The Chicago Blog

People who live in fear of airplane accidents, flu pandemics, and other such disasters are often cast as alarmist or paranoid, despite the painful fruition of their fears in such incidents as the crash of a Yemeni jet this morning into the Indian Ocean (the second major plane crash this month), the lethal explosion last night of a freight train in northern Italy, and the collision last week of two Washington, D.C., Metro trains.

In Worst Cases, Lee Clark confirms that such individuals are more reasonable and prescient than they're given credit for. Surveying the full range of possible catastrophes that animate and dominate the popular imagination—from toxic spills and terrorism to plane crashes and pandemics—he explores how the ubiquity of worst cases in everyday life has stripped them of some of their ability to shock us. Fear and dread, Clarke argues, have actually become too rare: only when the public has more substantial information and more credible warnings will it take worst cases as seriously as it should. A timely and necessary look into how we think about the unthinkable, Worst Cases is essential reading for anyone attuned to our current climate of threat and fear.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Film and Media | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by MM at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After being arrested in October of 2006 for the murder of acclaimed Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, three men—two Chechen brothers and a former police investigator—were found not guilty by a jury on charges that they provided logistical support for her killing. But today's New York Times reports that Russia's Supreme Court has now overturned their acquittals, as well as the acquittal of "a fourth defendant, a former colonel in the F.S.B., the successor to the K.G.B., who faced lesser charges," on the grounds that "there had been procedural violations by the judges and the defense during the first trial." According to the NYT:

Ms. Politkovskaya's colleagues said they were not surprised by the court's decision but said they feared that the new trial would be a distraction from their central concern: finding the gunman and the mastermind in the crime.… Investigators say they believe that Rustam Makhmudov, a brother of the two Chechen defendants, carried out the murder, shooting Ms. Politkovskaya, 48, with a Makarov 9-millimeter pistol on Oct. 7, 2006, in the hallway of her apartment building as she returned home.

He is thought to be in hiding abroad. The person or people who ordered the killing have not been found.

But, the article quotes Sergei Sokolov, deputy editor of the Novya Gazeta where Ms. Politkovskaya worked, saying that whoever ordered the killing, "it is obvious that the one who ordered it is a very prominent person." It has been widely speculated that the motive for Politkovskaya's murder was her outspoken criticism of the Russia's handling of its bloody conflict with Chechnya that began with the movement for Chechen independence in 1991 and continues to the present day. Her second book on the subject, A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya was published by the press in 2003. In the book Politkovskaya recounts the horrors of living in the midst of the war, examines how the war has affected Russian society, and takes a hard look at how people on both sides are profiting from it. A powerful account of what is acknowledged as one of the most dangerous and least understood conflicts on the planet, Politkovskaya's book offers one of the world's only window's into this region and its troubles.

For more on the Politkovskaya's book read this excerpt. Also see our past posts on Politkovskaya's murder and the ensuing trial, or follow the NYT's coverage here.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 01:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

From nameless Gitmo detainees to warrantless wiretaps, the abuse of executive power by successive presidents continues to make headlines. Even NPR's This American Life entered the fray with a piece that aired last weekend about the 1953 U.S. Supreme Court case that created a "state secret privilege" permitting the executive branch to derail normal judicial procedures for cases it claimed would disclose national security secrets. The TAL story reveals that the original 1953 case, in fact, contained no state secrets at all—calling into question not only the government's motives for moving to dismiss that trial, but undermining the legal basis for the string of cases shut down since—up through the Bush administrations and, unfortunately, the current administration as well.

If this were not enough to concern the ordinary citizen, Peter M. Shane, professor of law at Ohio State University and author of the new book, Madison's Nightmare: How Executive Power Threatens American Democracy argues in a recent article for George Mason University's History News Network that the most systematic White House power grab has garnered much less publicity.

Over the past thirty years, Shane argues, the White House has taken increasing control over "domestic rulemaking activity by administrative agencies"—agencies responsible for regulating everything from the air we breathe to discrimination in schools and entitlements to health care— by subjecting them to intensive scrutiny by the president's Office of Management and Budget. Along with torture, domestic surveillance, and executive secrecy—which Shane also discusses in his book—he sees rulemaking by the executive branch as a significant threat. Shane writes:

The move towards centralization of policy control in OMB should worry Americans for three reasons. First, a tightly controlled bureaucracy is actually less responsive to public sentiment than a bureaucracy in which administrators enjoy some room for independent judgment. This seems counterintuitive because we elect presidents, but not bureaucrats. The problem, however, is that the President is unlikely to reflect the views of the median voter on each and every issue of significant public concern. Because the President chooses agency heads, they will all share his general policy outlook, but each agency head is somewhat more inclined than the President to respect the median voter's view on the particular issues that his or her specific agency addresses.

Second, the system is potentially less accountable to the public. The more decision making is concentrated in the White House, the easier it becomes to use executive privilege as a shield against disclosure of the decision making process. To be fair, recent Presidents have taken some significant steps to make White House regulatory review more open and transparent than it was in the 1980s, but the potential for changing course towards more secrecy is always present.

Third, the system adds months of delay to the process of issuing new regulations. As I detail in Madison's Nightmare, it has never been demonstrated that the reduction in regulatory costs produced by White House review has adequately compensated for the value of benefits foregone by delaying new health, safety and environmental regulations for periods often lasting six months or longer.

Shane concludes:

I wrote Madison's Nightmare partly in the hope of explaining persuasively … how aggressive presidentialism undermines good governance. Much of the book deals with the dramatic questions of torture, domestic surveillance, and executive secrecy that are so often in the news. I hope that the book also brings at least some greater attention to the centralization of presidential policy making control, which deserves far more public attention and debate than it has seen since its inception.

Read the complete article on the History News Network and read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
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Debate is already raging over the Consumer Financial Protection Agency just proposed as part of the Obama Administration's plans for regulating the financial system. Yesterday afternoon, the Los Angeles Times blog Money & Co. highlighted representative arguments of those battling on each side of the issue:

"Providing this much power to one agency is truly frightening as they will get to set the rules and pick the winners/losers for the financial sector," the LAT quotes Andrew Busch, a markets strategist at BMO Capital Markets in Chicago, as writing.

The California Public Interest Research Group, on the other hand, argued that "the CFPA would ensure the safety, fairness and sustainability of credit.… The president's proposal addresses a glaring oversight in the regulatory structure by creating an agency designed to monitor the safety of financial products from the viewpoint of the consumer."

As Larry Glickman, author of the forthcoming Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America, might point out, this isn't the first time Americans have argued at high pitch over regulations designed to protect consumers. In Buying Power, he tells the story of the decade-long—and ultimately successful—campaign that conservatives launched in the late 1960s against proposed legislation to create a Consumer Protection Agency.

"Although the fight over the CPA is little remembered today," Glickman writes, "it was front page news throughout much of the 1960s and 1970s, and it sheds light on both the decline of Great Society liberalism and the rise of a new and ascendant style of conservatism."

He concludes, however, that though "Great Society liberalism was defeated in large measure because of its association with consumerism (and visa versa), there is reason to believe that [a] new wave of consumer activism may contribute to an emergent liberalism, one which uses the nexus of the market and the internet to remind people that consumption is a vital component of citizenship in a global society."

Indeed, especially in the current economic climate—as Glickman pointed out recently in the New York Times—Americans are once again aware of the importance of consumer demand.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tomorrow, June 5, marks the twentieth anniversary of one of the most famous images in recent memory. On this day in 1989, the Los Angeles Times was probably the first American newspaper to publish a photograph that continued (and still continues) to appear on countless TV screens and in publications around the world: that of an anonymous man who had stepped in front of a row of tanks near the embattled Tiananmen Square.

Four photographers captured this now-iconic moment, and in commemoration of its anniversary they reflect on the the encounter at the New York Times's Lens blog. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, authors of No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, have also reflected—extensively—on the definitive image. In their chapter devoted to Tiananmen imagery, they reconsider its meaning, arguing that the photo can be seen as both a progressive celebration of human rights and as a societal vision limited by individualism. "The choice between the individual and the authoritarian state is any easy one," they conclude, "but either way you get the empty street."

In addition to their extensive discussion in No Caption Needed, Hariman and Lucaites also have discussed the matter on their blog of the same name, where they've posted about, among other things, a Chick-fil-A ad that parodied the Tank Man image.

Archived in Books for the News | Film and Media | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 01:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A CNN story today offers a reminder that "if President Obama has his way, health care reform will be finalized this year.… And while the specifics of how to fix the nation's health care system are far from final, the debate over how to pull it off will turn on a key question: How to pay for it."

That's precisely the question Jonathan Oberlander, author of The Political Life of Medicare, takes up in the last issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. "All the funding options," Oberlander concludes, "contain various levels of political poison. Indeed, financing will probably have to be patched together from a combination of controversial sources."

Explaining the costs and benefits of these sources, Oberlander investigates ideas such as increasing "sin taxes" on tobacco and alcohol, taxing some employer-paid insurance premiums, expanding health insurance coverage to cover more people, and making cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. This last option, of course, is one to which Oberlander has also written a comprehensive backstory, revealing in The Political Life of Medicare how Medicare politics and policies have developed since the program's enactment in 1965.

And, as his NEJM piece reminds us, Oberlander's accessible analyses continue to provide an excellent starting point for those involved with what he calls the "extraordinary challenge" of "assembling a workable financing plan" for health care reform.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now that President Obama has officially announced his nomination of Sonia Sotomayor as the replacement for retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter, reaction to his decision abounds. Most of the responses look forward—to the looming confirmation process or to how she'll adjudicate—but some investigate what went into the decision in the first place.

That's where David Yalof comes in. The author of Pursuit of Justices: Presidential Politics and the Selection of Supreme Court Nominees, Yalof was a sought-after commentator in the run up to Obama's announcement this morning, with organizations from PBS's NewsHour to CNN asking him to weigh in.

In Pursuit of Justices, Yalof's investigations go even deeper than his recent commentaries, as he takes the reader behind the scenes of what happens before the Senate hearings to show how presidents go about deciding who will sit on the highest court in the land. In the process, he disputes much conventional wisdom about the selection process, including the widely held view that presidents choose nominees primarily to influence future decisions of the high court.

Archived in Books for the News | Law | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 01:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Though he campaigned on a theme of change, in his first months in office, Barack Obama has already asserted inherent presidential power in ways reminiscent of his Republican predecessors. While abandoning some of the Bush Administration’s more audacious claims, President Obama has asserted the state secrets privilege in national security litigation, resisted judicial review of enemy combatant detention in Afghanistan, issued signing statements suggesting constitutional reservations about bills he has signed into law, and pursued the Bush Administration’s Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq, even though it was never approved by Congress.

With Madison’s Nightmare, Peter Shane shows how ambitious assertions of presidential power are the logical outcome of a decades-long trend that has seen presidents of both parties have waged an assault on the basic checks and balances of the U.S. government. Starting with Reagan and the elder Bush, continuing under Clinton, and culminating most spectacularly under the recent Bush administration, this “aggressive presidentialism” has diminished the role of the other branches of government and led to ideological, inappropriate, and sometimes downright illegal actions. If we want our government to work as the Founders intended, simply electing a new president is not enough: both liberals and conservatives must launch a wide-ranging reform effort that will change all levels of government and support a renewed culture of accountability.

Read the press release or read an excerpt.

Archived in Law | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Several sources reported this morning that the head of the Justice Department's antitrust division under the Obama administration, Christine A. Varney, plans to toughen up on monopolistic and predatory business practices—especially by large enterprises attempting to exploit the weakened positions of smaller companies struggling through the current recession. A Bloomberg article quotes Varney suggesting that "a more vigorous antitrust policy in the financial markets may have helped avert the current economic crisis: 'Is too big to fail," she asks, "'a failure of antitrust?'"

According to the New York Times Varney's plans would restore the same sort of Clinton-era antitrust policy that led to the landmark antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft and Intel in the 1990s, and which has since sparked heated debate in Washington about how best to foster a healthy economy that functions in the interests of consumers. Making an important contribution to that debate, William H. Page and John E. Lopatka's 2007 book The Microsoft Case: Antitrust, High Technology, and Consumer Welfare offers the contrarian argument that consumers are, in fact, rarely served by antitrust intervention. Both the government and the courts, Page and Lopatka contend, were unduly influenced by the harms that Microsoft's practices would have on its rivals—though they did not harm consumers and may even have benefited them. Highlighting critical points during the Microsoft litigation where they say the system failed consumers by overrating government's ability to influence outcomes in a dynamic market, theirs remains one of the most essential books on the topic.

You can read more about the Obama administration's planned shift in antitrust policy at the NYT website or find our more about Page and Lopatka's The Microsoft Case.

Also of interest from the press: Antitrust Law, Second Edition, by Richard A. Posner—an influential critique of antitrust law from the perspective of law and economics.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Law | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 03:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“Some people are vengeful, calling for jail, public humiliation, or even revolution,” the New York Times reported in March, adding to innumerable accounts of outrage at the news that insurance giant A.I.G. planned to use millions of federal bailout dollars for employee bonuses. Punctuated by such anger, the economic crisis has shone a stark light on the growing chasm between America’s haves and have-nots. Striking a timely note of unity, Class War? reveals that both sides of this class divide actually agree to a surprising—and heartening—extent about what government should do to close it.

In fact, Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs argue that at every income level and across geographical and ideological lines, most Americans favor public intervention to narrow the gap between rich and poor and create equal economic opportunities for all. Drawing on more than 70 years of opinion studies, they show that majorities support not only higher minimum wages, improved public education, and greater access to healthcare, but also the use of taxation to fund such programs.

As lawmakers battle over how to heal our ailing economy, Class War? provides undeniable proof of the popular consensus their constituents have been building for decades: that our government must take aggressive action against the iniquity that plagues our nation.

Read the press release.

Archived in Politics and Current Events | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Scott McLemee's column this week for Inside Higher Ed, titled "Stop the Insani-Tea!", starts by noting some of the rhetorical dissonances of last week's tax-day tea-party demonstrations: "'No taxation without representation!' they demanded, having evidently hibernated through the recent election cycle."

But the real point of the column is to call into question the anti-tax crowd assumption that Joe the Plumber's opinions coincide with those of a majority of citizens. McLemee uses Benjamin I. Page and Lawrence R. Jacobs' new book Class War?: What Americans Really Think about Economic Inequality to "help to clarify why alarmist denunciations of higher taxation and (shudder!) 'redistribution of the wealth' just won't cut it." McLemee, quoting Page and Jacobs, writes:

"Even Democrats and lower-income workers harbor rather conservative views about free enterprise, the value of material incentives to motivate work, individual self-reliance, and a generalized suspicion of government waste and unresponsiveness." Their survey found that 58 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of low-income earners agreed that "large differences in pay are probably necessary to get people to work hard."

But at the same time they report a widespread concern that the gap between extremes of wealth and poverty is growing and poses a danger. "Although Americans accept the idea that unequal pay motivates hard work," they find, "a solid majority (59 percent) disagree with the proposition that large differences in income are 'necessary for America's prosperity.…'"

Page and Jacobs are doubtless correct to describe the default setting of American public opinion as a kind of "conservative egalitarianism." Citizens "want opportunities for economic success," they write, "and want individuals to take care of themselves when possible. But they also want genuine opportunity for themselves and others, and a measure of economic security to pursue opportunity and to insure themselves and their neighbors against disasters beyond their control."

Read the rest of the article on the Inside Higher Ed. website or check out some of the survey data files referenced in the book.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 02:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In April of 2003, in the wake of a violent counter-insurgency, thousands of priceless relics from ancient Mesopotamian civilization were stolen from Iraq's National Museum in Baghdad. Despite the presence of an American tank unit, the pillaging went unchecked, and more than 15,000 artifacts—some of the oldest evidence of human culture—disappeared into the shadowy worldwide market in illicit antiquities. Since then, the looting and vandalism of the world's cultural heritage in Iraq saw an increase as gangs continued to loot artifacts that had previously been unexcavated, and though on February 23, 2009 the museum was reopened by Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, many of its artifacts have yet to be restored. Recently Lawrence Rothfield, author of The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum, joined the Chronicle of Higher Education's David Glenn to discuss the reasons for the failure to protect Iraq's cultural heritage and what might be done to prevent it in the future. From the Chronicle:

Q. Why did the United States do such a bad job of protecting the museum in 2003?

Before the war, nobody except archaeologists was worried about civilians looting the archaeological sites and the museum. And that includes the Iraqi exiles who were advising the State Department's Future of Iraq Project, which was supposed to develop plans for the postwar period. They set up working groups on all sectors of society — but they forgot about culture.

Q. But would it have made a difference if the Future of Iraq Project had paid attention to culture?

No, it wouldn't have made any difference at all, given that the military threw all of their plans in the garbage can anyway.

Now, the military itself was very interested in doing its job in terms of protecting cultural sites and museums. But under international law, its job is defined as not destroying or looting cultural sites itself — not as preventing civilians from destroying sites.

So before the war, they reached out to archaeologists, and they did a perfect job of identifying sites to put on a no-strike list. None of those sites was destroyed in active combat operations.

Unfortunately, they ignored warnings from the same archaeologists they were working with that the museums and sites might be looted by Iraqis. The Pentagon should have known about that issue. Nine museums were looted after the 1991 Gulf War. The military did not learn its lesson from that experience.

Read the rest of the interview on the Chronicle website or on the author's blog, The Punching Bag. Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In 1969, the Chicago Seven were charged with intent to “incite, organize, promote, and encourage” antiwar riots during the Democratic National Convention. The Chicago Conspiracy Trial is an electrifying account of the months-long trial that commanded the attention of a divided nation. John Schultz, on assignment for the Evergreen Review, witnessed the whole trial, from the jury selection to the aftermath of the verdict. His vivid account exposes the raw emotions and judicial corruption that came to define one of the most significant legal events in American history.

“A beautiful, compelling, tear-jerking, mind-boggling book.” —William Burroughs

“A probe into the American conscience.” —David Graber, Los Angeles Times

Read the press release or read an excerpt.

Archived in Chicago | History | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In one of the many articles that have appeared recently about higher education during the recession—covering everything from increased applications to the reshuffled popularity of different fields—Slate asks whether advanced education really pays off during times like these. Laurel, one of the many students whose experiences the article cites in formulating an answer, has a familiar story:

"Many of the academic jobs that I applied to were cancelled," Laurel writes. "I've been scouring Craigslist but thus far I haven't found a position that requests familiarity with obscure art historical literature from the 18th century written in Serbo-Croatian.… I am hurdling toward being the saddest type of graduate student—the one who has finished and is at a loss for what to do next. I'm going to be the one sitting on the front steps of that Ivory Tower with my elbows on my knees and my chin in my hands just begging to be let back in."

But Laurel has other options, as Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius point out in "So What Are You Going to Do with That?"—which explains why the paths leading away from the Ivory Tower can be just as rewarding for the tens of thousands of Ph.D.'s and M.A.'s who leave grad school every year. Designed for anyone contemplating the jump from scholarship to the outside world—whether by choice or necessity—"So What Are You Going to Do with That?" covers topics ranging from career counseling to interview etiquette to translating skills learned in the academy into terms an employer can understand and appreciate.

And that's a skill whose value any new graduate can appreciate.

Archived in Books for the News | Literature | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ever since the U.S. military invaded Iraq in 2003, the nightly news has offered accounts of troops fighting a lethal and adaptive insurgency, where the divisions between enemy and ally are ambiguous at best, and where working with the local population is essential for day-to-day survival. But what does this mean for soldiers on the ground? And how can troops facing deployment quickly adapt to such a hostile environment?

From the lessons they learned during multiple tours of duty in Iraq, two American veterans of the war have written a tactical primer based on the military classic The Defence of Duffer’s Drift. Over the course of six dreams, a young officer deployed for the first time in Iraq fights the same battle again and again, learning each time—the hard way—which misconceptions he needs to discard and which lessons he must learn to defeat a dangerous enemy and achieve a lasting victory.

Accompanied by the Boer War-era novella that inspired it, The Defense of Jisr al-Doreaa offers an invaluable resource for anyone seeking to understand how the United States plans to win the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Read the press release.

Archived in History | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a story this weekend about Barack Obama's ubiquity, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette asked Kathleen Hall Jamieson's expert opinion about whether he's overexposed in the media. She said no: Obama's "target audience is that vast swath in the middle," Jamison explained. "The audience that's able to be persuaded is the ESPN audience, the Leno audience and the national audience that watches him in prime time.… If he'd had Internet and cable, Reagan would have done the rest of what Obama is doing."

As we've noted, Jamieson—a coauthor of Presidents Creating the Presidency—is no stranger to broad exposure herself. On the heels of her expert election commentary on the NewsHour, among dozens of other outlets, she's now turned to illuminating Obama's presidency and the issues his administration faces. This weekend alone, her wisdom appeared not only in the Post-Gazette but also in the National Journal's assessment of Obama's economic message and on "On the Media," where she reflected on the "War on Terror."

As the new president continues to use rhetoric to shape the presidency, Jamieson's Presidents Creating the Presidency holds more timely insights about the continuing re-creation of the nation's highest office.

Archived in Commentary | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The alchemist's quest to transform base metals into gold lasted over 2500 years beginning with the ancient Egyptians and culminating with eighteenth century European and American alchemists like George Starkey and his apprentice Robert Boyle. As Stephen Heuser writes in a recent article for The Boston Globe: "Centuries of work and scholarship had been plowed into alchemical pursuits, and for what? Countless ruined cauldrons, a long trail of empty mystical symbols, and precisely zero ounces of transmuted gold. As a legacy, alchemy ranks above even fantasy baseball as a great human icon of misspent mental energy." But, Heuser asks, "was it really such a waste?"

In his article Heuser cites the rising number of scholars who would answer that question in the negative—including Press authors Bernard Lightman, Tara Nummedal, William R. Newman, and Lawrence M. Principe—all of whom have joined the ranks of historians, humanists, and philosophers of science that cite alchemy's profound influence on the beginnings of modern chemistry in calling for a reappraisal of its historical significance. Heuser's article continues:

Alchemists, they are finding, can take credit for a long roster of genuine chemical achievements, as well as the techniques that would prove essential to the birth of modern lab science[Robert Boyle is also today widely regarded as one of the founders of modern chemistry]. In alchemists' intricate notes and diagrams, they see the early attempt to codify and hand down experimental knowledge. In the practices of alchemical workshops, they find a masterly refinement of distillation, sublimation, and other techniques still important in modern laboratories.…

Bringing alchemy under the tent of science does more than illuminate a turning point in a distant history, however: It suggests a different way to think about science in our own time. Science might be the most productive tool ever invented for understanding the world, but despite its claims on truth, it is still just that: a tool, and a man-made one. Alchemy is an important reminder that modern science [also] has a context…

Isaac Newton, the first great physicist, reached for alchemy when he tried to formulate a theory of the universe that could account for everything from plant life to gravity. Albert Einstein tried, and failed, to cap his career by formulating a single theory that explained all the universe's forces. And at the cutting edge of modern physics, string theory purports to offer a complete but possibly unprovable explanation of the universe based on 11 dimensions and imperceptibly tiny strings.

Alchemists wouldn't recognize the mathematics behind the theory. But in its grandeur, in its claim to total authority, in its unprovability, they would surely recognize its spirit.

Read the rest of Heuser's article on the Boston Chronicle's website Boston.com. Or click on our author's names above to find our more about their books and the revival of alchemy studies.

Archived in Books for the News | Chicago | History and Philosophy of Science | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 03:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The California Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments today on Proposition 8, the successful ballot measure that amended the state's constitution to ban gay marriage. The Los Angeles Times reports that supporters of gay marriage "seek to overturn Proposition 8 by saying it isn't a constitutional amendment at all, but a constitutional revision that should have been required to go through a much more rigorous process to become law."

Whatever the court decides, it seems safe to predict that this is only one of many battles to come between two sides of an issue that—as the authors of The Politics of Same-Sex Marriage point out—has waxed and waned in the public sphere since the passing of the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act. In fact, same-sex couples filed suit Tuesday against the federal government over portions of the act. The suit is expected to take several years to make its way through the federal court system—which leaves a lot of time for reading up on the issue in the meantime.

The Politics of Same-Sex Marriage, a great place to start, brings together an esteemed list of scholars to explore all facets of this heated issue, including the ideologies and strategies on both sides of the argument, the public's response, the use of the issue in political campaigns, and how same-sex marriage fits into the broad context of policy cycles and windows of political opportunity.

And Same Sex, Different Politics brings an illuminating comparative approach to gay rights issues. It's the first book to compare results across struggles over laws governing military service, homosexual conduct, adoption, marriage and partner recognition, hate crimes, and civil rights. In each area, Gary Mucciaroni found, the gay rights movement's achievements depended both on Americans' perceptions of its demands and on the political venue in which the conflict plays out. Adoption policy, for example, generally takes shape in a decentralized system of courts that enables couples to target sympathetic judges, while fights for gay marriage generally culminate in legislation or ballot referenda—Proposition 8 comes to mind—against which it is easier to mount opposition.

Archived in Books for the News | Gay and Lesbian | Law | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by MM at 09:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It has been widely reported recently that Illinois hasn't yet revealed any concrete plans for the cash allotted to it for highway, bridge and transit projects via the President's economic stimulus bill. And this morning, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood issued a warning that time is running out. Washington is required to distribute funds by the 10th. Combined with Illinois' recently bolstered reputation for political corruption and mismanagement, the report seems at once predictable and worrisome, bringing to the fore the central pitfall of Obama's attempts to jump-start the economy—the potential for local governments to simply squander billions of taxpayer dollars—a problem that Barry B. LePatner, author of Broken Buildings, busted Budgets, argues is compounded by a construction industry that "is just as broken as the infrastructure it's charged with building and repairing." In his article, "Five Points the Government MUST Consider Before Doling Out Billions to the Construction Industry" LePatner delivers a critical assessment of the construction industry and its inefficiencies, and outlines the steps a responsible government must take to ensure the money from one of the biggest spending programs in history is used wisely. Read the article on the American Surveyor website, or find out more about LePatner's book at www.brokenbuildings.com.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Economics | Law | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A review of Brian Ladd's Autophobia published in Friday's Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune begins by noting the relevance of the book's topic to the nation's current economic crisis—a crisis spearheaded by rapid changes to our auto-centric culture like "volatile gas prices, car-oriented subdivisions in foreclosure," and "an auto industry in free fall." But then, wasn't it just yesterday that this very same car culture was the driving force behind one of the biggest economic booms in our nation's history? As reviewer Jim Foti notes, Ladd's book offers up ample evidence that since its invention, the automobile has played an integral role in America's successes, as well as its failures, provoking heated debates over whether they are sources of good or evil—markers of progress, or signs of the apocalypse. And while many might argue for the latter considering our current state of affairs, Foti notes that "as Ladd points out, so far the car's doomsayers have been wrong every time."

On Saturday, Chicago Tribune cultural critic Julia Keller also reviewed Ladd's book, along with another insightful critique of America's automotive culture, Cotten Seiler's Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America. Praising both books, she takes special note of Republic of Drivers writing: "Seiler's book is written with grace and authority and finely wrought insight. He points out how the language of driving and the language of capitalism both employ 'tropes of motion:' moving, hustling. Cars, he says, 'are products of a highly specific conception of what it means to be modern and free.' We may believe that we're in the driver's seat, that is, but in point of fact, cars took control of the cultural steering wheel before we even hit the city limits."

For more insights on America's car culture read an excerpt from Autophobia and listen to an audio interview with the author.

Archived in History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Several news agencies are reporting this morning on a Russian court's acquittal of three men who had been accused of participating in the 2006 murder of Anna Politkovskaya, the renowned investigative journalist who reported on the brutal tactics used by Russian leaders to quell Chechen uprisings during the past several years.

A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya collects many of Politkovskaya's articles and columns on Chechnya's prolonged and bloody conflict with Russia, from which it declared independence in 1991. The book recounts the horrors of living in the midst of the war, examines how the war has affected Russian society, and takes a hard look at how people on both sides are profiting from it, from the guards who accept bribes from Chechens out after curfew to the United Nations. The result is a powerful and honest account of a dangerous and little-understood conflict. We have an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 8 marked the 131th anniversary of the birth of Martin Buber, theologian, philosopher, and political radical. Buber (1878–1965) was actively committed to a fundamental economic and political reconstruction of society as well as the pursuit of international peace. In his voluminous writings on Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine, Buber united his religious and philosophical teachings with his politics, which he felt were essential to a life of public dialogue and service to God.

Buber's presences looms large over the Chicago Jewish studies list; in addition to Buber's own writings in print, the Press also recently published a study analyzing his interpretation of Hasidic spirituality as a form of cultural criticism. In honor of this influential thinker's life and work, we offer a Martin Buber reading list.

A Land of Two Peoples: Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs
Martin Buber, Edited with Commentary and a new Preface by Paul Mendes-Flohr

Collected in A Land of Two Peoples are the private and open letters, addresses, and essays in which Buber advocated binationalism as a solution to the conflict in the Middle East. A committed Zionist, Buber steadfastly articulated the moral necessity for reconciliation and accommodation between the Arabs and Jews. From the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 to his death in 1965, he campaigned passionately for a "one state solution." With the Middle East embroiled in religious and ethnic chaos, A Land of Two Peoples remains as relevant today as it was when it was first published more than twenty years ago. This timely reprint, which includes a new preface by Paul Mendes-Flohr, offers context and depth to current affairs and will be welcomed by those interested in Middle Eastern studies and political theory.

On Intersubjectivity and Cultural Creativity
Martin Buber, Edited and with an Introduction by S. N. Eisenstadt

One of the foremost religious and social philosophers of the twentieth century, Buber also wrote extensively on sociological subjects, particularly as these affected his philosophical concerns. Collected here, these writings—touching on education, religion, the state, and charismatic leadership—offer essential insights into the human condition as it is expressed in culture and society.

Buber's central focus in his sociological work is the relation between social interaction, or intersubjectivity, and the process of human creativity. Specifically, Buber seeks to define the nature and conditions of creativity, the conditions of authentic intersubjective social relations that nurture creativity in society and culture. He attempts to identify situations favorable to creativity that he believes exist to some extent in all cultures, though their fullest development occurs only rarely.

Buber considers the combination of open dialogue between human and human and a dialogue between man and God to be necessary for the crystallization of the common discourse that is essential for holding a free, just, and open society together.

Aesthetics of Renewal: Martin Buber's Early Representation of Hasidism as Kulturkritik
Martina Urban

Buber's embrace of Hasidism at the start of the twentieth century was instrumental to the revival of this popular form of Jewish mysticism. Hoping to instigate a Jewish cultural and spiritual renaissance, he published a series of anthologies of Hasidic teachings written in German to introduce the tradition to a wide audience. In Aesthetics of Renewal, Martina Urban closely analyzes Buber's writings and sources to explore his interpretation of Hasidic spirituality as a form of cultural criticism.

For Buber, Hasidic legends and teachings were not a static, canonical body of knowledge, but were dynamic and open to continuous reinterpretation. Urban argues that this representation of Hasidism was essential to the Zionist effort to restore a sense of unity across the Jewish diaspora as purely religious traditions weakened—and that Buber's anthologies in turn played a vital part in the broad movement to use cultural memory as a means to reconstruct a collective identity for Jews. As Urban unravels the rich layers of Buber's vision of Hasidism in this insightful book, he emerges as one of the preeminent thinkers on the place of religion in modern culture.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events | Religion
Posted by SXH at 02:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As U.S. senators continue to debate the economic stimulus package on which they could vote as early as tonight, their deliberation over such a huge bill heightens the implications of the questions Gary Mucciaroni and Paul Quirk pose in Deliberative Choices: Debating Public Policy in Congress. Does debate genuinely inform members of Congress and the public? Or does it mostly mislead and manipulate them?

Mucciaroni and Quirk argue that in fashioning the claims they use in debate, legislators make a strategic trade-off between boosting their rhetorical force and ensuring their ability to withstand scrutiny. They show how legislators' varying responses to such a trade-off shape the issues they focus on, the claims they make, and the information they provide in support of those claims.

Mucciaroni and Quirk conclude that congressional debate generally is only moderately realistic and informed. It often trades in half-truths, omissions, and sometimes even outright falsehoods. Yet some debates are highly informative. We can only hope today's will fall into this last category. But in any case, it's always possible to improve deliberation, and the authors recommend reforms designed to do so.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New York Times reports today that intellectual historian and author John Patrick Diggins passed away Wednesday in Manhattan at the age of 73. Diggins—whose scholarly work encompassed the breadth of American political thought from "the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the present day"—was known for his "provocative, revisionist approach to the history of the American left and right." The NYT notes that "he nourished a sneaking fondness for the Lyrical Left but declared Ronald Reagan to be 'one of the two or three truly great presidents in history.'" The NYT article continues: "The tension between liberal ideals, pragmatism and authority ran like a leitmotif through books like The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest and the Foundation of Liberalism, The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority and Eugene O'Neill's America: Desire Under Democracy"—all of which the University of Chicago Press is honored to have published.

Archived in Biography | Books for the News | History | Literature | Philosophy | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This morning at the Urban Institute Derek Hyra, author of The New Urban Renewal, and Wendell Pritchett, author of Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City joined a forum with other experts on urban affairs to discuss the question: Can public housing overcome its history of racial discrimination and segregation?

The discussion addressed such issues as whether public housing policies can simultaneously address the problems of poverty and race. And, if so, how? You can listen to a webcast of the panel and, for historical perspective, read an excerpt of Pritchett's book.

Archived in Black Studies | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 02:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some news of note from all around the world wide web:

Over at ReadySteadyBook, Sharon Cameron's Impersonality: Seven Essays has been selected as a book of the month for January.

After the New Yorker's Book Bench blog posted on Guy P. Raffa's Danteworlds:A Reader's Guide to the Inferno, the Los Angeles Times Jacket Copy blog picked up on the thread. All of this excitement comes as the Press prepares to issue Raffa's The Complete Danteworlds: A Reader's Guide to the Divine Comedy in June.

Elsewhere on the blogosphere, Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth's Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher is subjected to the page 99 test.

Ann Southworth, author of Lawyers of the Right: Professionalizing the Conservative Coalition has been guest-blogging about her book this week on the Volokh Conspiracy blog.

The twelve books of A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell collectively occupied spot number 32 on the Telegraph's list of 100 novels everyone should read.

And finally, in the wake of the Obama inauguration, suggestions for books to occupy the coveted space on the new President's bedside table have been circulating. In Washington Monthly, Andrew J. Bacevich recommends more from Reinhold Niebuhr, whom Obama has called "one of my favorite philosophers" and singles out our Irony of American History as "one volume that deserves a careful second reading."

Archived in Literature | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by SXH at 03:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Echoing his own previous speeches and the hopes of countless predecessors, Barack Obama called in his inagural address for more meaningful civic participation. "As much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies," he argued. "It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break; the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours."

But, absent such extraordinary and heartrending situations, how might we most effectively wield the civic "instruments"—which Obama, for one, identified as "honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism"—with which we are supposed to meet the myriad challenges we face?

In an attempt to begin to answer that question, we'd like to close out this week of Presidential posts by pointing out that Danielle Allen's Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education is a thought-provoking place to start. An extended essay that Toni Morrison deemed "a profound meditation on citizenship, race, and the astonishing transformative power of true democracy," Talking to Strangers outlines the possibilities inherent in "a citizenship of political friendship."

Arguing that sacrifice is the key concept that bridges citizenship and trust, Allen uncovers the ordinary, daily sacrifices citizens make to keep democracy working (perhaps this is what Obama had in mind when he invoked "the price and promise of citizenship"?). And, usefully, she offers methods for recognizing and reciprocating those sacrifices.

Combining all this hopefulness with well-reasoned nuance—she notes in this excerpt that her "argument is neither Pollyanna's nor Hollywood's"—Allen offers a manifesto of sorts for a revitalized democratic citizenry.

Appropriately, we talked to her about it.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As a nationally recognized expert on political communication and coauthor of Presidents Creating the Presidency, the definitive book on presidential rhetoric, Kathleen Hall Jamieson was called upon yesterday to assess the speeches of both the outgoing and the incoming president.

She told USA Today that, "like his predecessors, Bush [was] 'trying to set the criteria by which the presidency will be judged.'" And, in today's article on Obama's inaugural address, she explains to USA Today readers that "inaugurations have four basic goals: Reuniting people after a tough election, celebrating shared American values, forecasting the administration's policies and swearing fidelity to the Constitution as the president takes the oath of office"—an argument also cited by Jill Lepore in her recent New Yorker article on presidential inaugurals.

If you're interested in learning more about how presidents have used rhetoric to shape the presidency—and how they continue to re-create it—you couldn't stumble across a better starting point than Karyln Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamison's newly updated book on the subject.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chris Otter, author of The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910 is today's guest on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed. On the program Otter joins host Laurie Taylor and Lynda Nead, Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London, to discuss the political and social changes brought about in 19th century Britain by the use of gas lighting. Tune in at the Thinking Allowed website after the live broadcast, or find out more about Otter's book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Literature | Politics and Current Events | Psychology | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As part of its coverage leading up to today's presidential inauguration, the New York Times ran an article yesterday about the books that have contributed the new president's worldview.

"His appreciation of the magic of language and his ardent love of reading have not only endowed him with a rare ability to communicate his ideas to millions of Americans while contextualizing complex ideas about race and religion," Michiko Kakutani argues, "they have also shaped his sense of who he is and his apprehension of the world.… He has tended to look to non-ideological histories and philosophical works that address complex problems without any easy solutions, like Reinhold Niebuhr's writings, which emphasize the ambivalent nature of human beings and the dangers of willful innocence and infallibility."

Indeed, as President Obama himself has noted, "Niebuhr is one of my favorite philosophers. I take away [from his works] the compelling idea that there's serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn't use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away … the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard."

So, in recognition of today's swearing-in, we offer this excerpt from Niebuhr's The Irony of American History, Niebuhr's masterpiece on the incongruity between personal ideals and political reality which is both an indictment of American moral complacency and a warning against the arrogance of virtue.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

News agencies around the world are reporting today that more than 1,000 Palestinians have now died in Gaza as a result of the battles that continue even as diplomats report progress in efforts to establish a cease-fire.

The images that accompany these reports are saddeningly familiar: for decades, we’ve looked from afar at images of violent clashes between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. But for all the harrowing power of these images, it is still nearly impossible for many people to imagine the struggles of those living in the midst of the fighting. In Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine American-born Israeli David Shulman takes us right into the heart of the conflict with an eye-opening chronicle of his work as a member of the peace group Ta‘ayush, which takes its name from the Arabic for “living together.”

Though Shulman never denies the complexity of the issues fueling the conflict—nor the culpability of people on both sides—he forcefully clarifies the injustices perpetrated by Israel by showing us the human dimension of the occupation. Here we meet Palestinians whose houses have been blown up by the Israeli army, shepherds whose sheep have been poisoned by settlers, farmers stripped of their land by Israel’s dividing wall. We watch as whip-swinging police on horseback attack crowds of nonviolent demonstrators, as Israeli settlers shoot innocent Palestinians harvesting olives, and as families and communities become utterly destroyed by the unrelenting violence of the occupation.

This excerpt exemplifies Shulman’s searching attempt to discover how his beloved Israel went wrong—and how, through acts of compassionate disobedience, it might still be brought back.

And Shulman, of course, is far from the first to delve into an aspect of this long and complicated story: Martin Buber’s A Land of Two Peoples collects his writings that advocate for a binational state while Nadia Abu El-Haj’s Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (excerpt) explores the relation between archaeology and Israeli national identity.

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 01:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Introducing a report yesterday on Stanford University's newly announced energy institute—to be funded by a $100 million gift by wealthy alums—the host of American Public Media's Marketplace noted that though "it's tough sledding out there if you're a charity or a foundation or a university endowment … the money hasn't completely dried up.… [But] schools will have to rely on private funding for a while, and that could cause some sticky situations."

Daniel S. Greenberg, whom Marketplace interviewed for yesterday's report, is an expert on those kinds of situations, and in Science for Sale: The Perils, Delusions, and Rewards of Campus Capitalism, he reveals that the ties between private wealth and college campuses are more complicated—and less profitable—than media reports would suggest. But just because potential corruption is overhyped, Greenberg argues, doesn't mean that there's no danger. As he told Marketplace, "the Ivory Tower is gone.… The record seems to show that universities are much more interested in getting the money and getting on with the project than they are in protecting their traditional values."

For its part, Stanford noted that, in the words of university president John Hennessy, "universities such as Stanford need to focus their full talent on the greatest challenges facing the world today.… Energy is certainly one of those issues." According to the Stanford Daily, the $100 million grant will fund "will fund faculty hiring, graduate student support and energy research."

Archived in Books for the News | Education | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It was widely reported yesterday, including this story in the Chicago Tribune, that the Obama administration will appoint Cass R. Sunstein, faculty member of the U of C Law School from 1981 to 2008, and currently the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard, to head up its Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs—a key position responsible for overhauling a broad range of federal regulations, including those of financial markets. The Tribune quotes one of Obama's transition officials:

"This office is in charge of coordinating and overseeing government regulations… and a smarter approach to regulation is key to making government work better and getting better results in terms of protecting health, the environment, etc."

In addition to his academic credentials, Sunstein has also authored and contributed to a large corpus of books and articles "devoted to exploring the relationship between law and human behavior," several of which have been published by the press—most recently he co-authored Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide. See a complete list of UCP's Sunstein titles.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jan R. Van Meter, author of Tippecanoe and Tyler Too: Famous Slogans and Catchphrases in American History, made an appearance earlier today on KCUR public radio's Up to Date with Steve Kraske to discuss his new book and some of the fascinating stories it contains about the various slogans and catch phrases that have helped define American public life. Archived audio of the show will be available on the KCUR website after the show.

And If you're in Kansas City this evening you can catch more of Van Meter this evening at 6:30pm at the Kansas City Public Library, Central Location. Navigate to our author events page or to the Kansas City Public Library website for more info.

Also, read a web feature on contemporary slogans that we'll remember and listen to another audio interview with Van Meter for the Chicago Audio Works podcast.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New York Times reports today that president elect Barack Obama has chosen Steven Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, for the position of energy secretary in his new administration. The Times article quotes Scott Segal, director of an industry group called the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council saying: "[Chu's] experience seems to dovetail perfectly with the president-elect's commitment to bringing new energy technology to market in a timely fashion… An understanding of the art of the possible in energy technology will be critical to the development of a cost-effective climate change policy."

But while Chu might be garnering positive publicity now, it wasn't so long ago that he was at the center of a heated controversy at Berkeley concerning his support of a deal with British Petroleum to provide partial funding for a new Energy Biosciences Institute that would grant the company unprecedented rights to the intellectual property it produces. A 2007 article about the deal for the Chronicle of Higher Education quotes Daniel S. Greenberg, author of Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism saying "universities have been so eager to enter into business deals with industry, they will do quite stupid things." Critics of the deal have also raised concerns over "whether the biofuels institute will be too influenced by BP's corporate agenda.…" According to the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights "because four of the eight seats on the governing board will be controlled by BP, the company can block proposed research from going forward." Proponents however argue that BP's support will significantly boost research aimed at the production of new and cleaner energy and get those technologies more quickly into the hands of consumers. Now, with Chu in a prime position to further enmesh the private and public spheres in planning for the nation's energy future, one can only speculate as to how high the stakes in the debate have been raised.

For more on the controversial role modern scientists play in transforming knowledge into power and profit checkout some of Greenberg's other books including Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion or The Politics of Pure Science.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 01:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you're busy trying to figure out how to survive the market meltdown, then at some point you might also begin wondering about how, and why, it all started in the first place. In a recent article for the Washington Monthly Greg Anrig takes note of Lawrence D. Brown and Lawrence R. Jacobs timely new book, The Private Abuse of the Public Interest: Market Myths and Policy Muddles for offering an insightful answer. Anrig writes:

In the waning days of the Bush administration, as venerable Wall Street firms collapsed, credit markets froze, stocks crashed, and economic indicators deteriorated, free market, antiregulatory Republicans found themselves with no choice but to partially nationalize the banking industry. It was a Shakespearean denouement for the conservative movement. For nearly thirty years, the right had dominated political debate on the strength of the simple argument that government was the problem and free markets the solution.…

[But] as Lawrence D. Brown and Lawrence R. Jacobs demonstrate in The Private Abuse of the Public Interest: Market Myths and Policy Muddles, the era of conservative dominance has wrought a cyclical pattern: first comes the fervent advocacy of market-based policy ideas, followed by their implementation, which causes damage that can [ironically] only be fixed by extensive governmental intervention.…

Brown and Jacobs discern five phases…in the cycle. First, conservatives deem the central problem in every arena to be an insufficient reliance on markets.… Second, conservative policy experts propose a simple solution: a substitution of market forces for government.… The third step in Brown and Jacobs's framework is legislative action to implement the ideas proposed by the market worshippers.… The fourth phase is when the seductive simplicity of free market theory meets complicated institutional reality.… The final stage is when political backlash forces policymakers to respond to the unintended consequences and failures of the market-based approaches—causing government to grow and thereby subverting the original goals of the pro-market adherents.…

With a presidential candidate openly campaigning for more rather than less regulation, as Barack Obama has just done successfully, the United States has clearly entered a new era. When the inevitable reaction pushing for a return to free markets comes back around, the lesson of this insightful book is clear: don't go there unless you want even bigger government to clean up after the failures that are sure to follow.

Read the full article on the Washington Monthly website.

Archived in Economics | Politics and Current Events | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you're one of the many tourists flocking to Barack Obama's Chicago home, you'll come up against formidable barricades. And touring the rest of what the city has dubbed Presidential Chicago will only take so much time. So, after you're done following in the president-elect's footsteps, why not chart a path of your own?

• Our Guide to Chicago's Murals, divided into easy-to-read geographical sections with useful maps for walking tours, is the perfect companion for tourists or Chicagoans interested in coming to know better this aspect of the city's history.

• Chicago's Famous Buildings get a similarly user-friendly treatment in our leading pocket guide to the architecture that comprises Chicago's breathtaking skyline, its dozens of monuments, and its historic legacy.

• For fairweather travelers, The Chicago River, by veteran river tour guide David Solzman, offers a diverse collection of easy and enjoyable tours for anyone who wants to experience the river by foot, boat, canoe, or car.

• If you don't want to leave Obama territory, The Robie House of Frank Lloyd Wright functions as the perfect companion for a visitor to what may now be the second most famous home in the neighborhood.

• And, finally, the Press is only about a thirty minute walk from that red brick house behind the barricades. So, drop on in:

View Larger Map

Archived in Chicago | Commentary | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In the aftermath of the Democratic Party's broad success on Election Day, David Brooks argued last week, "the battle lines have already been drawn in the fight over the future of conservatism." In her op-ed in yesterday's National Law Journal, Ann Southworth explains that these rifts extend to lawyers. Drawing on the research she conducted for Lawyers of the Right: Professionalizing the Conservative Coalition, Southworth argues that while "lawyers might be expected to help unite the coalition … class and cultural conflict inhibits cooperation among lawyers for the various constituencies of the conservative alliance. These lawyers are fundamentally divided by social background, values, geography and professional identity."

Lawyers of the Right, published this month, provides a rich portrait of this diverse group of lawyers who represent conservative and libertarian nonprofit organizations. Featuring insights based on in-depth interviews with more than 70 lawyers, it explores their values and identities and traces the implications of their shared interest in promoting political strategies that give lawyers leading roles.

"It remains to be seen," Southworth points out, "whether the Republican Party will rebuild a winning coalition and what role lawyers might play in efforts to forge common ground within the party's ranks." But, in the midst of what Brooks's column deemed "darkness at dusk," her work helps illuminate the possibilities.

Archived in Books for the News | Law | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jan Van Meter was recently interviewed on CSPAN's BookTV on the topic of his new book Tippecanoe and Tyler Too: Famous Slogans and Catchphrases in American History—a fascinating historical analysis of various catchphrases and slogans, from FDR's "speak softly and carry a big stick," to King's "I have a dream," that have become an indelible part of American public culture. In the interview Van Meter addresses not only the slogans and catchphrases of the past, but also those of the present with Barak Obama's campaign mantra "Yes we can" topping his list. Watch the interview online at the CSPAN website or catch the rebroadcasts on BookTV, Saturday, November 29, at 2:00 PM; Sunday, November 30, at 4:00 AM; and Sunday, November 30, at 3:00 PM.

Also read a web feature on contemporary slogans that we'll remember and listen to another interview with Van Meter for the Chicago Audio Works podcast.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ashley Gilbertson, veteran NYT photographer and author of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War, was featured last Thursday along with first-time Iraq correspondent Campbell Robertson in a videocast for the Times Baghdad Bureau blog. In the video—illustrated with a selection of Gilbertson's Baghdad photographs—the pair discuss the radical changes that have taken place in the city since the beginning of the conflict, noting a decrease in overall violence, the conversion of onetime insurgents into peace keepers, and, perhaps most conspicuously, the relative absence of U. S. troops patrolling the streets.

But while America seems to have been at least marginally successful in transforming the once horrendous conditions in Iraq's capital, the war has also had a transformative effect on America, evidenced by the profound impacts it has had on the lives of all those who have been witness to its violence. For example, Gilbertson himself, who initially supported the war is now adamantly against it, as stated in this recent clip of the author speaking about the war and its often tragic effects on the lives of its veterans—a topic that Gilbertson says is the focus of a new project.

Also see this website for Gilbertson's book featuring another video interview with the author.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 09:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today's Washington Post story about Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America chronicles the emergence as "a major player on the Hill" of the first nonpartisan organization dedicated to veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The veterans' group might not have the budget or membership or fancy clients of some of the lobbying shops that line K Street," the Post notes. "But its leaders, most of whom are younger than 30, are keenly aware of the problems their unique constituency faces—post-traumatic stress, traumatic brain injury, repeated tours—a fact that has helped the fledgling nonprofit group become a powerful voice for the 1.8 million veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan on this Veterans Day."

For those of us who don't work on Capitol Hill, Operation Homecoming tells the stories of those same veterans, in their own words. Called "the honest voice of war" by Jeff Shaara, this volume is the result of an initiative launched by the National Endowment for the Arts to bring distinguished writers to military bases to inspire U.S. soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, and their families to record their wartime experiences. Encouraged by such authors as Tom Clancy, Tobias Wolff, and Marilyn Nelson, American military personnel and their loved ones wrote candidly about what they saw, heard, and felt while in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as on the home front. These unflinching eyewitness accounts, private journals, short stories, and letters offer an intensely revealing look into the extraordinary lives of soldiers and veterans.

As the Wall Street Journal noted, "One of the chanted mantras of our time is, 'But I support the troops.' Terrific. Now read Operation Homecoming to find out who they are, what they think, feel, want, have learned, won and lost in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Archived in Commentary | Literature | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Does the election of Barack Obama signal the end of the culture wars, the end of the politics of polarization? If you can't sink a candidacy with the ankle weight of a '60s-era bomber, has that decade's grip on our politics finally been broken?

Once the partisans have been cleared out of the way, the historians are unencumbered. For instance, William Graebner in Patty's Got a Gun: Patricia Hearst in 1970s America.

In April 1974, twenty-year-old newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst robbed a San Francisco bank in the company of members of the Symbionese Liberation Army—who had kidnapped her nine weeks earlier. What was she? Traumatized victim, brainwashed zombie, or domestic terrorist? From a review yesterday in the Economist:

What makes this book worth reading is not so much the first half, a compelling enough account of Ms. Hearst's kidnapping and subsequent time in the headlines, as the second half: an attempt to put the Hearst affair in the context of an America struggling to emerge from the Vietnam quagmire and the ignominy of Watergate. The America of the 1970s, he argues, was ridding itself of the legacy of the "permissive" 1960s, and was preparing for the rightward shift of Reaganism and an emphasis in the 1980s on the individual.… As Mr. Graebner puts it, it is possible that in a different decade Ms. Hearst might well have been acquitted.

We also have an excerpt from the book and an audio interview with the author.

Archived in Film and Media | History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 02:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At long, long last, election day is here! After you vote (using a ballot that Marcia Lausen's Design for Democracy team helped design, if you're in Oregon or here in Chicago), catch up on the latest election commentary from our tireless authors.

• Daron Shaw, author of The Race to 270, recently talked to the BBC about the "battle for the working class male."

• John Geer, author of the widely discussed In Defense of Negativity, explains John McCain's indefatigability in today's Arizona Republic. "McCain is not going to give up, and he's going to go to the bitter end, even though the odds are he's going to lose," Geer told the Republic.

• In today's Chicago Tribune, Lawrence Jacobs, coauthor of The Private Abuse of the Public Interest, discusses the "reawakening" of American politics. "Not long ago we were bemoaning the withdrawal and cynicism of American voters," Jacobs said. "This election is showing a consistently intense electorate. People have been following this at a fever pitch for months and months."

• Nonetheless, it seems safe to assume that Presidents Creating the Presidency coauthor Kathleen Hall Jamieson has been following the race even more closely than most Americans, if her incisive commentary on the NewsHour and elsewhere is any indication. Last week, she talked to U.S. News & World Report about polling.

• Finally, for a glimpse of the action that all of this commentary has been driving at for months, view polling places across the country through the Polling Place Photo Project, a joint effort by the New York Times and our copublisher, the AIGA's Design for Democracy.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 04:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It was an unforgettably bizarre image: a beret-clad Patty Hearst, looking for all the world like a brainwashed zombie, toting a submachine gun as she and her erstwhile kidnappers from the Symbionese Liberation Army robbed a San Francisco bank in broad daylight. In that moment, Patty Hearst became one of the indelible symbols of 1970s America—an era suffused with confusion, anomie, and a vague sense of dissolution and decline, the heady promise of the 1960s already seeming impossibly distant.

With Patty’s Got a Gun, William Graebner offers the first full reconsideration of the Patty Hearst story in decades. Setting the abduction, robbery, and the sensational criminal trial that followed fully in the context of the era, he offers us a Patty Hearst who more than anything served as a mirror to her times. Politicians, pundits and reporters saw in Hearst the embodiment (and often the justification) of their own take on the problems of American culture, from feminism to individualism to plain old lax parenting—and the conclusions they drew directly fueled the burgeoning Reaganite retrenchment. Steeped in the culture of the 1970s, Patty’s Got a Gun grippingly recreates the media circus around the Hearst trial—and the single, affectless individual at its heart.

Read the press release.

Also, read an excerpt or listen to an audio interview.

Archived in History | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In her most recent book, Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica, anthropologist Gina A. Ulysse explores how a group of entrepreneurial women in the Caribbean have managed to struggle against traditional class, color, and gender codes to carve out a niche for themselves as international traders, importing and exporting goods from the Jamaican port of Kingston. But in her recent article for the Hartford Courant, Ulysse demonstrates that one, of course, needn't to look so far abroad to witness how black women in the modern world are negotiating their way beyond entrenched stereotypes and social expectations to rise to position and power. Ulysse writes:

Recently, interviewer Larry King tried his best to get a rise out of Michelle Obama. Her responses remained cool, collected and focused. She defied the angry black woman stereotype. She was forthright, intelligent, impeccably stylish and obviously happy. With these characteristics, Michelle creates discomfort in many because she raises fundamental questions about society's fixation with categories and how we understand our place within the pecking order of things.…

A versatile black female navigating different social landscapes, Michelle keeps shattering the racial component in the glass ceiling. To get where she is today, she took giant class leaps and succeeded in institutions not made in her image. She also excelled in the corporate world. That took courage and savvy.…

Michelle is warm, funny, beautiful and wholesome. Rather than denying her past—often a prerequisite of socioeconomic mobility—she hails those who paved the way for her success. And like them doesn't sweat the small stuff to keep her eyes on the prize. When she exceeds expectations, it is precisely because she is neither a caricature nor fractured. Indeed, she is something new in popular imagination—a black female as model of completeness. As she told King, another template.

Read the rest of Ulysse's article on the Hartford Courant website.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 01:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Senator John Kerry is catching a lot of flak for the widely reported joke he told earlier this week at Senator John McCain's expense. Reportedly, though, the joke generated "lots of laughter" in Kerry's audience. Whether the crack makes you laugh or wince (or both), Ted Cohen's Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters can explain how this joke—-and others like it—work. For Cohen, jokes are complicated transactions in which communities are forged, intimacy is offered, and otherwise offensive stereotypes and cliches lose their sting—at least sometimes. In other cases, the sting just becomes more potent. Indeed, the fuss over Kerry's joke is just the latest in a series of incidents that exemplify American humor's increasingly embattled nature.

Immersing us in the ranks of contemporary joke tellers—from Jon Stewart to Bill Clinton to Beavis and Butt-Head—who aim to do more than simply amuse, Paul Lewis's Cracking Up explains how American humor functions in these contentious times. Stephen Kercher's Revel with a Cause (excerpt), meanwhile, reminds us of the debt that comics like Stewart and Stephen Colbert owe to Mort Sahl, Stan Freberg, and Lenny Bruce—liberal satirists who, through their wry and scabrous comedic routines, waged war against the political ironies, contradictions, and hypocrisies of their times.

In short, today's political jokes have a long backstory. And how many places other than here can you read about the rich intellectual tradition of what, at first glance, might have seemed like throw-away laugh lines?

Archived in Books for the News | Literature | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 01:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Especially in an election year, we sort sort ourselves into distinct social groups. But exactly how do we make those choices, and what external factors might affect our decision making process? To find out more about the associating and polarizing power of politics, science writer John Horgan conducted a timely interview last week with David Berreby, author of Us and Them: The Science of Identity for bloggingheads.tv. In the interview Berreby discusses several issues particularly relevant to the upcoming elections including "reality and illusion in racial concepts" and "McCain's failure to exploit identity politics," among other topics.

Check out the complete interview at blogginheads.tv.

For more timely social commentary from an award winning science writer navigate to Berreby's blog at www.usthemblog.com.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There are two important events you undoubtedly have marked on your calendars next month: November 3, the publication date of Obsession: A History by Lennard J. Davis, and November 4, Election Day. Though at first these two events may seem unrelated, they in fact have much in common. Davis explains:

In the vice-presidential debate, Sarah Palin called for an end to “obsessive politics.”

I don’t know about you, but obsessive politics is just about the only thing I’ve been engaging in this election season. I check blogs, online news sources, cable TV, radio, daily tracking polls, Facebook, and anything else that can provide me up-to-the minute information and commentary. I’ve entered the OCD world of politics, and believe me life in the fast click-lane is invigorating.

I never did this before. In the past I was content to let the front page of the morning newspaper tell me the latest. But now the paper is so yesterday, and the latest news is so “an hour ago.”

It turns out I’m not alone in my obsessiveness.

Continue reading "The OCD world of politics" »

Archived in Commentary | Politics and Current Events
Posted by SXH at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An unlikely new media celebrity is flitting across the political stage. When Joe Wurzelbacher stopped presidential candidate Barack Obama on a campaign trip to Ohio last week, he probably didn't anticipate becoming the centerpiece of a nationally televised debate on tax policy. But during last Wednesday's presidential debate, both candidates made frequent references Wurzelbacher and his encounter with Obama, at times addressing him directly to frame their arguments, and propelling "Joe the plumber" to at least fifteen minutes of political fame.

Last night Kathleen Hall Jamieson, an expert on the subject of political rhetoric and co-author of Presidents Creating the Presidency: Deeds Done in Words, was on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer to discuss style and rhetoric in the '08 campaign, and deliver some insight on the significance of "Joe the plumber" in Wednesday's debate. From the News Hour:

Kathleen Hall Jamieson: Joe the plumber helped Sen. McCain control part of the agenda of the debate, but Joe the plumber also set up a very concrete example that both campaigns could now play through in the following days.

And what we're going to find out—as the fact-checkers sort the world out—is that, if Joe the plumber only makes $40,000 a year, he, in fact, benefits more from Sen. Obama's plan than he does from Sen. McCain's.

If, however, he founds his business and he makes more than $250,000, well, you know, he's going to see a tax increase from Sen. Obama.

And on the health care plan, we found an area of real confusion, because Sen. Obama hasn't specified when people are going to be paying a fine, how many people have to be in a business to call it a small business, how much dollar amount does the business have to have to be classified small business.

So when Sen. Obama says, "Well, small businesses are exempted, Joe, don't worry." The fact-checkers and news people are now saying, "But, Sen. Obama, you haven't specified what constitutes a small business." That may actually advance this dialogue.

So Joe has made concrete very abstract proposals. And as a result, I think he's advanced this process very importantly.

You can view video and a transcript of the rest of the discussion on the News Hour website, or find out more about Jamieson's book.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 01:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the second episode of the Chicago Audio Works podcast we feature an interview with Jan Van Meter, author of Tippecanoe and Tyler Too: Famous Slogans and Catchphrases in American History. Host Chris Gondek talks with Van Meter about the various slogans and catchphrases that permeate our public culture—from Theodore Roosevelt's "speak softly and carry a big stick," to the Virginia Slims marketing slogan "You've come a long way, baby"—and their profound influence on American values, beliefs, and politics.

Chicago Audio Works is produced by Chris Gondek of Heron & Crane and the Invisible Hand. This and previous episodes of Chicago Audio Works are also available from iTunes and other digital media aggregators.

See all audio and video available from the University of Chicago Press.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New York Times reported today that French police discovered toxic mercury pellets in the car of human rights lawyer Karinna Moskalenko, one day before pretrial hearings in Moscow into the murder of one of her best-known clients, journalist and author Anna Politkovskaya.

Politkovskaya's writing garnered worldwide attention for her coverage of the brutal conflict in Chechnya. She published hundreds of articles in Novaya gazeta, some of which are collected in A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya published in 2003.

On October 7, 2006 Anna Politkovskaya was found shot to death in her Moscow apartment. As she was a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin, Chechen Prime Minister (now President) Ramzan Kadyrov, and both sides in the Chechen wars, speculation as to possible political motives for her death abounded. In August of 2007 ten suspects were arrested. Three of those suspects—including two Chechen brothers, Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov and a former police officer, Sergei Khadzhikurbanov—were set to go on trial, with preliminary hearings beginning today. The judge refused a request to delay the trial until Ms. Moskalenko recovered from mercury poisoning.

To find out more about the recent developments in the case of the murder of Anna Politkovskaya read the New York Times article. To find out more about Politkovskaya's writing, read an excerpt from her book: “Russia's Secret Heroes”.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 01:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Like many political observers, we noticed a troubling change in the tenor of the campaign last week: angry (and ill-informed) crowds at rallies, a passionately divided electorate, and increasingly negative campaign ads.

But, according to John G. Geer, author of In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns, "the real source of negativity in presidential campaigns is not attack ads themselves but the coverage of them by the news media." In an op-ed published on Politico late last month, Greer said "negative" is a subjective term, and that's just the problem. "When the definition of 'negative' is shaped by one's position on the ideological spectrum, we should worry." Also, there are, he pointed out, positive aspects of so-called negative ads: "They are more specific and documented than are positive ads. And they're more likely to be about the important issues facing the nation."

The flip side is that, of course, attacks ads typically aren't personal. Not so this week. If the oft-repeated maxim that this election is about character is true, should we get used to these hostile personal attacks? In an editorial in the October 12 Washington Post , Greer says the current climate of negativity is a natural outcome of a candidate trying to "change the subject" and regain footing in the polls. And, he notes, neither campaign is guiltless here: both have aired about the same number of negative ads. So, even as Greer admits, "the number of attack ads seems excessive to me, too," he is still assured negativity is ultimately essential to our sometimes ugly democracy: "It may not be pretty, but democratic politics rarely are. U.S. elections are pitched battles for control of the federal government. The stakes are huge, and tempers flare. But the candidate left standing will be battle-tested for the fiery trial that awaits him when he takes that oath of office." In politics it seems, there is no rest for the negative.

For highlights of negativity from the past, visit the Attack Ad Hall of Fame .

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by SXH at 01:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At Tuesday night's presidential debate, most of the discussion centered on what moderator Tom Brokaw called the "new economic realities out there that everyone in this hall and across this country understands." Senators McCain and Obama talked mostly about how they would respond to these problems, but the day before the debate, in a panel discussion on their new book The Private Abuse of the Public Interest, Lawrence Brown and Lawrence Jacobs explained how we got into this mess in the first place.

The unraveling of the credit market and the wild swings on Wall Street, they explained, are the latest dramatic illustrations of a pattern their book lays bare, in which deregulation and privatization run amuck and require government action to rescue the public interest. Journalists covering the crisis are listening. McClatchy Newspapers sought Lawrence Jacobs's expertise last week for a story questioning what prompted lax oversight of the financial industry. (His take? "You could say that the finance industry got their money's worth by supporting members of Congress who were inclined to look the other way.… The big impact that money may have is in discouraging certain topics from ever coming for a vote or even being seriously considered in a committee hearing.")

The Los Angeles Times, too, recently cited Brown and Jacobs's work explaining the effects of the "'deregulation fever' that gripped Democrats and Republicans near the end of the 1960s and persisted." As Jacobs told the LAT, "There was an unquestioned assumption over these decades that if government stays out of the picture, the markets will be more dynamic and the outcome will be better for the country as a whole. … What started as a reasoned and nuanced discussion of how to nudge the economy forward turned into a kind of radical utopian stampede in which leaders of both parties said, 'Government was the problem.'"

Whichever party wins the presidency in November will do well to heed the warnings of Brown and Jacobs's sobering history lesson.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 04:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A Monday Morning Political News Round-Up

Today is the last day to register to vote in the November election in many states, so if you haven't yet, consider this another gentle reminder that the time to do so is now. Check out this handy Google maps application that allows you to access everything you need to know to register and cast your ballot in four weeks.

Yesterday's front page feature in the New York Times on the shifting electoral battlegrounds reminded us of the continued timeliness of Daron R. Shaw's The Race to 270: The Electoral College and the Campaign Strategies of 2000 and 2004, which explores strategies both parties have developed to win decisive electoral votes by targeting specific states and media markets. With McCain's decision to pullout of Michigan last week and the continued fallout out from the economic crisis on Wall Street, Shaw's book remains as relevant as ever as we approach the home stretch in a tightly contested race.

Finally, in these times of unprecedented political interest, political speech is once again in the crosshairs. Polymath and noted disability studies scholar, not to mention author of the compulsively readable forthcoming book Obsession: A History, Lennard Davis recently contributed a piece to NPR Program Day to Day regarding the University of Illinois' recent decision to bar professors from any adornment on their vehicle, office door, or person that expresses their political views. As Davis notes, the ban could stifle fruitful classroom discussion: "The danger of the Illinois ruling isn't so much that you have to peel off your McCain bumper sticker, it's the chilling effect in the classroom and the corridors.… What to do in a class on Macbeth if students want to discuss the abuse of power by a national leader?" Important questions to ponder, without a doubt.

Archived in Commentary | Politics and Current Events
Posted by SXH at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In 1988, during a presidential campaign of yore, election coverage quoted Presidents Creating the Presidency coauthor Kathleen Hall Jamieson so frequently that the New York Times ran a story about it. "In every Presidential campaign," the Times noted, "a handful of people become 'hot sources' of information, quoted seemingly everywhere only to fade from view the day after the election."

But, twenty years and five campaigns later, Jamieson certainly hasn't faded. In addition to appearing on PBS's NewsHour to analyze this year's presidential race, Jamieson has been quoted or cited in 2008 election coverage by virtually every major American news organization.

She talked to the AP, for example, about the tone of certainty both candidates have adopted. She discussed the campaign's declining civility with the Arizona Republic. And in the Christian Science Monitor she analyzed the Republican Party's press management strategy with Sarah Palin.

For more from this brilliant communications scholar, peruse Presidents Creating the Presidency—or simply read the news.

Archived in Commentary | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In an article published this morning on the Politico website, John G. Geer, author of In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns turns a critical eye on this year's presidential campaign to offer some fascinating insights as to why the mudslinging that many argue has sullied this year's elections might not be so bad after all. Geer writes:

Americans do not like negative ads; as much as 80 percent of the public indicates distaste for them. Yet people do not think it's negative for candidates to attack on issues. It's the personal attacks they equate with negative ads. Most commentators include issue attacks as negative, such as McCain's strongly disputed claim that Obama supports sex education for kindergartners. To complicate matters further, most attack ads in presidential campaigns are not personal, they're about issues. That fact rarely gets discussed by the news media. Instead, the news media focus on one or two outrageous ads and fail to look at the broader patterns.

Along these same lines, consider the favorable aspects of negative ads that are rarely mentioned: They are more specific and documented than are positive ads. And they're more likely to be about the important issues facing the nation.

Why is there such a disconnect between perception and reality? My answer will not be popular in some quarters, but the real source of negativity in presidential campaigns is not attack ads themselves but the coverage of them by the news media.

Read the full article on the Politico website.

Also see this special feature, John Geer's Attack Ad Hall of Fame.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The latest word is that tonight's presidential debate in Oxford, MS, between John McCain and Barack Obama will indeed go on. This is a relief to millions of politically-obsessed Americans who otherwise would have to make other plans.

Newton Minow, who more than anyone else is responsible for televised debates, and his co-author Craig L. LaMay, have an op-ed piece in this morning's Chicago Tribune in which they give a bit of the history of the presidential debates. (For the full story consult their book Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future.)

Minow and LaMay advise: "After you watch tonight's debate, turn off your television and avoid the spin that follows." Good advice, even though in Chicago we like to think we are as immune to political spin as we are to cold, wind, and snow.

Minow and LaMay also recently participated in a panel discussion about the debates with former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, and Ellen Hume the research director of MIT's Center for Future Civic Media, at the Harvard School of Law. The HLS has a posted a nice summary of the discussion as well as an archived video of the panel on their website.

On our own website you can relive some of memorable moments from presidential debates—today is the anniversary of the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debate—and you can read an excerpt from the book.

2008 is also, by the way, the 150th anniversary of the granddaddy of them all, the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. We have an edition of the transcripts in The Complete Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858. We'll see this evening whether Obama and McCain can live up to the high standards set by their esteemed predecessors.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 02:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We're less than six weeks away from the election, but if you want to be a truly informed voter when you cast your ballot this November, we've got some books to recommend for the home stretch.

In preparation for the first Obama-McCain match-up this Friday, why not spend some time with Newton N. Minow and Craig L. LaMay's Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future? This fascinating history offers a genuinely inside look into the origins of the presidential debates from the man who invented them. (See memorable moments from presidential debates and read an excerpt from the book.)

If the campaign has gotten too dirty for you, give John G. Geer's In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns a read. Greer argues that when political candidates attack each other, raising doubts about each other's views and qualifications, voters—and the democratic process—benefit. (See a special feature, John Geer's Attack Ad Hall of Fame.)

And if the phrase "hanging chad" still haunts your dreams and you fear another Florida-like ballot debacle, have a look at Marcia Lausen's Design for Democracy: Ballot and Election Design. A handsomely designed specimen itself, this book calls for and lays out adaptable design models that can improve almost every part of the election process—from ballots to registration forms and informational brochures to administrative materials for poll workers.

For more books for the political season, check out our comprehensive list. And if you haven't already, register to vote!

Archived in Commentary | Politics and Current Events
Posted by SXH at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Regina G. Lawrence is a coauthor of When the Press Fails and, with Melody Rose, of the forthcoming Playing the Gender Card? Media, Strategy, and Hillary Clinton’s Run for the White House (Lynne Reinner Publishers). As such, she has deeper insight than most into the renewed prominence of gender issues in press coverage of the ongoing presidential campaign:

Roughly two weeks after Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was named as Senator John McCain’s running mate, McCain’s campaign manager Rick Davis announced on Fox News that Palin would not interact with reporters “until the point in time when she'll be treated with respect and deference.”

Apparently, the McCain campaign is hoping that the new addition to the Republican ticket will get the same kind of media treatment that George W. Bush received in the early years of his presidency—particularly concerning his war agenda. As we document in When the Press Fails, the national media mostly tip-toed around the inconsistencies and holes in the Bush administration’s claims about Iraq (among other issues), unintentionally abetting the administration’s rush to war.

Continue reading "Will Palin ride press deference to the White House?" »

Archived in Books for the News | Film and Media | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 02:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked seven years ago today, the probability that the United States would not respond with vigor and violence was exactly zero. Whatever ethics may suggest for you or me, a nation that turns the other cheek is bound for suicide.

Events like 9/11 are murderous because people are killed; they are unjust because innocents suffer. But what we seek to commemorate today was a tragedy, and that is something quite different.

The clue to this difference is that American response became in just one torturous hour a necessity rather than a choice. Once we were forced to act, the matter was wrested from our hands, not so much by the attackers as by the facts of who we are and how we fit into and depend upon circumstances of long making and global significance.

Continue reading "Remembering 9/11" »

Archived in Commentary | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 02:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

David Simpson, author of 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration wonders, where are the ghosts?

Seven years after 9/11 one of the strangest things is that there are no ghosts. There never were. The photographs that appeared day after day in The New York Times seemed to me then flagrantly dishonorable in their very effort to commemorate. They left little to be haunted by as they reconstructed the lives of the dead as Disneyfied icons of optimistic upward mobility, dreams achieved, selfless happiness, and civic virtue amidst an energetic and responsive democracy. No one was cruel, unhappy, or disappointed, no one unappeased.

Ghosts call for appeasement and are symptomatic of unfinished business. Whether from a desire to be properly buried, to be forgiven, to punish, or simply to visit once again the living, to mourn with them, inform them or warn them, the ghost demands attention. It says, above all: I have come to trouble you, in death as I might have done in life, and to confront you what you cannot easily dismiss or understand. As we approach a critical election I fear that these ghosts will once again be prevented from haunting us in any profound way; that they will again be conjured away even as they are conjured up as a revenge motif by a deadly political game whose logic requires endless war and whose methods are the manufacture of a fear that is always of the 'other' and never of the uncanny that is all too at home in the homeland itself.

I'd like to believe that the heavy tread of the politicians toward brave little Georgia and the cross-border raids into Pakistan do not prefigure some October surprise that will once again exploit our September memories, but I remember how little we had of a critical and vigilant journalism during the prelude to the invasion of Iraq. Far too many on all sides have died to avenge the dead of 9/11. We have managed little or no concern about these deaths even when they are our own. Except for the immediately bereaved who have hardly been allowed to speak but are constantly spoken for, we have continued to be kept (do we keep ourselves?) from our own hauntings, our own Godzillas or jungles of screaming souls. We remain collectively all too untroubled by the dead of 9/11, all too confident of the way to go. There has been no new seriousness of the sort that 9/11 seemed to demand seven years ago. The rhetoric of trauma was everywhere in the months after 9/11, but it concealed the absence of trauma itself, of deep trauma's imperative toward introversion and arrestation. We did not stop the clock for deep reflection. I fear that the next two months are not likely to produce any more complex emotions than the ones we have had thrust upon us for the last seven years.

Archived in Commentary | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by MM at 09:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Julia Vitullo-Martin has an interesting review of Derek S. Hyra's new book, The New Urban Renewal: The Economic Transformation of Harlem and Bronzeville, in Sunday's New York Post. In his book Hyra looks at the nation's two most important historic, urban black neighborhoods—New York's Harlem and Chicago's Bronzeville—to explore the shifting dynamics of class and race as these two iconic black communities undergo an unprecedented period of gentrification. From the Post review:

Hyra's most fundamental concern: As these neighborhoods come back economically, what will happen to their poor residents? Hyra notes that both Bronzeville and Harlem are "revitalizing without drastic racial changeover." In the last 10 years, Central Harlem's white population increased to 2% from 1.5%, and the white proportion in Bronzeville increased to 4% from 2.5%.

Yet while Hyra is very worried about the displacement of the poor, he argues that class antagonism is actually important to the redevelopment of formerly impoverished communities. Black middle-class values translate into effective political activity and organizations, including block clubs, planning boards and religiously affiliated community development corporations. The problem, as he sees it, is that the "coming home" of the black middle class will produce a neighborhood in which poor blacks are no longer welcome.

Is he correct? Only time will tell. After all, the new, large, urban black middle class is itself a new phenomenon. How its development will affect the historic neighborhoods it treasures is an open question.

Read the rest of the article on the New York Post website.

Archived in Anthropology | Black Studies | Chicago | History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Most of us probably think we know how urban gentrification works: rich young whites move into poor, non-white areas and gobble up cheap real estate, eventually forcing longtime residents to move to more affordable but distant locales. Since the late 1990s, however, a surprising new pattern has emerged as a handful of poverty-stricken black neighborhoods have evolved into residential hotspots boasting high-income housing, destination dining, designer boutiques, and even bed-and-breakfasts—all while managing to stay black.

No two neighborhoods in the country exemplify this trend better than Harlem in New York City and Bronzeville in Chicago. In this groundbreaking book, Derek S. Hyra—a resident of both of these neighborhoods—moves from the streets to city hall to corporate boardrooms, tracing the web of factors at play in the remarkable revitalization of these two historic enclaves.

Read the press release.

Archived in Black Studies | Chicago | History | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 02:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In yesterday's New York Sun Harvard economist Edward Glaeser reviewed Derek Hyra's new book The New Urban Renewal: The Economic Transformation of Harlem and Bronzeville. Hyra's book looks at urban gentrification in two neighborhoods—Chicago's Bronzeville and New York's Harlem—and its impact on various socio-economic groups, revealing a sharp divide between middle-income and less affluent residents in benefiting from such transformations. As Glaeser explains:

A dynamic private sector… has made New York and Chicago increasingly prosperous places over the last 15 years.… As these cities have done well, demand for space has exploded. We see rising demand in the skyrocketing price of space in Manhattan and in the cranes that seem to be a permanent feature of Chicago's Lake Shore Drive skyline. Booming demand has also increased the desire among middle-class people to move to formerly poor areas such as Harlem and Bronzeville: Upwardly mobile urbanites, priced out of more expensive areas, have become urban pioneers "gentrifying" areas that used to be poor. But just as the real pioneers weren't always such a blessing for the American Indians on the frontier, gentrifiers aren't always a boon for the established residents of an area.…

Continue reading the article on the New York Sun website.

Archived in Black Studies | Chicago | Economics | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week's edition of the Chicago Reader is running an interesting review of Frank Kusch's Battleground Chicago—an unconventional look at the 1968 'police riots' at the Democratic National Convention. The event has become infamous for the brutality of the police in attempting to control the groups of anti-war protesters demonstrating at the convention. But Kusch's book goes beyond this stereotypical image using seldom heard accounts of the event from the police's point of view to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of how and why they acted as they did. The Reader's Barry Wightman writes:

Kusch… constructs his narrative from interviews he conducted with 80 former Chicago policemen who were on the street during the convention. These are regular guys who fought in World War II and Korea, lived in the bungalow belt, and found themselves on the fault line during one of the tectonic shifts of the period. And every time one of them is quoted, the story comes alive.…

Read the review from the Reader. Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Chicago | History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday's Financial Times ran a positive review of Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips' psychoanalytic exploration of human intimacy in their new book, Intimacies. Summarizing the work the FT's Salley Vickers writes:

Taking the form of a conversation between this congenial but not necessarily like-minded pair, Intimacies explores the pitfalls and possibilities of human intimacy and the damage that a zeal to know ourselves and others can wreak. The exchange of views reflects the authors' philosophies: differences are the source, not the stumbling blocks, of intimacy; distance should enhance not diminish pleasure in others' company; and it is disastrous to take things personally.

Read the full review on the Financial Times website.

Archived in Literature | Philosophy | Politics and Current Events | Psychology | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Michael F. Robinson, author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture has written an interesting piece for the Space Review that draws on his cultural analysis of polar exploration in the nineteenth century to comment on NASA's recent space exploration initiatives. In the article, Robinson notes that sensationalism was often used to justify early polar expeditions rather than their scientific value, and argues that NASA's recent plans to send astronauts to Mars might be an analogous situation. Robinson writes:

A manned mission to Mars, if it happens, will be a dazzling event guaranteed to keep us glued to our televisions. But symbolism alone cannot carry the US space program forward. One hundred years ago, Americans faced the same dilemma on the Arctic frontier. In their relentless pursuit of the North Pole, explorers had abandoned science. After Robert Peary claimed the discovery of the North Pole in 1909, American scientists breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, scientific exploration of the Arctic could begin in earnest. Franz Boas, professor of anthropology at Columbia University, expressed the mood of scientists then, but he could have been expressing the opinion of many scientists now. "We must not forget that the explorer is not expected merely to travel from one point to another, but that we must expect him also to see and to observe things worth seeing."

Read the article on the Space Review website.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History and Philosophy of Science | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

William O. Beeman, whose book The Great Satan vs. the Mad Mullahs: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other was reprinted last year by the press, teamed up with nuclear scientist Dr. Behrad Nakhai to write an interesting commentary on Iran's nuclear activity posted yesterday to the New American Media website. In the article Beeman argues against rumors in the media about Iran's nuclear weapons capabilities, saying that while "Iran is engaged in peaceful nuclear research" it is still far from being able to produce a nuclear weapon, and suggests that claims to the contrary have been fabricated to bolster Israeli official's "requests for the Bush administration's blessing to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities."

Read the full article on the New American Media website or find out more about Beeman's book here.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Politics and Current Events | Religion
Posted by TXM at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Allan H. Meltzer, professor of economics and author of A History of the Federal Reserve, Volume 1: 1913-1951, wrote an interesting op-ed piece for today's Wall Street Journal that warns policymakers against increasing the Federal Reserve's supervision of investment banks. In his article, Meltzer argues that the Federal Reserve's increased involvement with private investment banking firms could lead to greater assurance of government bailouts, and encourage more of the risky lending practices that have led to the highly publicized bank closures in recent months.

Read Meltzer's article on the WSJ website, or find out more about Meltzer's book, A History of the Federal Reserve, Volume 1: 1913-1951. Volume Two is currently slated for publication in the Fall of 2009.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 09:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mary Pattillo, author of Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City was interviewed yesterday on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show to discuss the gentrification of urban African American communities.

Pattillo's book is an eye-opening sociological exploration of Chicago's North Kenwood–Oakland neighborhood and the community's embattled process of revitalization, where the often conflicting interests of the black middle-class, their less-fortunate neighbors, and the established centers of white economic and political power frame a dramatic tale of the transformation of black communities in the twenty-first century.

In the interview Pattillo touches on many of the issues discussed in her book and fields some interesting questions from WNYC listeners. Listen to the audio on the WNYC website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Black Studies | Chicago | History | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Newton Minow will be signing books and answering questions at a virtual booksigning this Saturday, June 14th, at 12 noon CDT. Minow is co-author with Craig L. LaMay of the recently released Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future.

The booksigning will be webcast from the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop at 357 West Chicago Avenue in Chicago. You may attend in person or online. The webcast will be available from VirtualBookSigning.net.

On our own site we revisit some of the memorable moments from presidential debates, supplemented with images and links to online videos where available. Nixon sweating, “I knew Jack Kennedy,” presidential scowls and more. We also have an excerpt about the first televised debate between Nixon and Kennedy.

If you're interested in how a virtual booksigning works, take a look at this program from Book-TV.

Archived in Author Events | Film and Media | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 09:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We have previously noted the tenure battle of Nadia Abu El-Haj, who was granted tenure by Barnard last November after a contentious public dispute. Another Columbia professor—and Chicago author—Joseph A. Massad, has been in the grips of a similar tenure controversy for more than a year. Massad is an associate professor of Arab politics in Columbia's department of Middle East and Asian languages and culture and the author most recently of Desiring Arabs, a study of the representation of sexuality in the Arab world.

Departments of Middle Eastern studies are flash points of controversy at a number of universities and nowhere have the flashes ignited more careers than at Columbia, where off-campus and alumni groups have joined in the discussion. The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about Massad's case that gives more details about the controversy as well as contextualizes the conflict in terms of a larger debate "over what constitutes academic freedom" and "whether outside groups should have influence in academic decisions."

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 01:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jim Boyd, the former deputy editorial page editor at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis has written an interesting piece on W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston's When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina for the Spring 2008 issue of the Nieman Report. Using his own personal experiences to comment on the author's claims that the American news media—especially during the Bush presidency—has become increasingly susceptible to White House spin Boyd writes:

It is the central thesis of When the Press Fails that the press has become excessively deferential to political power in Washington and has forfeited its (occasional) role as independent watchdog of government. The rule of the press road in Washington now is to run every story through the filter of political power and, unless another strong actor (say, Congress) raises a stink, the press will dutifully report whatever the administration says, without challenge. When you add into the mix an administration that admits to no requirement that it be truthful and straight—indeed, quite the reverse—we have the embarrassing story of press failure to challenge the deceitful case for war in Iraq.

But as Boyd points out, the press's obeisance to governmental authority may be less a reaction to heavy-handed politicians, as to the major news media corporations' focus on making profits:

The most pernicious influence is the fiduciary obligation that owners of our highly concentrated media believe they owe to shareholders.… As deputy editorial page editor at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, I was the principal writer on Iraq for the newspaper's editorial page. We broke with Bush on Iraq when he broke with the United Nations. We became increasingly strident and began to draw national attention and a national Web audience. We suffered for it; our corporate masters strongly disapproved of our behavior; they wanted us flying well under the radar screen.… Apparently the prevailing wisdom in corporate media boardrooms is that workers—even when they are journalists—don't serve shareholders well by making waves. We make nice, which dovetails powerfully with the inclination to defer to power.

Navigate to the Nieman Foundation's website to read the full article online.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 03:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Monday, May 26 is the official publication date of our paperback edition of Andrew Carroll's Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families. Through a series of eyewitness accounts, private journals, short stories, and letters, the book delivers a fascinating firsthand account of the lives of American servicemen and women in Iraq in their own words.

Operation Homecoming is also Oscar nominated documentary produced for PBS's America at a Crossroads. You can check out the movie trailer on YouTube or navigate to the America at a Crossroads website for local air times and additional media.

Find out more about the book here.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events | Psychology | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On May 9, 1961 Newton N. Minow addressed the National Association of Broadcasters in Washington, DC. President John F. Kennedy had recently appointed Minow to the chair of the Federal Communications Commission. To the assembled executives of broadcast television he said:

I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly commercials—many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you'll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.

You can read the text and listen to the audio of that speech, which took the broadcasters to task for failing to serve the public interest even while they used the public airwaves.

Minow's positive contribution to public-spirited television was the creation of the presidential debates. With co-author Craig L. LaMay he recounts that story in Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future. See some memorable moments from the presidential debates and read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 02:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The war in Iraq is more than five years old and even though the end is not in sight, the lessons of the war are already being debated within the military.

National Public Radio has a story this morning about the sharpening disagreement in the US Army over how great a role counterinsurgency tactics should play. The story is prompted by an internal Pentagon report that suggests the Army is excessively focused on counterinsurgency training and neglecting conventional force capabilities such as field artillery. The report asserts that 90 percent of artillery units are "unqualified to fire artillery accurately."

We have of course paid a great deal of attention in this space to the rise of counterinsurgency doctrine within the military, since our publication in book form of the Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Not only is it interesting to see some Army strategists question whether the pendulum has swung too far in the COIN direction, but some of the commentary would seem to implicate our own role in bringing the COIN manual to a wider audience.

NPR reporter Guy Raz quotes a recent lecture by Gian Gentile, chairman of the history department at West Point:

Gentile, who served two tours in Iraq, is perhaps the most outspoken internal critic of what he calls the Army's dangerous obsession with counterinsurgency.

"The high public profile of the new counterinsurgency manual, combined with the perception that its use and practice with the surge in Iraq has lowered the violence, I think has had a Svengali effect on us," Gentile said during the lecture. "It's almost like we have a secret recipe for success now involving counterinsurgency and irregular war."

A five year war would, on the face of it, go quite a ways toward proving that no "secret recipe for success" has been found. But then counterinsurgency is always messy and slow.

Listen to the audio of the NPR story. The discussion will undoubtedly continue at the Small Wars Journal blog.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In the current edition of the American Interest, reviewer James Rosen delivers a positive assessment of Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites' recent book, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. Praising the book for its thorough treatment of nine case studies involving some of the most influential images of the twentieth century, Rosen writes:

[No Caption Needed] is a penetrating and provocative analysis of the way certain popular photographs, whether produced by professionals or amateurs, acquire the power to change public policy and with it the course of history.… The author's analytical achievement is enabled by an extraordinary feat of research and reporting. They have unearthed hidden facts, from both the backstory and the aftermath, surrounding each of their nine chosen photographs.…

[But] almost as compelling… are the stories of their subsequent appropriation. No Caption Needed details the uses and abuses of these nine iconic photographs by propagandists and peddlers of all kinds, with results that prove alternately haunting, playful, predictable, mercenary, dishonest and sometimes just plain twisted.…

Pick up a copy of the American Interest to read the rest of the review.
Also see the authors' No Caption Needed blog and read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Film and Media | History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Soon after The Hollow Hope’s initial publication, a reviewer declared that “one may not always agree with Rosenberg’s book, but it will be impossible to ignore it. It should set the terms of the debate about the role of the Supreme Court during the last decade of the twentieth century.” Having fulfilled all of this promise and then some during nearly two decades of intense argument over its conclusions, The Hollow Hope now returns—substantially expanded and updated—to chart the course of twenty-first century debate about whether courts can spur political and social reform.

With new chapters that respond to his critics and address the courts’ role in the struggle for same-sex marriage rights, Gerald Rosenberg emphatically reasserts his powerful contention that it’s nearly impossible to generate significant reforms through litigation. The reason? American courts are ineffective and relatively weak—far from the uniquely powerful sources for change they’re often portrayed as. Rosenberg supports this claim by documenting the direct and secondary effects of key court decisions—particularly Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade. Further illuminating these cases, as well as the ongoing fight for same-sex marriage rights, he also marshals impressive evidence to overturn the common assumption that even unsuccessful litigation can advance a cause by raising its profile.

The Hollow Hope has indisputably vindicated another reviewer’s prediction that it would “fundamentally reshape how we see the courts and what questions we ask about them.” As legal battles over hot-button social issues stretch on, the new Hollow Hope is poised to reignite the landmark debate sparked by its first incarnation.

Read the press release.

Archived in Law | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Writing for the May 15 New York Review of Books A.C. Grayling begins his review of several books on primatology with a brief retrospective of the work of Dr. Jane Goodall. Along with several of her contemporaries—Grayling cites paleoanthropologist Louis Leaky, and zoologist Dian Fossey among others—Goodall's research on primate's social behavior helped to shed light on the connections between humanity and our nearest living ancestors. And since her groundbreaking study at Tanzania's Gombe National Park, many other scientists have continued in the same vein, gaining further insights into primates social lives and, in turn, giving us new and deeper insights into our own. As a worthy example Grayling cites Robert M. Seyfarth and Dorothy L. Cheney's most recent book Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. Grayling writes:

Baboon Metaphysics, by Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, shows how far ethology has come since Jane Goodall's early years at Gombe. An account of Cheney's and Seyfarth's field research into the social interactions of baboons, this is an impressive story, not just because of the care that went into the observations and experiments they record, but also in the philosophical sophistication of their thinking about the mental life of baboons.

Cheney and Seyfarth cite a remark from one of Darwin's notebooks as the starting point for their work: "He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke." By "baboon" Darwin undoubtedly meant the language, or at least the system of communication, of baboons, and by "metaphysics" he did not mean quite what this word now denotes (namely, inquiry into the fundamental nature of reality) but philosophy in general—especially ethics and the nature and sources of knowledge.… Reconstructing the intention of Darwin's remark, we see what he had in mind: now that religious explanations will no longer do, the significance and value of things human must be understood by placing mankind squarely in nature, and learning as much as possible from mankind's closest relatives about how we came to be what we are. Thus understood, Darwinian metaphysics is sociobiology as applied to human beings.

For Cheney and Seyfarth the implication of Darwin's dictum is that ethological study of monkeys and apes can yield clues to the nature of the mind.…

The review ends on a provocative note:

One thing is clear: whereas human self-importance once placed human beings outside nature, everything that has followed from research of the kind done by Jane Goodall and Cheney and Seyfarth makes it impossible to think in such terms any longer. This point should by now be a mere commonplace; yet there are many millions of people whose faith-based ways of viewing the world lead them to think otherwise.

Read the rest of the review on the New York Review of Books website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Biology | Economics | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 04:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Former President Bill Clinton said earlier this year that the choice facing 2008 Democratic primary voters is not “change versus experience,” but rather “words versus deeds, talk versus action, rhetoric versus reality.” No matter who becomes the next President, though, he or she will continue the long presidential tradition of acting through words to increase and sustain the powers of the executive branch. When it comes to shaping the highest office in the land, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson reveal, deeds are done in words, and rhetoric can change reality.

In Presidents Creating the Presidency, Campbell and Jamieson expand and recast their classic Deeds Done in Words for the YouTube era, revealing how our media-saturated age has transformed the continuously evolving rhetorical strategies that increase or deplete political capital by enhancing presidential authority or ceding it to other branches. Covering chief executives from George Washington to George W. Bush, the authors add new analyses of signing statements and national eulogies to their explorations of inaugural addresses, veto messages, and war rhetoric, among other genres of presidential oratory. For two centuries, these rhetorical acts have succeeded brilliantly and failed miserably at satisfying the demands of audience, occasion, and institution. Illuminating the reasons behind each outcome, Campbell and Jamieson draw an authoritative picture of how presidents have used rhetoric to shape the presidency—and how they continue to re-create it.

Read the press release.

Archived in Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 01:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the Washington Post's recently published Q&A session with Lt. Col. John A. Nagl, Nagl uses his expertise in U.S. counterinsurgency operations to respond to reader's questions regarding the future of the U.S. military presence in the Middle East. Nagl is author and contributor to several recent books on military counterinsurgency strategy including Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam and The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. He also currently commands the 1st Battalion, 34th Armor at Fort Riley, Kansas. From the Washington Post:

Little Rock, Ark.: We don't get much information regarding the nation-building activities in Afghanistan. Did we meet the rebuilding commitments we made to them when we won the war there?

Lt. Col. John Nagl: Little Rock, the counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan has not received the attention it has deserved. I visited there a little more than a year ago, and was struck most by the abject poverty of the country, even in Kabul. Afghanistan is the fifth-poorest country in the world after three decades of war. It desperately needs international assistance, particularly infrastructure development (roads above all). The Taliban's resurgence has made the development work even harder than we'd anticipated. We still have a lot of work to do there, and I'm pleased that we have decided to commit additional combat forces to Afghanistan next year, as have some of our allies.

Santa Monica, Calif.: What is your take on the newly released report by Pentagon think tank National Defense University's National Institute for Strategic Studies…?

Lt. Col. John Nagl: Santa Monica, the INSS report you reference was written by Col. Joe Collins (Ret.), a good friend and mentor. Press reports on it were somewhat out of context; Joe published a rejoinder on the excellent "Small Wars Journal" Web site (which I commend to anyone interested in the defense community's discussion of counterinsurgency).

That said, there were serious mistakes made early on in Iraq; the decisions to disband the Iraqi Army and to radically de-Baathify the country made the insurgency far stronger than it might have been, and made the tasks of rebuilding the country and recreating the Army harder. However, those mistakes do not mean that we cannot help Iraq become a reasonably stable state that can control what happens within its own borders and that does not present a threat to the region, although doing so will take continued American commitment for a number of years.

Read the rest of the conversation on the Washington Post website.

Also see an excerpt from Learning to eat Soup with a Knife or read Nagl's foreword to the Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 02:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The symptoms are all around us: rising temperatures, increasingly destructive storms, shrinking animal populations, creeping deserts. The earth is slowly dying, poisoned by too much carbon dioxide—and it’s high time we called a doctor. Enter popular science writer and journalist William Calvin, who with Global Fever delivers a grim diagnosis and outlines a radically thorough course of treatment. In stark, straightforward language, Calvin warns us of the mortal danger we face from unanticipated feedback loops as rising temperatures kill off plants and dry up water, leading to ever-faster warming. Every day we put off serious action, the situation becomes more desperate and our possible solutions narrow. If we hope to avoid climate disaster and the scarcely imaginable social upheaval that would accompany it, Calvin argues that we must commit to an aggressive, worldwide effort to switch to clean technologies—from hot rock geothermal power to air-fueled cars—essentially jumpstarting what would amount to a new, green, industrial revolution. The time for half-measures is over; Global Fever is a blueprint for real, comprehensive action.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Economics | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

2008 marks the fortieth anniversary of a black mark on American history: the 1968 Democratic Convention and its notorious example of police brutality against demonstrators. The provocative Battleground Chicago offers a new perspective on this tragic event by revealing how-and why-the police attacked antiwar activists at the convention. Working from interviews with eighty former Chicago police officers who were on the scene, Frank Kusch uncovers the other side of the story of ’68, deepening our understanding of a turbulent decade.

Read the press release.

Also read an excerpt.

Archived in Chicago | History | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John Louis Lucaites, author of No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy has posted an apropos commentary about the Earth Day themed cover image on today's Time Magazine to his No Caption Needed blog. Detailing a photoshopped version of Joe Rosenthal's iconic photograph of WWII troops on Iwo Jima's Mt. Suribachi raising a giant conifer in place of the flag, Lucaites makes the image an occasion to deliver some interesting commentary on the history of the original photograph's appropriation and the particularly fetishistic way that the Time Magazine editors have chosen to use it today. Lucaites writes:

By most accounts Joe Rosenthal's photograph of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima's Mt. Suribachi is the most reproduced photograph of all time—ever!…

Such reproductions have occurred not just in traditional print media, but on stamps (twice), commemorative plates, woodcuts, silk screens, coins, key chains, cigarette lighters, matchbook covers, beer steins, lunchboxes, hats, t-shirts, ties, calendars, comic books, credit cards, trading cards, post cards, and human skin, and in advertisements for everything from car insurance to condoms and strip joints.…

All of this is to say that on the face of things there is nothing particularly noteworthy about Time's appropriation of the image this week to frame and promote its "green" agenda in a special issue on the "War on Global Warming," … but my interest here is in mapping out how the particular appropriation of the original photograph coaches an attitude that seems to rely on tired and clichéd conceptions of American exceptionalism. Put simply, it is not just an appeal to be "green" (although it is that), but it also functions to translate the meaning of being "green" into a symbolic register that both defines environmentalism in terms of U.S. nationalism—"green is the new red, white, and blue"—and, more, makes something of an imperialistic fetish out of it.

Read the rest of Lucaites piece on the No Caption Needed blog, or read an excerpt from Lucaite's book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Film and Media | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 04:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Newton Minow, the current vice chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates and author of Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future was interviewed today on Chicago Public Radio's Eight Forty-Eight. From his time as assistant counsel to Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson when Stevenson first proposed the idea of the debates in 1960, to his stints as cochair of the presidential debates in 1976 and 1980, Minow has played an integral role in transforming them into the major media events we know today. In the interview Minow delivers some fascinating commentary on the history of the debates and addresses some of the criticism leveled against them. You can find the archived audio online at the Chicago Public Radio website.

Also see memorable moments from presidential debates and read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 03:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Nashville Scene ran an interesting article recently about John G. Geer's, In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns. Citing Hillary Clinton's recent "red telephone" ad below, Paul Griffith writes for the Scene:

According to Geer, democracy needs below-the-belt imagery like that of the Clinton ad, even if such characterizations can be painful to watch, because negative ads often provide more actual information than warmer, fuzzier bids for support. "For a negative appeal to be effective," he writes, "the sponsor of that appeal must marshal more evidence, on average, than for positive appeals."

Griffith concludes:

Someone should give Hillary Clinton a copy of this book, given recent Democratic calls for her to quit for fear her less-than-positive ads might disrupt party unity.

Read the rest of the article at the Nashville Scene website.

Also see a special feature, John Geer's Attack Ad Hall of Fame.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 02:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Newton N. Minow and Craig L. LeMay, authors of Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future were interviewed recently on The Biz, the blog of TVGuide editor Stephen Battaglio. In the interview Battaglio engages the authors in a discussion of the presidential debates as "one of the biggest TV attractions of the year" and their ever increasing ability to draw record ratings for broadcast television networks:

TVGuide.com: Your book points out how both Presidents Johnson and Nixon didn't want to debate their challengers…. Now it seems that it would be impossible for a presidential candidate to avoid it.
Minow: Young people who have grown up with presidential debates expect them. I don't think any candidate can escape it.
Lamay: Absolutely. Remember in 1992 when President George H.W. Bush [who balked at debating Bill Clinton and Ross Perot] was followed around on the campaign trail by the guy in the chicken suit? If you avoided a debate today, you'd have millions of virtual chickens [all over the Internet].

TVGuide.com: The first 2004 debate between President Bush and Sen. John Kerry set a record with 62.5 million viewers. Will a meeting between Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama or Sen. Hillary Clinton top that?
Minow: I think it will, absolutely. It will be higher and the debates will be repeated and distributed in all kinds of new ways on the Internet. Every American will have a chance to see them.

You can read the full interview on The Biz.

Also see these memorable moments from presidential debates and read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mark Feeney, arts writer for the Boston Globe and author of Nixon at the Movies: A Book about Belief, has won the Pulitzer prize in criticism for ten of his recent essays on visual culture. In an article posted to the Globe's website Monday afternoon Don Aucoin writes:

Feeney won the Pulitzer for 10 critical essays that suggest the fluency and brio of his writing style, and the range of interests on which he brings that style to bear.

He wrote of the "unheroic loneliness of everyday people'" reflected in the paintings of Edward Hopper, the "pure visual kapow" of aerial photos by Bradford Washburn and Frank Gohlke, the collision between art and celebrity in the work of photographer Annie Leibovitz, the artistic trajectory traveled by filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, and the sense of community in the work of photographer Charles (Teenie) Harris.

The essay on Hopper bears one of Feeney's trademarks, namely, the ability to see connections among disparate works, from high art to low. Feeney alludes to John Updike, Ernest Hemingway, and Alexis de Tocqueville, but then goes on to describe an artistic kinship between Hopper (or at least the world he created) and such figures as lyricist Lorenz Hart, Willy Loman from "Death of a Salesman,'" Elisha Cook Jr. in "The Maltese Falcon,'" Thelma Ritter in "Pickup on South Street,'" and even the Beach Boys.

The Globe has posted links to Feeney's Pulitzer nominated stories on their website.

Also be sure to check out Nixon at the Movies and experience for yourself Feeney's unparalleled ability to draw together seemingly incongruous subject matter into a fascinating critique of American arts and culture.

See a special web feature for the book.

Archived in Awards | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 09:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Donald S. Lopez Jr., author of several books on Tibetan Buddhism including The Madman's Middle Way: Reflections on Reality of the Tibetan Monk Gendun Chopel and Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West has written an interesting piece for openDemocracy on the recent turmoil in Tibet and the future of the movement for Tibetan independence. Lopez draws a parallel between Tibet's current political relationship with China, and Latvia's former relationship with the USSR. Lopez notes that since the 19th century Latvia, though culturally distinct from Russia, was repeatedly placed under communist control between brief respites of independence, only to gain what Latvians hope will be a lasting independence when the USSR collapsed in 1991. Thus Lopez writes: "Is there anything to do but wait? Latvia regained its independence with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It would seem that Tibet could only regain its independence with the collapse of the Peoples Republic of China. In Buddhism, time is measured not in centuries, but in cycles of creation, abiding, destruction, and vacuity, then creation again."

Read the full article on the openDemocracy website.

Also find out 7 Things You Didn't Know about Tibet, a web feature for Prisoners of Shangri-La.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lt. Col. John A. Nagl is a leading experts on U.S. counterinsurgency operations. Authoring and contributing to several recent books on the topic—Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife and The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual—Nagl has been instrumental in promoting an alternative to conventional counterinsurgency strategy: increasing the U.S. military's advisory role to foreign forces, and "[empowering] our partners to defend and govern their own countries." In an op-ed piece in yesterday's New York Times Nagl takes a look at the ongoing conflict in Iraq and offers his advice on how "to [successfully] shift of the combat load from American forces to the Iraqi and Afghan armies." Nagl writes:

First, United States military and civilian leadership must recognize that resources to support this major shift in strategy have to be re-routed from our regular forces. Left to themselves, the military services will inevitably neglect advisory efforts to sustain conventional forces.…

Second, shifting the burden from our forces to Iraqi and Afghan troops will call for close coordination between our civilian leadership and commanders in the field. Even as American combat forces draw down in favor of adviser-supported local armies, American combat support in the form of firepower, intelligence and logistics will continue to be crucial…

Third, the United States' success depends on the willingness of the Iraqi and Afghan armies to fight with tenacity and skill. Soldiers of both countries are good fighters when well led. But we'll let them down if we don't send more and larger teams to embed with locals.

Finally, the American people must continue to be patient. In the 20th century, the average counterinsurgency campaign took nine years. The campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to run longer, and other commitments loom in this protracted struggle against Al Qaeda and its imitators. Bitter experience has long recognized that only local armies can ultimately prevail in counterinsurgency operations.

Read the rest of the article on the NYT website.

Also read the preface from Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife or Nagl's foreword to the Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the midst of the dramatic primary debates and what's gearing up to be an embattled general election, Chicago's NBC5 News ran an interview with one of the "pioneers of televised presidential debates," Newton N. Minow, author of the recent Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future. NBC5's political editor Carol Marin begins her report by noting that with his wide range of experience in both television and politics—from his position as chairman of PBS to his current position as vice chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates—"Minow is the only person to be a part of every official presidential debate between the Republican and Democratic nominees since 1960." The interview continues with Minow's comments on the current presidential debates: "'I hope in the 2008 debates, the candidates will actually question each other.' In the end, he said, the most important thing to come out of a debate is really very simple: 'Can you trust that candidate to act in your best interest? To tell you the truth?'"

Watch the archived video of the interview on the NBC5 website.

Also see this web feature on memorable moments from presidential debates and read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday's New York Times ran an interesting op-ed piece by author and sociologist Monica Prasad on recent proposals to impose a tax on industrial emissions of carbon dioxide in an effort to combat global warming and other negative impacts of greenhouse gasses. In the article Prasad—author of the 2005 book The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States—uses her superior knowledge of European economic policy to demonstrate how one European country has made the carbon tax work. Prasad writes:

The very thought of new tax revenue has a way of changing the priorities of the most hard-headed politicians—even Genghis Khan learned to be peaceful, the story goes, when he saw how much more rewarding it was to tax peasants than to kill them. But if we want lower emissions, the goal of a carbon tax is to prompt producers to change their behavior, not to allow them to continue polluting while handing over cash to the government.

How do you get them to change? First, you prevent policy makers from turning the tax into a cash cow. Carbon tax discussions always seem to devolve into gleeful suggestions for ways to spend the revenue. Reduce the income tax? Give the money to low-income consumers? Use it to pay for health care? Everyone seems to forget that the amount of revenue is directly tied to the amount of pollution that is still going on.

Denmark avoids the temptation to maximize the tax revenue by giving the proceeds back to industry, earmarking much of it to subsidize environmental innovation. Danish firms are pushed away from carbon and pulled into environmental innovation, and the country's economy isn't put at a competitive disadvantage. So this is lesson No. 1 from Denmark.

Read the rest of the article online at the NYT website.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to the New York Times, yesterday evening marked a significant checkpoint in the War in Iraq when a roadside bomb exploded killing four more U.S. troops, bringing the total American death toll in Iraq to 4000. With no end in sight and casualties steadily rising, media outlets around the globe have used the 4,000th death as an opportunity to look back on the war and the many soldiers who have lost their lives there since 2003. But providing perhaps one of the most vivid and personal of these retrospectives, is NYT photojournalist and author Ashley Gilbertson's recent Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War. Documenting the conflict from the initial invasion, to Iraq's first national elections, Gilbertson's book tells candidly of his own experience photographing the war and of the lives of the soldiers fighting it.

To preview some of the images from the book navigate to the author's portfolio on the NYT website.

To hear more about the Gilbertson's experience in Iraq, you can navigate to the Press's special website for the book which features and exclusive half-hour interview with the author, or see this archived video from CSPAN's Book TV of Gilbertson's talk earlier this month at a Borders Books & Music in Vienna, Virginia.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nicholas J. G. Winter is publishing his book, Dangerous Frames: How Ideas about Race and Gender Shape Public Opinion at the perfect time, just as these issues are getting their most concrete expression in the political sphere. We asked him to reflect on the the Democratic presidential race in light of the ideas he explores in his book.

The historic presence in the Democratic primary race of both the first woman and the first African American with serious shots at a major party nomination has understandably brought lots of media attention to the roles of gender and race in Americans’ political thinking and voting. Much of this coverage obscures rather than clarifies those roles.

On the one hand, commentators ask whether black and female voters support “one of their own.” Do black voters support Obama? Do women support Clinton?

On the other hand, others ask some version of the question “Are Americans more racist or more sexist?” Is gender more fundamental to American social structure, or is racism more centrally embedded in American politics. More concretely, will white male swing voters be more disinclined to vote for a woman or an African American man in the general election?

Continue reading "Race, Gender, and Politics: Dangerous Frames" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Black Studies | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 08:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In an op-ed published in last Sunday's Washington Post Lt. Colonel John A. Nagl, author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam and contributor to the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, draws on his hands-on knowledge of counterinsurgency operations to deliver an insightful analysis of current U.S. strategy in the Middle East. While praising the success of last year's "surge" Nagl warns that it may still be a bit "too soon to take a victory lap." Nagl writes:

The "surge" of five brigades and the extension of Army combat tours in Iraq from 12 to 15 months has strained the Army to the breaking point. Neither the Army nor the Marine Corps has a reserve of ground troops to handle other crises. Meanwhile, the Taliban is regaining strength in Afghanistan and the lawless border regions of Pakistan,… and the foreseeable consequences of a hasty U.S. withdrawal from Iraq… could easily reverse last year's gains and provide a new home for terrorism in the Middle East.

The best short-term solution is rapidly expanding the Iraqi and Afghan security forces to hold towns cleared by U.S. forces. Local forces, stiffened by foreign advisers, have historically been the keys to success in counterinsurgency warfare. As such, I've been among the serving officers and veterans who've urged the U.S. Army to create a standing Adviser Corps.

But even greatly expanding and institutionalizing the role of advisers cannot win the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Insurgencies are ultimately inspired by ideas, and defeating the Iraqi insurgency will require a counter-narrative—backed up by robust economic development, a solid and committed government in Baghdad, and providing the Iraqi people with basic services such as water, electricity and (above all) security. As such, the single most important step the United States could take toward victory is re-creating an information agency to discredit our enemies' narratives and amplify those of our allies.

Read more Nagl in his new preface to Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, or see his foreword to the The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, “The Evolution and Importance of Army/Marine Corps Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency”

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy authors Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites undertook a fascinating survey of some of the most iconic images of the last century, analyzing their profound effects on the American political and social landscape. Since the 2007 publication of their book, the authors have also started a blog where they continue their critique of the role that photojournalism and other visual practices play in democratic society, bringing their ideas to bear on current issues and new media in real-time.

Today's posting showcases the work of another UCP author, photographer Ashley Gilbertson and his extraordinary images of the war in Iraq which have illustrated the pages of the New York Times and other publications since the beginning of the U. S. invasion in 2003. The No Caption Needed blog offers a brief slide show of Gilbertson's work taken from his recent book, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War. Navigate to www.nocaptionneeded.com to check it out as well as read the other insightful critiques of visual media the author's offer.

To find out more about Gilbertson's book see the press's special website featuring an exclusive half-hour interview with the author where he relates his experiences photographing the war in Iraq as well as some of the his own ideas about the importance and impact of his images on public culture.

Archived in Books for the News | Film and Media | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Newton Minow is more responsible than any other individual for the televising of presidential debates—an oasis in what he famously termed “a vast wasteland.” From the creation of the Kennedy-Nixon debates to his current service on the Commission on Presidential Debates, he has worked to bring political discussion into the mass media. He is uniquely situated to write the just-released Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future, which he authored with journalism professor Craig L. LaMay.

Minow and LaMay reviewed the history of presidential debates in their book and from their comments we culled some of the memorable moments from past debates, supplemented with images and links to online videos where available. Nixon sweating, “I knew Jack Kennedy,” presidential scowls and more—review them and relive them.

We also have an excerpt about the first televised debate between Nixon and Kennedy.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 02:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Based on Eric Klinenberg's Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, a new play by Steven Simoncic looks at the 1995 heat wave that hit the city of Chicago with 106 degree temperatures and caused the deaths of over seven hundred people—one of the deadliest disasters in Chicago's history. Reviewing the play for the Chicago Sun-Times theater critic Heidi Weiss writes:

Mayor Daley is known to be an avid theatergoer. But it's unlikely that he, or City Council members, or a slew of officials from major city agencies who were on the job during the summer of 1995, will be stopping in at Pegasus Players in the coming weeks to catch Heat Wave. If they do, they will be subjected to a most uncomfortable two hours.

As for everyone else, this world premiere (produced with Live Bait Theater) will serve as a vivid reminder of a moment when (a decade before Hurricane Katrina) both municipal government and that far more diffuse thing that might be termed "the human safety net" failed miserably.

More about the play is available at the Pegasus players website. More about the book is at our website and in our interview with Eric Klinenberg.

Archived in Books for the News | Chicago | Film and Media | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Another review appearing in the March 6 New York Review of Books delivers a fine exposition of Simon Kitson's new book The Hunt for Nazi Spies: Fighting Espionage in Vichy France. Writing for the NYRB Robert O. Paxton explains how Kitson's book reveals a new dimension of the Vichy government's complex and often strained relationship with the Nazi forces with which it collaborated. Paxton's review begins:

At first it sounds implausible. Did Marshal Pétain's Vichy French government, notoriously ready to collaborate with Nazi Germany, actually arrest and execute Nazi spies? Simon Kitson, a young British scholar at the University of Birmingham, shows that it did. His exhaustive search of French military, police, and judicial archives found that between 1940 and 1942 Vichy police and counterintelligence officers arrested between 1,500 and 2,000 agents working for Nazi Germany. Some 80 percent of them were French nationals. About forty German agents were executed, though none of them appears to have been a German citizen; some German citizens were imprisoned, however. The arrests stopped in November 1942 when the German army overran the unoccupied southern half of France, following the American landing in North Africa.

These facts were not entirely unknown. But no one had looked seriously into this cobwebby corner before Simon Kitson (and a few of his French contemporaries such as Sébastien Laurent) gained access to military and judicial archives concerning French counterintelligence activities for the years 1940—1944, and grasped that the subject was more than a passing curiosity.

Continue reading the rest of the article on the NYRB website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just in time for the opening of his exhibition at Melbourne's Obscura Gallery, the Australian paper The Age ran an article last Sunday on Ashley Gilbertson and his new book, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War. As the article notes, Gilbertson is himself an Australian native and got his first taste of professional journalism "documenting the lives of Kosovar refugees seeking temporary protection in Australia." The article continues:

The project sparked an interest in the plight of displaced people that led him to West Papua, Afghanistan and eventually Iraq, where he has spent a total of 18 months since 2002.

His early trips to the country were a hand-to-mouth existence, selling stories as he went, often depending on the goodwill of colleagues and strangers.

Towards the end of a trip in 2003 he picked up work for the New York Times. Since he returned from that trip, his work has been exclusively for the US newspaper.

His work while embedded with US marines during the 2004 Fallujah offensive made his name, earning him the prestigious Robert Capa Award for courageous photography from the US Overseas Press Club.

But his experiences have left scars. He watched as Lance Corporal William Miller, a soldier who was escorting him up the stairwell of a minaret, was shot dead by an insurgent. Running out of the mosque under insurgent fire, he wished to die. "I ran out into the street with the marines, hoping I would take a slug," he said.

Read more about Gilbertson's harrowing experiences in Iraq at The Age. Also check out the Obscura Gallery's web page for more information on his exhibition. Finally, see the Whiskey Tango Foxtrot website featuring a full half hour video interview with the author.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last Sunday David Shulman author of Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine was interviewed on the CBC's Sunday Edition. Focusing on Shulman's experiences as a member of Ta'ayush—a peace group working to end violence in the West Bank—Shulman recounts the extreme injustices suffered by Israelis and Palestinians as they struggle to survive in an environment of constant violence and upheaval.

You can listen to the complete interview online at the "Sunday Edition" web page. Also read an excerpt from Shulman's book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Marcia Lausen's recent book, Design for Democracy: Ballot and Election Design took center stage in an article on ballot design appearing in last Sunday's International Herald Tribune. Noting the relevance of Lausen's book, Alice Rawsthorn writes for the IHT:

With Super Tuesday now behind us, and the November 2008 presidential election looming, it seems timely to consider how to avoid a repetition of the 2000 punch-card catastrophe. Marcia Lausen, a graphic designer and professor of graphic design at the University of Illinois at Chicago, does so in the book Design for Democracy: Ballot and Election Design. As well as analyzing what went wrong in Florida eight years ago, she suggests how the design of ballots and the rest of the voting process could be improved in the future.…

Often, good information design is rooted in sticking to simple rules. Obvious though many of those rules may seem, the U.S. electoral debacle of 2000 illustrates the peril of ignoring them, while Lausen's book shows how effective they can be.

Read the rest of the article on the IHT website.

Also see the Design for Democracy website produced by the book's co-publishers, the American Institute of Graphic Arts.

Archived in Film and Media | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Last Wednesday the Drug Law Blog authored by San Francisco attorney Alex Coolman ran an interesting interview with Doris Marie Provine, author of Unequal under Law: Race in the War on Drugs. The interview focuses on the topic of her book, exploring how issues of race have influenced American anti-drug efforts. Coolman prefaces the interview with some positive words about Provine's fascinating new book:

Professor Doris Marie Provine of Arizona State University's School of Justice & Social Inquiry is the author of a really interesting and challenging new book called Unequal Under Law: Race in the War on Drugs. I keep coming back to this book as a reference point for talking about some of the thorniest issues related to the intersection of race with American action—and inaction—on drug policy. These are issues that are so big and obvious that they're almost hard to recognize as issues. Unequal Under Law, however, does a really nice job of emphasizing that we are, in fact, making racial choices in drug policy—both consciously and unconsciously—that profoundly affect the lives of our fellow citizens.

Read the interview on the Drug Law Blog.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Law | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John G. Geer, author of In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaign, argues that negative ads are positive—they focus on important political issues and give voters critical information about differences between candidates. Attack ads do not degrade but enrich the democratic process. See his pick of the genre in John Geer’s Attack Ad Hall of Fame.

Inevitably, Geer himself was swiftboated on Youtube.

Comments on Geer's Hall of Fame selections are welcome.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 02:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The California Literary Review, an online magazine, is running a great selection of photographs from Ashley Gilbertson's recently published Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War. The photos are accompanied by a short essay by the author discussing how he wound up on assignment with the New York Times covering the battle of Falluja—one of the fiercest battles of the conflict:

In March 2004, four American contractors were ambushed in the center of Falluja, a city forty-three miles west of Baghdad. They were dragged from their cars, beaten, and their bodies burnt.… Back in Iraq, furious Marine generals who were supposedly in control of Falluja promised swift vengeance and on April 4 attacked the city with everything they had. Hundreds of Iraqis were killed in a week of intense urban combat.…

My rotation had finished and I was at the bureau packing to leave the country when a scramble ensued to get someone from the paper to cover the battle from the frontlines. Times higher-ups contacted generals and politicians, and eventually we were given two… slots, one of them mine. I repacked my bags, this time including body armor and equipment I needed to file my photos under battle conditions. A few hours Later I boarded an aircraft bound for the dusty Camp Falluja five miles east of the city.

You can find the rest of the article and the accompanying photos online at the California Literary Review website. Also see the website for the book featuring a fascinating video interview with the author discussing his experiences as a war photographer in Iraq.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 02:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sunday's Toronto Star ran an interesting article on sociologist David Grazian's revealing portrait of Philadelphia's thriving club scene in On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife. Summarizing the book the Star's Ryan Bigge writes:

Although Grazian discusses the sophisticated public relations matrix that helps bring in customers, he's more interested in exploring the paradox that club goers allow themselves to be willingly hustled. Making a comparison to movies filled with computer-generated effects, Grazian suggests, "People are willing to suspend their disbelief in order to enjoy a thrilling lie."

Which means the tens of thousands of club goers—the actual number is the subject of considerable contention, but even the lowest two-night estimate is 40,000—that cram Toronto's entertainment district on Friday and Saturday nights, spending millions of dollars per year on drinks, are marks of their own making. Of course, just because the game is rigged, doesn't mean you can't enjoy yourself, as the eternal popularity of Las Vegas demonstrates.

Read the rest of the article on the Toronto Star website or read this excerpt from the first chapter of the book. The press's website also features an interview with Grazian about his previous book on a similar topic, Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs.

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events | Psychology | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a news release from Vanderbilt University's news office, John G. Geer, author of In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns observes that Hillary Clinton's win in New Hampshire may mean that she and her supporters direct fewer negative attacks at Barack Obama. But Geer does not necessarily see this as a good thing:

"The public would be better served if all of the remaining candidates undergo this type of scrutiny.… Many pundits view negative ads as counterproductive, but nothing could be further from the truth."

Geer said that there are many incentives for candidates in both parties to run negative ads that address legitimate issues. "Attack ads contain more substantive information than positive ads," he said. "Therefore, they generate a dialogue that helps voters understand the respective positions of the candidates."

In addition, attack ads toughen up the eventual nominee for the general election, when the attacks will come faster and harder. "How candidates handle the criticism will provide insight to how they might govern, since those who occupy the Oval Office are the frequent target of harsh attacks," he said.

To find out more about Geer's unconventional take on advertising in presidential campaings read the rest of the article on the VU news service website. You may preview a sample of the book on Google Book Search. And, turning the tables, see Geer subjected to an attack ad.

Archived in Books for the News | Film and Media | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 02:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bloomberg.com is running an interesting review of a selection of the many recently published books on the war in Iraq. In the review, Charles Taylor notes the "unexpected treasure" that is the U. S. Army's Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during World War II—a small book originally published in 1942 designed to help American soldiers adapt to Iraqi culture, but that perhaps has more relevance today than it did over sixty years ago. Taylor writes:

This small guide for U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq during the Second World War—containing a map of the country, a glossary of useful Arabic phrases and instructions on what to expect and how to act—is the unexpected treasure of the lot. Brief, sensible, written in the kind of clear English that used to be common in American life, the book speaks of a time when thought was given to preparing soldiers for what they would face culturally as well as militarily, and when the importance of the mission was not assumed to grant soldiers the right to swagger like conquerors.

The new foreword by Lieutenant Colonel John A. Nagl sounds both appreciative and rueful, written in the voice of a man who wonders how we ever became embroiled in such a foul-up.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New York Sun is running a review of Simon Kitson's recent book The Hunt for Nazi Spies: Fighting Espionage in Vichy France in today's "Arts and Letters" section of the paper. Praising the book for it's captivating account of the French predicament under German occupation reviewer and spy novelist Claire Berlinski writes:

The Hunt for Nazi Spies: Fighting Espionage in Vichy France is history, not a novel, and Mr. Kitson is a historian's historian: a patient, meticulous master of the archives, a disciplined analyst, a servant of the evidence. His study of the French counterintelligence service's pursuit of German spies during the collaboration is not calculated to appeal to a mass market. Yet the imaginative reader will find the germ here of at least a dozen characters to populate a sensational spy novel.

The review goes on to address the central question of the book: why was the collaborationist Vichy regime hunting and imprisoning Nazi spies at all?

Mr. Kitson is fascinated by this paradox. [Does this phenomenon] suggest a deep vein of anti-Vichy, pro-resistance sentiment among the French secret services, as some of its veterans have suggested in their memoirs? No, Mr. Kitson answers. This is by no means an exonerating story: The overarching goals of the Vichy regime, in whose service, he concludes, the Vichy spy-hunters were most certainly acting, was the defense of French sovereignty and the preservation of a state monopoly on collaboration. These unauthorized collaborators were a threat to both, and thus were they neutralized.

Read the rest of the review on the New York Sun website. Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Barry B. LePatner's Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets: How to Fix America's Trillion-Dollar Construction Industry is featured in today's Wall Street Journal business section. Reviewer James R. Hagerty uses LePatner's book to cite one possible benefit of the otherwise gloomy housing market crisis—weeding out the weaklings in the contracting businesses. Hagerty writes:

Every now and then, a major construction project is completed on time and on budget. Everyone is amazed.

Barry LePatner, a New York lawyer specializing in construction cases, thinks this exception should become the rule. Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets outlines his proposals for making that possible.

Mr. LePatner's swift kick to the construction industry comes when it is already down. Commercial construction is slowing, and house building is in a severe slump, partly caused by a glut of new homes erected by overly optimistic builders even before the subprime crisis made it harder to find qualified buyers. The downturn will apply the wrecking ball to many of the weaker construction companies. But that won't be enough, according to Mr. LePatner. He argues that the industry will become efficient only when its customers become savvier and more demanding.

His solutions involve, among other things, hiring experts who can monitor builders and who have financial incentives to prevent needless overruns. Tougher contracts should enforce fixed costs or, at least, severely limit the scope for escalation. And thorough background checks—looking for lawsuits, public complaints and financial troubles—may lower the chance of hiring dodgy engineers and construction teams.

Such steps would force out of business weak firms that can't deliver on their promises. The survivors, Mr. LePatner thinks, would be larger firms that are less reliant on subcontractors and are better able to train employees and invest in technology.

To find out more see the WSJ article (available for seven days free to non-subscribers) or navigate to www.brokenbuildings.com.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Economics | Law | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Two articles on Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites's No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy ran this month, both of which cite the book for its controversial look at some of the most influential images of the last century, and how such images have radically changed the political and social landscape of America. An article in the November 29 London Review of Books (only available to subscribers) begins with a critique of "one of the most reproduced photographs in American history"—Joe Rosenthal's image of U.S. troops struggling to raise an American flag on top of Mount Suribachi on the island of Iwo Jima. The LRB's David Simpson writes:

The Pulitzer-prize winning photo of the Suribachi Summit… was actually of a second flag-raising, staged with a larger flag after the fighting had died down. Literally speaking it was not so much a struggle against military odds as a struggle against gravity. This was known at the time, and was a sufficiently sensitive issue for both Time and Life to refrain from publishing it until it had become so ubiquitous as to be beyond complex questioning. That happened very fast. The photo became more or less instantly a leitmotif of American popular culture and a key item in the manufacture of consent by politicians and advertisers alike.…

Debates about the authenticity of photographs, especially war photographs, have been commonplace since at least the American Civil War. In No Caption Needed Robert Hariman and John Lucaites are less concerned with these debates than the ways in which iconic images have been used to propose and renegotiate various kinds of 'democratic citizenship' and 'civic identity.' Here original truths matter less than accumulated traditions or assumptions.… For these authors the Iwo Jima flag works because it is aesthetically compelling, … because it converts military into civic action, and because it effaces the personalities of the soldiers in the service of a common and anonymous effort. …

The review continues:

The authors think we have a 'need' for these iconic images, and often suggest that democracy is better for them. But it is a fine line (if there is a line) between the vigorous, deliberative debate conducted by empowered citizens… and the consumption of patriotic propaganda.

A feature in the Chronicle of Higher Education also focused on the author's take on the powerful yet complicated impact of iconic images on American culture. You can read the Chronicle piece online at their website, read an excerpt from the book, or navigate over to the authors' blog where they frequently post provocative critiques of notable images in contemporary photojournalism.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Film and Media | History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 08:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ashley Gilbertson, author of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War recently joined fellow photographer Nina Berman on WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show to discuss their recent projects documenting the lives of American soldiers in Iraq and how they manage to cope with their experiences after they come home. As Lopate reveals in his interview, both books offer a candid look into the horrors of modern warfare soldiers are forced to endure and the toll it takes on them both physically and emotionally. Navigate to the WNYC website to listen to archived audio from the show as well as view two photo galleries featuring a small sampling of each photographer's work.

Gilbertson was also recently interviewed by Sandip Roy for NPR's UpFront radio to discuss Gilbertson's personal experiences as a photographer in Iraq. You can find a transcription as well as archived audio of their conversation online at the UpFront website.

Finally, don't miss the UCP's own Whiskey Tango Foxtrot website where you can read more about Gilbertson's book, place an order, and view our own video interview with Gilbertson.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

David Shulman's Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine is currently being featured in a review for the December 6 issue of the New York Review of Books. A human rights activist and member of the peace group Ta'ayush, Shulman is an active participant in the group's efforts to address the conflict between Israel and Palestine through non-violent means. With Dark Hope Shulman aims to further the revolutionary humanitarian goals of the organization through a first hand account of his work with the group bringing aid, rebuilding houses, and engaging in Ghandian acts of civil disobedience. Detailing Shulman's unique approach to political activism. Israeli scholar Avishai Margalit writes for the NYRB:

Shulman attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.… His linguistic and cultural interests were mainly focused on South India. In 1987, when he was thirty-seven, he received a MacArthur Fellowship. He has published many translations of Indian poetry. Shulman's language in his diary is fresh and uncontaminated by the lazy clichés often used to describe the conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. By temperament and calling, Shulman is a scholar, not a politician. Recalling Auden's lines on Yeats, we may say that mad Israel hurt him into politics.

Into what sort of politics, one may ask. Shulman's work on India and its culture suggests that his politics—if this is the term—would draw on Gandhi's example. He writes, "We follow the classical tradition of civil disobedience, in the footsteps of Gandhi, Thoreau, and Martin Luther King.…"

Shulman advocates a Gandhian approach on moral grounds and perhaps also on practical grounds, and a large number of his activities would have pleased the Mahatma. But in my opinion he is trying to do something that can be accurately seen as part of the nonviolent struggle to alleviate the burdens of the occupation but is also different from it. Shulman is a moral witness…he makes an effort to observe and report on suffering arising from evil conduct. He may take risks in doing so, but he has a moral purpose: to expose the evil done by a regime that tries to cover up its immoral deeds. A moral witness acts with a sense of hope: that there is, or will be, a moral community for which his or her testimony matters.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Biography | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 09:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When Ashley Gilbertson arrived in Iraq at the beginning of the U.S. invasion he was only twenty five years old and had no affiliation with any newspaper. Nevertheless, he was among the first photojournalists to cover the conflict for American audiences. Soon picked up as a freelance photographer for the New York Times, Gilbertson has since established himself as one of the most adept chroniclers of the conflict in the middle east.

Yesterday, the New York Times ran a special piece in the Arts and Leisure featuring a selection of Gilbertson's photographs of the war, all of which can be found in his new book, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer’s Chronicle of the Iraq War. Dexter Filkins prefaces Gilbertson's photos in the NYT saying:

Ashley Gilbertson, a freelance photographer for the New York Times, has followed the war in Iraq from its beginning through its most singular moments. In his new book… Gilbertson has compiled the best of those images, freezing the war's most intense and dramatic moments… The heart of the book, graphically and emotionally, is the battle of Falluja in November 2004, when 6,000 marines and soldiers went into what was then a contested jihadi stronghold. Those photos capture street-to-street fighting in all its manic ferocity.

But the most moving of these images are not of fighting and violence but of the moments in between: a group of soldiers sunning themselves during a pause in the battle, a child hurling himself down a slide at a Baghdad playground, an Iraqi man and son standing frozen before an American soldier. Moments like these remind us just how human the experience of war really is.

Check out the photographs from the New York Times piece on their website, then navigate to our web site for the book to view a fascinating interview with the photographer and hear him speak about his personal experiences photographing war.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The situation in our surveillance state is such that the government can monitor many of our daily activities, using closed-circuit TV, global positioning systems, and a wide array of other sophisticated technologies—without warning, and at any time. But despite the growing public awareness of these intrusions, our post-9/11 environment of fear makes people reluctant to question them. Yet, as Christopher Slobogin explains in Privacy at Risk, these shocking violations of privacy are often perpetrated by those in positions of power.

This ground-breaking book argues that courts should prod legislatures into enacting more meaningful protection against government overreach by applying the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. Slobogin demonstrates how we can thus preserve rights guaranteed by the Constitution—without compromising the government’s ability to investigate criminal acts—in a book that will intrigue anyone concerned about privacy rights in the digital age.

Read the press release.

Archived in Law | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 04:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Economist recently ran an interesting story on the evolution of American counterinsurgency tactics to meet the demands of the current war in Iraq. Drawing on Lt. Col. John A. Nagl's Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam the Economist piece begins by citing the history of Western counterinsurgency operations and how they obviate the need for improvements in military strategy:

Given the difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan, American officers are relearning the history of their own interventions in Latin America and, more important, the lessons of British imperial policing. Why, American experts asked, did Britain succeed against communist revolutionaries in Malaya in the 1950s, whereas America failed to defeat the communists in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s?

In his 2002 book Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, John Nagl, an American lieutenant-colonel, concluded that British soldiers were better than the Americans at learning from their mistakes. General Sir Gerald Templer, the British high commissioner in Malaya, argued that "the shooting side of the business" was only a minor part of the campaign. Coining a phrase, he suggested that the solution "lies not in pouring more troops into the jungle, but in the hearts and minds of the people." In contrast, says Colonel Nagl, the Americans in Vietnam remained wedded to "unrestrained and uncontrolled firepower," despite some work with small units that were deployed in border villages and civil-military reconstruction projects.

But more recently, Nagl, along with the likes of David Petraeus, has had the chance to influence American military strategy much more directly as part of the think-tank that produced The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual—one of the most important contemporary military documents on modern counterinsurgency published. Nevertheless skeptical about the progress of the war in Iraq the Economist glosses the manual in saying:

The American army and marines have produced a new counterinsurgency manual. One of its authors, General David Petraeus, is now in charge of the "surge" in Iraq. It may be too late to turn Iraq round, and Afghanistan could slide into greater violence. But the manual offers some comfort: it says counter-insurgency operations "usually begin poorly," and the way to success is for an army to become a good "learning organization."

But can we learn fast enough to turn around the failing war in Iraq? To find out more about the book and the changes in counterinsurgency tactics it proposes, read Nagl's foreword and "Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency Operations" from the first chapter.

Also, Sarah Sewall, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, and another major contributor to the Manual, is currently taping a piece for PBS's Charlie Rose show to discuss the book in the context of the current situation in Iraq. Check the Charlie Rose website for air times.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 02:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Marcia Lausen's new book Design for Democracy: Ballot + Election Design was recently featured in two articles this week. A review posted today on Newsweek's website and another yesterday on the Fast Company blog both focus on Lausen's book as an attempt to ensure that 2007 is not a repeat of the irregularities created by the poorly designed ballots used in Florida in 2000. Causing mass confusion and sparking the infamous recount, as Newsweek's Rolf Ebeling notes, there is no better example to demonstrate the importance of well designed election materials. Ebeling writes:

Graphic designers encounter a fair amount of eye-rolling—some of it deserved—when they champion the necessity of their work outside their professional choir. Passionately defending color palettes, rattling off obscure rules of proper typography—these things often come off as superficial and fussy to the unconverted.… But, but, but … intelligent application of type, line and color does provide a service beyond visual appeal. It can clarify complexity. And I can prove it.

Look no further than the new book Design for Democracy: Ballot + Election Design, by Marcia Lausen, an elegant examination of how to improve the utility of our nation's varied—and, in some cases, shockingly bad—voter materials. In reaction to the problems brought to national attention in the 2000 elections—when Americans learned all about the troubles with "butterfly ballots" and "hanging chads"—a group of designers led by Lausen (a professor of graphic design at the University of Illinois at Chicago) developed a comprehensive visual system for everything from voter registration pamphlets to instructions for setting up ballot-counting tables. The emphasis here is on a system: their work was not intended to set a national standard but to act as a guideline adaptable to the unique requirements of state and local elections. Working with election officials, they have, since 2000, already put some of their ideas to work in Illinois and Oregon elections.

Read the rest of the Newsweek article on their website. The Fast Company article is also online here.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With his book tour now in full swing Ashley Gilbertson, author of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War has been making so many appearances lately we can barely keep track of him. From prime time TV interviews, to high school classrooms, here's our attempt to catch up with Gilbertson's most recent events:

Last Tuesday Gilbertson was interviewed on Philadelphia NPR affiliate WHYY's Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane. Archived audio from the show is available on the WHYY website in real-audio format .

Wednesday saw Gilbertson appearing in Boston for a slightly surreal interview on local FOX TV morning news. They've also put the video online at their website.

Yesterday, however, Gilbertson took some time out to speak with a group of high school students from Millis, MA. The interview was recorded for the Millis Middle/High School's Studio 103, a student-run production facility for a local access TV channel, and should appear on their blog soon as well.

An interview and multimedia slide show with a sampling of the photo's from Gilbertson's book was also featured last Thursday on the online news magazine Alternet.

And tonight Gilbertson will be seen on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 in a rebroadcast of Cooper's show on the battle for Falluja, called "The Anvil of God"—Gilbertson was recently awarded the Robert Capa Gold Medal from the Overseas Press Club for his coverage of the U.S. invasion of Falluja.

Finally, Gilbertson's talk and signing at the Washington DC area Borders was recently filmed by CSPAN-2's Book TV—who will broadcast it this Sunday night at 7:00 pm eastern time, 6:00 pm central.

But despite all these interviews with major media moguls, his recent interview with Press senior editor Alan Thomas of course offers by far the most interesting examination of Gilbertson's work. You can see footage from the interview online at the press's special website for the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our entire voting process, from registering to vote to following instructions at the polling place, can be almost as confusing as those infamous Florida ballots. Tackling this grave problem head-on, Design for Democracy presents adaptable design models that can improve almost every part of the election process by maximizing the clarity and usability of ballots, registration forms, posters and signs, informational brochures and guides, and even administrative materials for pollworkers. This handsome volume also lays out specific guidelines—covering issues like color palette, typography, and image use—that anchor the comprehensive election design system devised by the group of specialists from whose name the book takes its title. Part of a major AIGA strategic program, this group’s prototypes and recommendations have already been used successfully in major Illinois and Oregon elections and, collected here, are poised to spread across the country.

Read the press release.

Archived in Film and Media | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Alex Chadwick interviewed Ashley Gilbertson a few days ago for the NPR radio program Day to Day. The interview is not only about Iraq and the photographs that Gilbertson took there, but also about the ways that events in Iraq changed him, aged him, matured him—especially when he "crossed the line" in Falluja.

The NPR site also has a brief gallery of Gilbertson's Iraq photos. More photos are available in a feature that recently ran in the New Statesman. Gilbertson's own website offers plenty of photos, too.

But what better way to experience these dramatic images than in person? An exhibit of his Iraq photographs opened two weeks ago in New York. For more Gilbertson events see our author events page.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War not only includes over two hundred photographs, but also is a searing memoir of a photographer's experiences documenting the military, political, and human dimensions of the conflict in Iraq.

For an extended conversation about all these issues, see our video interview with Gilbertson online at our Whiskey Tango Foxtrot website.

Update: Monday, Nov. 5: Julia Keller reviewed Whiskey Tango Foxtrot in the Chicago Tribune yesterday.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The media bombards us with images from Iraq on a daily basis, but as the New Yorker's George Packer notes in his blog Interesting Times, "Iraq has not been a photographer's war." The iconic images of the war have come from amateurs (Abu Ghraib, videos of beheadings) that have "turned documentary photography into a leering form of humiliation and a potent weapon in the information campaign that is the core strategy of contemporary insurgencies, based on the terrifying principle of can-you-top-this."

In Ashley Gilbertson's Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War, Packer finds photographs that have not been drained of humanity.

An Australian freelancer in his twenties, [Ashley Gilbertson] went to northern Iraq before the war and has been going back ever since, mostly on contract for the Times. His new book, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, just published by the University of Chicago, collects Gilbertson's four years of work from Iraq, with an introduction by his Times colleague Dexter Filkins, and a colloquial, self-revealing text beautifully written by the photographer himself. The pictures chart the descent of Iraq from the initial post-invasion euphoria into the extreme violence of the battles for Karbala, Samarra, and Falluja. They also show a young photojournalist, who "wasn't interested in covering combat," learning his craft, proving his mettle, forcing himself into situations that nearly destroy him morally as well as physically, and finally discovering, amid the inferno of Falluja in November, 2004, the strange tenderness that characterizes the very greatest war photography. Gilbertson's pictures from the battle of Falluja perform the opposite function of the war pornography that Abu Ghraib and Zarqawi gave the world: they give back to their subjects the humanity that the war is taking away.

See a special website for the book featuring a video interview with the author. Gilbertson has also recently been interviewed on CNN and on CBS News.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now available in paperback— Jean-Noël Jeanneney, former president of France's Bibliothèque Nationale, here takes aim at what he sees as the most troubling aspect of Google's Library Project: its potential to misrepresent—and even damage—the world's cultural heritage. In this impassioned work, Jeanneney argues that Google's unsystematic digitization of books from a few partner libraries and its reliance on works written mostly in English constitute acts of selection that can only extend the dominance of American culture abroad.

Read the press release.

Archived in History | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

University of Chicago economics professor Roger B. Myerson, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences this week, is working on a paper critiquing U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq. The paper, “Foundations of the State in Theory and Practice: Reading Bremer and the Counterinsurgency Field Manual” (see PDF draft version) examines two texts. The first is L. Paul Bremer's My Year in Iraq, his memoir of the fourteen months he was head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, charged with Iraq reconstruction. The second text is The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

Both books, says Myerson, “express theories of the foundations of the constitutional state. Their theories have been used to guide practical policy-making in the reconstruction of Iraq, but we should also read them as exercises in social theory. … I want to examine the theories of nation-building that are expressed by Bremer and the Field Manual.”

Myerson criticizes the fundamental strategy that was followed by Bremer: “a democratic state must be based on a written constitution.” In fact, says Myerson,

constitutional democracies are not necessarily established this way. The British parliamentary system developed without any formal constitutional document, and America adopted a constitution several years after the revolution, when people wanted to expand the power of the central government. So there must be something else in society, other than a formal constitutional document, that can provide effective checks on the powers of political leaders.

“The state is established by its political leaders and their network of trusting supporters,” says Myerson, and not by a formal document.

In critiquing The Counterinsurgency Field Manual, Myerson notes that while the Field Manual recognizes “the vital importance of the network of trust among leaders and their cadre of active supporters” among the insurgents that U.S. forces are trying to defeat, the Field Manual fails to recognize that “the network of political leadership is equally vital to the state that the counterinsurgents are trying to establish.”

Myerson concludes that the strategies expressed in both texts ignore the critical role played by political leadership:

The first step in a project of democratic state-building should have been to encourage individual politicians to develop independent reputations for responsible and tolerant governance. To build effective government against violent opposition, the problem is not to provide a clean administration without favoritism but to make sure that favoritism is effectively managed by political leaders whose judgments are trusted by their supporters.

(Tip of the hat to the Chicago Tribune.)

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 09:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For those of you who don't pay much attention to Canadian politics, Ontario just finished its provincial elections in which Premier Dalton McGuinty was re-elected for a second term in Canada's most-populous province. But also up for re-election was Ontario's election process itself. This year voters were asked to cast ballots for both a new provincial government and for a referendum that would change dramatically the way Ontario's officials are elected. But many voters who were often unexpectedly asked to fill out not one but two ballots found themselves confused and disoriented by unclear voting instructions and hard to read ballots—probably two significant factors in the proposed referendum's failure. Enter Marcia Lausen, author of Design for Democracy: Ballot and Election Design who argues that though often overlooked as a significant part of elections, design can have a significant impact on the voting process by maximizing the clarity and functionality of ballots, registration forms, and even the polling locations themselves. Last Sunday she was called in by the Toronto Star to critique Ontario's election material. Reporter Ryan Bigge writes:

Lausen's critique of my Notice of Registration card (NRC) is thoroughly humbling. Lausen rapidly lists visual inefficiencies: too many sizes and weights of type; text centered for no apparent reason; indentations that follow no known system of logic, and at least 12 different type styles used. In Design For Democracy, Lausen suggests limiting type to two sizes (small and large) and two weights (light and bold).

My Notice of Registration's yellow-and-black-bumblebee colour scheme is described as "fine" by Lausen, although she says the use of colour could be more functional. Overall, my NRC earns a "C" from Lausen, who sees no evidence that a graphic designer was involved with the finished product.…

Read the rest of Lausen's ballot critique on the Toronto Star's website or find out more about the book on the UCP website.

Archived in Books for the News | Film and Media | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Army Times recently reviewed two of the press's most talked about books on the war in Iraq—Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during World War II and The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. While the Counterinsurgency Field Manual was given its own special treatment in a review by Rob Colenso Jr., in the LifeLines section of the September 10 edition of the Army Times, reviewer William H. McMichael touches on the confluence of both books. Acknowledging the Countinsurgency Field Manual's new and unconventional approach to counterinsurgency, McMichael points out its emphasis on "gaining the trust of the general populace so insurgents can be rooted out and eliminated." But, McMichael notes, these kind of tactics might not be so new or unconventional after all:

Well before the 2003 invasion—64 years ago, to be precise—a simple booklet written for soldiers [had already] spelled out how to survive military service in Iraq and, most pertinent to the current war, how to win friends and influence people.…

The Army published Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq During World War II in 1943 as a handy, easy-to-read guide for U. S. troops assigned to bolster the British occupation in Iraq and help keep the Nazis out.

[But] this booklet, so full of helpful advice and so applicable today, was set aside after the war and forgotten.

Now back in print with a new foreword by Lieutenant Colonel John A. Nagl, Instructions for American Servicemen puts a fascinating historical perspective on the current situation in Iraq and the military's recent counterinsurgency tactics. Check out both the Counterinsurgency Field Manual along with Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq on our website. Also read an excerpt and Nagl's foreword from the Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

According to the New York Times, in his testimony before Congress yesterday General Petraeus was clear in his assertion that the military must continue to play a vital role in the counterinsurgency operations in Iraq—and unfortunately for a much longer period of time than many might have hoped. But until the situation affords an opportunity for peace without military intervention the army must be able to find a way to adapt to one of the most entrenched and unconventional conflicts in U.S. military history. With a foreword written by Petraeus himself, the recently published U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual suggests a new set of tools and techniques to deal with modern counterinsurgency operations and represents a relevant, if not revolutionary, challenge to conventional U.S. military doctrine. A review of the book was published in the Chicago Tribune recently, testifying to the importance of its ideas in relation to the current conflict. Robert Bateman writes for the Tribune:

Doctrine is the written foundation upon which we as a nation organize, train and equip our forces to fight our wars. We are, it is rumored, currently at war, and the man who oversaw the creation of this manual is the same one now charged with running that war, Gen. David Petraeus, who is set to offer his assessment of the progress of that war next week. But because the military does not distribute doctrinal manuals to the general public, such material rarely reaches the average reader. By publishing the new Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual, the U. of C. is correcting that situation with this, probably the most important piece of doctrine written in the past 20 years.

The Manual also recently figured in to a critical but interesting piece by Tom Hayden for The Nation.

Read the first chapter of the book, "Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency Operations" and a foreword by Lt. Col. John A. Nagle.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 09:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lt. Col. John A. Nagl will be a featured guest this weekend on Book TV's After Words. Nagl will join Sean Naylor, senior writer for the Army Times, to discuss The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Nagl was on the team of writers who created the new Counterinsurgency Manual.

Our edition of the Manual includes Nagl's foreword as well as an introduction by Sarah Sewall, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. We also have online “Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency Operations,” an excerpt from the first chapter.

You can catch Nagl's discussion of the book on C-SPAN2 this Saturday at 9 pm, Sunday at 6 pm and 9 pm, and again Monday at 12 am. (Times are Eastern.) Check the Book TV website for more details.

Nagl is also the author of one of the most influential books on counterinsurgency, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam; we have his preface to the book available.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ashley Gilbertson's new book, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War has received some pre-publication praise in an article published in this month's edition of Mother Jones. Ted Genoways begins his article by arguing that much of the recent war reportage from Iraq has been corrupted by bad reporting and bias, but offers Gilbertson's forthcoming book as a much needed corrective. Genoways writes:

Thankfully, we have writers and photographers like Gilbertson, now working primarily on contract for the New York Times, who have not given up on the idea of real reporting. The photographs in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot convey a clear eyed fidelity to the facts. They include pictures of corpses and bleeding soldiers, pictures of officers practicing golf swings and enjoying saunas, and pictures of incarcerated prisoners and brutal interrogations. The lurid and the ludicrous share equal space often to dizzying effect. The text is refreshingly direct and self deprecating—whether revealing Gilbertson's embarrassment at wetting his pants under fire or his agony and post-traumatic stress after being splattered by the brains of the man in front of him on patrol. This is the kind of reporting we so desperately need: free of false bravura, free of agenda, free of inflated urgency.…

The book belongs less on the shelf with other histories of the war than on the same shelf with Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. This is not trumped up news coming live from Iraq but the straight story with harrowing snapshots of the American soul. When future generations look back and wonder where we went wrong, where we failed ourselves and them, it will not be hours of television and radio broadcasts that they will pore over. It will be a select few texts, and Gilbertson's book deserves to be one of them.

Check the Mother Jones website where they should post the entire article soon. Our own special website for Whiskey Tango Foxtrot will also be online soon featuring images from the book and an interview with Gilbertson.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 01:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Ten suspects have been arrested for the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya last October. The ten include "five police and Federal Security Service officers and three Chechen brothers," according to the Moscow Times which went on to state that

Prosecutor General Yury Chaika, in announcing the arrests Monday, said Politkovskaya had known and met the person who ordered her killing and that her death was probably carried out on behalf of someone living abroad who wanted to discredit Russia. Those arrested belong to a Moscow-based criminal group specializing in contract killings and led by an ethnic Chechen, Chaika told reporters.

In the New York Times, Dmitry A. Muratov, editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, the independent newspaper where Politkovskaya worked, called the prosecutor's account of the murders' motives "a nightmare.' "Political interference is hindering the investigation," said Muratov in a telephone interview with the newspaper. "The prosecutor general is acting not like a prosecutor general but a politician who works at the instructions of the president."

The Moscow Times also notes:

Politkovskaya was the thirteenth reporter in Russia killed in a contract-style murder since Putin came to power in 2000, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. A lack of convictions in any of those cases has raised doubts about the state's commitment to protecting journalists and a free press.

In 2003, we published Politikovskaya's second book on the Chechen War, A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya. We have an excerpt from the book, an article titled "Russia's Secret Heroes."

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Here is the Jon Stewart interview of Lt. Col. John Nagl on the Daily Show on Thursday night, as provided by Comedy Central:


(Tip of the hat to Small Wars Journal.)

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week's Chicago Reader features a front page story titled "Defending Strauss" in which contributor Julie Englander delivers a comprehensive report on the long-running controversy surrounding the former University of Chicago professor of philosophy, Leo Strauss, who died in 1973. As Englander explains, Strauss's name and work have become closely associated with the political practices of some of the neoconservative architects of the war in Iraq, like former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and high-ranking Pentagon official Abram Shulsky, based partly on their association at the University of Chicago. Englander writes:

[The critics argue that] Straussians agreed with their guru, a scholar of Plato, that there are "truths [that] can be comprehended only by a very few, and would be misunderstood by the masses." Thus the "noble lie" (a phrase from Plato's Republic that Strauss liked to use) that [the Bush administration] told the American public: Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, and we've got to go in there, whatever the cost.

But as Englander notes, several writers have recently come to Strauss's aid, arguing that his work has been misinterpreted and misappropriated in the context of America's current political woes:

Figuring enough was enough, in 2006 Michael and Catherine Zuckert published The Truth About Leo Strauss. They described Strauss's encounters with ancient and modern philosophy and pictured him as a skeptic and moderate who had conflicted feelings about modern democracy (as he did about modernism generally) but thought it better than the alternatives. They asked, "Does the Platonic/Straussian doctrine of the noble lie serve to justify the kind of alleged lies critics of Strauss… lay at his doorstep?" They went on, "This is not to say that political leaders do not on occasion do such things, but again, they did not learn to do this from Strauss."

"A lot of stupid and unfair things were said about Strauss," says Michael. "The idea that he had some big political agenda is just nutty."

Yale's Steven Smith concedes in the preface to Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism that Strauss "has always been something of an exotic plant" and is undoubtedly "an acquired taste." But he was "a friend of liberal democracy—one of the best friends democracy has ever had."

To find out more about this thinker and the controversy he stirred up thirty years after his death, read an excerpt from Reading Leo Strauss or read an excerpt from the Zuckert's The Truth about Leo Strauss.

Also be sure to do a quick search on our website to find some of Strauss's own works including Leo Strauss On Plato's Symposium and On Tyranny.

Archived in Commentary | History | Philosophy | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Updated on August 24: The Daily Show interview of Lt. Col. Nagl is viewable on YouTube. It may not be there for long.

Making our debut as the inside source for UCP celebrity news, we're excited to announce that Lt. Col. John Nagl will be appearing on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart tonight at 10:00 PM CST, to discuss The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. The result of unprecedented collaboration among top U.S. military experts, scholars, and practitioners of U.S. counterinsurgency operations, The Manual documents a revolutionary change in U.S. military doctrine. Nagl, who wrote a foreword for the Manual, will presumably be discussing how the document's emphasis on the importance of decentralized decision-making, the need to understand local politics and customs, and the key role of intelligence in winning the support of the population promises a vast change in U.S. military strategy—but on the Daily Show you never know.

Nagl has also recently contributed to the Press's re-publication of the United States Army's Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during World War II, and released a book, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam—both offering more relevant and fascinating insights into U.S. military strategy.

Read an excerpt from the Counterinsurgency Field Manual or the preface to Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife.

Archived in Author Events | History | Politics and Current Events
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Lieutenant Col. John A. Nagl was featured yesterday on NPR's All Things Considered to discuss the recent re-publication of the U. S. Army's Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during World War II. Nagl—who wrote the forward to the new edition—joins host Michele Norris to discuss the valuable lessons to be found in this small advice manual issued to soldiers serving in Iraq more than 60 years ago; advice which Nagl argues is still very much relevant today. In his interview, Nagl laments the fact that the army had not heeded some of this advice before the current counterinsurgency operations began in 2003, and encourages the adoption of some of the book's suggestions in the context of the United States' current efforts to win Iraqi hearts and minds.

Navigate to the NPR website to listen to archived audio of the show as well as read an illustrated excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Politics and Current Events
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Pulitzer prize winning writer Russell Baker recently published an interesting review of several new books about the tenuous state of American journalism focusing on topics like Rupert Murdoch's recent takeover of the Wall Street Journal, and the growing scarcity of substantive news coverage. In the review written for the August 16 New York Review of Books, Baker cites Lance W. Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston's When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina to argue that many modern news sources have already shown alarming signs of failure in their obligation to keep the public informed in a fair and unbiased way, especially as evidenced by the media's dealings with the current Bush administration. Baker writes:

Assignment to Washington is one of the highest prizes a newspaper has to offer, and not surprisingly the Washington press is an elite group: well-educated, well-paid, talented, at ease among the mighty, a bit smug perhaps about knowing secrets others don't, but for the most part sensitive to an obligation to keep the public informed without fear or prejudice. Yet they failed this obligation during the Bush years, the authors of When The Press Fails contend, partly because of their tendency to defer excessively to power.

Their "deference to power" was not a newly hatched product of the Bush era, according to the authors, but a habit "deeply ingrained and continually reinforced in the culture and routines of mainstream journalism." It is a habit that makes Washington journalists vulnerable to manipulation by the powerful and indifferent to dissent and protest. Dissenters and protesters are often dismissed as "mavericks," suggesting they are not to be taken too seriously.…

At its most damaging, deference to power means a readiness to tell the narrative of government as the powerful tell it. The Bush people have talked of creating their own reality. The writers of When the Press Fails refer to this Bushian "reality" as a "script" and criticize the Washington press for accepting it as reality, even when, as during the Iraq war, "that script seemed bizarrely out of line with observable events."

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Politics and Current Events | Reviews
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The front page of the Sunday, July 29th edition of the New York Times book review is running an article by Harvard professor Samantha Power about several new books offering alternatives to the current combat strategies employed in Iraq. Posing the question of what can be done now that we have positioned ourselves in the middle of a difficult and prolonged conflict, Powers begins her article with a review of The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual—a book that she argues might hold the key to reversing the American military's dwindling returns in Iraq. Powers writes:

Criticizing the calamities of the last six years of American foreign policy has become all too easy. And it does not itself improve our approach to combating terrorist threats that do in fact loom large—larger, in fact, because of Bush's mistakes.… Several new books take up this challenge, each addressing a different piece of the national security predicament. Together, they allow one to begin to define a new approach to counterterrorism.…

The book to begin with in looking for a revised 21st-century strategy is, unexpectedly, the landmark The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. It was released as a government document in December 2006, but owing to its enormous popularity (1.5 million downloads in the first month alone), it has now been published by a university press, with a provocative, highly readable new foreword and introduction that testify to the manual's "paradigm-shattering" content.…

And with suggestions ranging from placing greater emphasis on the protection of civilians and coordinating efforts for reconstruction and development, to phrases like "Sometimes the more force is used, the less effective it is," the Counterinsurgency Field Manual is indeed a revolutionary challenge to conventional U.S. military doctrine.

Read the foreword by John A. Nagl and an excerpt, "Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency Operations."

Archived in History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
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Lt. Colonel John A. Nagl, author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam and contributor to the recently published U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, was the subject of an article in Tuesday's Manhattan Mercury discussing the counterinsurgency in Iraq. The article focuses on Nagl's strategies for winning the conflict, which he claims requires a fundamentally different approach than the "conventional large scale World War II search and destroy tactics" that the U.S. military has traditionally employed. Mark Scott writes for the Mercury:

Instead [the U.S. Army] must focus on building up the government, economy and security forces of the host nation. This is essentially the approach being used by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan with the military transition team plan, which embeds American soldiers with Iraqi and Afghan forces to train them to ultimately take over the defense of their country.

"These are long, hard, slow wars," Nagl said. "Ultimate success in Iraq very much depends on the political growth and development of the Iraqi government, which is still enormously young and faces some very severe challenges."

Recently, Nagl has been pushing a proposal for the Army to create a permanent "Army Advisor Corps," that would embed such "transition teams" full-time with Iraqi national security forces. (His proposal has recently been taken up by U.S. Senator John McCain.) Could Nagl have the key to improving what many believe to be a deteriorating situation in Iraq? To find out more get the rest of the article on the Mercury's website.

Also see Nagl's new preface to Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, his foreword to the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, and an excerpt from the Manual, "Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency."

Last Saturday Nagl was a guest speaker at Chicago's Pritzker Military Library. Head on over to their website for an audio podcast of his talk.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 01:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lieutenant Colonel John A. Nagl, author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam, will speak this coming Saturday, July 14, at 10:00 am at the Pritzker Military Library in downtown Chicago. According to the library's website "Nagl, recently returned from Iraq and now commanding a battalion, will share his observations, experiences and thoughts while discussing the recently updated Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife." (You can read Nagl's new preface to the book online.) See the Library's website for more details about the event.

Invariably, armies are accused of preparing to fight the previous war. In Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, Lieutenant Colonel John A. Nagl—a veteran of both Operation Desert Storm and the current conflict in Iraq—considers the now-crucial question of how armies adapt to changing circumstances during the course of conflicts for which they are initially unprepared. Through the use of archival sources and interviews with participants in both engagements, Nagl compares the development of counterinsurgency doctrine and practice in the Malayan Emergency from 1948 to 1960 with what developed in the Vietnam War from 1950 to 1975.

Nagl also contributed a foreword to our edition of the The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual as well as a foreword to our republication of Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during World War II.

Archived in Author Events | History | Politics and Current Events
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An Associated Press piece written by their Iraq editor, Brian Murphy, was picked up yesterday by the Olympian in Olympia, Washington. It's a nifty little story about how we came to publish Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during World War II.

Publishing is often all about accident and serendipity and Instructions illustrates that in spades. A booklet printed for American soldiers is found sixty-four years later at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University and so brought back into print—the same words, utterly altered by different circumstances.

George Packer also takes note of the book on his blog, Interesting Times, on the New Yorker website.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
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An essay by David Shulman, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine.

Israeli peace activists don’t expect to be popular. Although by all accounts most Israelis do want peace and would accept any reasonable compromise, they normally react with bitter scorn and hatred for anyone who seems to cross the lines. Organizations like mine, Ta’ayush—“Jewish-Arab Partnership,” one of the most effective of the peace groups operating at the grassroots level in the occupied territories—are viewed as naïve at best, treasonous at worst. Last month’s events in Gaza confirmed everyone’s worst prejudices. “You want to make peace with them?” my neighbors asked me in supercilious tones. “Can’t you see that they’re all violent thugs? Why are you helping them?”

Continue reading "On the West Bank, It's Still Cynicism as Usual" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Politics and Current Events
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Robert Hariman and Louis Lucaites, authors of No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy have recently started their own blog at www.nocaptionneeded.com. As a companion resource to their new book, the blog is "dedicated to discussion of the role that photojournalism and other visual practices play in a vital democratic society." Bringing the author's ideas to bear on current issues and new media, almost in real-time, we definitely recommend you check it out.

In No Caption Needed, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites provide the definitive study of the iconic photograph as a dynamic form of public art. Their critical analyses of nine individual icons explore the photographs themselves and their subsequent circulation through an astonishing array of media, including stamps, posters, billboards, editorial cartoons, TV shows, Web pages, tattoos, and more. As these iconic images are reproduced and refashioned by governments, commercial advertisers, journalists, grassroots advocates, bloggers, and artists, their alterations throw key features of political experience into sharp relief. Iconic images are revealed as models of visual eloquence, signposts for collective memory, means of persuasion across the political spectrum, and a crucial resource for critical reflection.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Film and Media | History | Politics and Current Events
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Wall Street Journal reporter Greg Jaffe, writing on his blog Washington Wire, noted our revival of a United States Army guidebook for soldiers stationed in Iraq, and says it "includes lots of homespun wisdom that would have come in handy in 2003."

The book is Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during World War II, handed out to soldiers in 1943 and now published with a foreword by Lt. Colonel John A. Nagl. Jaffe notes:

Recently, senior Army and Marine Corps officials have had success in al Anbar province in western Iraq by cutting deals with Iraqi tribal leaders and sheikhs to fight Sunni radical groups like al Qaeda in Iraq. If the Pentagon's top brass, who initially rejected working with tribal leaders, had read the World War II guide it's possible that idea would have come to them sooner. "The nomads are divided into tribes headed by sheiks," the guide notes. "These leaders are very powerful and should be shown great consideration."

Archived in Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
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Lieutenant Colonel John A. Nagl was interviewed Monday on The World to talk about the new U.S. strategy for fighting the insurgency in Iraq, which involves arming and supporting Sunni's who, at one time, were themselves insurgents. Nagl spoke to the issue from the historical perspective of his book Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam.

Nagl also co-authored and contributed a foreword to our edition of The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, which will be published on July 4. Additionally, Nagl has written a foreword to a little book we plucked out of the archives of the U.S. Army and will publish a little later this summer, Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during World