Yesterday, we asked scholar Sandra M. Gustafson, author of Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic, to comment on President Obama's recent State of the Union address. This afternoon, she's joined by James T. Kloppenberg, author of Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition, who engages with the history of other deliberative democrats and evaluates where Obama's words fell for a spectrum of interested parties, while remarking on the conflict and compromise that informs both authors' books. Thanks again to Professors Gustafson and Kloppenberg for sharing their thoughts with us!

"Obama's 2012 SOTU: Keeping Open the Invitation to Deliberate" by James T. Kloppenberg

Champions of conciliation face an uphill battle in 2012. As Sandra Gustafson notes, ours is a contentious culture. Of course that's nothing new. As Barack Obama emphasized in The Audacity of Hope and as he has observed many times since, conflict is as American as apple pie. The first settlers in New England began squabbling before they got off the ships that carried them across the Atlantic. William Penn's utopian vision of a peaceful Pennsylvania vanished in a firestorm of criticism. Most of those shipped to the southern colonies arrived as slaves, servants, or convicts, inferior beings to whom the ruling white males would not have to listen. Yet beneath the noisy arguments that erupted everywhere in colonial America, a new sensibility quietly established itself around the idea of self-government. In New England towns, in the villages established by the quarreling religious and ethnic groups that settled the middle colonies, and in the colonial legislatures where southern planters fought a war on two fronts against the demands of English officials and the rabble they wanted to keep subservient, people were learning from experience that, in the absence of a ruling monarch or an aristocracy with privileges secured by law, the members of every deliberative body had to learn to accept the judgment of the majority. Accompanying conflict, in other words, was the imperative of persuasion, the need to convince those who disagreed to see the light and come around.

Ever since the ancient world, a tension has persisted in democratic cultures between the prophet's principled refusal to compromise with evil and the deliberative democrat's equally principled commitment to the institutions and the process of achieving gradual change through conciliation. As Sandra Gustafson shows in her splendid book Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic, and as I try to establish in my forthcoming book Tragic Irony: Democracy in European and American Thought, conflict and its provisional resolution through compromise together constitute the democratic tradition on both sides of the Atlantic. Although Obama understands the power and the necessity of unyielding calls to justice, he also understands that democracy can work only when the chasm between competing and incompatible principles can be bridged through efforts to understand other perspectives and identify and bring to the surface buried commitments to shared ideals. Americans have always fought bitterly over issues ranging from theology to economics, from slavery to abortion, and those who reject compromise always dismiss as unprincipled those conciliators who work to discover or create overlapping consensus where others see only irreconcilable differences. Like deliberative democrats from James Madison to John Dewey, Obama understands that although not every dispute can be resolved through deliberation, the alternative—civil war—is always tragic and usually ineffective as a means to heal the deep wounds it creates. Our culture's romantic celebration of warriors blinds us to war's long-term consequences; democracy depends on persuasion and must resort to force only as a last resort.

Obama's State of the Union address surprised only those who continue to project onto him either their own aspirations for radical change or their own paranoid fantasies about his secret plot to turn the United States into Denmark. The speech instead falls neatly in the continuous line of analysis Obama has offered ever since 1988, when he wrote the little essay "Why Organize?" before he left the Chicago world of community organizing for the Harvard Law School. Some commentators on the left complain that the SOTU left them feeling undernourished: Obama failed to excoriate his opponents or lay out a bold plan—to be accomplished by executive order, evidently, given the Republican majority in the House of Representatives—to bring justice to our land of inequality and oppression. By contrast, members of the self-styled moderate conservative commentariat have been left sputtering about the speech: the food is terrible, they complain about the mildly progressive measures Obama sketched out as his priorities, and there's so little of it. Their frustration is easy to understand. Although Obama did make clear his preferences for a simplified and more steeply graduated income tax, steps to return manufacturing to the United States, and more robust regulation of the environment and the financial sector, there was nothing in the speech to antagonize the independent voters whom his Republican opponent will have to woo in November. Instead he continued to plead for "responsibility," "cooperation," "opportunity," and "fairness," favorite code words invoked by progressives for over a century to justify the reforms we seek. For decades conservatives successfully blocked such initiatives by raising various specters, first communism, now terrorism, and again and again the various demons conjured up by the notion of a culture war. Obama refused to play into the mythology that he is an anti-business or anti-American radical. Instead he embraced the explicitly solidaristic ethos of the military and reminded us that he is willing to deploy helicopters, moles, or drones when he deems it necessary. Americans who actually listened to his words, rather than filtering the speech through the increasingly rickety categories concocted by his critics, heard the voice of a moderate who still believes, against all odds, in deliberative democracy. Although surrounded by people who would rather shout down their opponents than reason with them, Obama showed yet again his commitment to the proposition that the electorate can be persuaded to choose a path of moderate development toward a newer, and more inclusive, understanding of the present-day meanings of the nation's traditional democratic ideals of liberty and justice for all.

James T. Kloppenberg is the Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University and the author of Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (Second Edition, 2012).

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Following President Barack Obama's recent State of the Union address, we thought it a fitting occasion to invite a dialogue from two leading scholars of civic rhetoric and the democratic tradition. Today, Sandra M. Gustafson, author of Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic, examines the metaphor of war in Congressional politics and evaluates President Obama's use of military imagery, in light of his initial post-partisan appeal. Tomorrow, she'll be joined by James Kloppenberg, author of Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition, who accounts for our own projections onto the President and explores Obama's use of moderate policies and progressive language. We're delighted to host both of them on the blog, and hope you're as intrigued by their analyses as we are.

President Barack Obama opened his fourth State of the Union address with a paean to the American armed forces. In a tribute designed to showcase important achievements of his first term, he celebrated the end of the Iraq War, which Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta declared over on December 15, 2011; the assassination of Osama bin Laden earlier that year; and the diminished power of the Taliban and draw down of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Overlooking some notable military failures—the Abu Ghraib scandal, the "kill team" in Afghanistan, the hazing related death of Pvt. Danny Chen, statistics indicating widespread sexual assault—the president instead celebrated the "courage, selflessness and teamwork" that have made the U.S. armed forces successful: "They're not consumed with personal ambition. They don't obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together." Building on an image of an American military characterized by fairness and discipline, he contrasted them with less successful institutions that have "let us down." He did not need to say that for many people the central example of a failed institution was Congress itself, which in the days leading up to his speech had an approval rating of 13 percent.

That the most recent sitting U.S. president to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize should look to the military as a model for Congress bears reflection. The legislative branch is in its design and function very different from the hierarchical military system. It is an independent branch of government, not subordinate to the commander in chief. By calling on Congress to be more like the military, Obama was not suggesting a breach of separation of powers. He was speaking to one of the central issues that has bedeviled his presidency: the increasingly rigid refusal of Congressional Republicans to work with him and the Democrats to solve pressing national problems.

Candidate Obama campaigned on a platform of post-partisanship. His early years as a mixed-race child raised by white grandparents and his work as a community organizer prepared him for his mediating role as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, which launched his political career. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama characterized the United States as a "deliberative democracy" that works through free and open discussion. He promised to move past rigid polarities and take good ideas where he found them, a stance based in pragmatist philosophy as James Kloppenberg has shown in Reading Obama. This promise was tacitly premised on the willingness of Republicans to work with him. Instead, fueled by Tea Party money and energy, they embraced an oppositional role. War, not dialogue, has been the guiding metaphor in Congressional politics for much of the last three years.

This turn of events cannot have been wholly unanticipated. The readiness with which the president's most truculent opponents label his policies "socialism" draws on a long tradition of associating African Americans with leftist ideologies—a tradition based in the reality that in the four decades between the Russian Revolution and the Stalinist revelations, many African American intellectuals turned to those ideologies for an antidote to the pervasive racism of a segregated United States that prided itself on its democracy while inscribing inequality in law. Ralph Waldo Ellison was one such intellectual. In his great novel Invisible Man, which celebrates its sixtieth anniversary this March, he portrayed a young black man's attraction to and ultimate disillusionment with powerful ideologies. During his campaign Obama repeatedly observed that he was a human Rorschach test, meaning that people saw in him what they wanted to see—a not-so-subtle allusion to Ellison's unnamed hero.

Today war has become a standard way of modeling difference. In her 1998 book The Argument Culture: Stopping America's War of Words, Georgetown linguist Deborah Tannen analyzed "a pervasive warlike atmosphere" infecting public dialogue. Noting that a conflict-based approach to difference has a long history, she nevertheless documented its rise to new heights in recent decades. Conflict pervades the media, the law, technology (think computer games), and education. I work at the home of the "Fighting Irish," where a leader of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies was featured in a promotional video series "What Would You Fight For?" The installment was called "Fighting for Peace."

Writing about the fate of the president's post-partisan agenda in the New Yorker, Ryan Lizza cited research on the extremely limited impact that presidential rhetoric has historically had. Obama has called for compromise and consensus-building on many occasions over the last three years, including during the health care reform discussions and during his negotiations with John Boehner over the debt ceiling. Those appeals have contributed to a number of concrete legislative results, but they have probably also contributed to the heightened oppositionalism of the Tea Party Republicans. While it was this atmosphere that Obama promised to change, the extent of the problem requires long-term, systemic efforts, not quick fixes.

A number of initiatives—some originating with the administration, some not—offer a vision of a longer-term transformation. Last June NEH chairman and former Republican congressman Jim Leach completed a nineteen-month "Civility Tour" of all fifty states to promote better public dialogue. This month the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement, on commission from the Department of Education, released "A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy's Future." The report calls on institutions of higher education to promote "capacities to engage diverse perspectives and people" and build more robust institutions of democratic civic engagement. Meanwhile the group No Labels has encouraged people to eschew party labels and promoted a set of Congressional reforms designed to fix the processes that have contributed to polarization and paralysis.

At the conclusion of his State of the Union address, President Obama returned to his opening military imagery, this time in connection with the flag given him by the SEAL Team that killed Bin Laden. The names of the team are written on the flag, and the president noted that "some may be Democrats. Some may be Republicans. But that doesn't matter." What matters, he went on to say, is that they were able to work together, to have each other's backs, and he called on Congress and the nation to do the same. It is a reflection of our moment—sad, perhaps, but real—that American culture has become so saturated with conflict that our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president turns to the military institutions designed to engage in conflict as our best examples of teamwork and cooperation.

Sandra M. Gustafson teaches at the University of Notre Dame, where she is a member of the English department and a faculty fellow at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Her book Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2011.

Stay tuned for tomorrow's response from James Kloppenberg, Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University, and the author of Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (Princeton University Press, Second Edition, 2012).

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As New Hampshire voters take to the polls in today's Republican primary, more and more media analysis continues to emerge on the role played by the Iowa caucuses, and whether or not such a "primary" position is warranted by the state's demographics.

In Why Iowa?: How Caucuses and Sequential Elections Improve the Presidential Nominating Process, David P. Redlawsk (five-time former Iowa precinct caucus chair), Caroline J. Tolbert, and Todd Donovan argue that not only is Iowa's impact warranted, but it reveals a great deal about other informational aspects of the campaign. Iowa's exceptionally well-designed caucus system brings candidates' arguments, strengths, and weaknesses into the open and—most importantly—under the media's lens.

A recent piece by John Sides for the NYT's FiveThirtyEight blog focused on Iowa's dramatic finish, where a late surge by Rick Santorum left Mitt Romney with a narrow, eight-vote victory. Sides's appealed to media data and commentary from the Why Iowa? authors, in addition to polling data from Nate Silver. The result? In Sides's words:

Why does this matter? Mr. Redlawsk and his colleagues demonstrate that not only do candidates who do relatively well in Iowa do better in New Hampshire—see also Nate's analysis—but this shift in media attention may play the causal role. The media's attention matters too, and their attention depends on how candidates perform versus expectations. Mr. Redlawsk and his colleagues then show that the results in New Hampshire shape the candidates' overall share of votes in the primaries as a whole. So Iowa affects New Hampshire, and New Hampshire affects everything else. . . .

In the run-up to the caucus, Redlawsk spoke with Ezra Klein at the Washington Post about how Iowa rose to its current first-in-the-nation status and why so many candidates care about such a small number of delegates. As Redlawsk commented:

Probably what Iowa does best is winnow the field: eliminate the also-rans, the ones who just can't build a campaign. That's really what Iowa does. It teaches them to build a grassroots campaign. Those who do well get to move forward, and those who don't drop out. That said, in the last few cycles, Iowa has played a very significant role. There's no question that it launched Obama. But in the end, it's not so much winning Iowa as it is generating attention because you beat expectations.

Tolbert chimed in for a piece by Gail Collins for the NYT, which presented a dissenting perspective on Iowa, where as Tolbert noted, "Caucuses tend to foster more grass-roots participation."

Redlawsk also sat down for Public Radio International's The Takeaway, and offered some wisdom about the caucuses unpredictable results and what the truth is about their effect on candidate selection:

It's the media that's the primary king-maker here. What the media does is interprets the results of Iowa, the results of New Hampshire, as we go forward in a sequential process.

For more information about Why Iowa?, check out the authors' interactive website, which includes excerpts, interviews and talks (including recent mentions on the BBC and Southern California Public Radio's Madeleine Brand Show, and other information about the book and its scholarship.

In the meantime, here's some coverage of the 1988 Republican and Democratic Iowa caucuses from PBS's MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour (including some vintage Roger Mudd) that grapples with some of same questions Why Iowa? continues to debate:

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This week brought The Black Power Mixtape to Chicago, though the film was previously released in early September to audiences in Los Angeles and New York. A documentary pieced together by filmmaker Goran Hugo Olsson from hundreds of reels of 16-mm interview footage produced by Swedish television journalists from 1967 to 1975, The Black Power Mixtape interlaces contemporary audio commentary revisting the Movement with many clips either unseen since they first aired in Europe, or lost to network archives. Organized chronologically by year, the film documents the rise of Black Power, from Stokely Carmichael's earliest post-SNCC speeches and the founding of the Black Panther Party's Free Breakfast Program to TV Guide's (a publication owned by Richard Nixon's then Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Walter Annenberg) critique of Scandinavian television's "negative" portrayal of American society, eventually trailing off into more-or-less vernacular pieces on Harlem bookstores and drug-treatment culture.

To watch the movement's rhetorical development and the increasing exile, imprisonment, and death of its leaders alongside the community's—and nation's—growing disillusionment with the Vietnam War, Nixon administration politics, and urban poverty, is a fascinating exercise in the nuances of discrimination and endemic societal problems. To watch all of this alongside a sometimes sympathetic, often curious, and largely culturally distanced assortment of Swedish journalists (drawn from over twenty televised broadcasts) leaves you pondering an almost inexplicable gap—between that time and the present, between these two societies (often united by their anti-Vietnam political stance), and between the roles of participant and observer. What sort of historical reading properly prepares you for a bus of blonde-haired Swedish investigative journalists being chastised about exploring Harlem, as their tour guide uncomfortably stumbles out a comment about how their fear is shared by better ("better?" "Can I say that?") African American citizens?

In 2001, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., the William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University, edited the collection Is It Nation Time? Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism—thirty-five years after Adam Clayton Powell Jr. delivered, as part of his baccalaureate address at Howard University, an early version of the phrase: "To demand these God-given rights is to seek black power." Is It Nation Time? collects new and classic writings on the Black Power Movement and its legacy by renowned thinkers—including Glaude, Cornel West, and Robin D. G. Kelley—in order to tackle contemporary issues such as the commodification of blackness, class tensions, and the larger discourse surrounding black nationalism.

A precursor to Is It Nation Time?, William L. Van Deburg's New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975, follows the literal arc of much of The Black Power Mixtape's historical trajectory, offering a comprehensive account of the Black Power Movement's rise and fall, from its preconditions to ideologies that straddled everything from labor and campus life to sports, soul music, theology, and nationalism. The book garnered the Gustavus Myers Center's Outstanding Book Award (1993), and was praised by Bob Blauner in the New York Times as a "densely textured evocation of one of American history's most revolutionary transformations in ethnic group consciousness."

Angela Davis, who recently retired from the University of California, Santa Cruz's History of Consciousness program, where she long served as a professor (she's currently Distinguished Professor in the Women's and Gender Studies Department at Syracuse University), has several key moments in The Black Power Mixtape (including one that demonstrated the journalists' unusual access to Davis during her 1971-72 stay in a Marin County prison cell). The most pressing of these occurs during the conclusion of one interview, where Davis states (in response to a question about violence in the movement): "When someone asks me about violence, I find it incredible," she says. "A person asking that can have no idea about what black people have gone through in this country."

To understand the raw emotion and power of Davis's articulation, Is It Nation Time? and New Day in Babylon are fine places to start—but to place her words in the context of our own continued struggles for social justice and equality today, where institutional racism, economic disparity, the struggle for GLBTQ rights, and other issues play out in daily headlines, is to hear an echo of her furious intensity as part of a soundtrack whose audience continues to grow.

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Recently, in light of the tenth anniversary of the events that unfolded on September 11, 2001, discourse in the American public sphere has centered on a remembrance of what was lost that day. Yet, at the same time, many darker elements of the national psyche have also been confronted: reckoning the health plight of rescue workers, for instance, and questioning exploitation of the events for any war or terror produced in their wake with a clarity produced in hindsight.

At Chicago, we bear in mind the lessons gleaned from David Simpson's 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration, which examines the paradoxical nature of American reactions following the event, from angles of aestheticization, exploitation, and appropriation. Simpson's book, which expands on several essays published in the London Review of Books, analyzes our responses to the events of that September morning with the persuasive sweep of humanities scholarship, ultimately using the tools of this cultural knowledge to help us digest the tragedy and its deep and wide-sweeping consequences.

At the University of Chicago, the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism (CPOST) , a social science research group dedicated to advancing knowledge of international security and terrorism, has put together an admirable selection of perspectives on 9/11 by some of America's most prominent policy makers and professors. Among them? Robert A. Pape, the director of CPOST, and coauthor of Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It. Cutting the Fuse, written by two global experts, has quickly become the definitive book on suicide terrorism, and its advancement of foreign military occupation as the root cause of these types of attacks has heralded impressive policy debates.

On the CPOST site, in a piece entitled "The End of Fear," Pape writes:

America has been waging a long war against terrorism, but without much serious public debate about what is truly motivating terrorists to kill us. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attack, this was perfectly understandable. If toppling the Taliban was necessary to take out Al Qaeda's sanctuary in Afghanistan, so be it. But, in an instant, there was also a great need to know, or perhaps better to say, to "understand" the events of that terrible day. A simple narrative was readily available and a powerful conventional wisdom began to exert its grip. Since the 9/11 hijackers were all Muslims, it was easy to presume that Islamic fundamentalism was the central motivating force driving the 19 hijackers to kill themselves in order to kill us. Within weeks after the attack, surveys of American attitudes show that this presumption was fast congealing into a hard reality in the public mind. Americans immediately wondered, "Why do they hate us?" and almost as immediately came to the conclusion that it was because of who we are, not what we do.

The narrative of Islamic fundamentalism did more than explain why America was attacked. It also pointed toward a simple, grand solution, one whose ambition only made it seem all the more worthy in light of the trauma of that terrible day. If Islamic fundamentalism was driving the threat and if its roots grew from the culture of the Arab world, then America had a clear mission: To transform Arab societies, with Western political institutions and social norms as the ultimate antidote to the virus of Islamic extremism.

The only problem: Islamic fundamentalism is not the main driver of suicide terrorism. What drives this phenomenon more than any other single factor is foreign military presence, which inspires wave after wave of individuals to join terrorist groups in order to carry out suicide attacks in the hope that these would end the foreign presence in their lands.

The reproduction of simple narratives that Pape writes about is just the sort of verbal image that W. J. T. Mitchell uncovers at the core of Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present. Though Mitchell eventually argues that the shared anxiety present in the concept of cloning and the replication of terror-based imagery and narratives fuels an uncanny structural resemblance, his startling analysis reaches the same conclusion as Pape's: the War on Terror has not only recruited more fighters to the jihadist cause, but undermined the tenets of our own foreign and domestic policies.

All of this, though, pales in the face of those events, even a decade later. But just as unrelentingly, it asks us to consider the decade since with senses more attuned to facilitating change, rather than reconciling our losses, however tragic they may be.

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In a recent post for the Yale University Press blog, Eva Ledóchowicz (our shared sales representative for Eastern Europe) penned an article on the potential of the ebook as a "book without border," linking the changing landscape of publishing (for better or worse) with developments in the European Union surrounding ID-free travel made possible by laws governing the Schengen area.

The Schengen area came to be on March 26, 1995, when five original signatories (Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands) implemented the Schengen Agreement (1985, named for Schengen, Luxembourg, where the document was first signed) into law, allowing for what approaches a single state for international travel, with no internal border controls (harkening back to pre-World War I days, when one could travel from Paris to St. Petersburg without a passport). Two years later, and twenty-five countries were onboard. In recent years, concerns over the pressure to provide shared security for the entire Schengen region, along with the preferences of individual nations over migration, has led to a new vulnerability for Schengen, its member nations, and those travelers who come and go within its amorphous borders.

In Cultures of Border Control: Schengen and the Evolution of European Frontiers, political scientist Ruben Zaiotti traces the changing assumptions and cultural practices that led European policymakers to challenge long-established conceptions of sovereignty and security. While Zaiotti broadly surveys the implications of this new European integration, he also contrasts Schengen with post-9/11 developments in North America, where more restrictive control of borders has become a dominant theme.

Scholarship like Zaiotti's helps us to understand the circumstances and principles that shape territoriality in our globalized society, and Eva's post is an incisive first-hand account of what it might mean to be borderless (as commerce, ideas, or persons) in our twenty-first century world—we recommend you have a look at both.

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The tale told in Wong Kar-Wai's 1994 film Chungking Express isn't particularly straightforward. In between the stop-motion jumps and alternative shots, the flick tells two stories: a cop with a jones for a lost love buys tins of pineapple that are due to expire the same day as his affection, while another cop. . . . Well, there's some mirroring with postdated boarding passes and a girl named Faye and California, the restaurant and the place and that kind of Dreamin' from the Mamas and the Papas song, and . . . uh, flight attendants and cousins . . . and. . . . Suffice to say it's perfectly complicated. The title of the film in Chinese literally translates to "Chungking Jungle," which refers to both its dense urban landscape and the Chungking Mansions in Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, Hong Kong, where much of the movie's first sequence is set. Like the film, the Chungking Mansions offer an idiosyncratic slice of life in our transnational capitalist society.

Curry shops, African record stands, clothing stalls, sari tailors, Nigerian exporters, Sub-Saharan internet cafes, Lahore Fast Food, barbershops, Bollywood video kiosks, guestrooms inhabited by 120 distinct nationalities (on any given day), porno stands, and even Indian whiskey distributors fight for turf among a 17-story tower block. But as a recent Wall Street Journal review of anthropologist Gordon Mathew's Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong points out, the notoriously shabby tenement is engaged in a culture as much about low-end globalism as it is about cheap sleep and squalid stories.

Visitors go to Chungking Mansions to buy consumer and trade goods that have been manufactured in mainland China, bringing them back to their home countries for resale at a higher price. The goods are bought from middlemen who work from one of the more than 100 tiny storefronts and stalls on the lower floors of the building. Some traders transport their goods home by pooling money and renting shipping containers, but many simply fill their luggage with wares.

In the production notes for Chungking Express, Kar-Wai speaks to his desire to use the Mansions as part of his set:

It is a legendary place where the relations between people are very complicated. It has always fascinated and intrigued me. It is also a permanent hotspot for the cops in Hong Kong because of the illegal traffic that takes place there. That mass-populated and hyperactive place is a great metaphor for the town herself.

The WSJ goes on to commend Ghetto at the Center of the World as "a first rate business book," and closes its review with a quote that further articulates the Mansions as a microcosm of capitalism's soft underbelly:

Mathews adds: "As a Pakistani said to me vis-à-vis Indians, 'I do not like them; they are not my friends. But I am here to make money, as they are here to make money. We cannot afford to fight.'"

Whither the West? You'll have to watch the movie to find out whether or not the cop(s) get(s) the girl(s).

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In the week since Fourth of July celebrations rang out on every neighborhood block and city stoop (at least in Chicago's Logan Square, where the Crime Blotter lit up like a game of Pong with noise violations well into mid-week), we've had a chance to surf through the op-eds, remembrances, and the short- and long-form explorations of social and political freedoms published in the holiday's wake. One that extends beyond grist-of-the-mill celebration is Eric Slauter's "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" in the Boston Globe, a blockbuster foray into the reception history of the Declaration of Independence, which considers the circumstances surrounding the document's most storied sentence :

"We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."

Using new digital tools to consider newspaper accounts, sermons, Supreme Court rulings, almanacs, and facsimiles from the day of the Declaration and beyond, Slauter advances the Declaration's most iconic clause ("a radical commitment to equality") as inspiration for the abolitionists of the early nineteenth century, the workingmen's movement of the 1820s, and a certain 1848 convention in Seneca Falls, while at the same time appealing to a changing context, wherein Abraham Lincoln claimed that the Founding Fathers must have boldly envisioned its phrasing for some "future use" and Frederick Douglass (1852) heard the Declaration's "shouts of liberty and equality" as nothing more than "hollow mockery."

In the Globe piece, Slauter grounds the phrase in its own history:

But at the time, very few in the newly United States besides a small contingent of black and white antislavery activists would have seen the Declaration as a document of radical egalitarianism or even as a founding document. That we do so now is a testament in part to their efforts, and to generations of readers since who have pressed the United States to live up to those words. It is truly their Declaration, rather than Jefferson's or Congress's, that we celebrate today.

Combining literary scholarship with its more pragmatic social contexts is nothing new for Slauter. In The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution, Slauter explores the origins and meanings of the U.S. Constitution from a vantage that places agency with the key actors who founded the nation—and who considered this new government to be a work of art framed from natural rights. The runner-up for the Modern Language Association's First Book Prize, The State as a Work of Art has been praised by Gordon S. Wood in the New Republic as "richly imaginative" and "the first full-scale effort by a literary scholar to bring to bear the special tools of his discipline on the Constitution and its cultural origins."

What better mix of politic and rhetoric to further usher in July, when dog days advance and the pursuit of happiness becomes that much more surreal?

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Elizabeth Taylor was the twentieth century's White Diamond—in an age that saw the decline of the Hollywood icon, her violet-eyed takes on high society Angela Vickers, hard-drinking Martha, and unhinged Maggie the Cat channeled pure lady power. It's not surprising that so many felt touched both publicly and privately by the the much-married screen siren, humanitarian, perfume impresario, and perpetual tabloid cover model. Perhaps one of the more interesting elements to explore in the wake of Taylor's death is the outpouring of public grief, from shrines set up at iconic gay bars to violet-hued flowers left on the actress's Hollywood star. We asked Notre Dame professor of American studies Erika Doss, author of Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America to share her thoughts on what might be behind contemporary culture's memorial obsessions:

Elizabeth Taylor died this past Wednesday (March 23rd), and within hours the public grief industry kicked into full production. Fans gathered around her star on Hollywood Boulevard's Walk of Fame, leaving bouquets of flowers dyed to match her violet-colored eyes. Reporters mobbed them with questions about what Taylor "meant" to them; responses ranged from her "eternal movie star beauty" to her "multiple marriages" (eight in total, twice to Richard Burton) and activism on behalf of AIDS research. Other mourners flocked to the Abbey, a gay bar in West Hollywood where Taylor regularly downed watermelon martinis. A temporary shrine featuring floral wreaths, votive candles, film stills, and other tokens of remembrance was set up in the bar's VIP room; on a nearby table, staffers set aside a Blue Velvet Martini (vodka and blueberry schnapps) in tribute to Taylor's 1944 movie National Velvet. In terms of specific places to grieve, there really wasn't anywhere else for fans to congregate: no Graceland or traumatic death site. The seventy-nine-year-old actress died of congestive heart failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, and in accordance with personal wishes and Jewish tradition, was buried twenty-four hours later in Forest Lawn Cemetery in a private ceremony attended by her closest friends and family.

Many fans turned to online grief support groups. Internet memorial outfits like "The Eternal Portal," "Respectance," "Valley of Life," "Gone Too Soon," and "Memorial Matters," which offer services ranging from building memorial websites ("simple to create, remember anywhere," fourteen-day no obligation) to selling commemorative products (armbands, candles, balloons, and awareness ribbons personalized with the name of the deceased), saw a flurry of quickly made Elizabeth Taylor tributes. Other stars and celebs paid tribute on Twitter: Elton John, "We have just lost a Hollywood giant. More importantly, we have lost an incredible human being"; Russell Crowe, "R.I.P. Elizabeth Taylor, Goddess"; Kirstie Alley, "Elizabeth . . . thank u for the lessons u taught me about life . . . suffering and Joy . . . you are the BRIGHTEST STAR in the universe. . . Eternal love"; Joan Rivers, "Sad to hear of Elizabeth Taylor's death. She was the 1st major celebrity to join me in the fight against AIDS when it wasn't a popular cause." By Wednesday night, hundreds of thousands of Tweets, Facebook messages, and blog diaries featured the shared sentiment: "R.I.P. Elizabeth Taylor."

Temporary memorials, online shrines, and social networking practices all point to changed understandings—and expectations—of public mourning in America today. The more tragic and traumatic the death, or the more sudden and surprising, the more effusive the public display of grief. When Taylor's good friend Michael Jackson died in July 2009, for example, thousands descended upon the teeny white house in Gary, Indiana where Jackson and his siblings were raised. Dozens of TV crews and reporters set up camp while a steady stream of mourners added teddy bears, condolence cards, and hand-painted pictures of the King of Pop to a sprawling shrine that took up most of the front yard. Fans held candlelight vigils in the street and practiced Moonwalking; neighborhood kids hawked tshirts, CDs, and bottles of water.

For her part, Dame Elizabeth Taylor shrugged off such carnivalesque performances of grief. "I can't be part of the public whoopla," she told one reporter after Jackson died. "I just don't believe that Michael would want me to share my grief with millions of others. How I feel is between us, not a public event." She might have been amused by the very public dimensions of her own passing.

For more of Doss's thoughts on the culture of commemoration and our obsession with issues of memory and history, have a look at Memorial Mania's UCP page here.

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Welcome back to TRAFFIC: Japan in Peril, an exchange of thoughts on the nation's future in light of the recent Pacific coast earthquake and the subsequent tsunami. This afternoon, we asked John Whittier Treat, professor of East Asian languages and literature at Yale University and acclaimed scholar of Japanese studies, and Margaret Morganroth Gullette, noted cultural critic, age activist, and award-winning journalist, to comment on Japan's current crisis and its links to the nation's past atomic experiences—and the uncertain future of its aging population.

TRAFFIC taps the expertise of leading figures from across the disciplines—whose prescient views on current events help to shape the way we interpret the world around us—on themes of contemporary global interest.

From John Whittier Treat, author of Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb:

On Fukushima and Japanese Rearmament

Japan's Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, with six reactors one of the largest in the world, is also one of the oldest. The Tokyo Electric Power Company began the process of building this plant in 1960, bringing it on line ten years later despite citizen concerns over placing reactors in known earthquake-prone zones (it is timely to note that our own Diablo Canyon nuclear facility in California was built to withstand a 7.5 magnitude earthquake; Japan's last Friday was 8.9). In fact, trouble began not long after Fukushima joined the grid: fire broke out in 1976, though news of it only reached the public thanks to a whistle-blower. Other accidents occurred in 1978, 1990 and 1998. Now, this past weekend, we know that some people in the plant have already died, others have received potentially lethal doses of radiation, increased numbers of residents are being evacuated, and doses of iodine are being readied for many others. Even if a meltdown of a nuclear core—or two—is averted, Fukushima has already joined the ranks of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl to comprise an unholy trinity of the world's worst nuclear power catastrophes to date.

Fukushima Prefecture, however, is not an analog to Pennsylvania or the Ukraine in all respects. Fukushima is Japan, where the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the closing act of World War Two exposed tens of thousands of Japanese to radioactivity that sometimes killed them in later years, sometimes left them pitifully enfeebled, and sometimes, they feared, altered the genes they passed on to their children and grandchildren. This makes what we elsewhere in the world are now witnessing as "news" a vivid memory for the Japanese as well as their present-tense event. Genpatsu 'nuclear power' immediately recalls the older word genbaku 'atomic bomb' with a surplus of history and horror that our English translations do not.

Last December, and in response to a perceived growing threat from its nuclear-armed near neighbors, the Japanese Diet voted across all party lines to move closer than it ever has towards abandoning its long-standing "nuclear allergy" when it doubled its defense budget. At the time, few voices at home were raised in protest. More than half a century had passed since August 6 and 9 that long hot summer of the Japanese Empire's defeat; the world had changed, Japan faced new enemies, and they do seem suddenly emboldened. Article 9 of Japan's postwar "peace constitution" notwithstanding, Japan's new arms-building program seemed destined to include, covertly if not openly, immeasurably improved descendants of the Little Boy and the Thin Man weapons used against them long ago.

But partisans for nuclear disarmament in Japan can hope that now, as their nation surely recovers from the devastation of the earthquake, the tidal waves, and the nuclear debacle of its power industry, the country's as-yet unique sensitivity to the power of the atom to do harm as well as good will revive, come center-stage again, make the Japanese government rethink the new path on which it has set out in an admittedly evermore militarized Northeast Asia. Fukushima already has its victims, and the number will likely grow if reports are true. But the live coverage on television and the internet of explosions in the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant may also usefully inspire the Japanese to reclaim their moral leadership in a world increasingly crowded with nuclear nations and declare: Here is a line we will not cross.

It is too early to tell what all the repercussions of this latest nuclear power accident will be. Japan, weakened economically after its infamous "Lost Decade," and ill served by a series of short-lived, anemic governments, now faces immense new hurdles. But among the challenges is an opportunity—to regain the higher ground in the ongoing international debate on the future of nuclear technology.

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From Margaret Morganroth Gullette, author of Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America:

Japan in Peril

Everyone should have special compassion for elderly people in a catastrophe like this one in Japan. Emergency crews in Japan must recognize that older people need special protections.

One lesson that Americans did not learn from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, sadly, is that older people are the most vulnerable.

Of those who died right away, 64 percent were over sixty-five, in a city where beforehand a mere 12 percent were over that age. A full 78 percent were fifty and up. Katrina was one of the worst medical catastrophes for the aged in recent U.S. history. In the longer run, the hard fact is that thousands of people over fifty were given painfully less choice—about being evacuated or drowning; easing back to normal or fighting for every scrap of recovery; getting home fast or spending years in the alien diaspora.

As I say in Agewise, we could not learn that lesson because the press was mainly unconcerned about age or ageism.

Katrina was not an isolated incident. In Paris in the heat wave of 2003, it was also older people who died. In Paris "disparate impact of age" meant not old people's intrinsic frailty, but family abandonment and lack of communal resources like air-conditioning. After 9/11, our foremost gerontologist, the late Dr. Robert Butler, pointed out that in Manhattan pets were evacuated within twenty-four hours, while older shut-ins and the disabled waited for up to a week without electricity or food.

Adult children also behaved heroically in New Orleans. First responders in a boat offered to take a bedridden woman's family if they left her behind. The family refused. When a second boat approached, they prudently placed her in it first.

What I worry about is "triage" whenever there is scarcity. Younger people too suffer from hypothermia or dehydration but older people die sooner without appropriate treatment. Rescuers everywhere make unconscious decisions about who gets sought if missing, who receives warm blankets, radiation tests, or housing. Perhaps enough respect for elders survives to make that possible. Such emergencies are a gigantic implicit test of social values.

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This concludes our series TRAFFIC: Japan in Peril—thank you for joining us. For additional information on John Whittier Treat's Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb, or Margaret Morganroth Gullette's Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America, please visit the University of Chicago Press's website here.

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | History | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
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Welcome to TRAFFIC, an exchange of thoughts between leading figures from across the humanities, social science, and natural sciences, whose prescient views on current events help to shape the way we interpret the world around us.

Join us for the two-day exchange TRAFFIC: Japan in Peril on the future of that nation and the larger global consequences, in light of the recent tsunami and earthquake that devastated the Tōhoku region on the Pacific coast, leaving left thousands dead, tens of thousands more imperiled, and a series of nuclear reactors on the brink of partial meltdown. Today, we asked sociologist Lee Clarke, a specialist in technological and organizational failures, with expertise in community response to disaster, and Ronald T. Merrill, a geophysicist and paleomagnetic pioneer, to share their thoughts with us on how they see Japan's future unfolding:

From Ronald T. Merrill, author of Our Magnetic Earth: The Science of Geomagnetism:

My wife and I lived in Japan most of 1965 while I was studying geophysics. During that time we made many friends, which have subsequently increased in number. We wish them all the best during this tragic time.

Although somewhat painful, earth scientists can use this tragedy as an opportunity to educate others on earthquakes and tsunamis. Unfortunately, there likely could be more bad news to come. My 'rule of thumb' is to expect that another earthquake, about a magnitude smaller than the main shock, could be among the many aftershocks to follow in the coming year or so. Although such an aftershock (around magnitude 8) would have about 30 times less energy than the 9.0 earthquake that struck on March 11 (not the ten times less energy often erroneously given in the popular media), it would still release hundreds of times more energy than did the Hiroshima atomic bomb dropped near the end of World War II. It could also trigger another devastating tsunami.

Although we all hope that this possibility is not realized, we can reflect on what we would do in a similar situation, particularly in Washington State where I live. About 13 subduction earthquakes with magnitude near 9 are estimated to have occurred off our coast during the past 7500 years. The last one occurred in 1700 and was large enough to produce a tsunami that struck Japan with waves several feet tall. Such an earthquake is almost inevitable in our State's future, even though seismologists do not have the capability of predicting just when this will occur.

In the meantime, everyone living where earthquakes occur should consider how prepared they are: Do you know what to do in the event of an earthquake? Have your bookcases been secured to a wall? Where do you plan to obtain drinking water when your taps fail and none is available to purchase? These questions and others are well worth considering now.

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From Lee Clarke, author of Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Modern Imagination:

Some working hypotheses

The horrors in Japan reveal the folly of concentration. In Worst Cases, I flagged population concentration as one of the social conditions that gives rise to "globally relevant disasters." People concentrate themselves in dangerous places and this makes them a target that's easier to strike when hazards come along. Japan is in the Ring of Fire. So is Indonesia, where 250,000 died in the 2004 tsunami. So are two nuclear plants in California, Diablo Canyon and San Onofre (2 live reactors, 1 dead one, also "spent" nuclear fuel).

Thinking in terms of worst cases isn't always a bad idea. I've taken a little heat, so to speak, over the past five years for advocating "possibilistic thinking." This heat is mainly from people who didn't read the book. But if there'd been more of it in Japan maybe they wouldn't have put the backup generators in the basement. Maybe someone would have said "Well, it's unlikely but if a tsunami rolls in we want to have the cooling system well above sea level; the consequences could be really bad."

We flaunt our vulnerabilities to powerful forces like the atom, the sea, tectonic plates, and organizational failures, to great peril. Hubris is at the root of many of our vulnerabilities. As I wrote in Worst Cases, "Hubris enables people to push the envelope, to build things never before built, and to think of things never before thought." Hubris can help the audacious imagination. But it can just as easily hurt the impudent one. Here are some examples: thinking the Mississippi River can be controlled indefinitely, presuming New York City is safe from hurricanes, and neglecting the New Madrid fault.

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Join us tomorrow for Part II of TRAFFIC: Japan in Peril, with additional commentary from an ageism expert and Japanese historian on what happens next—and how we might prepare for this future.

For additional information on Lee Clarke's Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination, and Ronald T. Merrill's Our Magnetic Earth: The Science of Geomagnetism, please visit the University of Chicago Press's website here.

TRAFFIC is taken from the Arabic taraffaqa, "to walk along slowly together."

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Archived in Books for the News | Cartography and Geography | History and Philosophy of Science | Politics and Current Events
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"Our democracy is out of control in Wisconsin," Mr. Barca said. "And you all know it—you can feel it."

A quote from this morning's New York Times, by State Representative and Wisconsin Democrat Peter Barca reveals the escalation of already tense emotions in Madison as the State Assembly prepares to vote on a bill curtailing bargaining rights for many government workers.* Wisconsin has been a site for national and international coverage in past weeks, as tens of thousands of protesters have take to the Wisconsin State Capitol in demonstrations against Republican Scott Walker's proposed legislation—which would weaken collective bargaining for state employees, requiring those employees to contribute 5.8 percent of their salaries to cover pension costs, and 12.6 percent towards health care premiums.

Recent studies, including one published by the Wall Street Journal, emphasize that growth in state and local government jobs nearly doubles the rate of population growth, and public unions depend on tax revenues to generate pay and benefits. For Wisconsin, a state whose 2003 and 2011 tax cuts may help to generate up to an 800 million dollar reduction in tax revenues by 2013, the situation is dire; this, coupled with Governor Walker's legislation, which is part of a "budget repair bill," could affect thousands of workers seeking to organize in their own interests. All of this, despite a particularly rich union history: Wisconsin was the first state in the United States to provide collective bargaining rights to public employees, back in 1959.

Richard B. Freeman and Casey Ichniowski's When Public Sector Workers Unionize was first published in 1988, when public sector unionism had become one of the most dynamic components of the American labor movement. Contributors to the book focus on the role of labor-management relations in the public sphere, and pay special attention to what the private sector can learn from what was—at the time—the fairly unmitigated success of collective bargaining in the public. The larger arguments of the book acknowledge how public sector unionism affects the economy—stimulating employment, reducing layoff rates, and developing innovative ways to settle labor disputes. Commissioned by the nonprofit, nonpartisan, private National Bureau of Economic Research during the 1980s, the study behind the book offers a new lens through which we might view what's happening today in Madison: and question what consequences might be foreseen by the bill's passing.

*The bill passed 53-42 in the state Assembly later this afternoon and will now be put into the hands of Governor Walker, who has promised to sign it.

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In the spirit of Presidents' Day (in other birthday news: the cribbing of W. H. Auden lines —"One rational voice is dumb/Over his grave the household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved"), we're celebrating the caricatured, the cartoonish, the garishly sketch, the "Generalíssimo Francisco Franco is still dead!" reverie of Fathers, Founding and Our American Presidents. With that in mind, here's a list of commands our backlist has in reserve for our Commander(s)-in-Chief:

Top Five of Ten: We command you, Commander!

Richard Nixon, with this volume Philip Guston's Poor Richard by Debra Bricker Balken, we command you:

"Openly betray your sense of aesthetic abstraction in favor of imagery representative of the American 1970s: fill it with personal and political meaning that helps to bring about the renewal of the figure in painting and a witty, sardonic take on a political regime gone awry. Be good."

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Gerald Ford, with this volume Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future by Newton N. Minow and Craig L. Lamay, we command you:

"Consider a neck and shoulder massage. Relax. Watch and rewatch Fletch. During the October 1976 presidential debate, consider building a time machine and traveling to 1989, when the statement 'Poland is no longer under communist domination' will actually ring true."

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John Adams, with this volume Abigail and John Adams: The Americanization of Sensibility by G. J. Barker-Benfield, we command you:

"Heed Abigail's advice: 'I love to amuse myself with my pen, and pour out some of the tender sentiments of a Heart over flowing with affection, not for the Eye of a cruel Enemy who no doubt would ridicule every Humane and Social Sentiment long ago grown Callous to the finer sensibilities—but for the sympathetick Heart that Beats in unison with.' Careful also, sir, with those Boston Patriot letters to the editor."

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Abraham Lincoln, with this volume Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and Memory in Late Twentieth-Century America by Barry Schwartz, we command you:

"Transcend controversies for secular sainthood. Withstand indifference, questioning, and cynicism: embrace your flaws, do justice, protect Mary Todd from those bad séance vibes."

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George Herbert Walker Bush, with this volume Tippecanoe and Tyler Too: Famous Slogans and Catchphrases in American History by Jan R. Van Meter, we command you:

"Consider what is old and passing; throw the I Ching. Watch the low Neap tide under a Kennebunkport moon. Usher in your acceptance of the GOP presidential nomination with the promise of a lesson learned: No new tricycles, tragedies, tautologies; No new Tao. . . . No new teleology, temp agency, television mini-series. . . . No new Terms of Endearment, tipping point, toxoplasmosis. . . . No new. . . . Nothing new. . . . Nothing new under the sun, George. Read your Beckett."

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It's nearly impossible to turn away from the tumultuous events in Cairo, and to make sense of rights and freedoms on the line from an international vantage. We've been following the feeds at the Guardian and most recently reading PEN International's statement, released this morning, and thinking about the March of Millions planned for Tuesday. In trying to stay present with the coverage and assessing where to begin to solidify our understanding of a nation's culture and a movement for its people, we came across the music of Umm Kulthum, whose fallahah (peasant) perspective imbued her life and work, offering insight into the cultural and political studies that Egypt faced only a generation or two before.

Kulthum, the "voice of Egypt" (also "the Star of the East" and the "Nightingale of the Nile"), was one of the most celebrated performers of the twentieth-century Arab world. The idiom she created from local culture and traditions helped her to develop a populist musical practice that was heralded as a crowning example of a new, yet authentically Arab-Egyptian culture, during tumultuous changes mid-century.

Perhaps most pressingly, Kulthum's music and public persona helped to contribute to the artistic, societal, and political forces that surrounded her, the daughter of an Imam, lauded by Maria Callas and Charles de Gaulle, exiled and reinstated from the Egyptian musician's guild following the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Virginia Danielson's The Voice of Egypt: Umm Kulthum, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century is the first English-language biography of this remarkable figure (see a website devoted to her life and work here), and a chronicle of societal shifts in this modern nation whose repercussions are still relevant and a part of events today.

With Egypt in mind—listen to Umm Kulthum singing "Enta Omri" below:

Archived in Books for the News | Music | Politics and Current Events
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On the heels of last night's State of the Union speech, which saw President Obama addressing a newly divided Congress, and amid the varied responses, rebuttals, and interpretations that have emerged, we asked Sandra M. Gustafson, author of the forthcoming Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic to weigh in on how deliberation was shaping the current political climate. Gustafson digs deep into Obama's rhetoric, connecting it to several speeches written during his presidential tenure, as well as early Congressional debates that shaped our civic discourse, nineteenth-century American literature, and the recent events in Tucson. Read Gustafson's compelling take below:

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In a recent op-ed published by the New York Times, Joanne B. Freeman provides a chilling background for reports that, in the wake of the Tucson shootings earlier this month, several lawmakers planned to begin carrying guns. Freeman's article relates the little-known story of the violence that disrupted Congressional debates in the years leading up to the Civil War. In those years legislators threatened and sometimes attacked one another with guns, knives, and canes. But there is another and more hopeful side to this history.

James Madison championed deliberation as a central feature of the government created by the United States Constitution, and in the years after the nation's founding many writers and public figures worked to make the ideal of deliberation into a reality. No public figure contributed more to this effort than Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster, who in his speeches to Congress repeatedly returned to the ideals of republican self-governance that Americans of his day associated with Cicero. These efforts became more urgent following the election of Andrew Jackson, who for the first time brought frontier culture into the White House. Best known for embodying a particular version of American democracy (one identified with giving white men the vote regardless of property qualifications), Jackson also contributed to a political climate of conflict and violence that was most apparent in the removal of Native Americans from their homeland and the escalating tensions over slavery.

Webster's effort to make American civic discourse increasingly deliberative is nowhere more apparent than in an 1830 speech known as the Second Reply to Hayne—an address that continued to be widely taught in American schools well into the twentieth century and that has long been celebrated for its ringing proclamation, "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!" The Webster-Hayne debates in the Senate involved competing regional alliances, economic programs, and interpretations of the federal system. Both sides of the debate claimed to be perpetuating the values of the nation's founders. As a proponent of Henry Clay's American System, Webster argued that public lands should be administered for the good of the nation. He criticized Hayne and by implication, Hayne's fellow South Carolinian, Vice President John Calhoun, the major exponent of nullification, for putting local interests over national ones. Like Calhoun, Hayne argued for a loose and soluble federal system which gave priority to discrete local needs, such as the protection and expansion of slavery, and did not attempt to manufacture a vision of the good of the whole.

Webster put particular emphasis in his address on the deteriorating conditions of debate generated by the nullification movement. He charged that over the previous two days, Hayne had touched on a wide array of topics with the single exception of the public lands—to which he had "not paid even the cold respect of a passing glance." Not only had Hayne been disrespectful to the Senate by ignoring the subject of the resolution, he had been rude to Webster personally, refusing his northern colleague's request to delay the debate because Hayne had "something rankling" in his heart and because "he had a shot . . . to return, and he wished to discharge it." Webster mocked Hayne's rhetorical violence, observing that "if nobody is found, after all, either killed or wounded, it is not the first time, in the history of human affairs, that the vigor and success of the war have not quite come up to the lofty and sounding phrase of the manifesto." He then contrasted Hayne's anger toward him with his own even temper and respectful treatment of his colleague. The Senate, Webster continued with a rising emphasis, is "a Senate of equals, of men of individual honor and personal character, and of absolute independence. We know no masters, we acknowledge no dictators." The floor of the Senate was not the arena for rhetorical contests but "a hall for mutual consultation and discussion." Throughout his lengthy address Webster repeatedly criticized Hayne for fostering "party abuse and frothy violence" and for claiming that the Democratic Party to which he belonged was "the true Pure, the only honest, patriotic party."

Webster further contested Hayne's interpretation of the Constitution, which held that state legislatures could declare federal laws unconstitutional. In this view, the federal government was based upon a compact and thus was not a national state in the full sense of the term. Webster insisted that the sovereign people, and not the states, authorize the federal government. In a famous passage that Abraham Lincoln later echoed in the Gettysburg Address, Webster insisted that "It is, Sir, the people's Constitution, the people's government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people." Nullification theory destroyed the Constitution, undermining the government until it became merely "a collection of topics for everlasting controversy; heads of debate for a disputatious people." Webster explained the nullifiers' capacity to reduce the federal government to powerlessness as a function of the way the human mind is constituted. In a controversy, Webster suggested, both sides of the argument appear "very clear, and very palpable, to those who respectively espouse them; and both sides usually grow clearer as the controversy advances." Webster warned that extreme polarization of the sort fostered by Hayne's militarist rhetoric would lead to the real violence that Freeman describes.

Webster was not the only voice calling for more mutually respectful public debates. Such appeals occurred in unexpected places, such as the frontier novels of James Fenimore Cooper. The Last of the Mohicans, which appeared just four years before Webster's speech, contains plenty of violence, but it also includes a great many scenes of respectful consultation and thoughtful decision making, notably between Natty Bumppo and his Delaware companions. Cooper bluntly observes of one such scene that "the most decorous christian [sic] assembly," even a collection of "reverend ministers," "might have learned a wholesome lesson of moderation from the forbearance and courtesy of the disputants." Another frontier voice, that of David Crockett, used humor rather than violence as a means to challenge opponents, showing how it could be used to create strong social bonds that foster the common good. When Crockett served as Representative from Tennessee, he publicly broke with Jackson over his land and Indian policies and allied himself with Daniel Webster and his associates. The words of Webster, Cooper, and Crockett offer a striking reflection on the road not taken in the political struggle over national expansion and slavery.

The State of the Union speech last night moved the United States further down the road toward the civil and deliberate politics that Webster and others envisioned. Recoiling from the violence in Tucson, rather than brandishing guns at one another, many legislators chose to sit with members of the other party in an effort to foster greater comity in what has been an unusually polarized Congress. Observers noted the change that this seating arrangement made in the tone of the event, which was less boisterous and partisan, more thoughtful and deliberate than in years past. President Obama contributed to that tone by stressing the themes of civility and consensus-building which have characterized his political message since he rose to national attention with his 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention, where he memorably said "there is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America." The proposals in his speech last night drew from both liberal and conservative agendas in a pragmatist effort to elicit the best ideas from both sides to most effectively address national concerns.

It was in this spirit that he opened his speech with an echo of the 2004 address that launched his national career, as well as with an acknowledgment of his moving tribute to Christina Taylor Green, the nine-year-old victim of the Tucson shootings, whose family sat in the gallery next to Michelle Obama:

"We are part of the American family. We believe that in a country where every race and faith and point of view can be found, we are still bound together as one people; that we share common hopes and a common creed; that the dreams of a little girl in Tucson are not so different than those of our own children, and that they all deserve the chance to be fulfilled."

This description of a national family, and the subtle reference to a young girl's untimely death, allude to another classic work from the antebellum United States: Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), in which Little Eva dies because of her deep attunement to the sufferings of the slaves, which, she says, sink into her heart.

This is not the first time that the president's rhetoric has evoked Stowe's novel. In the conclusion to "A More Perfect Union," his speech on race in America delivered in March 2008, Obama told the story of a young campaign worker named Ashley whose commitment attracted an elderly black man. The story of this unlikely pair resonates with the powerful connection between Little Eva and Uncle Tom. As Obama noted then, "that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children." The civil and deliberate tone that Congress and the President set at the State of the Union address will not by itself solve the national problems that he outlined. But the moment of recognition of a shared set of goals can help foster the spirit of cooperation and compromise with which it is necessary to begin.

Sandra M. Gustafson is a professor of English and American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her book Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic will appear this spring from the University of Chicago Press.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Literature | Politics and Current Events
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In 1919, the (literally) round table at New York's Algonquin Hotel first became fodder for the goings-about-town sections of literary journals and New York City dailies, as Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, and others (shoutout to Edna Ferber!) barbed wits while whittling their way through Prohibition, personal failures and successes ("This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.") and other trappings of the times. In April 1974, in tribute to those well-quoted luminaries, three contemporary critics (John Leonard, Nona Balakian, and Ivan Sandrof) decided to extend their conversation about contemporary literature to the national level and thus, the National Book Critics Circle was formed.

Now, our foray, thirty-seven years after the fact:

Hearty congrats to Susie Linfield, author of The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence, a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism! In a banner year (Two university presses with nominees in the Criticism category! Independent publishers spread throughout the list!) for the NBCC, we couldn't be more delighted to celebrate what Artforum, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, the Nation, and many others have already acknowledged: Linfield's book is a tour-de-force polemic on the often intimate and always complex relationship between photography and political violence. Stay tuned, as this year's award winners will be announced on March 10th. Until then we, arm-in-arm with all of those critical commentators that comprise the NBCC, encourage you to celebrate Linfield and the other nominees the best way we know how—by urging you to read their praiseworthy tomes.

If you haven't yet found the time to check out this impassioned critical take on the history of violence and its bearings on modern photojournalism, excerpts from The Cruel Radiance are available online at Tablet and Guernica, in addition to on the book's University of Chicago Press site here.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Awards | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by KAM at 04:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Three-day weekend: fin! We're back with a vengeance today: and by vengeance, we mean filled with admiration and applause for Robert K. Elder's piece on the approaching 150th anniversary of the largest mass execution in US history, which appeared in this morning's New York Times. Elder, author of Last Words of the Executed (a sample of excerpts here), profiles the fate of the thirty-eight doomed Dakota Indians executed that day, including one story of mistaken identity, and updates us with the possible case for federal pardon. Spot-on narrative coverage of a historical issue with lingering repercussions for our own heated debate on capital punishment, we say. Congrats, again, Mr. Elder.

In other news, we've been poring over the 124-page transcript from Senator Bernie Sanders's filibuster this past Friday. Galleycat already ran with a well-researched piece on all of the references Sanders made to books in his eight-and-a-half-hour-long speech (plus excerpts!) filibustering the tax deal shaped by Congressional Republicans and President Obama. With that post as inspiration, we thought to Top Five or Ten this, in tribute to Senator Sanders's verbal endurance and in spirited promotion of books we think he might squeeze in as holiday reading before the next round:

Top Five or Ten: Books we'll be sending to Senator Sanders in the hopes he'll find time to read them before the next contentious bipartisan debate requires a prolific speech act

Robert A. Kaster and Martha C. Nussbaum's translations of Seneca in Anger, Mercy, Revenge

Seneca (4 BCE-65 CE) was a Roman Stoic philosopher, dramatist, and statesman, all during the Silver Age of Latin literature. In Anger, Mercy, Revenge, Kaster and Nussbaum deftly translate three key writings, two of which were penned as advice for the young emperor, Nero. The third? The Apocolocyntosis, an artful satire lampooning the end of the reign of Claudius. Who better to champion an eight-hour speech than a Stoic, we ask? Read an excerpt here.

**

George William Van Cleve's A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic

Van Cleve convincingly shows that the Constitutional provisions protecting slavery were much more than another mere "political" compromise—they were integral to the principles of the new nation. By the late 1780s, a majority of Americans wanted to create a strong federal republic that would be capable of expanding into a continental empire and in order for America to become an empire on such a scale, Van Cleve argues, the Southern states had to be willing partners in the endeavor. The cost of their allegiance? The deliberate long-term protection of slavery by America's leaders through the nation's early expansion. MacArthur Fellow and National Book Award-winner Annette Gordon-Reed calls the book "a dazzling addition to scholarship."

**

Jane L. Collins and Victoria Mayer's Both Hands Tied: Welfare Reform and the Race to the Bottom of the Low-Wage Labor Market

An in-depth study of the working poor in the midwestern United States, Both Hands Tied tackles the plight of working women in light of a gendered change in the labor market, welfare reform, and profound shifts in the responsibilities of family, firms, and the state. Sanders might first read Carl Chancellor's insightful post about the book on Change.org's Poverty in America blog here.

**

Marjorie Perloff's Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media

Perloff's negotiation between poetic and media discourses has much to offer a would-be filibusterer. The natural speech of Phil Donahue versus the natural speech of modernism? Check. Written under "the sign" of John Cage, the artist behind one of our best-known acts of silence? Check. We really should make this a two-in-one and include Perloff's Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century, which brilliantly posits how citation became a form of literary discourse.

**

Gregory Koger's Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and Senate

We end with our most obvious candidate—the go-to history for how and why obstruction has been institutionalized by the US Senate over the past fifty years, and how its transformation continues to affect politics and policymaking. Hailed by everyone from the New York Review of Books to the Washington Post, Filibustering is great tactical reading for Sanders and its smart red cover makes it an apt object to wave on the Senate floor.

**

Right, Mr. Smith?

Archived in Books for the News | History | Literature | Politics and Current Events
Posted by KAM at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What follows below is the conclusion of our inaugural installment of TRAFFIC, a series in critical dialogue with leading scholars from across the disciplines and the ideas that shape our world. Here, W. J. T. Mitchell (Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present) and Tzvetan Todorov (The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations) discuss Nick Ut's iconic image of the Vietnam War, the duty of humanities scholars, and the changing face of liberal democracies. Thanks very much for joining us—we hope you'll return for future conversations.

TRAFFIC, by the way, is taken from the Arabic taraffaqa, "to walk along slowly together."

Dear Tzvetan:

I have located the picture from the October 23rd New York Times, and it is, as you suggested, quite appalling. The little girl, having seen her parents killed in front of her by U.S. soldiers, is wailing in grief, while the figure of a soldier stands in the shadows outside the illuminated area where we see the blood-spattered child. I sometimes wonder how an embedded photographer can bear to take such a picture, which was clearly done at very close range in the immediate aftermath of this event. The picture also raises the question of the ethics of beholding. As James Agee put it so memorably in his commentary on Walker Evans's photographs of destitute sharecroppers:

"Who are you who will read these words and study these photographs, and through what cause, by what chance and for what purpose, and by what right to you qualify to, and what will you do about it?"

The picture defies commentary of any interpretive sort; it is more like the direct transcription of a trauma in its naked, inconsolable appeal for pity and comfort. What it is doing in conjunction with a news story that tends to minimize U. S. responsibility while engaging in observations about the comparatively greater cruelty of the Iraqis toward their own people is—to me—completely inexplicable and quite shocking. For me, the picture is rather like that image that has become iconic of the Vietnam war—the 1972 photo by Nick Ut of a naked Vietnamese girl, her skin burned by napalm, fleeing from her burning village. I don't think this image will become iconic in the same way for a variety of reasons, but any American who sees it should, in my view, think long and hard about what has become of the United States. We are supposed to be a beacon of peace and liberty, but instead we have become the greatest purveyor of military violence in the world, with uncounted hundreds of bases scattered around the world, and two major wars in progress with no end in sight. This is not some accident of history, but reflects a fundamental pathology and pattern that can only lead to disaster for our nation. This picture, which is a product of a war fought in the name of every American citizen, should lead all of us to take a long look in the mirror.

Best wishes,
Tom

**

Dear Tom:

I gladly agree with your just remarks on the picture I mentioned earlier. It does remind me more of the Nick Ut photo of the running Vietnamese girl than the tortured prisoners of Abu Ghraib, and the presence of the photographer at that very moment is indeed somewhat problematic: in a way, he has become a part of this terrible event.

I would generalize another remark of yours: I think not only American citizens but also those of the European states should "think long and hard about what have become" our liberal democracies. On the international scene we have adopted a kind of democratic messianism, i.e. the strategy of using military force in order to impose on distant countries the regime we consider most appropriate for them. On the internal front the very notion of common interest, implied by the democratic idea, seems to be fading away. This doesn't mean that the picture is entirely black, nor that in some distant place flourishes an idyllic utopia. In Europe as in the United States we live in pluralistic societies, by far preferable to China or Saudi Arabia; but in these societies antidemocratic forces have become stronger. I think that we, professionals of the humanities, should accept fully our role as educators, and use our capacities in interpreting—images, words, fictions, ideas—thus contributing to the defense of the values we cherish.

Yours,
Tzvetan

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Commentary | Politics and Current Events
Posted by KAM at 09:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you're just joining us, welcome to TRAFFIC: a new series hosted by the Chicago Blog that pairs leading critics and scholars from across the disciplines, often in conversation for the very first time. Welcome to Part II of our inaugural exchange, between Tzvetan Todorov, author of The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations (one of the Guardian's 2010 Books of the Year) and W. J. T. Mitchell, whose Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present, just published. Join Todorov and Mitchell as they discuss international media coverage of WikiLeaks and more below:

Dear Tzvetan:

Your linking of my image repertoire to Goya is very shrewd. The Hooded Man on the box curiously reminds some people of Goya's executioners and inquisitors—a strange reversal of the roles of torturer and victim. But I wonder what you think of the Christological echoes in this figure? To me, they seem unavoidable, but certain people have expressed resistance and skepticism, based on ethical concerns that this turns us away from the reality depicted in the picture. My answer is that there is a reality produced by the pictures in their reception that also needs study.

But the question I am most eager to ask you has to do with the concept of the the "historical uncanny," which to me is the spark that leaped between our two books. First, a purely personal thrill at the coincidence that we would publish books in the same year on the same list and on the same subject—the contemporary state of the war on terror. Perhaps it is not so surprising after all, given the importance of the subject, and the need to reframe it with the perspective of culture, civilization, and (in my case) images and metaphors. But I wonder how it strikes you to take your seminal discussion of the uncanny (in The Fantastic)—the literary genre that emerges between fantasy and the detective story—and test out its applicability to the very history we are studying. We say without hesitation that history discloses irony, tragedy, even farce (if Marx is right). Do you think there can be a properly historical uncanny? That is, moments when events produce suspension and transition between opposing interpretations, uncanny repetitions, coincidences, doubles, and the like? I see your figures of the civilized and the barbarian as avatars of these archaic double images, mirroring and opposing one another.

I would love to hear your thoughts on these questions.

Warmest regards,
Tom

**

Dear Tom:

I was struck myself by the proximity and simultaneity of our two books. Even more so, maybe, if one can confront this closeness with what we were both doing a few decades ago. I believe both of us were much more "textually" oriented and we weren't exploring current political events (at least I wasn't). This simultaneous change cannot be purely personal—probably it is related to the transformation of our societies as well. This deserves reflection. . . .

To comment rapidly on your two questions: I can see quite well the resemblance of the Hooded Man with the crucified Jesus. I have a feeling that the religious imagery of Christianity is so deeply absorbed by those who belong to our cultural tradition that we cannot avoid superimposing its schemes and models on our present perceptions. Goya is again a case in point: when he paints a man that will be executed in the following minutes (in The Third of May), we immediately relate the gesture of his open arms to Jesus Christ on the cross. The same is true concerning the figure in the first engraving of the Disasters of War ("Sad Premonitions. . . ."): the man praying on his knees (an allegorical image of the author) is immediately related by most viewers to the image of Christ in Gethsemani garden ("take away this from me").

This connection doesn't turn us away from the reality depicted because we always grasp reality with references to earlier perceptions, which in turn help shape present ones. On the other hand, I hadn't thought before you wrote that there may be a historical relation to the "uncanny." Excuse me for coming back again to the subject that interests me most these days— this was very topical for Goya, whose career was contemporary to the rise of this genre in England and France. I am thinking of these "undecidable" pictures of the last years of the XVIII century—of witches and witchcraft—when we don't know whether the characters are dreaming or really encountering demons.

My attention has been distracted during the days separating our first and second exchange of letters by a media event: the publication of new information on the Iraq war by WikiLeaks. The first thing that struck me was that the journalists from major newspapers that had access to the sources didn't present the same picture of them (another example of the construction of different facts out of the same raw material). The NYT and IHT published two papers on the subject: one was on the Iranian interventions in the war and the other on the fact that the worst violations of all rules were committed by the Iraqi police forces. Nothing was devoted to any violation of these rules by American forces.

The coverage in Le Monde was very different: it concentrated on the American transgressions of law and on the "banality of evil." Thus, if you read the NYT, you won't learn anything about the 303 complaints filed by Iraqi survivors because they had been tortured by American forces (more Hooded Men). On the other hand, Le Monde published photos of routine war, whereas the NYT has one very powerful picture which could become an emblematic image like those you discuss—an absolutely distressed young girl whose parents were shot in front of her eyes. A very strong image indeed; I wonder how you would comment it.

What strikes me also is that the official reaction in the United States is rather one-sided: "Pentagon condemns leaks." "We deplore WikiLeaks for inducing individuals to break the law, leak classified documents, etc." But they don't deplore the crimes committed by the soldiers or the private companies working for the army, or the orders they receive which cause them break the law. They don't condemn the torture: only the fact that it is exposed. To say nothing of the huge disproportion of victims in general: 4500 on the American side and several hundred-thousand for Iraq, although Iraq never attacked the United States.

This brings me back to another chapter of your book, in which you comment on Karl Rove's proud statement that he and his friends are creating reality. Indeed, but what an ugly reality it is! Isn't this the strongest threat for our fragile democracies?

Warm regards,
Tzvetan

Please be sure to join us tomorrow at the Chicago Blog for the conclusion of the Mitchell/Todorov TRAFFIC exchange—

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Posted by KAM at 06:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We're thrilled to introduce a new feature to the Chicago Blog today: TRAFFIC, an exchange of thoughts between leading figures from across the humanities, social science, and the hard sciences, whose prescient views on current events help to shape the way we interpret the world around us.

We're kicking things off with a series of letters between Tzvetan Todorov, author of The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations and W. J. T. Mitchell, author of Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present on the visual imagery of the war on terror, our current global political climate, and the role of the historical uncanny in everything from Abu Ghraib to Goya's Disasters of War. Filled with insights into our contemporary culture of occupation, Todorov and Mitchell's communication pairs two of our leading critical voices for the very first time and we hope that you'll join us here at the Chicago Blog for the next three days as we watch their exchange unfold.

**

Dear Tzvetan (if I may):

First let me say how much I have enjoyed your new book, The Fear of Barbarians. I find your account of the rise of Islamophobia very compelling, and I am especially struck by your remark that "the fear of barbarians is what risks making us barbarians." My favorite English poet, William Blake, put it this way: we "become what we behold," by projecting a feared image of the Other as cruel and uncivilized, and then mirroring back exactly the behavior we deplore. This mirroring process is both convincing and troubling, and I think it forms the common argument of our two books. It suggests that, as the cartoonist Walt Kelly put it so succinctly, "we have met the enemy and he is us." This, in a nutshell, is the basic argument of my critique of the so-called "war on terror" in Cloning Terror, which, I am proud to say, will appear on the same list with your new book.

This is not to suggest, however, that there are no real enemies of liberal, secular, democratic states. As you point out, the dangers posed by Al-Qaeda and radical Islamism are not imaginary. But it is the Manichean reaction of the Western powers, especially the United States, in conjuring up fantastic categories such as "Islamo-fascism" based on outdated cold war models, that turns Western democracies into dangers to themselves. I argue something very similar in my chapter on the war on terror as an "autoimmune disorder," extrapolating on Jacques Derrida's vivid metaphor of the body politic attacking its own constitution. For an American, that is the deepest wound administered by 9/11 and the threat of terrorism. It is a self-inflicted and threatens many of the liberties associated with American democracy.

Your critique of the metaphor of a "war on terror" is incisive and compelling. You demonstrate convincingly how counterproductive it is to apply the inappropriate model of a war between nation-states to a struggle against a relatively small number of extremists, who are in no way representative of the vast majority of their countrymen. This "war," in fact, as you point out, has had exactly the reverse of its intended effect. Instead of reducing the numbers of the enemy, it has served as a recruiting tool for jihadists, and actually helped to proliferate the number of enemies prepared to sacrifice themselves in acts of revenge. This is the pattern I call "cloning terror," the paradoxical result of the attempt to stamp out terror by means of wars of invasion and occupation.

I suppose the main difference in our approaches is one of framing.

You choose to situate your discussion within the age-old debate on barbarism versus civilization, with "culture" playing the role of a kind of currency between these two polarities. My framework is more narrowly focused on what I call the "iconological" dimension of the conflict, with an emphasis on the verbal and visual images, metaphors, and pictures that define the symbolic and imaginary elements of the conflict. That is why, for me, the figure of cloning is so crucial. It not only helps to clarify the curious and paradoxical reversal in which a war has the effect of making the enemy stronger; it also captures, in my view, a whole range of specific features of the imagery that defines the war on terror.

I'm thinking of the uncanny parallel between the "clone wars" in American domestic politics, and the war on terror; the proliferation of figures of mirroring, doubling, and repetition; the literalizing of what was previously thought to be "merely metaphoric" in the actualization of the fantasy of a war on terror, and the techno-scientific realization of the ancient fantasy of creating artificial life. In this regard, I have found myself recently —when asked to reflect on the overall argument of Cloning Terror—going back to your classic early book, The Fantastic and your brilliant location of the concept of the uncanny as a transitional aesthetic between fantastic narratives and the detective story, a liminal realm between imagination and reality. In retrospect, I think I could have labeled the argument of Cloning Terror as an instance of "the historical uncanny," describing a period in which the imaginary and metaphoric (the war on terror) became all too real and literal.

The clone, clearly, is also uncanny in the most precise sense, as a figure of doubling and repetition, as well as the realization of an ancient fantasy. Unfortunately, the Obama administration has refused to pursue the logic of this uncanny transition all the way into the realm of the detective story, to retrace the steps by which a phantasmatic, endless, and unwinnable war became all too real, along with the realization of the ultimate nightmare—the transformation of a nation officially committed to human rights into a place where one could actually have a public debate over the merits and necessity of torture. The telos of the detective story, the pursuit of truth and justice, however partial, has been renounced by Obama in favor of "looking forward, not backward." But the logic of the uncanny tells us that the past inevitably returns, and the ghosts of Abu Ghraib are waiting for us in the future.

I wonder if, looking back over the arguments you make in The Fear of Barbarians, you have had any second thoughts of this kind? If you had to reframe the argument of your book now, how would you do it? Your afterword was an attempt to bring your book up to date in 2010, well into Obama's administration, and my book portrayed itself as a history that continues "to the present"—clearly an impossible task. I very much look forward to hearing from you.

With best wishes,
Tom Mitchell

**

Dear Tom:

Thank you very much for your receptive comments and your generous appreciation of my book. I, too, was struck by the closeness of our two projects, which becomes clear on the very first page of both, due to the name of our common addressee, Edward Said. As you mention early in your book, one can insist on either "what happened" or "how it was represented." We both know that this seemingly obvious distinction raises some tricky problems, since how our perception selects and combines the features of the observed event is already a form of interpretation: things do happen in the outside world but it is the representation we give them, whether in words or images, that transforms them into intelligible events. Still, this distinction permits me to describe our two books and their complimentary nature—my focus being mainly on the events that shaped our recent history, and yours on their representation. At the same time, you have an incomparably better grasp of the internal American scene, which allows you to deal with many images unknown to me, and, more importantly, to connect the coverage of the "war on terror" with the debate on cloning.

One of my main purposes in my book was to insist on a point that you formulate at the very start of your letter: "The war on terror was having the effect of recruiting more jihadists, and increasing the number of terrorist attacks." Neither one of us recommends embracing terrorism and thus ceasing to fight it, but we believe that the current means used to achieve our aim are counterproductive. Just as self-damaging are other measures of fighting Islam in European countries nowadays, where the rise of a xenophobic extreme right is a concrete reality. This is why I devoted a chapter in The Fear of Barbarians to the discussion of certain "current affairs," such as the Dutch film Submission, the Danish caricatures, and the Pope's speech. Not that these situations are simple to deal with, but I am sure that the politics of intolerance and xenophobia only make things worse.

Your use of the cloning image allows you to insist on a point with which I agree completely: the danger of becoming a mirror image of the enemy one is fighting. The torture issue, a common topic of both our books, provides a fine illustration of this. Let me add that, if even the practices and theories of torture were produced under the responsibility of the United States government, European governments cannot be considered as entirely innocent: their agents were taking part in the interrogations and none of these governments ever spoke openly against the acts of torture.

Obama's election did indeed change the general climate of fear and the triumphant rhetoric of war, but other changes are slow to come. Guantanamo is not closed, the absurd war in Afghanistan is still going on, and the Bagram prison camp still cannot be visited by independent observers.

To come closer to the process of representation: in reading your book, I am struck by the proximity of the images you are discussing with the images of a painter I have been working on since the completion of The Fear of Barbarians: Goya. His Disasters of War and its drawings are sometimes surprisingly close to contemporary photos or paintings. Maybe I should put it the other way around: the most striking of our contemporary images remind me in their symbolic power of certain Goya engravings and drawings. I am sending you here two of them: one shows the pleasure taken by the executioner, smiling next to the victim, another illustrates an act of torture. Don't they remind us of attitudes captured by the Abu Ghraib pictures? Others are close to the Vietnam War images you mention.

I am struck by another coincidence. The War for Independence in Spain (1808–13) that Goya's artwork recorded, was fought against Napoleon's army but also against the enlightened Spaniards who saw in the occupation the occasion to accelerate the evolution of society, was also the first asymmetrical war between a modern army and a clandestine guerrilla (the word itself was invented on this occasion). The Afghan Taliban plays today the role of the reactionary Spanish clergy of the time, which defended national independence and traditional values; our occupation forces "bringing" democracy and human rights to Afghanistan play the part of the French regiments claiming that they bestow liberty and equality to the oppressed.

With my best wishes,
Tzvetan

Stay tuned tomorrow at the Chicago Blog and join us for the next installment of Mitchell and Todorov's TRAFFIC exchange—

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Posted by KAM at 03:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We try to start off on the positive side of the street: with congrats to Press authors Matthew Jesse Jackson and Tom Vanderbilt for their Warhol Foundation / Creative Capital Arts Writers grants, which will spear a variety of projects, from art-curio blogging to short-form cultural criticism.

And then we cross—

A combination of sources broke the news yesterday about the exhibit "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture," which opened on October 30th at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. The exhibit, the first at a major museum to focus on "sexual difference in the making of modern American portraiture," drew some gnarling critique from the Catholic League and conservative politicians, aimed at the late artist David Wojnarowicz's A Fire in My Belly. Wojnarowicz, a multidisciplinary artist, performer, and activist who died of AIDS-related complications in 1992, is known for work that mixed death and longing, simplicity and pathos. The work in question includes video footage of ants crawling on a crucifix, an image representative of the AIDS crisis. Soon to be Speaker of the House, Rep. John Boehner issued a statement that reads, in part, "American families have a right to expect better from recipients of taxpayer funds."

The Smithsonian took down the work.

Back to the middle: the explanation. Critic and theorist Wendy Steiner wrote The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism in 1995, less than a decade after a fatwa was issue for Salman Rushdie's death and twenty-five years after Robert Mapplethorpe began snapping his first polaroids. In it, she surveys a wealth of cultural controversies, demonstrating that the fear and outrage they inspire is really the result of an imperiled misunderstanding about the complicated relationship between art and life.

Steiner has always been compelled by these issues and her most recent book The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art is no different. Here she situates our contemporary culture, simultaneously fixated on artifice and the real thing, caught in a media-saturated, real-virtual divide that relies on the arts to etch out a new ethical potential: through the "figure" of the model-protagonist.

In part, it seems like that's what the Smithsonian curators wanted to do: to draw attention to the difference—imperceptible or obvious—that is all too real. In an excerpt from The Real Real Thing, available on the book's UCP site here, Steiner describes the changing mores of an almost contemporary society on the cusp of media saturation and anticipates recent events:

A realm of mirrors, of fantasy and feint, the arts have always presented a conundrum in terms of their real-world efficacy. 'Poetry makes nothing happen,' declares W. H. Auden in a poem that simultaneously derides that claim. True and not true, the assertion of artistic impotence has been a valid defense against the censor, the bowdlerizer, the book-burner. Do not worry, we assure them: aesthetics and ethics are separate spheres. What 'happens' in art is not happening in reality, and so it is quite safe to let anything 'happen' there. The changes that take place through art are changes of mind, and democracies recognize the value of entertaining any and all such virtual revolutions.

This position we abandon at our peril, Steiner finishes, before situating modeling—in all of its facets and well, faces—as our best exemplar between reality and representation.

Back to the other side—

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by KAM at 08:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We've always has a soft spot for newsworthy (pun intended) online publications—so it's no surprise that we read today's headlines about Salon with a bit of chagrin. The San Francisco-based "Internet roundtable" has long been in the red—with losses of $15 million dollars in the past three years alone—but now the Wall Street Journal reports (a paid content item quickly picked up by the New York Observer) that the company is searching for a larger media company to partner with or to subsume its enterprises. While possible pairings that emerge during heroic acts of desperation (remember John Candy and Eugene Levy in Armed and Dangerous?) can be surprisingly generative (this past April, Salon formed a content-based micro-partnership with the popular literary independent McSweeney's), it's the changing circumstances, audiences, and even our clinical understanding around how we receive and are informed by the news that are applying pressure to traditional journalistic practices.

Salon has transformed itself quite a bit during its twelve-year run, from an innovative online news site helmed by information-driven posts and public forum op-eds to a more lifestyle-inclusive, audience-driven . . . well, salon. Experiments with subscription-based content have faltered and pushed them further into the red, but recent media headlines alone—from the Tribune Co.'s buyout and various lawsuits with its creditors to a potential merger between Newsweek and the Daily Beast—suggest big changes for online journalism. Speaking of which, shout out to longtime Baffler editor and Press author Thomas Frank's powerful piece, "Bright Frenetic Mills," in this month's Harper's on a world where bloggers break stories and bubbles, navigating a landscape shaped by content mills and the perilous position of old-fashioned journalism (an excerpt from Frank's The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism is available here).

Jack Fuller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spent nearly forty years working in newspapers, including many as editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune and president of the Tribune Publishing Company, might not have a perfect prediction as to what the future holds, but he certainly has some sharp ideas. What Is Happening to News: The Information Explosion and the Crisis in Journalism anticipates Frank's polemic by exploring the crucial question of how journalism lost its way.

Fuller locates the surprising sources of change where few have thought to look before: in the collision between a revolutionary new information age and a human brain that is still wired for threats faced by our prehistoric ancestors. Sound impossibly suggestive? Check out an online excerpt from the book about the neuroscientific explanations behind twenty-first century info gathering here. And for more about how information overload, a growing distrust of experts and authority, and increasingly interactive media are changing the face of journalism as we know it, while still trying to provide the information necessary to a functioning democracy, don't miss What Is Happening to News.

Wait, are we still live?

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | Politics and Current Events
Posted by KAM at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." Oh, bless ye, former President Truman, and your reaction to Abstract Expressionism. We've been nursing this line for a few days, as for reasons unknown, we've seen a 1995 article by the Independent making the rounds of various Facebook pages and internet listservs. The gist of the reportage? That, amongst other wild revelations, modern art was a "weapon" knowingly used in our cold cultural war with the Soviet Union; that the CIA backed Stephen Spender's influential journal Encounter; and that a strange beast going by the name the Propaganda Assets Inventory subsidized everything from the 1958 touring exhibition "New American Painting" (featuring de Kooning, Motherwell, and Pollock, in an all-star cast) to the board of directors at MOMA. The rationale of the CIA was, of course, communist-combatant. Up in arms about the appeal communism still had for many intellectuals and artists, the government agency sought to portray Socialist Realism as an outdated art movement, and as the article mentions, they moved boldly forward with that plan:

[A]t its peak [the CIA] could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organisations. They joked that it was like a Wurlitzer jukebox: when the CIA pushed a button it could hear whatever tune it wanted playing across the world.

But the pressing question remains: if we couldn't convince a president of the integrity and value of modern avant-garde movements, did we really convince the rest of the world? And how did the rest of America come to embrace Sunday afternoon trips to a certain midtown Museum or Ed Harris's later star turn in a related biopic?

Television, duh.

Media art historian Lynn Spiegel penned TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television in order to address the surprising links between the urbane world of modern art and the commercials and network programming that helped define 1950s and '60s America. From trendy products advertised in between episodes of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet to the works of Richard Avedon, Ben Shahn, and Ero Saarinen that graced corporate headquarters, company cufflinks, and staged living rooms, Spiegel demonstrates how art, television, and commerce merged in dynamic—and surprising—ways. To read a fascinating excerpt from the book—which tells the story of fine-arts photographer Paul Strand's experience designing a sponsorship ad for CBS, pay a visit to the book's UCP website here. Are you listening, Conan? Time to reconsider your sofa.

And what about that Socialist Realism? Did Soviet art movements willingly collapse, eyes a-goggle at Pollock's Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)? Yes and no, well, not really—art historian, critic, and Our Literal Speed participant Matthew Jesse Jackson tells the most comprehensive story of unofficial postwar Soviet art yet to appear in any language in The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes. Kabakov's art—installations, paintings, illustrations, and texts—rose to prominence just as the Soviet Union began to disintegrate and through the work of Kabakov and his Moscow Conceptual Circle peers, Jackson suggests that what emerged in the wake of Stalin is now inextricably part of a transnational art world for which the Soviet Union is largely a memory, fading fast.

Art is what you make it—and both of these books reveal vital contributions to neglected chapters in the history of twentieth-century art. With that in mind, we offer yet another perspective: check out Andy Rooney's assessment of contemporary public art below. The buck really should stop here:

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Commentary | Politics and Current Events
Posted by KAM at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thursday's the perfect day for a wrap-up—good ol' Thunor's Day, Donderdag, or as Truman Capote had Holly Golightly put it best in Breakfast at Tiffany's:

"'Thursday.' She stood up. 'My God,' she said, and sat down again with a moan. 'It's too gruesome.'"

Gruesome or not, *it is* almost Friday. And with that in mind, we'd like to proliferate a few news items and multimedia ephemera in what we hope will become a Chicago ritual: the wrap-up on the day that is not the day that wraps things up. Onward!

With Veterans Day still weighing on hearts and minds, David Royko has reposted his father Mike Royko's classic Veterans Day column from 1993. Many know the legend of Mike Royko, Newspaperman, but few are familiar with the tender naiveté Royko exhibited in his Air Force days, via the exchange of letters with his sweetheart (and later wife) Carol Duckman that became Royko in Love: Mike's Letters to Carol.

In unavoidably idiosyncratic news outside of scholarly publishing that we just can't help touching upon: the Guardian and now People and the Los Angeles Times report the heroic, years-old tale of porpoises rescuing a sleeping, surfboard-helming Dick Van Dyke somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. If only scholarship circulated like chimney sweeps, folks!

The Scholarly Kitchen continues to run with a great series of posts about the paradigms binding contemporary publishing—this week alone, they've touched upon paywalls, the concept of trust throughout the various stages of publishing, and the peer review process and its levels of transparency.

The shadow of Milton Friedman continues to loom large at the New York Times, with Capitalism and Freedom shortly away from year fifty.

Have we mentioned that we love Columbia University Press's thoughtful weekly curation of scholarly press blogs? Thanks, guys!

Fare thee well, print edition of U.S. News and World Report?

Robert A. Pape and James K. Feldman's Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It and Tzvetan Todorov's The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations both made the Huffington Post's list of Best Social and Political Awareness Books of 2010. Congrats to all!

And finally, Press author Daiva Markelis sits down with Chicago's own Milt Rosenberg for an Extension 720 Podcast Exclusive about her recent book White Field, Black Sheep: A Lithuanian-American Life. Listen in and be sure to read an excerpt of the book here.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Commentary | Politics and Current Events | UCP News
Posted by KAM at 02:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Veterans Day has been around in one form or another for almost a century, since that great Tea Party-scourge Woodrow Wilson first proclaimed Armistice Day on November 11, 1919 and Dwight David Eisenhower pushed through a bill (originated by a shoe store owner from Emporia, Kansas) expanding the federal holiday to honor all of those who have served, regardless of conflict. Veterans Day, and the commemorations, protests, and remembrances associated with the call for continued and greater freedoms, has long been a time of serious-tempered reflection. With that in mind, we'd like to call your attention to a book we've blogged about here and there over the past few years, whose project is framed by the perils and virtues of today's holiday and whose author has engaged in a particular kind of service that allows our own intimate access to those lives put on the line for our varied causes.

Ashley Gilbertson is a contemporary photographer, born in Australia, who lives in New York but spends much of his time on assignment in the roadside fields, army hospitals, federal corridors, recovery homes, and civil unrest zones of Iraq, Afghanistan, and even Washington, D.C. In 2007, the Press published Gilbertson's Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War, which gathers the best of his extraordinary photographs of life in occupied Iraq, as he followed marines in to the cauldron of urban combat. Beyond the vivid images that chart the day-to-day experiences of U.S. troops on the ground, Gilbertson's own story—his guilt over the death of a marine escort, his struggles with post-traumatic stress, and his tenuous turn from hard-drinking photo ace to scarred survivor—plays an evocative role.

Since the book's publication, Gilbertson has become a regular at the New York Times's Lens Blog, with images of everything from the bedside recovery of a Times colleague and landmine victim in Afghanistan to a recent New York Times Magazine photo portfolio that examined a day in the life of Barack Obama. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot saw a fairly significant amount of acclaim when it was published, including George Packer's review for the New Yorker:

"Remarkable. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot collects Gilbertson's four years of work in 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."

Despite their obviously gritty and difficult circumstances, Gilbertson's photos, with their searing composition and verité style, can be easy on the eyes of consummate craftsmen. But not unlike Veterans Day, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot has its dark side; it reminds us of what and who and how we make sacrifices for the battles we choose to fight. Perhaps all of this is better said by Gilbertson himself, who sat down with the book's editor Alan Thomas for a video interview, the first part of which follows below:

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Commentary | Politics and Current Events
Posted by KAM at 01:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Uh-oh. TV Squad has the contemporary political equivalent of the long-stemming left brain-right brain debate: a chart of the most popular Republican and Democratic television shows (with the opposing party's strangely proportional tally in parentheses!). Based on a new study by Experian Simmons, the results situate the Grand Old Party on the couch in front of populist-charting favorites such as American Idol and Dancing with the Stars, while the lefties decompress with Law and Order: SVU and Mad Men. Chart toppers? Op-ed news network programming faves Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann, rather unsurprisingly.

Nearly twenty-five years ago, public opinion studies pioneers Shanto Iyengar and Donald R. Kinder first published News that Matters: Television and American Opinion. Just released in an updated edition, the book was the first to document a series of sophisticated and innovative experiments that demonstrated how the order and emphasis of news stories varied in selected television broadcasts. Now hailed as a political science classic, News that Matters, Updated Edition (with a new preface and epilogue, and available as an ebook) shows how and why extended coverage in the national news and broadcast television causes matters to gain or lose credibility, as criteria for everything from evaluating the sitting president to prioritizing issues on the ballot. Taking all of this in light of the Experian Simmons survey, I think we can say News that Matters does matter: careful what you tune into!

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events | Psychology
Posted by KAM at 05:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Susie Linfield is the director of the cultural reporting and criticism program at New York University, where she's an associate professor of journalism. Like many in her field, Linfield approaches the topic of her most recent University of Chicago Press book The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence head-on, arguing that learning to see the people in politically violent photographs is an ethically necessary act in today's visually proliferated world. Surveying the work of photographers as varied as James Nachtwey, Gilles Peress, and Jack Birns, and ranging in scope from China's cultural revolution and the events surrounding 9/11 to the Nigerian-Biafran and Bosnian wars, The Cruel Radiance adroitly considers how photography has—and should—respond to the increasingly nihilistic trajectory of modern warfare.

It should be unsurprising, to say the least, that the book has picked up steam in the weeks surrounding today's elections. You can check out several excerpts—this one at the UCP site on the history of photography, from Benjamin to Sontag; another at Guernica entitled "September 11th and the Democracy of Images"; and yet another at Tablet, which questions the right and wrong ways of looking at Holocaust-era photography.

Just yesterday, Artforum posted a 500 Words piece by Linfield, which included some important words on the book's immediate context:

[Robert] Capa's photos of the Spanish Civil War, or of China after the Japanese invasion, were very clear on political context. You knew what to do with your anger and your horror. Today, looking at images from Sierra Leone or the Congo, one can feel horror, disgust, and great sadness—but what to do in response is much less apparent. Which of the twelve militias now fighting in the Congo do you support? Visual atrocity is much clearer today, but we no longer have the political clarity to accompany it.

From there, it's a hop, skip, and jump over to the New York Times' story on Hilary Clinton's visit to Cambodia, where Clinton advocated for the nation to proceed with trials of the surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge, to understand the vital importance of the photojournalism Linfield discusses.

If you live in the NYC area, please consider attending Linfield's talk on Thursday, November 11th, at Book Culture. And, as ever, for more information about the book, be sure to check it out its University of Chicago Press page here.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Commentary | Politics and Current Events
Posted by KAM at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Despite a popular belief that suicide terrorism is the result of religious fanaticism, such attacks are really a calculated response to occupations by outsiders, according to Robert A. Pape and James K. Feldman in Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It. The book draws on exhaustively researched data on suicide attacks since 1980 in the Middle East, Chechnya, Sri Lanka, and around the world. The resulting picture is grim; as Pape recently noted, "Each month there are more suicide terrorists trying to kill Americans and their military allies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other Muslim countries than in all the years before 2001 combined." Nonetheless, based on this data, Pape claims, "we now have strong evidence that the narrative—that suicide terrorism is prompted by Islamic fundamentalism—is not true." The real problem is the way American military force is deployed overseas.

Steve Clemons, writing for the Huffington Post, agrees, "Can it be that American military bases abroad, usually thought of as 'stabilizers' in tough neighborhoods, are really the primary cause of radical terrorism against the US and its allies? That is what Robert Pape and James K. Feldman compellingly argue in their new book." Noting Pape and Feldman's advocacy of a military strategy that would combine stationing American military personnel offshore and working more closely with local forces, Clemons concludes:

Pape is working from the data upward in formulating a smart strategy for military organization. . . . Pape sees a chance to neutralize the forces that could otherwise yield another generation of hardened terrorists, many of whom are willing to engage in suicide attacks. I know the Pentagon is listening—and this impresses me. Others should be too.

Read an excerpt of Cutting the Fuse here.

Archived in Politics and Current Events
Posted by RH at 03:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This summer's unlikeliest hit book, F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, continues to attract notice. Glenn Beck, the Fox News host whose endorsement of the book in June catapulted it up the best-seller list, recently used the book’s success as evidence that his "audience is devouring books like never before." Over the weekend, the New York Times concurred with Beck and included Road in an article on the emerging "Tea Party canon." Taking stock of Hayek's pervasive influence on the current political landscape, the Times reported:

Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, alluded to The Road to Serfdom in introducing his economic "Roadmap for America's Future," which many other Republicans have embraced. Ron Johnson, who entered politics through a Tea Party meeting and is now the Republican nominee for Senate in Wisconsin, asserted that the $20 billion escrow fund that the Obama administration forced BP to set up to pay damages from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill circumvented "the rule of law," Hayek's term for the unwritten code that prohibits the government from interfering with the pursuit of "personal ends and desires."

Justin Amash, the 30-year-old Republican state legislator running for the House seat once held by Gerald Ford in Michigan, frequently posts links to essays by Hayek and Bastiat on his Facebook page, his chief vehicle for communicating with voters. "There is no single economist or philosopher I admire more than F. A. Hayek," he wrote in May. "I have his portrait on the wall of my legislative office and the Justin Amash for Congress office."

Read more on the Tea Party's reading list here. And check out an excerpt of the introduction to the book that, according to Glenn Beck, "will make your eyes bleed" on our site here.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Politics and Current Events
Posted by RH at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As their summer vacations end and the midterm elections approach, reporters and commentators have begun to ramp up their political coverage. With strong Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress as well as control of the White House, these elections are, not surprisingly, being viewed as a referendum on the majority party. The efficacy and success of the 111th Congress can be judged in a variety of ways, but in these discussions one issue always comes into play: the filibuster.

This summer George Packer's widely cited article on the Senate (from the August 9 issue of the New Yorker) brought the topic to the forefront. Packer painted a dismal picture of a governing body hamstrung by the need for a sixty-vote majority to pass any legislation, prompting the question, how did we get here? The answer can be found in Gregory Koger's history of the filibuster, Filibustering, the definitive study of this method of obstruction. At the recent annual American Political Science Association meeting, Koger convened a panel on the topic, featuring speakers such as Ezra Klein of the Washington Post and Brian Darling of the Heritage Foundation. You can watch a video of that panel over on C-SPAN's site or head over to Klein's blog to read his preliminary remarks on the topic.

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

For those geeked on all things IT or your favorite '90s aficionado, the big news is that 90210 Day has finally arrived—but we're busy ringing in 09-02-10 at the American Political Science Association's annual meeting. A big part of scholarly publishing focuses on the conferences, colloquia, and symposia whose panels and poster sessions are a rite of passage for academics—and a captive audience for booksellers and acquisitions editors alike. The Wardman Park Marriott is aflutter with bow ties and smart suits and I'm trying to sneak away private moments with my copy of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom (purchased during a mechanical flight delay at O'Hare—how many times can a writer described as our modern day Tolstoy refer to War and Peace in his own book, I dare to ask? But I kid, I kid—this one's a keeper!), which has turned out to be perfect reading. Franzen's hot in pursuit of the ghostly affective presences of globalization, consumption, and stewardship that hang, specter-like, over our contemporary moment. It turns out that the theme of this year's APSA—"The Politics of Hard Times: Citizens, Nations, and the International System under Economic Stress"—couldn't be more pitch-perfect for the concerns of current political science studies or Mr. Franzen's tour-de-force.

With all of that in mind, lots of browsers and buyers have picked up a copy of Jonathan GS Koppell's World Rule: Accountability, Legitimacy, and the Design of Global Governance. Koppell's novel work considers the pressing problems facing 25 global governance organizations (GGO), from the World Trade Organization to the Forest Stewardship Council, including satisfying the demands of key constituencies. Our Man Franzen uses the cause of the Cerulean Warbler, a songbird on the verge of extinction, to advance a narrative as troubled by the fraught social and political conditions of modern life—the plight of Zero Population Growth, viral marketing as the strange bedfellow of grassroots campaigning, and representation and accountability on intimately interpersonal levels—as is the average GGO.

Check out books Koppell and Franzen for more information on the hard times management of international affairs—in every "warbled" sense of the word.

Archived in Commentary | Politics and Current Events
Posted by KAM at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You might want to finish your bibimbap before reading this post. The salmonella outbreak that led to the largest egg recall in American history has now led to a disturbing Food and Drug Administration report about conditions on the Iowa farms where the eggs originated. The Chicago Tribune notes that the report's grisly details include horrors such as "barns with dozens of holes chewed by rodents that mice, insects, and wild birds used to enter and live inside the barns.… [And] manure built up in 4- to 8-foot-tall piles in pits below the hen houses, in such quantities that it pushed pit doors open, allowing rodents and other wild animals access to hen houses."

The farms in question are among the largest in the nation, and nearly half a billion eggs have been recalled. Given the extent and nature of the problems the inspectors have documented, it is clear the facilities haven't been visited by the FDA in a fairly long time. This kind of regulatory failure is the focus of Rena Steinzor and Sidney Shapiro's The People's Agents and the Battle to Protect the American Public: Special Interests, Government, and Threats to Health, Safety, and the Environment. Steinzor and Shapiro point out that the agencies responsible for protecting us from diseased eggs, oil spills, and greedy banks are not primarily to blame for their failures—the roots of the problem are political. Among other pressures, these agencies are often the target of campaigns to cut the federal budget. Sidney Shapiro addressed the latest call to do just that yesterday on the Huffington Post, writing:

There are a number of interrelated reasons for regulatory dysfunction, but one stands out: The budgets for the regulatory agencies have been cut over and over again, leaving the agencies short-handed. While the country has serious budget problems, regulatory agencies are such a small part of the federal budget that refunding them would have almost no impact on the annual budget or the size of the deficit.

Nonetheless, The People's Agents doesn't merely defend the existence of the agencies, it also presents plans for reforming them to ensure that they can continue to fulfill their mission of protecting the public.

Archived in Books for the News | Law | Politics and Current Events
Posted by RH at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tony Judt, world renowned scholar of European history, passed away last Friday at his home in Manhattan. The author of many books and a trenchant political columnist known for his outspoken views on Israeli policy, as an article published earlier this year in New York Magazine notes, Prof. Judt made a reputation for himslef in academic and non-academic circles alike as "one of the most admired and denounced thinkers living in New York City".

In 2008, Judt was diagnosed with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's Disease, but until his passing, maintained a constant stream of output, producing articles for the NYRB, lecturing, and working on a new book—a follow up to his most famous work Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945.

In 1998 the University of Chicago Press published Judt's The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century, a book that looks at the lives of three French philosophers—Leon Blum, Albert Camus, and Raymond Aron—to demonstrate their heroic commitment to personal integrity and moral responsibility unfettered by the difficult political exigencies of their time.

Many major news outlets have published articles and obituaries to mark the scholar's passing. Find out more about Prof. Judt's fascinating life and work at the New York Times, the Guardian.co.uk, The Chronicle of Higher Education, or the L.A. Times.

Archived in Commentary | History | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With all the media attention to the environmental and human catastrophe, both actual and predicted, surrounding our dependence on oil and other non-renewable sources of energy, it can be easy to take a rather pessimistic view of our global energy landscape. As a recent story on NPR's Marketplace asks, will we ever be able to rid ourselves of our addiction to oil?

Perhaps not, at least in the near future, but in his new book The Powers That Be: Global Energy for the Twenty-first Century and Beyond, consulting geologist and independent scholar Scott L. Montgomery offers readers a rare glimmer of hope—arguing that quitting cold turkey isn't a necessary—or realistic—step towards securing our energy future anyway. What is crucial, Montgomery explains, is focusing on developing a more diverse, adaptable energy future, one that draws on a variety of sources—and is thus less vulnerable to disruption or failure.

An admirably evenhanded and always realistic guide, Montgomery enables readers to understand the implications of energy funding, research, and politics at a global scale. At the same time, he doesn't neglect the ultimate connection between those decisions and the average citizen flipping a light switch or sliding behind the wheel of a car, making The Powers That Be indispensible for our ever-more energy conscious age.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News | Economics | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 01:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Still causing quite a stir almost a month after Glenn Beck's endorsement pushed it to the top of Amazon's sales rankings, F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom was the subject of an essay by Jennifer Schuessler in the July 11st edition of the New York Times Sunday Book Review. In her essay Schuessler explores the book's "long history of timely assists from the popular media," and, interestingly, asks how relevant the book really is to Glenn Beck's America.

Read it online at the NYT.

Also, read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New York Review of Books' NYR Blog has a review of Robert K. Elder's Last Words of the Executed, posted yesterday by NYRB contributor Charles Simic. In the review Simic reprints a few of the quotations from the soon to be executed prisoners featured in the book, but remarks:

Often more interesting than the final thoughts of some of these men and women are the short descriptions Elder provides of their backgrounds and the crimes they committed. Over the years, a few of them became the basis of novels and films, but there are plenty of others in the book that are just as tantalizing. Most likely, some of the executed were innocent, while others, who were guilty, had complicated and awful lives; one tends to feel sorry for them and wishes to know more about their stories. It's when it comes to true monsters, and there are plenty of them here, that even someone like me, who opposes capital punishment, begins to wonder if there ought to be an exception now and then.…

Navigate to the NYR Blog to read the full review.

Also, read these excerpts from the book.

Archived in Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This month's free e-book: Making Patriots by Walter Berns—a pithy and provocative essay that attempts to answer the question of how patriotism has flourished throughout America's history, despite the culture's veneration of individualism and self-interest.

After expertly and intelligibly guiding the reader through the history and philosophy of patriotism in a republic—from the ancient Greeks through contemporary life—Berns locates the best answer in the thought and words of Abraham Lincoln, who Berns claims understood better than anyone what the principles of democracy meant and what price adhering to them may exact. The graves at Arlington and Gettysburg and Omaha Beach in Normandy bear witness to the fact that self-interested individuals can become patriots, and Making Patriots is a compelling exploration of how this was done and how it might be again.

Download the complete e-book for free during the month of July or try a sample first with this excerpt.

Archived in Commentary | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It is being reported that President Obama has dismissed Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and named Gen. David H. Petraeus—McChrystal's boss—as the new commander of American forces in Afghanistan. McChrystal was dismissed for insubordinate remarks he made in a recent Rolling Stone story.

The Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency Operations hold that "Many important decisions are not made by generals." But sometimes they are, and deciding to give an interview to Rolling Stone has turned out to be a fateful decision.

The Paradoxes further hold that "Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction." But as President Obama has found, sometimes doing nothing is just not an option. However the president might also want to consider that "Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is."

General Petraeus steps into an increasingly difficult situation in Afghanistan. He was the prime mover behind the change in battlefield strategy in Iraq, as well as The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, which we reprinted in book form in 2007. The general will want to keep a copy close at hand.

Counterinsurgency expert Lieutenant Colonel John A. Nagl contributed a foreword to our edition in which discusses Petraeus' role in formulating counterinsurgency strategy both on the ground and in print. Also read all of the Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency Operations.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 03:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm innocent! I'm innocent! I'm innocent!

As guards dragged him into the gas chamber:

Don't let me go like this, God!

—Robert Otis Pierce, convicted of murder, California. Executed April 6, 1956

I'd just like to say I'm sailing with the Rock and I'll be back like 'Independence Day' with Jesus, June 6, like the movie, big mother ship and all. I'll be back.

—Aileen Wuornos, convicted of murder, Florida. Executed October 9, 2002

Some claim innocence. Others beg for forgiveness. At least three cheer for their favorite football teams. Through final utterances like these, author Rob Elder constructs a compelling oral history of American capital punishment ranging from women put to death during the Salem witch trials, to some of the most infamous criminal figures of the twentieth century like Ted Bundy and Illinois' own John Wayne Gacy.

And though there's been a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois for some time now, in an interview for The Onion A.V. Club, Elder discusses more of the famous last words of local convicts not lucky enough to escape the chair, the chamber, or the noose. From the interview:

AVC: Any other Illinois big shots?

RE: A gentleman who was executed in Pennsylvania is probably Chicago's most notorious serial killer. H. H. Holmes, the devil in Erik Larson's The Devil In The White City, admitted he killed two women, but claimed he didn't kill the other people. But what's more interesting than his last words are his final instructions. He killed more than 20 people in a hotel that he built basically to trap people, and he sold their remains to medical schools. In order to defend his own body, he asked that they cement him into a coffin to fend off grave robbers.

AVC: Wasn't Chicago native John Wayne Gacy our most notorious serial killer?

RE: Gacy was famous not just because he sexually molested and strangled his victims, but because around the neighborhood he was known as Pogo the Clown. The press named him "The Killer Clown." He was also famous because while in prison he made these childlike paintings of the Seven Dwarfs. But any childlike manner is not reflected in his last words. He just said, "Kiss my ass."

Read the complete interview on The Onion's A.V. Club website, and read an excerpt from the book. Also don't forget to check out Elder at the Stop Smiling magazine storefront tonight at 7 pm and Printer's Row Lit Fest this Saturday, June 12, 4:00 pm at Digitally Lit, Room 2.

Archived in Biography | Books for the News | History | Law | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lots of books consider the Enlightenment, but few earn such high marks as Dan Edelstein's The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution. In a recent review essay in the Nation, Samuel Moyn calls Edelstein's history "one of the most memorable and absorbing books on the era I have ever read." He goes on:

Edelstein argues that Enlightenment naturalism turned out to be a recipe for terrible wrongs. Edelstein wants to know how the Jacobins, whom he rightly credits with some of the most progressive and egalitarian aims any political movement has ever professed (notably the invention of social rights to work and education), ended up orchestrating a reign of terror. Against interpretations that simply blame circumstances, Edelstein too insists that ideas mattered. But the most provocative argument in his book is that the ideas that made the revolution spiral out of control were the cult of nature and the belief in natural rights.

A highly original work of historical analysis, political theory, literary criticism, and intellectual history, The Terror of Natural Right challenges, as Moyn notes, prevailing assumptions of the Terror to offer a new perspective on the Revolutionary period. Read more about the book or check out other titles on the period that call into question traditional ways of thinking about the Enlightenment.

Archived in History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by at 03:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Much of the legislation currently winding its way through Washington—from health care to financial reform—has helped to widen the gap between the two major political parties. Earlier this morning Chicago Public Radio's Eight Forty-Eight invited Robert Y. Shapiro, professor of political science at Columbia University and co-author of Politicians Don't Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness, to discuss the pros and cons of today's polarized political landscape.

"Is all the partisanship a diminishment of politics? Or does it lift the game to its highest level?" Listen to the archived audio from the show on the Chicago Public Radio website to find out.

Also read an excerpt from Shapiro's book.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

David E. Apter, professor emeritus of comparative political and social development at Yale University and author of many books on the political and social struggles of developing nations including The Politics of Modernization published by the Press in 1965, passed away last Tuesday at the age of 85.

According to this obituary in the New York Times:

[Apter's work draws] on social science and political theory and his own forays into impoverished lands, where he encountered peasants, politicians and sometimes terrorists.… In his travels, he interviewed colonial bureaucrats, nationalist leaders, generals, foot soldiers, tribal chiefs, trade unionists, farmers, fishermen and merchants in the bazaar.

"He was a tireless field worker, learning the fine grain of life out on the surfaces of the world where people actually live, and had a remarkable capacity to make broader theory out of it," Kai T. Erikson, a former president of the American Sociological Association, said in an interview.

"It's hard to pin him to the wall as a political scientist or a sociologist," Professor Erikson said. "He had huge influence in both fields, bringing them together as an inventor of interdisciplinarity—almost the coiner of the term."

David E. Apter is survived by his wife as well as his two children Andrew and Emily Apter, both of whom are leading academics in their fields have published several books with the Press.

Archived in Commentary | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the our post-9/11 world, inundated by video surveillance, and where joining Facebook has become almost obligatory, debate about an individual's right to privacy has begun to take center stage. While some argue that some loss of privacy is a small price to pay for our safety, and the benefits of staying connected online outweigh concerns over the use and abuse of personal information, others disagree.

Recently Christena Nippert-Eng, professor of sociology at the Illinois Institute of Technology and author of the forthcoming Islands of Privacy, made an appearance on Chicago Public Radio's Eight Forty-Eight in a panel discussion addressing the topic. Listen to the archived audio on the Chicago Public Radio website.

About the book:

In Islands of Privacy, Christena Nippert-Eng gives us an intimate view into the full range of ordinary people's sometimes extraordinary efforts to preserve the border between themselves and the rest of the world.

Packed with stories that are funny and sad, familiar and strange, Islands of Privacy tours the myriad arenas where privacy battles are fought, lost, and won. Nippert-Eng explores how we manage our secrets, our phone calls and e-mail, the perimeters of our homes, and our interactions with neighbors. She discovers that everybody practices the art of selectively concealing and disclosing information on a daily basis. This important balancing act governs a wide range of behaviors, from deciding whether to give our bosses our cell phone numbers to choosing what we carry in our wallets or purses. Violations of privacy and anxiety about how we grant it to each other also come under Nippert-Eng's microscope as she crafts a compelling argument that successfully managing privacy is critical for successfully maintaining our relationships with each other and our selves.

Roaming from the beach to the bank and from the bathroom to the bus, Nippert-Eng's keenly observed and vividly told book gives us the skinny on how we defend our shrinking islands of privacy in the vast ocean of accessibility that surrounds us.

Islands of Privacy will publish in September 2010.

Also see Nippert-Eng's previous book on a related topic Home and Work: Negotiating Boundaries through Everyday Life.

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

As Lynn C. Klotz and Edward J. Sylvester write in this recent article from the Huffington Post, in the wake of 9/11, and the subsequent lethal anthrax letters, the United States has spent billions of dollars on measures to defend the population against the threat of biological weapons. Over the last decade a significant proportion of taxpayer dollars have been funneled into clandestine biosecurity labs where thousands of scientists labor to identify possible terrorist threats, and produce countermeasures to protect a vulnerable population. But in their article as in their recent book, Breeding Bio Insecurity: How U.S. Biodefense Is Exporting Fear, Globalizing Risk, and Making Us All Less Secure, Klotz and Sylvester convincingly argue that all that money and effort hasn't actually made us any safer—in fact, it has made us more vulnerable.

In the article, the authors use a scenario put forward by the congressional Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism—a scenario in which a single crop duster with a payload of anthrax could potentially "kill more Americans than died in World War II"—to demonstrate how efforts to defend against such far-fetched imaginary threats can actually play a major role in creating the real ones. Read it online at the Huffington Post website.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The subway blasts that killed dozens of people in central Moscow this morning, carried out by insurgents from southern Russia's Caucasus region, have brought the long conflict between Chechen nationalists and Russia back to the forefront of the global consciousness. Though the brutal conflict over control of the Caucasus—far to the southwest of the Russian capital—has continued to quietly rage since Russia gained control over the region in 2000, the often repressive political atmosphere of post cold-war Russia, and the desire to suppress the many accusations of human rights abuses leveled against both sides, has helped to keep many of the details of the conflict from public scrutiny, especially in the west. The following are a few titles from the press that attempt to rectify that situation:

Before her mysterious assassination in 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, a correspondent for the liberal Moscow newspaper Novaya gazeta, was the only journalist to have constant access to the region, and in her book A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya she offers a rare insider's view of life in Chechnya, centered on stories of those caught—literally—in the crossfire of the conflict. Her 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. Politkovskaya's unflinching honesty and her courage in speaking truth to power combine here to produce a powerful account of what is acknowledged as one of the most dangerous and least understood conflicts on the planet.

Placing the conflict in context, Georgi M. Derluguian's Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World-System Biography offers a gripping account of the developmental dynamics involved in the collapse of Soviet socialism through the life story of Musa Shanib—a dissident Chechen intellectual who became a nationalist warlord. Derluguian contextualizes Shanib's personal trajectory—from de-Stalinization through the nationalist rebellions of the 1990s, to the recent rise in Islamic militancy—masterfully revealing not only how external economic and political forces affect the former Soviet republics, but how those forces are in turn shaped by the individuals, institutions, ethnicities, and social networks that make up those societies.

And in Caucasus: A Journey to the Land between Christianity and Islam, award-winning author Nicholas Griffin recounts his journey to this war torn region to explore the roots of the ongoing conflict, centering his travelogue on Imam Shamil, the great nineteenth century Muslim warrior who commanded a quarter-century resistance against invading Russian forces.

Delving deep into the Caucasus, Griffin transcends the headlines trumpeting Chechen insurgency to give the land and its conflicts dimension: evoking the weather, terrain, and geography alongside national traditions, religious affiliations, and personal legends as barriers to peaceful co-existence. In focusing his tale on Shamil while retracing his steps, Griffin compellingly demonstrates the way history repeats itself.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 01:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Sunday, the New York Times Magazine featured haunting photographs of the bedrooms young American soldiers killed in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The moving images, shot in stark black and white, represent a departure for the photographer Ashley Gilbertson, who is known for his striking combat imagery. On the Lens blog of Times, Miki Meek writes:

Although his coverage of Iraq has won awards, including the Robert Capa Gold Medal from the Overseas Press Club of America in 2004, Mr. Gilbertson, 32, said he has stopped photographing combat zones because the American public isn't responding anymore. Now concentrating on showing the aftereffects of war, including post-traumatic stress disorder, Mr. Gilbertson looks at bedrooms as a way of memorializing the lives—rather than the deaths—of young combatants. "It's powerful to look at where these kids lived, to see who they were as living, breathing human beings," Mr. Gilbertson said. "Their bedrooms were the one place in the house where they could express themselves with all the things they loved."

Indeed, these photographs affect the viewer differently than war images do: the absence and loss is palpable here. The holes left by the deceased soldiers are visible. In Gilbertson's move away from the battlefield, he is interested in recording the "war at home," as he puts it in this interview. This evolution of focus and technique comes after years spent in war zones; the images he captured there and the experiences he had are preserved in the book Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot gathers the best of Gilbertson's photographs, chronicling America's early battles in Iraq, the initial occupation of Baghdad, the insurgency that erupted shortly afterward, the dramatic battle to overtake Falluja, and ultimately, the country's first national elections. No Western photojournalist has done as much sustained work in occupied Iraq as Gilbertson, and this wide-ranging treatment of the war from the viewpoint of a photographer is the first of its kind. Accompanying each section of the book is a personal account of Gilbertson's experiences covering the conflict. Throughout, he conveys the exhilaration and terror of photographing war, as well as the challenges of photojournalism in our age of embedded reporting. But ultimately, and just as importantly, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot tells the story of Gilbertson's own journey from hard-drinking bravado to the grave realism of a scarred survivor. Here he struggles with guilt over the death of a marine escort, tells candidly of his own experience with post-traumatic stress, and grapples with the reality that Iraq—despite the sacrifice in Iraqi and American lives—has descended into a civil war with no end in sight.

A searing account of the American experience in Iraq, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is sure to become one of the classic war photography books of our time.

For more on WTF, visit this website.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by at 09:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Toronto's The Globe and Mail published a review of Adrian Johns's Piracy in Monday's edition of the paper. In the review Grace Westcott takes special note of Johns's unique approach to the history of intellectual property debates— a feat he accomplishes by focusing his narrative away from the victims of piracy, to the look more closely at the roles of the pirates themselves. As Westcott writes:

Why is Johns talking about a history of piracy, as opposed to a history of intellectual property law? According to him, the modern concept of intellectual property did not even exist prior to the mid-19th century, by which point, he says, there had already been 150 years of piracy. More pointedly, he argues that virtually all the central principles of intellectual property were developed in response to piratical acts. It is conflict over piracy, and the measures taken against it, he says, that forces society to define and defend, adapt or abandon, strongly held ideals of authorship, public discourse, science and dissemination of knowledge. Piracy is, from this perspective, central to the emergence of the modern information society.

Read it online at The Globe and Mail website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Law | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

With the Supreme Court due to hear arguments tomorrow in a suit challenging Chicago's ban on handguns in the city, Chicago Public Radio's Eight Forty-Eight aired the second of a two part special on the history of Chicago's ban this morning. On the program contributor Robert Loerzel walks through some of the major events—including the tragic assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the ensuing riots on Chicago's South Side, the assassination of J.F.K., and even the attempted murder of Pope John Paul II—that helped to gain public support for Chicago's handgun ordinance.

But despite the mountains of negative publicity that guns have received, especially in the nation's urban centers, the question of whether allowing people to own or carry guns deters violent crime still remains.

Back in 2000 the University of Chicago Press published one of the most influential and controversial books on the issue, John R. Lott, Jr.'s More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws. Slated for an updated third edition later this month, Lott's book employs some of the most rigorously comprehensive data analysis ever conducted on crime statistics and right-to-carry laws to directly challenge common perceptions about the relationship between guns, crime, and violence. For the third edition, Lott draws on an additional ten years of data—including provocative analysis of the effects of gun bans in Chicago and Washington, D.C.—to bring the book fully up to date and further bolster its central contention that, in fact, more guns mean less crime.

Tune your radio to 91.5 tomorrow to catch more analysis on the challenge to Chicago's gun control ordinance, or navigate to the Chicago Public Radio website to listen to the archived audio from this morning's program.

Also navigate to the press website to read an interview with John R. Lott Jr. or to find out more about the updated third edition.

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

Adrian Johns, author of Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates has written a posting for the Washington Post's Short Stack blog. In his post, Johns discusses the blowback that can result from attempts to clamp down on illegal copying:

Over the last half-millennium, measures to defend creative property have repeatedly proved counterproductive—not just because individual pirates themselves escaped, but because those measures triggered public reactions against their own proponents. The major transitions that constitute the history of intellectual property itself were repeatedly caused by precisely this kind of reaction. In effect, the present nature of both copyrights and patents is a legacy of this long history of police overreach.

For more navigate to the Washington Post's Short Stack blog. We also have an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Law | Literature | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As a recent post on Amazon's book blog Omnivoracious points out, the volatile economic climate we've been living through the past few years makes it easy to question the real value of the dollar. When a financial crisis can put more Americans out of their homes than any of the major natural disasters that have hit the U.S. in the last decade, the nature of currency as an artificial construct is particularly obvious—and particularly ugly. But as it turns out, one contemporary artist, J.S.G. Boggs, has been using his craft to make a similar point in a somewhat more aesthetically pleasing, though highly controversial, way. As Omnivoracious blogger Tom Nissen writes:

J.S.G. Boggs is an artist, and in some minds, particularly those of the Bank of England and the U.S. Secret Service, a criminal. His crime is the reproduction of national currency. He draws money. But he doesn't just draw dollar bills and put them up in frames on gallery walls as a conceptual joke. He actually goes out and uses his drawings as money. When presented with a bill at a restaurant, say, he'll offer instead to pay with a Boggs bill… They are usually only drawn on one side of the paper, and with other idiosyncratic elements that make it clear that they are not legal tender. But yet they have value, at least when he can convince a restaurant owner, or a hotel manager, or someone else he owes money to, that they do.

We published the definitive text on this fascinating manipulator of money in Lawrence Weschler's 1999 book Boggs: A Comedy of Values. Weschler chronicles Boggs' exploits and the fundamental questions is work brings to bear on the value of art, and money. From his attempts to get those unfamiliar with his work to accept his art as currency (often worth much more than the dollar value it depicts), to his run-ins with the law for his artistic antics, as Nissley notes, Weschler's book paints a fascinating portrait of the artist and the challenges his unique brand of pop-art evokes.

For more read Nissen's article on Amazon's Omnivoracious blog.

The connection between art and money is also explored in Marc Shell's Art and Money, which ranges through the history of art including that of J. S. G. Boggs.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Economics | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 02:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New Republic has just debuted its new online book reviews site, and in the midst of clicking around we were pleased to note that The Book as it's called, is featuring one of our titles amongst its inaugural reviews. In an article posted to the site last Wednesday, Harvard economist Edward L. Gleaser reviews Dominic A. Pacyga's Chicago: A Biography—a thoroughly detailed and uncommonly intimate portrait of the city and its inhabitants written by a native Chicagoan. In his piece Glaeser inventories a few of the main topics in the book including Chicago's rapid industrial growth in the early 20th century, the city's role in the invention of the skyscraper, and Pacyga's unique focus on the stories of the city's working class.

Navigate to TNR's The Book to read the full review and see a gallery of photographs from the book.

Archived in Chicago | History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 03:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Gina Ulysse, author of Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica, has been quite busy in the wake of the earthquake in Haiti. Born in Pétionville, a suburb of Port-au-Prince, since her hometown's recent tragedy, Ulysse has been inundated with calls asking for her insights—as both a former resident and current scholar of Haiti—on the quake, its aftermath, and what it means for the future of one of the poorest and most embattled countries in the Western hemisphere. She has done numerous interviews and op-eds for NPR, the Huffington Post, and PRI's The World radio program with more to come. Click on the links to navigate to the articles—we'll update the page as more of Ulysse's commentary becomes available. In the meantime find out more about Ulysse's fascinating study of entrepreneurial women in the Caribbean isle in Downtown Ladies.

Update: As promised here are a couple more links to some of Ulysse's recent writing and commentary on Haiti:

From the January 11 edition of the Huffington Post, an article titled ""Avatar," Voodoo and White Spiritual Redemption"

From Duke University's Social Text journal — "Dehumanization & Fracture: Trauma at Home & Abroad"

And listen to this interview with Ulysse and Kate Ramsey, historian of Haiti and the Caribbean from Wisconsin Public Radio's Here On Earth: Radio Without Borders.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"What has most distinguished American responses to destruction over the past three centuries or so is a widespread conviction, born of beliefs and experience, that calamities are instruments of progress. In place of stoic resolve, many Americans (and certainly dominant American ideologies) embrace disasters as a means of escaping from the present into a better future."

Kevin Rozario is associate professor in the American Studies program at Smith College.

Also see Rozario's recent article on the Haitian earthquake for the Wall Street Journal or read an excerpt from The Culture of Calamity.

Archived in Commentary | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 02:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This morning the Supreme Court invalidated the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (the McCain-Feingold Act) as well as overturning its previous decisions upholding restrictions on corporate spending in political elections. An article in the New York Times states: "The ruling was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most basic free speech principle—that the government has no business regulating political speech."

Back in 2004 we published The Fallacy of Campaign Finance Reform by John Samples which made exactly that argument about campaign finance laws generally and the McCain-Feingold Act in particular. Samples argued that restrictions on campaign contributions not only inhibit the exercise of the constitutional right to speech, but that there is little to no evidence that campaign contributions really influence members of Congress. And that so-called negative political advertising improves the democratic process. And that limits on campaign contributions make it harder for new candidates to run for office, thereby protecting incumbents.

Back in 2004 our copywriters wrote that The Fallacy of Campaign Finance Reform "defies long-held assumptions and conventional political wisdom." Let’s now add that it accurately predicted the future.

We have an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Books for the News | Law | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 01:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As Patricia Cohen recently wrote in the New York Times reviewing two new books on higher education, "champions of the market can turn up in the oddest places. At the same time that bankers and businessmen are acknowledging the downsides of unregulated capitalism, college and university reformers are urging the academy to more closely embrace the marketplace." And one of the reformers Cohen reviews is our author.

In Saving Alma Mater: A Rescue Plan for America's Public Universities James C. Garland draws on more than thirty years of experience as a professor, administrator, and university president to argue that a new compact between state government and public universities is needed to make these schools more affordable and financially secure. As Cohen writes:

Mr. Garland is concerned with putting public university systems on a solid financial footing. Although they educate 80 percent of the nation's college students, public institutions have seen their quality sapped by shrinking government aid, changing demographics and growing income inequality. In Saving Alma Mater, Mr. Garland argues that government should end subsidies altogether and allow supply and demand to rule. Let public universities compete for students and set their own tuitions. To ensure that poor students can afford to attend, legislatures should eliminate institutional financing and instead use that money for financial aid to individuals. In essence, he proposes a voucher system.…

Mr. Garland also wants to bring some market discipline to the culture of academia. While professors tend to be progressives, they are stubbornly conservative when it comes to change. Indeed, as Mr. Menand points out, early reformers argued that the only way to elevate excellence above profits in a capitalist society was by protecting the profession from the market's insistence on cash rewards.

The result, Mr. Garland maintains, is that professors are oblivious to the costs of complex procedures, drawn-out debates and layers of committees; appeals to increase efficiency and productivity are routinely scorned.

For more about Garland's take on financial reform in public universities read Cohen's complete review on the NYT website. Or check out the following links for a debate we hosted right here on the blog several weeks back when we invited Garland, and another of our authors, Gaye Tuchman—whose book Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University presents a formidable counterpoint—to dialogue on the issue.

Part 1

Part 2

Also read an excerpt from Garland's book and see the author's blog.

Archived in Economics | Education | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Gary Becker and Richard Posner have been offering up some of the most insightful social and political commentary on the internet through The Becker-Posner blog for five years now. Starting back in December of '04, Becker, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, and Posner, a renowned jurist and legal scholar, (both at the University of Chicago), teamed up to offer their equally learned, but sometimes conflicting insights on everything from the legalization of gay marriage to the sale of human organs for transplant, quickly building a large, and loyal audience. So large, in fact, that in November of 2009 the University of Chicago Press published a "best of" collection of entries from their blog in their new book: Uncommon Sense: Economic Insights, from Marriage to Terrorism.

Recently, Milt Rosenberg, the host of WGN radio's Extension 720 invited the two on the show to discuss their new book, highlighting their pithy commentary on some of the most hot button issues of the day, including the legitimacy of the death penalty, NYC's proposed ban on trans fats, and illegal immigration.

To listen in navigate to the Extension 720 website to stream or download part 1 and part 2 of their conversation or find out more about Uncommon Sense on the press website.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics | Law | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Many of the nation's financial problems in the last few years have at least some of their roots in the mismanagement of personal finance. Some blame the fiscal hubris of consumers and speculators who bit off more than they could chew. Others blame industry, claiming that many corporations and lenders have made it a common practice to dupe consumers into making unwise investments—from mortgage brokers failing to inform their clients of the full terms of their loan repayment plans, to volatile interest rates and hidden fees on credit card debit. Yet others blame both—while a public consumer culture that encourages irresponsible spending may be partially to blame, the recession has also provided ample evidence on which to base a solid argument for increased consumer protection standards against predatory corporate practices as well.

In a recent article for the American Prospect, Larry Glickman author of Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America discusses Barak Obama's proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) and the history of government policy designed to protect the consumer. From the The Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906, to the Truth in Lending and Fair Labeling and Packaging Acts of the 70s, Glickman's article demonstrates how consumer protection legislation has inevitably provoked a strong reaction from the right but nevertheless enjoys a fair amount of public support once enacted, and according to Glickman, for good reason.

Read the article on the American Prospect website or find out more about Glickman's book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 03:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In the tense months that followed the 9/11 attacks, the public’s fears of further terrorism were fanned by the deadly anthrax letters, which seemed to symbolize the ease with which terrorists could kill using biological weapons. But in the subsequent years the United States government has spent billions of dollars on combating bioweapons—so citizens can rest easy, knowing we’re much safer. Or are we?

Far from it, say Lynn Klotz and Edward Sylvester, and with Breeding Bio Insecurity they make a forceful case that not only has all of that money and research not made us safer, it’s made us far more vulnerable. Laying out their case clearly and carefully, they show how the veil of secrecy in which biosecurity researchers have been forced to work—in hundreds of locations across the country, unable to properly share research or compare findings—has caused no end of delays and waste, while vastly multiplying the odds of theft, sabotage, or lethal accident. Meanwhile, our refusal to make this work public causes our allies and enemies alike to regard U.S. biodefense with suspicion. True biosecurity, Klotz and Sylvester explain, will require that the federal government replace fearmongering with a true analysis of risk, while openly involving the public and the scientific community in a joint effort to reduce the threat of bioterror.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Economics | Philosophy | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 03:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Several new reviews of Dominic Pacyga's Chicago: A Biography have popped up on the radar recently, one in the Chicago Sun-Times and another on Drexel University's online magazine The Smart Set. Both focus their attention on Pacyga's book for reversing the usual top-down approach to the telling of Chicago history, letting the stories of ordinary people narrate this "biographical" account of city life. Thomas Frisbie quotes Pacyga in his review for the Sun-Times:

"I try to look at everyday people as much as I can, at people in neighborhoods, how they build their community, how they survive, how they prosper or don't prosper," said Pacyga, who grew up in the Back of the Yards, attended De La Salle Institute and worked at the Union Stockyards when he was in college.

There are sections, for example, on "Ted Swigon’s Back of the Yards" and "Angeline Jackson's neighborhood." Swigon was an altar boy at St. John of God's Church and attended Quigley Preparatory Seminary before transferring to De La Salle. Jackson came from Mississippi to Chicago, eventually moving to Englewood.

"[Jackson's story] tells a lot about how that neighborhood went through racial change and how it went through physical change," Pacyga said. "She soon found herself living over an off-ramp of the Dan Ryan Expy. The Dan Ryan plowed right in front of her house."

And Jessa Crispin writes for The Smart Set:

When professor and Chicago historian Dominic A. Pacyga sat down to start his new history of the city, there was an overwhelming amount of material to work with. He decided not to write a chronological history of the city, something that could take up multiple volumes, but to treat Chicago as if it were a person—hence the title Chicago: A Biography. He focused on what he believes to be Chicago's defining characteristics, rather than its more flashier aspects. Some of the more sensational characters—the sociopaths like Leopold and Loeb, the gangsters like John Dillinger, the bisexual eccentrics like Frank Lloyd Wright—get either a cursory mention or none at all. His attention is taken up by what really does define the city: a fight for fairness for laborers, for the poor, and for children; capitalism and corruption run amok; the work produced and the people who do it.

The full text of both reviews can be found online. Also see a gallery of photographs from the book.

Archived in Chicago | History | Politics and Current Events | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As fall beckons with changing leaves and shortening days, one thing is certain: NFL football is back, and Chicagoans everywhere are packing their coolers and grills for a trip to Soldier Field. For decades, the stadium’s signature columns provided an iconic backdrop for the Chicago Bears, but few realize that it has been much more than that. Soldier Field: A Stadium and Its City explores how this amphitheater evolved from a public war memorial into a majestic arena that helped define Chicago.

Chicago Tribune staff writer Liam T. A. Ford led the reporting on the stadium’s 2003 renovation—and simultaneously found himself unearthing a dramatic history. As he tells it, the tale of Soldier Field truly is the story of Chicago, filled with political intrigue and civic pride. Designed by Holabird and Roche, Soldier Field arose through a serendipitous combination of local tax dollars, City Beautiful boosterism, and the machinations of Mayor “Big Bill” Thompson. The result was a stadium that stood at the center of Chicago’s political, cultural, and sporting life for nearly sixty years, long before the arrival of Walter Payton and William “the Refrigerator” Perry.

Ford describes it all in the voice of a seasoned reporter: the high school football games, track and field contests, rodeos, and even NASCAR races. Photographs, including many from the Chicago Park District’s extensive collections, capture remarkable scenes of the swelling crowds at ethnic festivals, Catholic masses, and political rallies. This book will remind readers that Soldier Field hosted such luminaries as Billy Graham and Martin Luther King Jr., Judy Garland and Johnny Cash—as well as the Grateful Dead’s final show.

Now part of the city’s bid for the 2016 Olympic Games, Chicago’s stadium on the lake continues to make dramatic history. Soldier Field captures this history in the making and will captivate armchair historians and sports fans alike.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Chicago | History | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A recent article for the Chronicle of Higher Education begins with a description of the five and a half months that Timothy S. Pachirat, one of the contributors to Edward Schatz's new book Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power, spent working in a Midwest slaughterhouse—"hanging beef livers on hooks," and using electric prods to move cattle into the holding pens. Such work is not the norm for a PhD in political science. But as the Chronicle's David Glenn explains, a few intrepid individuals in political science (taking a cue from anthropologists) have abandoned reliance on statistics and polls, turning instead to ethnographic fieldwork in order to gain a better understanding of how public opinion is really shaped.

In Pachirat's case, Glenn writes, his fieldwork "allowed him to 'illuminate in tangible ways the political and ethical consequences of the delegation of dirty, dangerous, and demeaning work.' Only participant-observation, [Pachirat] says, can give a full picture of how workers, managers, and federal health inspectors experience power relations." "If nothing else," as Glenn quotes another of the book's contributors, Katherine Cramer Walsh, "such observation might give pollsters intelligent ideas about what questions to ask." (Walsh's own fieldwork on political beliefs can also be found in her books Talking about Race, and Talking About Politics.)

Political Ethnography, discussed at length in the CHE article, is one of the first to analyze the work that results from this new approach to research in political science, and concludes that political ethnography can and should play a central role in the field.

To find out more about this burgeoning trend in poli-sci read David Glenn's article on the Chronicle website or pick up a copy of Edward Shatz's Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power.

Also in the Chronicle recently, three UCP titles made the cut for their recent list of recommend titles in political ethnography:

David D. Laitin, Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change Among the Yoruba

Katherine Cramer Walsh, Talking About Politics: Informal Groups and Social Identity in American Life

And of course,

Edward Schatz, ed., Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
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The Bush presidency may be one of the most criticized in the history of the office, but the one criticism leveled at the previous administration perhaps more often than any is that the former President exploited the threat of terrorism to hurdle constitutional checks and balances on executive power. Arguably, it was the public reaction to Bush's relentless power grab that became one of the driving forces behind the election of the current administration. Yet as New York Times contributor Anand Giridharadas points out in a recent article, President Obama has become the target for some of the very same accusations, as some argue that he too has used the Great Recession, and a renewed terrorist threat from Afghanistan, to push his own left wing agenda.

So with both sides of the aisle directing similar criticisms at one another, do their accusations actually carry any weight? Giridharadas' article cites Peter Alexander Meyers, author of Civic War and the Corruption of the Citizen who argues that in fact, presidential power, regardless of party affiliation, has "been steadily accruing since the nineteenth century, edging both Congress and the public out of decision-making during anything claimed to be a crisis." Giridharadas writes:

Beginning arguably with President Grover Cleveland's clampdown on the railroad strikes using emergency authority, which paved the way for broader regulation of the railroads and eventually of national commerce under subsequent presidents, Mr. Meyers contends that the boundary between foreign war and domestic crisis has slowly blurred in the public mind.

Mr. Meyers is particularly alert to the role of culture in bolstering this trend. As it is, the federal government has limited constitutional authority and ever more intricate problems to manage.

The effect of television and the Internet in an event like 9/11 or the Great Recession, is, he shows, to amplify and rerun and spread the sense of alarm. The result is that citizens have effectively acquiesced over time to two propositions that he believes to be dangerous when held in tandem: that, in crisis, the president knows best; and that a crisis is whatever the president says it is.

Mr. Meyers, also politically sympathetic to Mr. Obama, believes that Mr. Bush did not create on his own the culture of emergency for which his presidency is often blamed, and that Mr. Obama, as a consequence, will not reverse what is not merely one administration's doing.

"It was a monumental mistake to think that 'everything changed on 9/11,'" Mr. Meyers said in an e-mail message. But, he added, "I, with great regret but without surprise, would say that those who think that 'everything changed on November 4' are fooling themselves again."

You can find the complete article on the NYT website.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
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With the flurry of celebrity deaths appearing in the newspapers lately you might think the grim reaper had taken up residence in Hollywood for the season, but in an article for the September 16th Inside Higher Ed Scott McLemee takes note of the passing of a pop cultural icon from the opposite coast in a piece that uses the recent death of author, poet, autobiographer, and punk musician Jim Carroll as a segue into an insightful review of Paul Ricoeur's Living Up to Death—the philosopher's posthumously published meditation on the subject of mortality.

Consisting of one complete essay likely inspired by his wife's approaching death in 1996, and a series of fragments written during the author's own final days, as McLemee notes, the material in Living up to Death is less focused upon an individual's personal experience of dying as it is about "how an individual's death echoes in the memory of others"—a topic particularly relevant to the passing of so many, Jim Carroll included, whose work will likely live on well past their deaths. So for a slightly more insightful perspective on death and dying than most articles on "The Summer of Celebrity Deaths" are likely to offer, read McLemee's article on the Inside Higher Ed website, and pick up a copy of Ricoeur's Living up to Death.

Archived in Books for the News | Philosophy | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 01:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Thanks to a certain former governor from Alaska, "death panels" (and the attendant fear that the Obama administration will somehow decide when and how Americans die) have gained increasing currency in the health-care reform debate. Despite repeated assurances from the administration that the bill calls for no such thing (and evidence from fact-checking organizations that dispute Palin's claim), a new poll shows that 41% of Americans believe that "senior citizens or seriously-ill patients would die because government panels would prevent them from getting the medical treatment they needed."

This week, Newsweek magazine devoted its cover to an article (not-so-subtly) titled "The Case for Killing Granny." The piece argues that "the need to spend less money on the elderly at the end of life is the elephant in the room in the health-reform debate" and that in order to rein in health care costs, we, as a nation, despite how uneasy it makes us, are going to need to confront this reality. As the article suggests, "Americans are afraid not just of dying, but of talking and thinking about death. Until Americans learn to contemplate death as more than a scientific challenge to be overcome, our health-care system will remain unfixable." With end-of-life issues at center stage in the health-care reform debate, it's an apt time to look closely at modern death, especially in American hospitals. Medical anthropologist Sharon R. Kaufman does just that in the award-winning And a Time to Die: How American Hospitals Shape the End of Life.

Over the past thirty years, the way Americans experience death has been dramatically altered. The advent of medical technology capable of sustaining life without restoring health has changed where, when, and how we die. In this revelatory study, medical anthropologist Sharon R. Kaufman examines the powerful center of those changes: the hospital, where most Americans die today. She deftly links the experiences of patients and families, the work of hospital staff, and the ramifications of institutional bureaucracy to show the invisible power of the hospital system in shaping death and our individual experience of it. In doing so, Kaufman also speaks to the ways we understand what it means to be human and to be alive.

As Newsweek notes, "studies show that about 70 percent of people want to die at home—but that about half die in hospitals." Hospitals will continue to be central to the American way of death, and how we die, and who decides when, will be forever linked to the health-care reform debate of 2009, no matter what gets passed into law. Kaufman's book, which you can read an excerpt of here, shines light on the ethical quandaries at the heart of the issue.

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At 4:15 this afternoon, Peter Alexander Meyers's Civic War and the Corruption of the Citizen will be the focus of an Author Meets Critics session of the American Political Science Association annual meeting in Toronto. The upcoming event got Toronto Globe & Mail blogger Douglas Bell thinking about Meyers's work, which Bell praised as "the first [book] of what will amount to nothing less than a comprehensive theory of politics." Bell suggested, in fact, that Canadian Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff should pin over his desk a passage from the book:

The hope and flaw of democracy is that it boils down, not to the will of the people, but to the judgment of the Citizen, which is to say the capacity of each person to size up a situation and pitch his or her energies one way or another. The list of impediments and constraints in this practice is as long as a lifetime. This book in its own eccentric way, urges engagement in your own life; lived as it is, this is almost bound to bring you to the position of the Citizen. For every day is something new. Thresholds for action are constantly shifting ground. In the weave of lives lived together with others, the power of the Citizen is as simple as it is unpredictable: Shall I let this pass or shall I stand against it? Is this abuse, this lie, this outrage, the one that will bring me into the streets or will I avert my eyes, my ears again, and close my door.

"Voters long to be treated as Citizens," Bell writes, "not subjects; Barack Obama proved that. This could be Ig's time. But the time it is a wastin'."

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In a posting for the Washington Post's Short Stack blog Lawrence B. Glickman, author of Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America weighs in on the recent calls for a Whole Foods boycott in protest of an article written by company executive John Mackey critical of Obama's health care reform program. With a large customer base of progressives ardently in support of reform, many feel betrayed by a company which they assumed would share their political and social agenda.

Glickman's article points out the long history of consumer activism in the United States and the influential role it sometimes plays in American politics (think Boston Tea Party), yet as Glickman writes:

Despite their frequency throughout U.S. history, boycotts have rarely achieved their intended goals.… In the early 1900's, African Americans in twenty-five Southern cities initiated boycotts of segregated streetcars. Most of these campaigns were short-lived, unsuccessful, and lost to history. Yet they marked an early step in the campaign against segregation, which culminated in large measure with another, successful effort—the most famous boycott in the history of the United States: the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 and 1956. That movement not only ended Jim Crow transportation in that city but brought the Civil Rights campaign to the forefront of the nation's political agenda and moral consciousness.

Without the early failures, we might never have seen the later and celebrated successes.

Read the complete article on the Washington Post's Short Stack blog.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Despite the company's popularity amongst the progressive / environmentally conscious / vegetarian crowd (or as a recent post on the daily KOS notes, all those "willing to shell out three bucks for an organic orange, even in the midst of the worst recession in sixty years") Whole Foods executive John Mackey recently caused a bit of a dilemma for his company's PR department with an article for the Wall Street Journal countering Obama's health care reform program, with a decidedly Republican argument in support of "less government control and more individual empowerment." And while not everyone sees it as an appropriate tactic, the public reaction has by and large been swift and widespread with coverage of the calls for a boycott of the organic grocery chain appearing on news and social networking sites all over the net. (After all, it would be much harder to boycott the health insurance industry itself wouldn't it?)

I've been following the thread on the Whole Foods boycott on The Dish and other sites. My just-published book, Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America, which is an examination of boycotts from the American Revolution to the present, offers some historical perspective on some of the issues raised by this boycott. I examine the question of the efficacy of boycotts and argue that two kinds of boycotts are most likely to be successful: very local efforts and national campaigns whose goal is often to score political rather than economic points. (The UFW grape boycott would be a good example.) Aside from their efficacy, I believe that boycotts are an expression of what I call "long distance solidarity" and show that American citizens don't take consumption to be a private or apolitical zone.

Demonstrating how American's have—from the Boston Tea Party to the present—used consumerism as an important component of democratic political involvement, Glickman's Buying Power is an illuminating and timely look at the relationship between political engagement and American consumer culture.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Politics and Current Events
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Mary Pattillo, author of Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class and Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City was interviewed recently on Penn State Public Broadcasting's Conversations webcast speaking on the topic of her two books: the American black middle class. In the interview Pattillo talks about the history of the rise of the black middle class and the unique issues that middle class African American's face today in negotiating their place within their communities and in American society at large.

Navigate to the Penn State website to view the episode.

Also read this excerpt from Black on the Block and another from Black Picket Fences.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Black Studies | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
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Earlier this month at the Brookings Institution, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan talked with former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros about the challenges posed by concentrated poverty and the lessons of recent development initiatives.

In the midst of the discussion, Donovan told Cisneros that:

As I embark on my own path as HUD Secretary, Henry I want to say to you that I'm in the midst of reading Robert Weaver's biography. A great biography that was recently published and I say quite seriously that only in Weaver's example can I find any other HUD Secretary that has brought together the intellectual leadership, the practice, the passion, the commitment that you have brought to the work that you did not only as HUD Secretary, but to literally a lifetime of work in transforming neighborhoods and communities.

The "great biography," of course, can't be any other than Wendell Pritchett's Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City, the first and only biography of the first African American to hold a cabinet position in the federal government. From his role as FDR's "negro advisor" to his appointment, under Lyndon Johnson, as the first secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Robert Clifton Weaver was one of the most influential domestic policy makers and civil rights advocates of the twentieth century. Tracing Weaver's career through the creation, expansion, and contraction of New Deal liberalism, Pritchett's book illuminates his instrumental role in the birth of almost every urban initiative of the period, from public housing and urban renewal to affirmative action and rent control.

We're pleased to know that, in doing so, it's now reached a uniquely important target audience.

Archived in Biography | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by at 09:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The NYT published a story today about a new sign of hope for the peaceful co-habitation of the West Bank coming from a group of ultra-Orthodox Haredi Jews living in the outlying communities of Modiin Illit and Beitar Illit. According to the Times, though the rapidly growing populations of their settlements along disputed territories account for much of the Israeli government's claims for the need to expand into Palestinian territory, "these ultra-Orthodox inhabitants often express contempt for the settler movement, with its vows never to move."

The people here, who shun most aspects of modernity, came for three reasons: they needed affordable housing no longer available in and around Jerusalem or Tel Aviv; they were rejected by other Israeli cities as too cult-like; and officials wanted their presence to broaden Israel's narrow border.… Yet they are lumped with everyone else.

With an unsurpassed ideological commitment to their religion, but not to the hardline Zionist movements with which ultra-Orthodox communities are sometimes associated, their desire to divorce themselves from the broader nationalist movement brings new hope for a deal with the Palestinians over many existing land disputes and the possibility of a future in which both groups can co-exist peacefully.

In the summer of 2007 the press also published a book documenting a similar ray of hope for a resolution to the decades long conflict between Israel and Palestine in Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine—an eye-opening chronicle of the author David Shulman's work as a member of the peace group Ta'ayush, which takes its name from the Arabic for "living together." Comprised of both Israeli and Palestinian activists working side by side, Shulman's book documents the group's dogged efforts to pass through Israeli checkpoints to deliver aid, rebuild houses, and physically block the progress of the dividing wall. As they face off against police, soldiers, and hostile Israeli settlers, anger mixes with compassion, moments of kinship alternate with confrontation, and, throughout, Shulman wrestles with his duty to fight the cruelty enabled by "that dependable and devastating human failure to feel."

Offering humanizing accounts of the reality of a people struggling to overcome one of the most complicated conflicts of our era, both the Times article and Shulman's book make for essential reading on the topic.

For more read the complete NYT article or read an excerpt from Shulman's book.

Archived in Biography | Books for the News | History | Politics and Current Events
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The death of human rights worker Natalya Estemirova was widely reported last week as the latest in a string of unsolved murders of members of the small circle of journalists and activists working to expose the extreme brutality of the now decades-old conflict over Chechen independence. Since the 2006 murder of journalist and press author Anna Politkovskaya, whose book A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya offers an eyeopening look at the lives of Chechens caught in the crossfire between violent rebels and an equally violent counterinsurgency, we have followed some of the larger developments in what has been so far an unsuccessful quest to find and try her murderer(s).

And now with the assassination of Estemirova, who according to the UK's Times Online recently "became the first recipient of an award in [Politkovskaya's] name for work for the leading Russian rights group Memorial," the world has also lost one of the most prominent inheritors of Politkovskaya's legacy.

Find out more about Politkovskaya's groundbreaking work in A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya with this excerpt or follow some of the coverage of the assassinations at the New York Times or at the Times Online website.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
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Harry V. Jaffa's Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, first published in 1959, has long been regarded as the standard historiography of the pivotal 1858 debates between Abraham Lincoln during his candidacy for the U.S. Senate and Democratic incumbent Stephen A. Douglas on the issue of slavery. And in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the book's publication, the University of Chicago Press has just reissued a new edition of Jaffa's classic work, acknowledged today by Forbes magazine columnist Peter Robinson in an article that quotes Jaffa himself to demonstrate how the debates "turned on issues that were present at the very founding of western civilization—and that we must face again today."

In the article Jaffa argues that "the issue between Lincoln and Douglas was identical to the issue between Socrates and Thrasymachus in the first book of Plato's Republic." Just as Thrasymachus argues that justice "possesses no independent or objective standing" and is at the mercy of those in power, so too did Douglas argue that "the citizens of Kansas or Nebraska could make slavery acceptable in their states simply by voting in favor of it." The article continues:

Lincoln considered this absurd. "Lincoln thought slavery was wrong," Jaffa explains, "and he did not think a vote of the people could make it right."

Like the Founders, Lincoln believed implicitly in an objective moral order. Today we believe in "values."

"The secretary of state, the president, they all talk about 'values,'" Jaffa says. "A 'value' is a subjective desire, not an objective truth. George Washington said, 'The foundations of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality.' If you had said, 'Oh, Mr. Washington, you mean in our 'values?' Washington would have replied, 'What the hell are you talking about?…'"

Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln. All believed that morality—that goodness and justice—were not merely human constructs but real.

"We have to return to the political thought of the American founders and Abraham Lincoln," Harry Jaffa says. "Nothing is at stake but the salvation of Western civilization."

Naviagte to the Forbes website to read the rest of the article or find out more about the anniversary edition of Jaffa's groundbreaking work. Also see our edition of The Complete Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 edited and with an introduction by Paul M. Angle.

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Yesterday WBEZ's Worldview invited linguist and author George Lakoff, whose many books include Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, Second Edition and Metaphors We Live By, to discuss the Obama administration's attempts to wage a "political war of words" to combat the conservative political rhetoric that, according to Lakoff, has entrenched itself in the popular American idiom.

In the discussion Lakoff focuses his attention on the radically different rhetoric the Obama administration has used to approach the concepts like torture ("enhanced interrogation techniques" in Cheneyese), and "Islamic terrorism," ("violent extremism" as the Obama administration has phrased it), arguing that in order to win over the American public on many of the hot button issues of the day the president must formulate rhetoric that reconnects them to the personal realities of the issue they face.

Listen to the archived audio of the conversation on the WBEZ website or find out more about Lakoff's books on our website including this excerpt from Moral Politics.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
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Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth apologized yesterday after news broke about the company's now-canceled plan to host a series of sponsored dinners that would have offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record access to Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper's editorial staff.

The sponsorships, advertised as costing between $25,000 and $250,000, had generated waves of criticism. "If it's ugly for a Washington Post reporter to lobby for lobbyists," Slate's Jack Shafer, for one, argued, "it's doubly ugly for the publisher to do the same." Even if dinners had taken place, though, the lobbying they might have facilitated would have stood a high chance of failing.

As the authors of Lobbying and Policy Change point out, sixty percent of recent lobbying campaigns failed to change policy despite millions of dollars spent trying. After examining nearly one hundred issues, the authors found that resources explained less than five percent of the difference between successful and unsuccessful lobbying efforts.

But that doesn't mean, of course, that lobbies don't have any impact at all. When advocates for a given issue do finally succeed, the authors found, policy tends to change significantly—which corresponds with the argument coauthor Frank Baumgartner made with Bryan Jones in their classic Agendas and Instability in American Politics. In the newly updated second edition, Baumgartner and Jones take the long view of several issues—including nuclear energy, urban affairs, smoking, and auto safety—to demonstrate that bursts of rapid, unpredictable policy change punctuate the patterns of stability more frequently associated with government.

Archived in Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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 at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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
Posted by TXM at 02:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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 at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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 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
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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 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
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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
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“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
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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
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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
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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
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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 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
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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
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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
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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
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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 (3)

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
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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 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 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
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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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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,