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Prince Harry’s Memoir Won’t Hurt the Monarchy

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 01 › prince-harry-memoir-case-against-monarchy › 672721

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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Much has been said about the salacious revelations in Prince Harry’s new memoir, Spare. But as London-based Atlantic staff writer Helen Lewis writes, the book also makes a powerful—if perhaps futile—case against the monarchy. I emailed Helen to learn more.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

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The Panda Problem

Kelli María Korducki: How does Spare threaten the idea of the monarchy? And how might British and American readers read this differently?

Helen Lewis: Americans don’t feel the same instinctive defensiveness about the monarchy—after all, your country was founded in opposition to the hereditary power and privilege of Harry’s ancestors. Spare depicts the monarchy like The Hunger Games: No one chooses to be a part of it, each individual’s success depends on the failure of others, and the ultimate “prize” is worthless. Harry even references [the late author] Hilary Mantel’s famous comparison of the royal family to pandas—two threatened species, both ill-suited for the modern world and kept in airy enclosures that are really cages.

Kelli: What does Spare reveal about the strange codependence between the press—and, by extension, the public upon whose support the monarchy depends—and the Royal Family?

Helen: The most shocking allegation in Spare, the one which seems to have driven Harry into exile, is that his own family colluded with the press to plant negative stories about him to distract from their own foibles and missteps. He feels very strongly that the paparazzi chasing his mother’s car into that tunnel in Paris were complicit in her death, and yet nothing was done to hold them accountable. Skip forward 20 years, and he also feels that his father and the institution more broadly did not issue statements condemning the press coverage of Meghan Markle, which he feels was both intrusive and racist. The Royal Family’s attitude is different from Harry’s: They believe that complaining (or suing) doesn’t help, so instead, they try to use access and leaks as leverage to control the flow of information.

Kelli: You note in your essay that you grew up around the same time as Harry, and remember the toxic dynamics of ’90s and ’00s British tabloid culture. Could you describe that culture for an American audience? How has the media changed?

Helen: When Diana died in 1997, there was immediate revulsion at the harassment she had endured from paparazzi, and some papers even promised not to use “pap” shots anymore. (It didn’t last.) Around the same time, some reporters discovered that it was trivially easy to listen to someone’s voicemails if you knew their phone number; many people didn’t bother to change the default code, usually “1111.”

Those years really were the Wild West of tabloid culture, and things are different now for a few of reasons:

[The British journalist] Nick Davies broke a series of stories in The Guardian exposing the extent of phone hacking, which eventually led to prosecutions [and] payouts to those affected, and the Leveson Inquiry into the press. Celebrities won legal actions under European laws that guaranteed a right to privacy, which made newspapers more cautious. Technology changed. Who leaves a voicemail now? People just text one another. The rise of reality TV and influencer culture, which meant that papers could fill their pages with people who wanted the attention.

Kelli: Going back to the book, you write, “The tiny violin is played heavily in this symphony.” Yet you note that “Harry’s memoir makes it impossible to ignore the broken people inside the institution.” How so?

Helen: One of the tenets of cognitive behavioral therapy is that you can’t control what happens to you, but you can control your reactions. As a result of Harry’s hang-up about being the “spare,” he is primed to be sensitive to slights. Many of his complaints (for example, that his rent-free apartment was on the lower-ground floor, and so poorly lit) do sound quite petty. But that’s relatable! Even many normal, nonroyal families have a dynamic where one kid is designated as the “golden child” and the other is the “troublemaker.” The book conveys how much that dynamic might be magnified when your brother is destined from birth to be the head of a millennium-old institution, and must therefore be protected from scandal and blame.

Kelli: What happens now for the monarchy?

Helen: Probably nothing. Buckingham Palace has so far been totally silent on the allegations, and oddly, the sheer volume of revelations helps them, because it prevents a single narrative from emerging. The newspapers are very happy to write about Harry’s frostbitten penis and ’shroom trips rather than his criticisms of their own historic practices.

Today’s News

A New York judge fined the Trump Organization the maximum possible penalty of $1.6 million for tax fraud and other felonies. President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan met today to discuss strengthening the two countries’ alliance. At least nine people have been killed after a major storm system spawned tornadoes in Alabama and Georgia this week.

Dispatches

The Third Rail: David French offers guidance on how to think about Biden’s classified-information mess. The Books Briefing: Stories about idyllic worlds that have disappeared can be the best reminders of the beauty that is still in our reach, Nicole Acheampong writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Jan Richard Heinicke / laif / Redux

Cities Really Can Be Both Denser and Greener

By Emma Marris

When I moved from small-town Oregon to Paris’s 11th arrondissement last summer, the city seemed like a poem in gray: cobblestones, seven-story buildings, the steely waters of the Seine. But soon I started noticing the green woven in with the gray. Some of it was almost hidden, tucked inside the city’s large blocks, behind the apartment buildings lining the streets. I even discovered a sizable public park right across the street from my building, with big trees, Ping-Pong tables, citizen-tended gardens, and “wild” areas of vegetation dedicated to urban biodiversity. To enter it, you have to go through the gate of a private apartment building. Very Parisian.

Dense cities like Paris are busy and buzzy, a mille-feuille of human experience. They’re also good for the climate. Shorter travel distances and public transit reduce car usage, while dense multifamily residential architecture takes less energy to heat and cool. But when it comes to adapting to climate change, suddenly everyone wants green space and shade trees, which can cool and clean the air—the classic urban trade-off between density and green space.

Read the full article.

British drone user raises shark alarm in Australia

found Jan '23 BBC News

www.bbc.co.uk › news › uk-england-northamptonshire-64256341

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The expat spotted a great white swimming close to a packed beach and called to have it evacuated.

Academic Freedom Is Not a Matter of Opinion

found Jan '23 The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 01 › hamline-university-adjunct-professor-freedom › 672713

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After declining to renew the contract of an adjunct professor, the president of Hamline University issued a statement that underscores the need to defend academic freedom in American universities.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

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Student Drivers

Unless you follow academic politics, you might have missed the recent controversy at Hamline University, a small private college in St. Paul, Minnesota. The short version is that a professor named Erika López Prater showed students in her global-art-history class a 14th-century painting depicting the Prophet Muhammad. Aware that many Muslims regard such images as sacrilege, she warned ahead of time that she was going to show the picture and offered to excuse any student who did not want to view it.

Professor López Prater’s contract has not been renewed, and she will not be returning to the classroom. The university strenuously denies that she was fired. Of course, colleges let adjuncts go all the time, often reluctantly. But this, to me, seems like something more.

I began my 35-year teaching career in the late 1980s and was once a tenure-track faculty member at an elite college, where I was one of a handful of registered Republicans among a mostly liberal faculty. I have been denied tenure at one school and granted it at two others. I have been an adjunct, contract faculty (that is, working on a long-term contract but without actual tenure), a department chair, and a tenured full professor. I have led a tenure committee, and I have written tenure and promotion letters for candidates at other schools at the request of their institution. I have been a faculty member in a U.S. government institution, where I had to balance my right to self-expression against important and necessary legal restrictions on politicking in the classroom.

So I think I have a pretty clear idea of what goes on in classrooms. I know what academic freedom means. I think I know what “fired” looks like, and it seems to me that López Prater was fired—a conclusion that seems especially likely in the wake of a highly defensive public letter the school’s president, Fayneese Miller, wrote about the whole business.

After a piece about the controversy appeared in The New York Times, Miller issued a statement in which she decried how Hamline is now “under attack from forces outside our campus.”

Various so-called stakeholders interpreted the incident, as reported in various media, as one of “academic freedom.” The Times went so far as to cite PEN America’s claim that what was happening on our campus was one of the “most egregious violations of academic freedom” it had ever encountered.

It begs the question, “How?”

Allow me to interpret. By “so-called stakeholders,” Miller, I think, means people who believe this issue affects them, but who should buzz off and mind their own business. (And while I’m at it, stakeholders is a bit of jargon that should be banned from education.) About López Prater, Miller said, “The decision not to offer her another class was made at the unit level”—I assume here she means the department in which López Prater worked—”and in no way reflects on her ability to adequately teach the class.” Oh? Then what prompted “the decision at the unit level”?

Miller then lists the impeccably liberal credentials of Hamline as a school, none of which have anything to do with this case. After all of this throat clearing, she gets to the real questions she thinks should have been raised about academic freedom.

First, does your defense of academic freedom infringe upon the rights of students in violation of the very principles you defend? Second, does the claim that academic freedom is sacrosanct, and owes no debt to the traditions, beliefs, and views of students, comprise a privileged reaction?

This makes no sense. The “rights” of students were not jeopardized, and no curriculum owes a “debt” to any student’s “traditions, beliefs, and views.” (Indeed, if you don’t want your traditions, beliefs, or views challenged, then don’t come to a university, at least not to study anything in the humanities or the social sciences.) Miller’s view, it seems, is that academic freedom really only means as much freedom as your most sensitive students can stand, an irresponsible position that puts the university, the classroom, and the careers of scholars in the hands of students who are inexperienced in the subject matter, new to academic life, and, often, still in the throes of adolescence.

This, as I have written elsewhere, is contrary to the very notion of teaching itself. (It is also not anything close to the bedrock 1940 statement on the matter from the American Association of University Professors.) The goal of the university is to create educated and reasoning adults, not to shelter children against the pain of learning that the world is a complicated place. Classes are not a restaurant meal that must be served to students’ specifications; they are not a stand-up act that must make students laugh but never offend them. Miller is leaving the door open for future curricular challenges.

I myself have issued warnings for materials I show in class, notably the gory British nuclear-war movie Threads. I have offered to excuse students who might be disturbed by it, and I would not want someone to interfere with my class on nuclear weapons any more than I would interfere with anyone else’s about art history. There are, to be sure, plenty of times when professors do go off the rails, which is why their performance and syllabi—especially those of untenured faculty and outside adjuncts—are reviewed, in most schools, by a departmental or divisional committee. That doesn’t seem to be what happened here. A student complained, which apparently set in motion several events, including López Prater being summoned by a dean and a Hamline administrator sending an email to campus employees saying that certain actions taken in an online class were “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.”

Noting the school’s traditional Methodist mission that includes doing “all the good you can,” Miller adds, “To do all the good you can means, in part, minimizing harm.” Again, this is risible: The most effective way to avoid harm would be to walk into the classroom and ask the students what they’d like to talk about, let them vote on it, and give a veto to anyone who might be offended by the class’s choice.

Academic freedom is not an open invitation to be a jerk. It is not a license for faculty to harass students or to impose their will on them. But if all it means is that professors keep their jobs only at the sufferance of students, then it means nothing at all.

A significant part of the problem in American universities is the attack on tenure. López Prater was an adjunct—instructors who are far more vulnerable to dismissal at will. But that subject is too big to tackle today; I’ll write more on it here soon.

Today’s News

The annual inflation rate continued to slow in December, a new report shows. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to investigate the handling of classified documents that were found at President Joe Biden’s former office and his Delaware home. A judge set a new preliminary hearing date in June for the University of Idaho shooting suspect.

Evening Read

Tyler Comrie / Getty; The Atlantic

A Society That Can’t Get Enough of Work

By Lily Meyer

Work is not going well lately. Exhaustion and burnout are rampant; many young people are reconsidering whether they owe all their energy to their jobs, as seen in the widespread popularity of “quiet quitting.” An ongoing wave of unionization—including at Amazon and Starbucks—has led to victories, but has also been met with ferocious resistance from management. In this context, or perhaps in any context, it might feel absurd to imagine a society in which workers can’t get enough of work. It certainly would have seemed ludicrous to readers of the French firebrand Paul Lafargue’s satirical 1883 pamphlet, The Right to Be Lazy, in which he invents a Bizarro World where workers cause all kinds of “individual and social miseries” by refusing to quit at the end of the day.

Lafargue, a onetime doctor who became a critic, a socialist, and an activist, was a politically serious man, but in this recently reissued text, he uses humor to cut through the noise of political debate. His made-up work addicts are meant to help readers see the very real dangers of a system in which many have no choice but to work until they reach their breaking point. Lafargue’s mordant approach is still effective 140 years later. Mixed with the longevity of his ideas, it gives The Right to Be Lazy the angry, hilarious wisdom of a Shakespearean fool.

Read the full article.