The Chicago Blog

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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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)