In our new issue, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen tells the peculiar story of America’s unlikely romance with Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher who famously proclaimed the death of God. Nietzsche (1844-1900) did not live long enough to bask in the American spotlight, notes Ratner-

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“We’re becoming a nation of homebodies,” demographer William H. Frey wrote for the Brookings Institution’s blog last November, “and not by choice.” Frey was reacting to new Census data indicating that 11.6 percent of Americans moved in 2011, the lowest rate since statistics were first collected in 1948.

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In “Man as Machine," in the current issue of the WQ, contributing editor Max Byrd describes the French fascination with lifelike mechanical toys during and after the Enlightenment. Below he answers a few questions about his article.

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Four years ago, even the staunchest of pessimists might have been dismayed if they could have somehow learned that in 2012 the world economy would still be feeling the effects of recession. While the current economic downturn is the subject of a great deal of glum commentary, it has also, as demonstrated by this issue of the WQ, sparked much lively debate.

“Lessons of the Great Depression,” our cover cluster of articles, features a range of contrasting views on that calamity of the 1930s and the causes of our own current economic distress. Robert J. Samuelson finds in the Depression-era gold standard a parallel to the contemporary welfare state—a straitjacket that exacerbates economic ills. Louis Hyman answers with a historically based argument that stagnating wages and growing economic inequality are the root cause of our current distress and the source of the “debt bomb” that exploded in 2007 and 2008. Robert Z. Aliber contends that today’s “Mini-Depression” could have been avoided altogether if bank regulators and the Federal Reserve had acted to defuse that bomb, which was plainly visible amid the excesses of the last decade.

Elsewhere in the issue, journalist Zahid Hussain, the current Pakistan scholar here at the Wilson Center, offers an unusually well-informed report on Pakistan’s impoverished, little-studied tribal areas, whose status, he says, is crucial not only to his own country’s future but to

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With my (terrific) internship at The Wilson Quarterly behind me, I am about to set off for a semester of research and cultural and linguistic immersion in Tunisia, joining thousands of other young Americans who are traveling to the Middle East and North Africa for similar reasons.

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Christopher Hitchens, relentless provocateur and coruscating wit, died yesterday at age 62 of complications from cancer, with which he had waged a very public battle. His writing graced the pages of The Wilson Quarterly on a handful of occasions over the last two decades. Hitchens being Hitchens, none of these pieces lacks verve or insight.

In 1991, for example, Hitchens reviewed an anthology of articles from The Nation—where he was a columnist from 1982 to 2002—that had been collected into a book (The Nation, 1865-1990). In what would have been an apt description of himself, he wrote, “Most reformist journalists believe in liberty and in human reason, in letting the truth speak, but they also have a mission or policy which directs how that truth shall be used to fight injustices.”

Hitchens’s interests and agendas were many and varied. In 2005, he reviewed a book on Thomas Jefferson, about whom Hitchens himself wrote a biography. Five years earlier he mulled a biography of his beloved George Orwell, who managed to “get the chief issues of the 20th century right.” These were “fascism and Nazism, Stalinism, and imperialism,” all of which Hitchens opposed in one form or another. Over the years his pen strayed to other topics in the WQ: Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, the Spanish Civil War, the Balkans, political vitriol in Washington.  

In his review of the Nation anthology, Hitchens mentioned &

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Dear Readers,

THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE: Why Violence Has Declined. By Steven Pinker. Viking. 802 pp. $40

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Over at Marginal Revolution, one of the few blogs I read every day, economist Tyler Cowen cites his early 2009 piece in the WQ in a sobering post on the future of the euro. In that article, "Last Man Standing," Cowen wrote:

“It has become increasingly clear that the problems in European governance are severe – and I am referring to the wealthier nations, not Bosnia and Albania. The European nations are tied to each other through the European Union and the euro, but they don’t have a good method for

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Cullen Nutt: It’s nearly summer in Zimbabwe, and President Robert Mugabe’s campaign for reelection in 2012 is heating up. State television and radio outlets are said to feature a new song in which Mugabe—three months shy of his 88th birthday—sings about the injustices

State College, home to Penn State University’s main campus, is a sprawling town in the center of Pennsylvania, “three and a half hours from anywhere,” as the locals like to say. Its geographic isolation has a good deal to do with the debacle brought upon the university by the sex-abuse scandal in its legendary football program and, much worse, attempts for many years to cover it up. As most anyone who has followed the news recently knows, Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach who worked under the godlike head coach, Joe Paterno, is accused of sexually abusing young boys whom he met through the charity for at-risk youth he had founded, often bringing the boys onto university property and to football events.

From the time I arrived at Penn State in 1985 to head the English department, the place seemed extravagantly hierarchical and closed off, even for a land-grant university. Its presidents (three in my time) were all obsessed with public relations and cocooned by flatterers. The faculty includes many distinguished members but has always seemed unusually docile in its relations with the higher administration. Joe Paterno, however, was about the most effective supporter of academic seriousness in the whole place and had my admiration. When the renowned poet Czeslaw Milosz visited in 1990, nobody in the higher administration had heard of him or came to his appearances, though he was one of the few Nobel Prize winners to pass through State College.

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