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Tenth grade high school student contemplates an answer as he takes the California Standards Testing (STAR) in Wilmington, California. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
When I taught at an alternative public school for kids with exceptional social-emotional, behavioral, and learning needs, one of my students — I’ll call him Dante — got As in every class he took. School staff would frequently elevate Dante’s extraordinary focus and commitment as an example for his peers.
In the spring of Dante’s senior year, his counselor informed him he’d earned the status of valedictorian. His beaming smile of pride after hearing the news affirmed everything I love about public education. When his mother found out, she burst into tears of joy.
Then, abruptly, we were informed that there had been a mistake. Because Dante’s exceptional learning needs made it impossible for him to pass the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) — the standardized tests that Massachusetts requires high school students to pass prior to graduation — he would not receive a diploma. Without a diploma, he couldn’t be valedictorian — even though, according to his grades and the unanimous judgment of his teachers, he clearly deserved the honor. A wave of incredulity rippled through the staff as we tried to resign ourselves to this obviously cruel, unfair reality. For Dante, the news was devastating.
Even before the “giant federal wrecking ball” (to borrow leading education policy analyst Diane Ravitch’s phrasing) known as education reform, evidence from diverse fields had demonstrated a scientific concept known as Campbell’s Law: the more we base social decision-making on a specific quantitative measure, the more likely it is that that measure will become distorted, ultimately corrupting the processes it’s intended to monitor.
Just so, in the two decades since Congress reauthorized the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) as George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), researchers have collected a mountain of data showing that in the long run, attaching high-stakes, or punishments, to student standardized test scores does not improve educational outcomes. Instead, it results in a host of perverse consequences, with poor, minority, and disabled kids like Dante experiencing the greatest harms. This last point makes a lot of sense when you consider that standardized testing was first developed by eugenicists looking to organize people into racist taxonomies based on perceived ability.
But despite these serious problems — and the persistent, bipartisan unpopularity of the high-stakes testing regime inaugurated by NCLB — our current, Obama-era iteration of the ESEA (the Every Student Succeeds Act or ESSA) still requires states to impose inappropriate test-based accountability on students and school communities.
When we sort children into “proficient” and “failing” categories based on test scores, we’re not solving the opportunity gaps that show up in public education; we’re creating new ones. No one is helped, and many people are hurt, when we give students, teachers, and schools an impossible assignment and then sanction them for failing to complete it. Looking forward to the ESEA’s now overdue reauthorization, it’s high time we built accountability systems that nurture the humanity and potential of all kids — rather than placing artificial roadblocks in their way.
Due to a genetic mutation carried over from Kent County, England, the population of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, once knew an exceptionally high rate of inherited deafness. At its peak in the nineteenth century, Vineyard deafness affected as many as one in 155 people on the island. Because both deaf and hearing residents spoke a highly developed form of sign language, deafness posed no obstacle to full participation in economic, social, academic, and civic life.
In fact, according to education scholars Ray McDermott and Hervé Varenne, when surviving community members were later interviewed, “they could not always remember who among them had been deaf, for everyone spoke sign language, sometimes even hearing people with other hearing people.” In other words, the culture of eighteenth and nineteenth century Martha’s Vineyard was set up in a way that rendered deafness not a disability. Just consider that for a moment.
Most of the things we need to do in life are nothing like standardized tests.
McDermott and Varenne use the example of the Vineyard deaf to illustrate how disabilities are not, contrary to normative discourse, the unfortunate possessions of individual people. Rather, they’re cultural experiences, produced by structures that enable some of us while disabling others. There’s nothing per se disabling about needing a wheelchair, for example. Disability shows up in the interaction between that wheelchair and the sidewalks, curbs, buses, and buildings designed exclusively for people who walk.
Likewise, the inability to pass a state test did not narrow Dante’s opportunities for any reason intrinsic to Dante. Most of the things we need to do in life are nothing like standardized tests, which require students to independently read and respond to decontextualized academic material for hours at a time. The road signs we use to travel from home to work, for example, and the tasks that make up our jobs, are generally not designed to trick us. Standardized test questions often are.
Similarly, at work and throughout our lives, we’re obliged to collaborate. You’d be hard-pressed to find a meaningful contribution to society that did not involve any teamwork. But collaboration is strictly forbidden in standardized testing rooms. Even if you qualify for special accommodations, the tests only measure what you can do by yourself — in a highly stressful, frankly dehumanizing vacuum. It’s quite a leap to say, as Massachusetts, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, New York, Texas, Virginia, and Wyoming do, that students who don’t perform well under these conditions are categorically unfit for college or any career requiring a high school diploma.
It’s just as illogical to punish teachers or schools for poor standardized test scores. According to the American Statistical Association, school-level inputs only account for a very small percentage of student score variability — possibly as little as 1 percent. The most reliable predictors of kids’ standardized test scores are factors like socioeconomic status, over which schools have no control.
Poverty is associated with a variety of conditions (e.g., malnutrition, sleep deprivation, crowded or unstable housing, chronically overheated environments) that are known to lower test scores. These scores, in other words, capture a fundamentally economic problem caused by exploitative employers and a weak social safety net, and repackage that problem as the deficiency of individual students, educators, and schools.
In the heyday of neoliberal education reform, this made possible great reputation-laundering for lawmakers interested in projecting a concern for yawning inequality while doing nothing to redistribute wealth. Along the way, kids like Dante have been forced to feel an utterly pointless kind of misery.
Earlier this year, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona urged states to use standardized tests as a “flashlight,” to reveal what is and isn’t working, not a “hammer.” These and other comments from the nation’s top education official reflect just how much the tides have turned against the harsh penalties that NCLB forced states to attach to student test scores.
This turning of the tides is also reflected in state education laws. Take the exit exams that are used to withhold diplomas from students like Dante. As recently as 2014, nearly half of all US states made high school graduation contingent upon standardized test scores, despite evidence that exit exams don’t improve students’ learning or future employment and that they make vulnerable kids more likely to drop out and become incarcerated.
The most reliable predictors of kids’ standardized test scores are factors like socioeconomic status, over which schools have no control.
Today, only eight states still use them (although more states have standardized test–based grade retention policies for younger students). Some states have even gone so far as to offer a legislative mea culpa, retroactively awarding diplomas to people who were denied them on the basis of test scores. A bill currently pending before the Massachusetts Joint Committee on Education would remove the MCAS as a graduation requirement. In Washington, Representative Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) has gained attention as a vocal opponent of high-stakes testing and the high-stakes testing industry.
The Beyond Test Scores Project and the National Education Policy Center recently published a report titled “Educational Accountability 3.0: Beyond ESSA,” summarizing two dozen leading educational assessment scholars’ shared vision for what the next ESEA reauthorization should prioritize. They make six broad recommendations, including developing systems of reciprocal accountability, so that school communities like Dante’s can hold lawmakers accountable for providing them with needed resources.
Assessment systems, they argue, should reflect the wide range of important things that public schools do, rather than focusing exclusively on test scores. They stress that many of the problems we’ve seen in the neoliberal education reform era, such as test score–driven school closures, “can be remedied or reduced by lowering the stakes that have been central to NCLB-style accountability.”
Cardona’s “flashlight, not hammer” advice is a welcome contrast to the rhetoric of people like Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee. And as we can see from the example of exit exams, states do have some room to shift away from hammer mode while remaining ESSA compliant. Still, as long as the nation’s most important education law requires kids to take statewide tests throughout their public school careers, we’re likely to keep seeing complex, multifaceted people and institutions reduced to a profoundly flawed metric. And that means that a percentage of students will, like Dante, be arbitrarily labeled inadequate.
Young people should be focused on enjoying life, refining their interests and talents, and solving the world’s problems, not guessing which bubbles to darken to escape the worst abuses of a punitive education state. If we actually want to help schools better meet the needs of poor, minority, and disabled kids — a stated purpose of both NCLB and ESSA — we must allow them to assess learning in ways that afford all students the chance to show what they can do.
Climate Defiance protesters at a Semafor event featuring Senator Joe Manchin, June 6, 2023. (Twitter / Climate Defiance)
On Tuesday, as apocalyptic wildfire smoke began to blanket the East Coast, the digital media start-up Semafor hosted the “definitive conversation on permitting reform” — sponsored by lobbyists for fossil fuel interests and set up as a victory lap for special guest Senator Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, who had just pushed through a controversial gas pipeline in the new debt ceiling law.
But within minutes of Semafor’s top editor congratulating the coal-baron-turned-senator on his victory, climate activists stormed the interview, derailing the event and leading the Semafor editor to scream on camera at the protestors, “Get off my stage!” The spectacle quickly went viral.
The event perfectly encapsulated the problems with Beltway news outlets’ lucrative corporate sponsorship model. By seeking out fossil fuel industry cash and cozying up to the industry’s favorite politicians as the world burns, media outlets are picking a side in the battle to protect the planet’s future livability — settling down with the arsonists against all other life on Earth.
“Media outlets need to reevaluate,” said Rylee Haught, an organizer with the environmental group Climate Defiance who was involved in Tuesday’s protest. “If they’re taking giant chunks of cash from fossil fuel CEOs, they should be prepared for us to call them out at any time and shut down an event like this. When you’re platforming people like [Manchin], you need to be prepared.”
Sponsored by groups with major ties to fossil fuel interests, the Semafor event was meant to “explore the futureshape [sic]” of permitting reform as “America’s economy enters a period of substantial infrastructure investment.” The outlet’s Beltway journalists were scheduled to interview “policy makers, business leaders, advocacy groups, and thought leaders” — including Manchin.
The conservative Democrat helped write many of the permitting-reform provisions included in the recent debt ceiling law negotiated by President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican. Broadly speaking, the changes will expedite energy and pipeline projects.
Manchin publicly championed provisions in the legislation to fast-track the Mountain Valley Pipeline from West Virginia to southern Virginia, and shield the long-stalled project from further environmental challenges. Environmental groups say that the pipeline would emit at least twenty-six coal plants’ worth of greenhouse gasses and exacerbate the climate crisis.
“Congrats on that Mountain Valley Pipeline, how’d you do that?” Semafor’s editor at large, Steve Clemons, said to Manchin at the start of their conversation.
Within two minutes, activists with Climate Defiance had interrupted the interview, shouting about Manchin’s “dirty deal.” Semafor’s online video feed quickly cut to black, while video posted later by the protesters showed Clemons yelling at the disruptors.
Clemons and Manchin ultimately concluded their discussion in a smaller room. Once there, Manchin went on to brag about how the country is “producing more fossil fuel.”
All in all, the event lived up to its promise to illustrate the “futureshape” of something — not permitting reform, but rather the looming clash between industry-funded news media and activists who want to save the planet.
Semafor isn’t the first media company to employ the corporate sponsorship model, in which newsletters and events are “presented” or “supported” by companies with distinct financial interests in the topics being discussed.
It’s a lucrative business model, one that’s been very successful for Beltway tip-sheet companies like Politico, Axios, and more recently Punchbowl News. Politico’s flagship Playbook newsletter may feature a bullet point–style roundup of the day’s top stories, alongside a message from the tobacco giant Altria about how the company is “leading the way in transitioning millions of adult smokers from cigarettes to a smoke-free future.”
The corporate sponsorship model poses obvious potential ethical issues for journalists — especially when the sponsors have an interest in the stories being covered. Late last year, Semafor’s climate editor left the company because the company refused to stop running ads from the oil and gas giant Chevron on his stories.
Advertising has always been complicated for publications, though historically, it was protected by firewalls between a newspaper’s editorial and financial departments. With sponsored newsletters, the lines often blur further — as the journalists tend to frame their play-by-play coverage of legislative dealmaking in ways that encourage the policy outcomes that their corporate sponsors want.
One of the more odious developments in this corporate-sponsored news model is the events companies are hosting with writers and newsmakers, in the name of dialogue. These discussions pair lawmakers and policymakers with journalists under the banners of corporate sponsors — and that sponsorship often feels like the only real point to these events.
Punchbowl News, for instance, held a “pop-up conversation” with Maine Republican senator Susan Collins on Thursday on “national security and foreign relations,” sponsored by the defense contractor Raytheon. Next week, the outlet will host an event with Representative Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat, sponsored by telecom conglomerate Comcast.
Semafor’s event description gave off a uniquely cash-grab vibe: “Today, permitting reform is paralyzed by a complex knot of interests tugging and pulling in different directions,” wrote the company. “As America’s economy enters a period of substantial infrastructure investment, particularly on federal lands, there is a need to unpack America’s permitting system and bring the many stakeholders involved into dialogue with one another.” (“Stakeholders” is Washington-speak for industry groups.)
The debt ceiling deal’s permitting-reform measures, which will help speed up approvals for energy and pipeline projects, should be a boon for the fossil fuel industry. Notably, the legislation did not include provisions sought by progressives to expedite approvals for electric transmission lines for renewable-energy projects.
The debt ceiling deal specifically fast-tracks the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which would transport fracked gas across hazardous Appalachian Mountain terrain, including through more than two hundred miles with “high landslide susceptibility.” The legislation attempts to block judicial review of permits issued for the pipeline project, potentially threatening ongoing court cases over it.
Manchin, who has been pushing lawmakers to approve these measures for much of the past year, was one of the top beneficiaries of campaign cash last election cycle from executives at NextEra Energy, the electric utility company spearheading the Mountain Valley Pipeline project.
The Semafor event was sponsored by American Clean Power, a purported clean-energy lobbying group that has backed the permitting-reform measures. NextEra reported donating $950,000 to the organization in 2021.
Semafor listed the US Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s top business lobby, as a “partner” on the permitting-reform discussion. The lobbying group, whose members include major oil and gas companies, received $100,000 from NextEra in 2021.
Climate Defiance describes itself as “a brand-new, youth-led, grassroots organizing collective focused on using peaceful, nonviolent direct action to resist fossil fuels.”
In April, the group led its first major action: attempting to blockade the entrance to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the annual gala where the president makes jokes before the Washington press corps, demanding that Biden fulfill his promise to block new fossil fuel projects on federal lands.
Climate Defiance’s decision to protest at events with journalists and policymakers is deliberate: politicians and media are both climate problems for the same reason.
“Not only does Biden need to be held accountable, but we know that the same folks that are funding the worst politicians are also passing out cash to the corporate media outlets that will continue to say the things that the fossil fuels CEOs want them to say, more than uplifting folks like us,” said Haught.
Haught, one of Manchin’s constituents in West Virginia, said that the fight to stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline is a personal one for her, given how the fossil fuel industry has polluted the state and sickened communities. And she believes that events like the one Semafor held with industry groups and Manchin aren’t helpful.
“It was just a bunch of people in suits, having a conversation about having a conversation,” she said. “They literally sit around, and they’re like, ‘This is so important. And I’m so glad that we’re fostering all these ideas, everybody seems to have different ideas to how we move forward.’ But they’re really stalling for time, while fossil fuel CEOs continue to ravage the earth.”
The write-up from Semafor was a bit more positive, but it also contained what sounded like a dash of guilt.
“Semafor’s permitting reform event on Wednesday featured a robust discussion between host Steve Clemons and lawmakers, industry stakeholders, and environmentalists trying to find the sweet spot for a bipartisan deal,” the outlet wrote, adding: “It also featured a rousing edition of ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ from protesters upset over Manchin’s successful lobbying to approve the Mountain Valley Pipeline in the debt limit deal.”
In truth, without Climate Defiance’s intrusion, the Semafor event would have just been an unnecessary cash grab that few people watched. Instead, it became a viral illustration of all that’s wrong with the corporate-sponsored media model — and what climate activists are up against as they try to save the planet.
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Patriarchy is rooted in the cultural and legal traditions of patrilineality and patrilocality. (Lambert / Getty Images)
The following is an excerpt from Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life (Simon & Schuster, 2023)
Too many liberal feminists purport to want to #SmashThePatriarchy without really understanding what this concept means and how it infiltrates our everyday lives. A Greek word that means “the rule of the father,” patriarchy has long worked to oppress all people who lack the social position or necessary requirements to become patriarchs (such as being a first-born son or having independent means). Patriarchy not only shapes our public worlds as workers and consumers, but also regulates the most intimate details of our private experiences. But the “rule of the father” isn’t something just asserted, it depends on specific social customs regarding the shape of our families.
Patriarchy is partially rooted in the cultural and legal traditions of patrilineality (paternal descent) and patrilocality (where wives leave their natal kin to join a husband’s family). These twin forces still operate in the daily lives of billions of people and maintain a distinct lingering influence even in contemporary cultures that see themselves as more “enlightened” with regards to the traditional family. We can’t undermine patriarchy without dealing first with these two less familiar concepts: patrilineality and patrilocality.
Patrilineality denotes a set of social customs that confer primacy on the father’s family line. The best example of patrilineality comes from Genesis 5 and 11 in the Old Testament, the “begats” from Adam to Noah and from Shem to Abram, where we learn the names of each father and his firstborn son. Patrilineality is why fathers still “give the bride away” to the bridegroom during the traditional Western wedding ceremony, and it’s why about 70 percent of American women in 2015 and 90 percent of British women in 2016 still took their husband’s name after tying the knot.
It is also why the children of heterosexual couples generally take their father’s name even though it is the mother who gestates them for nine months and labors to bring them into the world. One 2018 survey from the American website BabyCenter, found that only 4 percent of children have their mother’s surname. And in Belgium until 2014, a child born to a married couple was legally obligated to have its father’s name. When you receive a holiday card from “the Andersons,” the whole family is identified by the last name of the father, which was his father’s last name, and his grandfather’s last name, and so on.
Historically, patrilineality meant that, upon marriage, rights over a woman’s body were transferred from father to groom. For example, the utopian socialist Flora Tristan lived her life governed by the 1804 Napoleonic Code, a wide-ranging law that stipulated that married women must obey their husbands, reside with their husbands, follow their husbands whenever they changed domiciles, and give over all property and wages for their husbands to administer.
In 1816, the French state also re-outlawed divorce, further trapping women in indissoluble marriages no matter how abusive or reprehensible the husband. Tristan only escaped her own nuptial chains after her husband repeatedly molested their daughter and then subsequently shot Tristan at point-blank range in broad daylight on the streets of Paris.
With her husband imprisoned for life, Tristan became a prominent utopian socialist intellectual who understood that women’s subjugation within the institution of monogamous marriage served to ensure women’s fidelity so that they produced only “legitimate” heirs. In postrevolutionary France, the Napoleonic family code facilitated the transfer of private property from fathers to sons among a newly ascendant bourgeois class. Propertied men demanded strict wifely fidelity so that their wealth and privileges did not end up in the hands of some sneaky milkman’s son.
Laws establishing a husband’s legal rights over his wife can still be found across the globe and were only repealed in Western countries in the last hundred fifty years. In the United Kingdom, the Married Women’s Property Act granted wives the right to own, buy, and sell their own property in 1882. In the United States, the 1907 Expatriation Act meant that American women who married immigrant husbands in cities like New York and Boston automatically lost their citizenship and had to apply for naturalization when their foreign husbands became eligible. The provisions of this act weren’t fully repealed until 1940. In West Germany, married women could not work outside the home without their husbands’ permission until 1957, and then only if their jobs did not interfere with their domestic responsibilities. This latter provision was not removed until 1977.
Although American women won the right to vote in 1920, married women were legally obliged to vote under their husband’s surname until 1975. Married women also had to fight for the right to maintain driver’s licenses and passports in their maiden names if they preferred. In Japan in July 2021, the Supreme Court upheld a law that required married couples to have the same surname. Although in theory it could be either spouse’s name, in practice 96 percent of Japanese women took their husband’s name.
To counter these pervasive patrilineal customs, countries such as Greece, as well as the province of Quebec in Canada, have rendered it illegal for a woman to take her husband’s name after marriage even if she wants to. In Canada as a whole, where white settlers once imposed patrilineal naming conventions on matrilineal indigenous peoples to help “regulate [the] division of property among heirs in a way that conformed with European, not Indigenous, property laws,” the 2008 to 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission allowed for the free restoration of indigenous names, including mononyms (the ability not to have a surname at all).
Patrilocality means that a new bride must leave her family and move into her husband’s household, usually with or near his family (think of Elizabeth Bennet moving from Longbourn to Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice). In many societies in Asia and Africa, wives are still expected to reside with their in-laws and obey their authority.
In Greece, it was only a 1983 Family Law reform that abolished the provision in the Civil Code that automatically established that a married woman’s legal residence was that of her husband. Although new families in many industrialized nations prefer to form their own residences (called neolocality), our deeper history of patrilocality means that men are expected to be breadwinners because a patrilocal culture assumes that the father must be the head of the new household and therefore primarily responsible for its provisioning.
A 2017 study found that 72 percent of American men and 71 percent of American women agreed that a man must be able to financially provide for his family in order to be considered a “good husband or partner.” This puts a lot of pressure on men, especially in weak economies with labor markets transformed by outsourcing and automation. Although the percentage of female breadwinners has grown in the last decades, about 71 percent of husbands still outearn their wives in households of heterosexual couples where both spouses work.
Patrilocal traditions also explain why only in exceptional cases do men uproot their lives to relocate for the new job of a wife or girlfriend. In my own field of academia, for example, one 2008 study of 9,043 full-time faculty at thirteen leading American research universities found that 36 percent of faculty had a partner also employed in academia and another 36 percent had a partner working in a different industry — but women disproportionately felt the limiting effects of being in a dual-career couple.
In contrast to men who prioritize their own professional ambitions, the study noted that the number one reason women academics gave for refusing an external offer of employment was that their male partners were not offered appropriate employment at the new location. The availability of a job for their partners outweighed other key considerations such as salary, benefits, research funds, or opportunities for promotion. And since getting a decent raise in academia usually requires moving to a new university, women’s relative immobility exacerbates the gender pay gap.
Whether it is in academia, in the military, or within the corporate world, women are more likely to follow their partners to a new city or country. When a couple needs to decide whether or not to take a job in a new place, it makes sense to invest in the career prospects of the partner with the higher salary. And because on average women more frequently leave their jobs to follow their partners than men do, employers may consider all women less reliable workers in the aggregate and pay them less than “more reliable” men. Finally, following a partner to a new city or country often separates women from their support networks: family, friends, and perhaps their preexisting childcare arrangements. The resultant isolation makes it more difficult to restart careers in the new location.
Too many women, with higher degrees and years of work experience, simply give up because it is so hard to “have it all.” Of those parents who did not work outside of the home in the United States in 2016, 78 percent of mothers reported they didn’t work because they were taking care of their home and family. For women, who generally earn less than men and who societies expect to provide more unpaid care work, it makes rational sense in economies with few social safety nets to embrace what social scientists call “hypergamy,” or the desire to marry up and find a partner who can and will support them. This practice reinforces the traditions of patrilineality and patrilocality because the man remains the “head of household.” And even in couples where wives earn more than their husbands, women still bear a disproportionately larger share of household tasks, which is why so many pine for new domestic arrangements.
Patrilocality is only one way of organizing domestic relations; human societies once displayed a diversity of traditions. But after centuries of Western colonialism that dispersed patriarchal family forms across the globe, fewer than thirty human societies remain matrilocal today. One community of Tibetan Buddhists called the Mosuo provides a fascinating example of a matrilocal society where neither spouse is expected to relocate. Among the Mosuo, grandmothers preside over large multigenerational families. Women own and inherit property through the maternal line and live with their mother’s extended family. Men live in their maternal grandmother’s household and practice a form of “walking marriage,” whereby they visit their partner only at night.
Both men and women can have as many companions as they desire, without stigma, and women often do not know who has fathered their children. The concept of “father” barely exists, and men have few paternal responsibilities. Being a good uncle is far more important, as men help raise the children of their sisters. Since there is no formal marriage, the only reason men and women form pairs is because they are attracted to each other or enjoy each other’s company. When the attraction fades, romantic ties can be dissolved without negative financial consequences or social impacts on the children. How very radical the Mosuo family structure seems to many of us today highlights just how deeply ingrained our own patrilocal and patrilineal traditions remain.
Of course, patriarchy works in tandem with capitalism as a tool for embedding structural forms of discrimination in our economies and societies, but if we are serious about challenging both systems, it is essential that we begin to target the underlying practices that uphold them both. Both patrilineality and patrilocality allow the nuclear family to become the core institution in capitalist societies that facilitates the intergenerational transfer of wealth and privilege. Radical changes to the way we organize our own domestic arrangements can profoundly disrupt the persistence of these traditions. It turns out that humanity has over two thousand years’ worth of cross-cultural experiments to help us imagine what these radical changes might look like in practice, and how we might implement them in our daily lives.
Various sources are claiming that at least 3,715 service members, 52 tanks and 207 AFVs have been neutralized, along with a range of other supporting assets, including 134 lightly armored and transport vehicles, five jets and support aircraft, and at least two helicopters. In addition, 48 artillery pieces and 53 drones of various types were destroyed as well.
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