articles that some folks just don’t get. It will sometimes cause less proficient readers to take away substantial misunderstandings about the contents of the article.
If you try to talk about a New Yorker article in detail with most people, it is not that tough to reach linguistic breakdown.
The CEFR is intended to measure the proficiency of foreign language learners and not measure the sophistication of native language speakers. Everyone that speaks English as a first language would pass a C2 level examination very easily.
The standard ways to measure text complexity in English for native speakers are the Flesch-Kincaid readability and grade level tests. These depend on the length of words and on the number of words in sentences so they're obviously not perfect, in particular they do not measure the use of rare vocabulary or references nor of difficult content.
I tested the OP and found:
Flesch reading ease 53.2 (fairly difficult)
Gunning Fog 11 (hard to read)
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level 10.1 grade
Coleman-Liau 10th grade
SMOG Index 9.6 grade
ARI 9.5 grade
Linsear Write Formula 11.4 grade
Where the references to grade are to American school grades. In other words this text can be read by average American 10th graders without difficulty.
I ran an article from the current New Yorker through as well (the one on Basquiat) and that came out as 11th grade reading level.
> Everyone that speaks English as a first language would pass a C2 level examination very easily.
This is almost exactly equivalent to saying that an average ten year old can read the New Yorker. A ten year old already has their native language down, the rules of grammar and syntax, the accent, the vocabulary, the capacity to discriminate between words with the same denotation but different connotations. There are ten year olds who can profitably read the New Yorker but very few. At least 10% of the adult population will have an absolute score on an IQ test similar to the average ten year old’s.
There are undoubtedly New Yorker articles that a ten year old could completely understand with sufficient exegesis but it’s the US’ premier literary journal and has been for decades. If they haven’t published articles with the depth and complexity of a Supreme Court judgment on some level I will be greatly surprised.
Most people are literally incapable of passing a law degree just as they are of learning calculus. You can write formal logic in English prose instead of using the symbols. The English prose version will be no more comprehensible to an average native English speaker than the one with mathematical symbols.
>This is almost exactly equivalent to saying that an average ten year old can read the New Yorker.
It is not because it is fundamentally incorrect to say that the New Yorker is a C2 level text.
The CEFR is not intended as a scale to measure the complexity of written text for native speakers and/or readers of a language, it is intended as a four part (listening, reading, speaking, writing) assessment scale of the overall language abilities of people. At most, one could say that a text was consistent with what would be expected of a successful CEFR C2 candidate in the reading portion of the test.
One of the reasons that you cannot use the CEFR to characterise the proficiency of native speakers is that it assumes that you can understand texts of a similar complexity in your native language. Most such assessments are given to educated people, usually adults, so the texts reflect that.
Yes, there are people who are not highly proficient by the standards of a native speaker at reading and particularly writing in their native language. Who knows, I may be wrong to think that they would easily pass the written portion of a CEFR test, certainly they would smash the oral portions.
However the CEFR tests are fundamentally not designed to assess quality of education for native speakers. You could shoehorn them into that role but we already have other measures of language ability (in the US often calibrated to grade level) that are specifically designed to measure this.
There are a lot of problems with the way you approach this.
19% of Americans cannot read well enough to fill out a job application correctly.
The organization for economic cooperation and development found that 50% of U.S. adults can't read a book written at an 8th grade level, which is a statistic which obviously requires the estimate of "average American reading at a 7th or 8th grade level" be questioned heavily.
I've seen many estimates that the average high school student reads at a 6th grade level, and only 15% of the country is at an undergraduate level despite 30% of people having a degree.
I don't know where you get the idea that "grade level" relates to grades completed, but the average American is likely at a 5th grade reading level.
Well, I'll admit to not being an expert on the American school system with which I only had a few years of contact. If that really is the case, that grade level of reading ability and number of grades completed is not linked then that is certainly an indictment of the American system of education. I'm happy to amend my claim that 10th graders can read the New Yorker to say that by American academic standards, they should be able to but often are not.
It doesn't change the fact that the CEFR framework is not intended either to measure native proficiency nor to assess the difficulty of a written text.
I'm not disputing that the New Yorker is written at a higher level than the average American cares to read, just disputing the use of CEFR framework to assess the text.
> The CEFR is intended to measure the proficiency of foreign language learners and not measure the sophistication of native language speakers.
You’re right about this, but these are the systems I know, and they are arguably more useful in this context that most of the grade-level models you listed (very abstract, and most folks don’t really understand the level they are based on).
> Everyone that speaks English as a first language would pass a C2 level examination very easily.
C2 is the equivalent of a highly educated native speaker. This does not describe most Americans, even ones with seemingly appropriate credentials.
A discussion I’ve heard about native speakers of English expected to pass a C1 test in a foreign language: “Can they pass C1 in English?” The answer was not always so clear.
> In other words this text can be read by average American 10th graders without difficulty.
These are more like ideal goals for a high-performing Xth grader. I have worked with the vocab lists that textbooks writers are supposed to use — the expectations are very high.
While it sounds like your measurements are more attuned to native speakers, I am not so sure that any high schooler could easily pass a C2 exam. Here is an example C2 practice exercise that doesn't seem all that far off from something you might see in the SAT: https://www.examenglish.com/cpe/cpe_reading_part1.htm
I doubt that the average native English speaker would pass a C2 level exam (even if you only consider the US and UK, as there are many other countries that speak English (for example India). While they probably won't have any problems with the grammar, C2 uses a lot of vocabularity that you won't be familiar with if you don't read much.
> To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.
If you read the whole article and think that Krugman says this housing bubble is a good idea your reading level can't be that good. Too many people did read the whole article and failed to grasp the tone and nuance. Even Arnold Kling had to point out this to his readers http://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/06/defending_what.html
One of the marks of a good writer is how they uncomplicate the writing without watering it down. Krugman is really good writer in that regard. His writing skill was probably a big reason why he became regular columnist in NYT.
That kind of writing can still be inaccessible to lower reading comprehension levels. If you are uncertain of his writing skills, I don't know what to say.
This is only true if you aim to reach as wide an audience as possible. If you are writing for a specialist audience making the reader work to connect the dots themselves has an extremely long history.
> This article is a republication, by permission, of a chapter of the author’s book Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (University of Chicago Press, 2014). The piece provides a beginner’s guide to techniques and devices used in esoteric writing. Among the techniques and devices described are the following: dissembling the true message (sometimes by presenting it as from a disputant, beggar, or buffoon, sometimes by arguing against it in ways that enhance awareness of its truth); dissembling the true target (exoterically speaking of Y when the real target is some other thing Z); developing a compelling argument and then taking it back; textual incongruity (for example, departing from a declared plan); conspicuous inconsistency or self-contradiction; the commission of errors that the author’s demonstrated competence and mastery would not allow (for example, altering a quotation in a significant way); dispersal (dispersing argumentation for a tacit viewpoint throughout the text); expressing very striking or intense thoughts in an oblique or ancillary fashion, such as in a meandering digression or in the notes; meaningful silence or conspicuous omission (as when the text creates expectations of coming to something that then remains unaddressed or unstated); alluding subtly to the writings or opinions of a significant figure; and placing thoughts of particular significance in middle of the text or in the exact center of a list or sequence.
That's really not a meaningful argument as to its merit. In fact, it's so famously not a meaningful argument that it has its own fancy name: argumentum ad antiquitatem.
I don't believe they were making a case that it has merit, only that it a long history and is a specific writing conceit for its audience...which I suppose gives it merit as being appropriate for its audience.
Not to mention that the typical New Yorker article is looong. Way longer than the typical random internet comment. This puts some demands on the reader as well. :-)
From all the US satirical cartoons I have seem they seem rather crude and tame compared to the UK and still rely rather old tropes that always seem to require labelling "oh look its the cat with $ signs for eyes and labelled "wall street"
whereas in the UK a cartoon might make a reference to a cartoon from 50-60-70 years ago and you would be expected to understand the reference with out labelling
So here's an example of a Steve Bell editorial cartoon. He's a leftwinger, in the fairly angry and vicious tradition of British satire, but this is a fairly restrained one:
It's a comment on the pageantry around the 75th anniversary of D-Day, and directly refers to a famous cartoon from WW2, which was published on VE Day by the (also socialist) cartoonist Philip Zec:
The whole genre isn't self-referential, but it's not unusual for leader cartoons to refer to other cartoons, famous paintings, television, or other things.
2. A scale for cartoons would be interesting. The top level would probably require something like awareness of current events, knowledge of one or more complex/academic theoretical concepts, and deep cultural embeddedness and awareness of cultural trends.
The Romances can have hugely brutal nested sentences as nothing.
Would you dare to read Don Quixote in the original and non-modernized Spanish? I think not.
That book mixed a parody of Medieval Spanish and the pre-Enlightentment era one.
The discovering of America put the Church on a lower-closer to the Earth place and became the roots of modern Humanism.
Don Quixote is a pun on the Dark Ages, myth and religion, compared it to Sancho Panza who is a metaphor of the almost Enlightened humanistic/pragmatic folk who doesn't believe on myths and doesn't have crazy religious-like hallucinations on giants.
Trust me, a lot of grammar from the crazy knight is stilL¡l valid today even if looks outdated.
Heck, it already was outdated, as I said Don Quixote was the old fart pun from the 1600s.
English' grammar is a joke compared to the versatibility of Romances. And, even forther back in time, Latin used similar traits.
No, thank you. I studied Italian and French (old, middle, and modern), Latin, and Ancient Greek, though most of that has vanished from disuse.
I'm not talking about the grammar (which is simply different in English despite a couple centuries of attempts to make it fit into Latin), or the degree of nuance Cervantes or Rabelais can extract from their linguistic milieu. I'm talking about the range of nuance that a educated, contemporary speaker of the language has available to them. It is simply vastly greater in English than in, say, modern French.
Yes. My parents taught me. They studied it at Cambridge.
I'm not talking about inflection. English doesn't use inflection except vestigially, though our grammar is every bit as subtle (compare English verb tenses to those of a Romance language). I'm talking about the employment of reference, accent, dialect...
>but a curated photoset of Sides of Appalachia You May Not Know is aimed at the level of The New Yorker, and not something relatable to everyday folk in the suburbs or the Midwest
FYI I'm a Midwesterner and problems relating to pictures isn't a regional trait that I'm aware of. A picture of X is in pretty direct correspondence to the visual experience of X itself, so it turns out pictures are pretty easy to digest! If you're a Midwesterner, you should definitely give pictures a try. If you're not a Midwesterner, it's possible that meeting a few more of them would change your idea of what they can relate to.
> It's odd how much Appalachia has gripped the popular imagination, and how outsiders and a few well-positioned insiders perpetuate it.
Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina are key swing states. That's the primary reason Appalachia gets so much attention. This electoral reality goes all the way back to the war on poverty.
Yes, but the Appalacian contingent is not a majority in any of those states. They just are historically less anti-union than other rural areas (while still socially conservative) so they can swing a bit. Overall the big cities and suburbs are usually the deciding factor there.
If anything, Appalachian are uniquely under-represented nationally. While the region as a whole contains nearly 25 million people, WV is the only state to have two Appalacian senators. I think TN has one as well, but, overall the political power of Appalachia does not at all seem sufficient to warrant extra attention.
>If anything, Appalachian are uniquely under-represented nationally. While the region as a whole contains nearly 25 million people, WV is the only state to have two Appalacian senators. I think TN has one as well, but, overall the political power of Appalachia does not at all seem sufficient to warrant extra attention.
Technically that is 50% more senators than California with twice the population.
Senators were just to make a comparison point against other rural areas (considering that the Senate is the place most rural places are over-represented). The same division though also ensures that, unlike Californians, Appalachians have relatively little voice in the electoral vote or for governor-level positions as well because WV is their only majority state.
A senator does you no good if your primary governmental irritant is the state government which for most rural areas is the case. The federal government generally doesn't do anything to egregious to rural areas (maybe because most federal policy mostly doesn't affect people's day to day lives or maybe because of those senators doing their jobs?) but the state governments generally have a problem with major cities enacting state level policy that should really be done on a county level.
Federally-funded farm subsidies are a huge deal to rural people in Midwest. Those are largely possible because mostly rural states like Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and the Dakotas have senators who strongly advocate for those deals.
Appalachians don't have the type of land that benefits from those subsidies, and they don't have enough clout to get an equivalent type of economic benefit package. The TVA was the last major economic project the feds funded, and it was hugely popular because it did actually improve the lives of people there. Better federal representation at the Senate level wouldn't solve every problem, but it could definitely alleviate some of the pain.
>but, overall the political power of Appalachia does not at all seem sufficient to warrant extra attention
They also serve (willingly or not) as exemplars held up by Republicans, particularly in the populist ideology of Trump supporters, of those "real Americans" who have been betrayed by globalism and progressivism, and to further the narrative of an intractable cultural and political divide having formed between the rural right and urban left (and to contrast the cultural and ethnic purity of the former against the corrupting influence of multiculturalism and secularism among the latter.)
Hard to say Vance is "more wrong" than his detractors ... when it seems all they say is "Nuh uh!". Let's do some quick math: many of the poorest areas of the country? Check. Some of the highest levels if drug addiction and overdose deaths over the last decades? Check. Rampant pollution? Check. Stagnant and or non-existent economies? Check. Extremely poorly educated populace? Check. Why are his detractors less wrong again? Or are they just embarrassed and see a way to make a quick buck with the current "grift it while you can" mentality gripping a large segment of our society?
Wrong in what regard? I found nothing wrong with Vance’s book. Having a similar family background to Vance, I think he has a great outlook on the matter.
I think his biggest miss was failing to connect the region to the rest of the country. He could have easily compared Appalachia to Rust Belt cities facing urban decay but never made the connection. It could have made the story of the region more approachable to more people. It seemed so obvious to me how the areas are linked by economic circumstances, environmental degradation, poor education levels, distinct culture and problems with drug addiction.
> He could have easily compared Appalachia to Rust Belt cities facing urban decay but never made the connection.
Did you and I read the same book? Most of this story is occurring in the Rust Belt[0], in Middletown, Ohio[1]. He discusses the mass Appalachian flight into Rust Belt towns and the mixing and clashing of culture.
If anything, I'm glad the author kept things largely, as the subtitle would imply, a memoir of sorts. He focuses on his family history and his life to give a face to the problem, but makes you aware that these are major problems in that community. From there you can draw your own comparison based on your experiences.
I think we read the same book. I don’t really think of Middletown as a Rust Belt city. It’s a town of 50,000 people. I am talking about big cities like Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago, Cleveland and smaller ones like Youngstown and Erie.
As someone who lives in one of those cities, it seemed like a clear correlation could have been made. It was chance to unite a rural and an urban problem across race and I thought it was a missed opportunity. I still enjoyed the book, but think it is even more powerful when read in tandem with a book like Evicted [1] that views the problem from another perspective.
Not what I said at all. I thought there was an opportunity to make a larger connection between what has happened in the Appalachian towns he focuses on and larger Rust Belt cities who face much of the same issues.
> a curated photoset of Sides of Appalachia You May Not Know is aimed at the level of The New Yorker, and not something relatable to everyday folk in the suburbs or the Midwest.
Midwesterner here.
You don't speak for me. JD Vance doesn't speak for me.
Please don't take personal swipes or lash back at another comment, even if it is wrong or seems so. Doing that only makes things worse. It doesn't help.
I took it to mean not relatable because we go "what's the big deal, looks like a hillier version of what and who I can see if I find a state highway and drive 20 minutes", here in the Midwest. A jab at the New Yorker more than the Midwest. That's my charitable reading based on the tone of the rest of the post, anyway—but I could be wrong.
The fact is, Appalachia is largely "just" economically depressed region like Northwest Kansas or the Mississippi Floodplain or the drive from Tucson to El Paso, where most jobs are retail and government and the best jobs are in mineral extraction or transportation or industry, but far fewer than in times past. Transportation is a pain but yet it's crisscrossed by critical routes, and life there is pretty normal for rural America. Really, there's only a handful of areas in the US where you can ride the a boom if you time it right, everywhere else things are just okay. In some places you have fewer options. People try to get by, or try to leave. It's odd how much Appalachia has gripped the popular imagination, and how outsiders and a few well-positioned insiders perpetuate it.