The Wilson Quarterly - Surveying the World of Ideas

From the Editors: Nietzsche’s Numbers

Cullen Nutt — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 07:00:00 EST

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-Rosenhagen, a historian at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and author of American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas. (See the review in the New York Times.) “In the closing years of the 1890s, as Nietzsche entered the final phase of his mental twilight, his philosophy experienced a popular dawn in the United States,” Ratner-Rosenhagen writes. She continues:

The interest in Nietzsche grew so dramatically that by 1910 observers could, without hyperbole, claim that it was one of the most significant “intellectual romances” of the period. Virtually unknown during his productive lifetime in his native Germany, now, across the Atlantic, in an America he had known little of, Friedrich Nietzsche had become a posthumous popular celebrity and public intellectual.

The rapid rise of Nietzsche’s American star is striking, and it’s borne out by data of a distinctly contemporary sort. I searched for “Nietzsche” in Google’s Books Ngram Viewer, which graphs the occurrences by year of any word or phrase in Google’s vast collection of books. I limited my search to books published in the United States after 1890—translations of Nietzsche’s works first appeared in English in 1896, so starting a few years earlier provides a baseline. As Ratner-Rosenhagen promises, the results leave no doubt that talk of Nietzsche in the United States did indeed take off in the first decade of the 20th century.

Take a look at my graph. (FYI—The Y-axis shows the number of occurrences as a percentage of the total number of words in all the books published for a given year.) “Nietzsche” mentions spike around 1910, no doubt pushed upward by H. L. Mencken’s 1908 survey The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Mentions wax and wane until about 1950, when again they climb for two straight decades. It’s probably no coincidence that the Princeton philosopher Walter Kaufmann published hugely influential interpretations and translations of Nietzsche during that time.

Nor is it likely any coincidence that mentions of Nietzsche skyrocketed into the stratosphere beginning in the late 1980s. Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, which drew on Nietzsche in different ways and which made a big splash in the United States, were published in 1987 and 1992 respectively.

Nietzsche’s numbers tailed slightly at the turn of the millennium, but his appeal endures. “If there is a Nietzsche for all seasons,” Ratner-Rosenhagen writes, “it is because there was a Nietzsche for every self.”

Photo by lungstruck via flickr

From the Editors: Why Are Americans Staying Put?

Cullen Nutt — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EST

“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.

Homebodies indeed, but many Americans may not be complaining. Contrary to oft-cited short-term explanations—underwater mortgages, the hollow labor market, and the Great Recession more broadly—American migration has been in decline for decades, through both economic boom and bust. Economists Raven Molloy, Christopher L. Smith, and Abigail Wozniak make this point about interstate migration in a scholarly article that we highlight in an In Essence item, “Staying Put,” in our latest issue.

Molloy, Smith, and Wozniak find that virtually all demographic groups—across the spectrum of income, age, marital status, education level, and ethnic background—moved between states at lower rates in 2010 (and 2000) than they did in 1980. (The authors focus on interstate migration indicators; the new Census numbers announced in late 2011 also account for migration within states and counties.) Molloy, Smith, and Wozniak say there’s no ready explanation for the trend, let alone any evidence that the latest economic turmoil had more than a marginal impact.

Migration statistics during the years of the recession may themselves be suspect. Economists Greg Kaplan and Sam Schulhofer-Wohl wrote a paper last year aptly titled “Interstate Migration Has Fallen Less Than You Think.” They say the steeper than normal drop-off in migration since 2006 is a statistical red herring. That year the Census Bureau changed the way it made certain calculations, correcting what had previously been an artificially inflated interstate migration rate. Kaplan and Schulhofer-Wohl reconciled the data and found that the 2007-2009 recession had little effect. Rather, “the migration rate has merely followed its long-term downward trend.”

All this throws into doubt some recent commentary on American geographic mobility. In a column for The New York Times Magazine, Adam Davidson says the Census numbers point to a fundamental divide between the haves and the have-nots. “People aren’t packing up for new economic opportunities the way they used to,” he laments. Instead of “the one percenters versus everyone else, the split in our economy is really between two other classes: the mobile and immobile.”

Maybe not. Another explanation is that the American economic landscape is growing more homogenous. People have less reason to call in the movers. Both groups of authors cited above explore this possibility. Molloy, Smith, and Wozniak point out that amenities in any given place are more uniform than ever. Why move to the Pacific Northwest or to Texas when you can enjoy Seattle’s Best or On the Border anywhere in the country? And why move anywhere for a job when you can telecommute? Besides, in the era of two-worker families pulling up stakes isn’t that easy—and might not make sense.

The question, then, may not be one of money. Among other theories, Kaplan and Schulhofer-Wohl wonder aloud whether it may be the case that “migration is low because it is unneeded, not because it is costly.”

Photo by HeatherWeaver via flickr

From the Editors: Hunting Vaucanson’s Duck

Megan Buskey — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EST

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.

How did you first become interested in the story of French inventor Jacques de Vaucanson and his automates?

I worked my way through my undergraduate studies at Harvard doing magic shows at birthday parties. One day about five years ago, wandering about in Paris, I came across a little basement operation in the Marais, more like a penny arcade than anything else, called the Museum of Magic and Automates. As a magician emeritus, I dug out my five euros and trotted right in. Their automates were not impressive—rather shabby and flea-bitten, if you can say that about toys made of metal. But they were fun and the encounter led me to two other museums of automates in Paris, one a private collection out in the suburb of Neuilly and the other the great Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, where there is a wonderful collection of automates and a small bookstore with much to read about Vaucanson. I was not the person mentioned in the article who bolted and ran when the dulcimer lady started to play, but I find some of the automates distinctly spooky—and therefore interesting.

You argue that Vaucanson’s mechanical duck and his project for Louis XV, the Bleeding Man, reflected a desire to test what it means to be human. Another impetus for mechanical experimentation could be utilitarian rather than philosophical in nature—such as an effort to create robots that can execute tasks more quickly than humans can. Can you elaborate on that element in this story?

Well, Vaucanson and the king claimed they were interested in medical research, hence their efforts to make the blood flow in the automaton through rubber veins and arteries and their hope he would stand and walk. Partly this was true. Other scientists of the era had similar ambitions. But there was also a psychological dimension. Partly they were seeing their own ailments in the Bleeding Man and wondering how to cure themselves. But there was also something daring and irresistible about defying the Church. They shared some of the same motives as Dr. Frankenstein.

On the other hand, Vaucanson was actually a gifted inventor of practical devices. He made a number of extremely useful tools, especially when he worked as director of the Silk Manufactures in Lyon. There he devised machines that were efficient, tireless, and in some ways intelligent—essentially assembly line automates. The conservatoire has a number of these on display outside the Theater of Automates. As I say in the article, Vaucanson really helped to usher in the Industrial Revolution in Europe.

How has writing this article informed the direction of your work?

Hah! I liked the material so much I wrote a novel about a reporter in Paris in 1926 who comes across Vaucanson’s duck—his rival is the beautiful (of course) young Elsie Short, who works as a doll hunter for Thomas Edison. (True—Edison wanted to find the perfect European doll so he could install a tiny phonograph in its head and have it sing “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”) It was great fun to write. It comes out in the fall of 2012. We haven’t fixed a title yet. I wanted to call it The Sh**ting Duck, but this was inexplicably rejected. Right now it’s called Rue du Dragon, after the street where the action takes place (and on the theory that anything with “dragon” in the title this year will sell). I would welcome suggestions, however.

Have there been any false sightings of the Bleeding Man or any notable efforts to find him?

Only in libraries! The best single account is by British journalist Gaby Woods in her book Edison’s Eve (2002). There is a standard biography of Vaucanson in French and a certain number of academic articles in this country, mostly written in the impenetrable prose of the university. I don’t know of any serious efforts to find the Bleeding Man. I myself, however, do regard any passing duck with special attention.

From the Editors: Of More Than One Mind

Steven Lagerfeld — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EST

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 neighboring Afghanistan’s as well. Historian Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen provides a fascinating look at the appeal philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche has held for Americans over the past century—I think of the essay as “Nietzsche and You.” Digging a bit further back in time, historical novelist Max Byrd relates the true story of an 18th-century Frenchman’s efforts to construct lifelike mechanical beings, and reflects on these creations’ connection to contemporary science.

One of the great rewards of editing the WQ is the opportunity to engage with that curious, intellectually demanding crowd that is our readership. Lately, readers have been telling me they want to see more contrasting arguments and ideas in our pages, the better to make up their own minds about things. In this issue, we are confident you will find, we deliver in spades.

From the Editors: The Arabic Hurdle

Courtney Joline — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EST

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.

Just as the Cold War spurred an increase in Russian language study, the 9/11 attacks and the two wars that followed have led more and more students to focus on the Middle East. Good data are hard to come by, but according to the Institute for International Education, the number of American students studying in Arabic-speaking countries soared 600 percent between 2002 and 2007, to more than 3,000. On U.S. campuses, enrollment in Arabic classes more than doubled by 2005.

The rise of Arabic language and cultural studies has two key sources: the federal government’s practical focus on promoting it and my generation’s inherent interest in cross-cultural awareness. After 9/11 and the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the State Department had fewer than 60 employees who were completely fluent in Arabic, and only five were considered up to the job of representing the United States on television programs in the Middle East. Now the State Department is channeling money into a new effort to increase undergraduate instruction in 13 languages, the Critical Language Scholarship Program. In the Middle East, it offers summer programs in Jordan, Egypt, Oman, Morocco, and Tunisia. Arabic is one of the tougher languages to learn. "It's easier to train someone to fly an F-14 than. . . to speak Arabic," one specialist told the Associated Press.

For me, the semester in Tunisia is an opportunity not only to strengthen my language skills but to immerse myself in another community and culture. While many adults in my life question my decision to travel to the Middle East and ask why I can’t go somewhere “normal like England or France,” I’m sure of my choices and excited at the prospect pushing myself into an entirely new environment. My generation has seen firsthand the necessity of cross-cultural understanding, and that can only go so far without understanding one another’s languages. By going abroad and focusing on a critical language, we hope to one day change the way America deals with the Middle East and change the conversation from one filled with cold, hard facts and bureaucracy into one with the basis in mutual understanding and respect.

Photo credit: A Tunisian suuq by Tony Hisgett via flickr

From the Editors: A Man of Parts

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 07:00:00 EST

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 “the need for arrogant extremism in politics.” He was sometimes accused of adopting such a pose himself.

In a WQ review of Hitchens’s final essay collection, Arguably, published earlier this year, Michael O’Donnell set these criticisms aside. Hitchens was an undeniable and irrepressible prizefighter. “Hitchens writes with a spontaneous, understated, digressive style, orbiting a target with asides and allusions until it is all but lost from sight,” O’Donnell wrote. “Then, like Muhammad Ali, he suddenly stops dancing and punches with his whole arm.”

Photo credit: meeshypants via flickr

From the Editors: The WQ’s Top 10 Books of 2011

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 07:00:00 EST

Dear Readers,

The process of selecting the 10 best books reviewed in the WQ’s pages this year occasioned some spirited debates in our offices. There was so much good stuff to choose from! The 10 titles we finally settled on, a few of which will appear on many best-of lists, and others of which were simply the particular favorites of our editors and reviewers, offer a veritable feast of scholarship, inquiry, and fine—even brave—writing. Compliments of the season, from our shelves to yours.

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

A monumental book that draws on anthropology, psychology, history, neuroscience, and other fields to show that humans have grown less violent over time.

DENG XIAOPING AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF CHINA. By Ezra F. Vogel.
Belknap/Harvard. 876 pp. $39.95

An exhaustively researched portrait of the leader who transformed 20th-century China.

HOW TO LIVE: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. By Sarah Bakewell. Other Press. 389 pp. $25

An unconventional biography of the French nobleman who invented the essay.

THE IMMORTALIZATION COMMISSION: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death. By John Gray. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 273 pp. $24

A philosophical and historical treatise about the ultimate futility of pushing against death’s outer limit.

IS MARRIAGE FOR WHITE PEOPLE? How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone. By Ralph Richard Banks. Dutton. 289 pp. $25.95

A Stanford law professor’s nuanced exploration of the wide gap that persists between the marriage rates of blacks and whites.

MALCOLM X: A Life of Reinvention. By Manning Marable. Viking. 594 pp. $30

The crowning achievement of a scholar who made his last great work, before his death earlier this year, the definitive biography of the radical black leader.

ODESSA: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams. By Charles King. W. W. Norton. 336 pp. $27.95

An elegant history of Odessa, the Russian Black Sea city whose past is studded with tragedy along with periods of dynamism and creativity.

THINKING, FAST AND SLOW. By Daniel Kahneman. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 499 pp. $30

A book about the irrational ways that humans make decisions, by the psychologist who made a science of the study.

THE WILD LIFE OF OUR BODIES: Predators, Parasites, and Partners That Shape Who We Are Today. By Rob Dunn. Harper. 290 pp. $26.99

A biologist proposes that some of the parasites and bacteria modern life has scrubbed away are necessary for human health.

A WORLD ON FIRE: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War. By Amanda Foreman. Random House. 956 pp. $35

A sweeping account of Britain’s multifaceted role in the American Civil War.

--The Editors

From the Editors: Economists Got This One Right

Steven Lagerfeld — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 07:00:00 EST

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 making collective decisions in contentious times….

Spain, Italy, and Greece, which have all lost their premier AAA credit rating, may require some form of financial aid. The Germans might look to spread this burden around Europe, but there are few places to turn. France and the Netherlands could chip in, but the hat cannot be passed very widely.”

In his Marginal Revolution post, Cowen notes that he wasn’t the only economist who saw trouble coming in Europe. (But what about the political scientists? After all, the euro crisis is at bottom a political failure.) “It is sometimes asserted that the economics profession should lose some status because so few economists predicted the U.S. financial crisis. I’m not sure economists should be judged by their ability to predict asset price movements, but grant the point. The euro crisis is now here, and it seems our profession should win some of its status back.”

From the Editors: What We re Reading

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 07:00:00 EST

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 of white rule and the importance of economic development for blacks. The book I’m currently reading, Peter Godwin’s memoir Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa, gives vivid evidence of why Mugabe’s musical message still resonates for many of his countrymen, even three decades after the advent of majority rule and Mugabe’s rise to power. Journalist Godwin grew up in white-ruled Rhodesia. He was raised in a fairly liberal household, but—the reader is reminded—much of white society oppressed and abused the black majority.

Godwin’s book doesn’t lack for boyhood innocence, what with his many colorful African adventures and mishaps. If it weren’t for the tragedies that ensued—war in the 1970s, mass killing in the 1980s, and then spectacular economic collapse and election violence in the 2000s—one might be tempted to call Mukiwa an apt read for the Zimbabwean summer.

Sarah L. Courteau: I’ve been reading Jeffrey Kluger’s The Sibling Effect: Brothers, Sisters, and the Bonds That Define Us, in an effort to understand the myriad dynamics of my own large family. I’m the oldest of seven, and have two older siblings through my dad’s first marriage. That’s 55 one-on-one relationships playing out at a given time. Kluger, a journalist at Time magazine, explores the benefits and drawbacks of birth order, the sometimes-brutal reality that most parents have a favorite child, and sibling rivalry. His breezy magazine writer’s style can occasionally grate, and even he admits that some of the findings are speculative (psychology is a squishy science), but it’s impossible to read this book and not see your family—and yourself—with fresh eyes.

Megan Buskey: You know you like a book when, the day after staying up late to read the first chapters, you return to the bookstore and buy another copy for a friend. So went my experience with Pulphead, a new collection by essayist John Jeremiah Sullivan, which is culled from his work for publications such as GQ and The Paris Review. The publisher pitches the book as “a tour of America’s cultural landscape” and with pieces on such disparate subjects as Michael Jackson, a Christian rock festival, and Andrew Lytle, the late don of Southern letters, it certainly fits that bill. But what brings this collection together, and will send you stockpiling copies to give as Christmas presents, is Sullivan’s dry, funny voice and his implicit pledge to never stop thinking.

Photo credit: book + fire by futurestreet via flickr

From the Editors: Paterno and the Poet

Christopher Clausen — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 07:00:00 EST

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. But Paterno, who happened to be in the Nittany Lion Inn for another event, asked me to introduce him. As I did so, a female administrator coyly asked Milosz if he knew what an eminent man he was meeting. Paterno brushed her off with Brooklyn contempt and added, “What he does is important; there’s no reason he should have heard of me.” One of the genuinely tragic aspects of the present sordid affair is that vanity led Joe to stay on as coach a decade too long and to surrender to the university administration’s compulsion to control information.

The befuddled university trustees, used to having their own way in what is very much a company town, seemed appalled at the discovery that they had completely lost control of the story, and that with ESPN and The New York Times on their case the supine local newspaper was the least of their problems. Paterno, who is 84, announced his retirement in what proved the vain hope of being allowed to finish out the current football season. The embattled president, Graham Spanier, was forced out a few hours later. A cynic might suspect these summary executions showed the same fixation on public relations that had led to the original cover-up. In addition to the criminal trials of Sandusky and two administrators indicted for perjury, civil suits and a federal investigation will probably keep the university’s lawyers and PR staff busy for years. The steady drip-drip-drip has only begun. If anyone in or outside Happy Valley needed a lesson in the dangers of big-time athletics, the temptations of secrecy, or the bureaucratic arrogance of mega-universities, here it is.

Photo credit: Statue of Joe Paterno on Penn State Campus by audreyjm529 via flickr

In Essence: Squawk Box

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EST

THE SOURCE: “Understanding the Rise of Talk Radio” by Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj, in PS: Political Science & Politics, Oct. 2011.

Hit the "scan" button on your car radio and you're just as likely to land on a station with a right-wing pundit lambasting health care reform as the latest Rihanna hit. Talk radio is thriving: About 3,500 American radio stations use that format today, up from about 1,750 in 2007 and just 500 in 1991. Political scientist Jeffrey M. Berry and sociologist Sarah Sobieraj, both of Tufts University, argue that the boom is more a matter of money talking than politics.

As with virtually all advertising-dependent media, the AM-FM, or “terrestrial,” radio industry has suffered from technological disruption and the harsh economic climate, Berry and Sobieraj write. The old methods of covering the bills aren’t working: Total radio revenues declined from $20 billion in 2000 to $14 billion in 2009.

Tuning in to some easy listening on the commute home was once commonplace, but drivers now relax to commercial-free playlists uploaded on their MP3 players and smartphones. Listener loyalty has been further eroded as big corporations have bought out mom-and-pop music stations and laid off local on-air personalities to consolidate costs. As audiences for radio music programs have dwindled, so too have the ad dollars music stations are able to command.

Talk radio defies this trend. Because it is highly topical, reflecting news of the day, its audience has not readily decamped to competitors such as podcasts. Radio listeners are relatively well educated and wealthy, and pay attention to what’s being broadcast to them—all plusses for advertisers. One radio professional in Los Angeles reported that “even in the current soft economy, some of [local AM station] KFI’s programs have waitlists for advertisers who want to buy commercial time.” And most radio stations in the United States are now owned by a few corporations, so local stations can easily fill their schedules with syndicated talk shows that cost little and bring in ad dollars.

Some cite talk radio’s politically conservative cast as the reason for its growth. But it’s just natural that talk radio would swing to the right, Berry and Sobieraj say. Liberals listen to a wider array of radio—blacks and Hispanics tend to tune into niche stations, for instance—and there’s always National Public Radio. The explosion of talk radio is a matter of dollars and cents, they insist. “For many stations music became unprofitable and switching to talk was an attempt to stay in business.”

Photo by ettlz via flickr

In Essence: Staying Put

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EST

THE SOURCE: “Internal Migration in the United States” by Raven Molloy, Christopher L. Smith, and Abigail Wozniak, in Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2011.

Americans like to think of themselves as a restless people, always ready to pack up and move in search of opportunity. But in the past 30 years, they have been increasingly stuck in place.

In the 1980s, for example, 3 percent of men migrated from one state to another every year; by the 2000s, only 1.7 percent made such moves. What lies behind this “historically unprecedented” 30-year decline? Raven Molloy and Christopher L. Smith, economists at the Federal Reserve Board, and Abigail Wozniak, an economist at the University of Notre Dame, say the trend defies easy explanation. It has endured for too long to be blamed on the ups and downs of the economy, and it has affected virtually every segment of the population.

Data gleaned from the Census Bureau and the Internal Revenue Service show that younger people and the more educated migrate at higher rates than others. Renters are more likely to pile their goods into a moving van than homeowners, as are childless households versus those with children. (While there has been much talk about the large number of people said to be stuck in their current homes because their mortgages are underwater, the researchers say there is little evidence in their data that this is a factor in decreased mobility.) Blacks and Hispanics migrate at lower rates than whites. The unemployed move more than those with jobs. Yet all these groups have migrated at declining rates since 1980.

In Europe and Canada, geographical mobility hasn’t changed much. Americans remain more footloose, even now. They are more than twice as likely as Italians to pull up stakes, for example. In 2009, almost a third of native-born Americans lived in a state outside the one in which they were born. (The intriguing exception to the rule is Britain, which has levels of geographical mobility comparable to those in the United States and has also experienced declining mobility.)

What is keeping more Americans in one place? The rise of telecommuting and more flexible work arrangements may play a role. Job markets and amenities have grown more homogenous over the years, possibly reducing the hunger to venture out in search of greener pastures. It may be that what economists call “labor market frictions” have increased—it has become harder to change jobs. In any event, the authors say, there could be a bright side to the new trend if Americans who don’t have one foot out the door are willing to invest more in the communities they currently call home.

Photo by Madame Ming via flickr

In Essence: The Empty Threat of Cyberwar

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EST

THE SOURCE: “Cyber War Will Not Take Place” by Thomas Rid, in Journal of Strategic Studies, Feb. 2012.

The specter of cyberwar haunts American leaders. “The next Pearl Harbor could very well be a cyberattack,” Leon Panetta warned last year when he was still CIA director.

Rubbish, says Thomas Rid, a reader in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. There are plenty of dark doings online, but they fall far short of war. “Cyberwar does not take place in the present. And it is highly unlikely that cyberwar will occur in the future,” he asserts.

The 19th-century Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz formulated the classic definition of an act of war: It must be violent, purposeful, and overtly political. Few cyberattacks on record have met even one of these criteria. Instead, cyberattackers of a political bent—government sponsored and otherwise—prowl the Web with three old-fashioned objectives: espionage, subversion, and sabotage. Online or off, acts of these kinds can accompany war, but they also occur in peacetime.

Online espionage is “booming,” Rid writes. In 2008, the Pentagon reported that spyware—allegedly of Russian provenance—had slithered its way onto a laptop at a U.S. military base in the Middle East. Initially, only the Pentagon’s unclassified network was compromised. But the bug was crafty. It automatically copied itself onto removable thumb drives, leading an unwitting user to transfer the spyware to the military’s secret network. Defense officials blamed the incident on an unnamed “foreign intelligence agency.”

Subversion is also common. In 2007, assailants bombarded dozens of Estonian Web sites after a statue revered by Russians was moved from the center of Tallinn, the Estonian capital. Estonian officials blamed Moscow for the chaos, but they lacked conclusive evidence. During the clash between Georgia and Russia a year later, Georgian Web sites were attacked. Again Moscow was blamed, and again the accusers lacked proof. In any case, Rid says these were mere “cyber scuffles,” even though they made headlines. The attacks weren’t violent, and they had little effect.

The Stuxnet computer virus is the latest and most serious instance of cybersabotage. In 2010, the super-sophisticated bug infected thousands of computers worldwide, but evidently its ultimate target was two computer systems at the heart of Iran’s nuclear program. The programming of the bug bore Israeli—and possibly American—fingerprints.

But even the unleashing of Stuxnet did not qualify as an act of war. The virus was not violent. Its origins—and the goals of those who created it—can only be guessed at.

Stuxnet has escalated cyberconflict to a new level, Rid allows, but it also shows how much more difficult life is becoming for attackers. Whoever designed the bug needed impeccable intelligence to know where and how to deliver it. A computer security expert joked that Stuxnet’s masters “probably even knew the shoe size” of the people operating the targeted computers. Would-be saboteurs aren’t always so well informed. Nor are they always so well financed; the price tag to engineer Stuxnet was probably very high. The advantage may be shifting to the defense.

What’s certain, Rid concludes, is that war on the Web is hardly inevitable. “There was no and there is no Pearl Harbor of cyberwar.”

Photo credit by solo via flickr

In Essence: For Love or Money

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EST

THE SOURCE: “Big Criticism” by Evan Kindley, in Critical Inquiry, Autumn 2011.

In 1946, poet and critic R.P. Blackmur sent a letter to many of America’s most prominent writers and critics. “For reasons that will later become apparent,” it began, “we should be very grateful for your best opinion as to what literary magazines now being published in the United States are of the most use to literature.” The impetus behind the query was the Rockefeller Foundation, which had decided to support literary magazines and had asked Blackmur to determine which were the most deserving.

The letter’s mysterious introduction and “flat bureaucratic tone” elicited some extraordinarily candid assessments of the country’s literary present and future, writes Evan Kindley, a Princeton doctoral candidate and the managing editor of The Los Angeles Review of Books. Many respondents weighed in as well on the benefits and perils of offering financial support to publications whose marginal status and anti-commercial stance were part of their identity.

The friction between aesthetics and politics was a central concern for many of the respondents. Poet and critic Randall Jarrell admired the leftist Partisan Review (which ceased publication in 2003), but also expressed reservations, in a critique that, with a couple of substitutions, might well apply to many literary magazines today: “Although its politics are doctrinaire and academic in that funny New York professional- left way, they haven’t prevented it from printing other groups, Stalinists excepted. . . . The worst things about it are its extraordinary limitations and lack of imagination: everything is looked at from the point of view of someone who’s semi-Marxist, fairly avant-garde, reasonably Bohemian, anti-bourgeois, cosmopolitan, anti-Stalinist, lives in New York, likes Mondrian, etc., etc., etc.”

Many of the writers saw the advantages of foundation support for little magazines—a number had folded under the twin pressures of the Depression and World War II, and those that remained were struggling. But these writers were also concerned about the effects such support might have on literary culture. Writing of Poetry, in whose pages he himself had been published, Wallace Stevens observed that even with a lavish endowment, the magazine would still only be “a modest establishment.” The difference, he added, would be that “no-one will write for it any longer for love. The New Republic would discover that it was the tool of the luxurious. Everyone would expect poets to buy the drinks, and so on.”
Stevens’s ambivalence points to an inherent conflict in the endowment of literature by virtually any big institution—even if such support allows writers to avoid rank commercialism. “Literature could perhaps become big without selling out to the market,” Kindley summarizes, “but at the cost of making itself explicable, rationalizable, justifiable.”

Respondents had less anxiety about supporting criticism than imaginative literature, Kindley notes. The Partisan Review, The Kenyon Review, and The Sewanee Review—“the ‘big three’ little magazines” that were the top vote-getters—were regarded, “first and foremost, as critical magazines.” And “there is just not the same sense of sacredness, and hence violability, attached to criticism. . . . The thinking may have been, if you have to institutionalize something, institutionalize criticism.” But perhaps most important, criticism naturally feeds the grants-based literary economy, because foundations are forever in search of justifications and distinctions in deciding where to put their money.

Though only The Kenyon Review and The Sewanee Review received Rockefeller money, a new institutions-based age in literature dawned. Out of this grew what Kindley terms “Big Criticism,” and, on its heels, “Big Theory” (as practiced by the likes of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault). Both Big Criticism and Big Theory “owe their existence to a standing need to justify literature and literary culture, which means, in a capitalist society, justifying their subsidization.” This modern arrangement, Kindley concludes, has fostered “the literary and intellectual culture we know in the United States today.”

In Essence: The Budget’s Next Battlefront

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EST

THE SOURCE: "The New Commanding Heights” by Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz, in National Affairs, Summer 2011.

The debt ceiling fracas that consumed Washington this summer made it seem as if restoring economic health was only a matter of finding a new balance of taxes and spending. But Arnold Kling of the Cato Institute and Nick Schulz of the American Enterprise Institute argue that policymakers are neglecting a transformational development on the horizon”: Health care and education are on track to become “the heart of the economy." That is, or should be, the central issue, they argue.

Unlike many fields, health care and education will enjoy solid demand and wage growth for the foreseeable future. They’ve already accounted for the vast majority of job gains in recent memory: Employment in health care, education, and other parts of the public sector increased by 16 percent over the past 10 years, while employment in all other sectors fell by eight percent. And the trend will only continue. The way the modern economy has evolved means that Americans use a smaller percentage of their income for basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter, freeing up money for secondary but still integral services such as education and health care. What’s more, even in hard times, people refrain from tightening their belts when it comes to these secondary services: In 2008, at the height of the panic over the financial system, personal spending on education and health care continued to rise.

Kling and Schulz note that it is also hard “to squeeze labor costs out of” these industries. Teachers and medical professionals need to have good judgment and problem-solving skills, and are virtually impossible to replace with machines. Just compare the idea of “increasing the number of operations per surgeon, or the number of essays graded per teacher,” with increasing the speed of a production line. And while the market generally offers people in such low-productivity occupations lower wages, the indispensability of teachers, doctors, and the like means their wages will climb to remain competitive with those in professions in which output is more readily manipulated.

Another notable characteristic of the education and health care industries is that they’re dominated by government. Kling and Schulz argue that as these two areas’ shares of the economy continue to grow—they totaled 26 percent of U.S. GDP in 2010—they will increasingly exert a negative influence. The public sector is largely exempt from imperatives that are routine in the private sector, such as “economic value, efficiency, productivity, and consumer preferences.” If so much of the U.S. labor market comes within the purview of the state, the values of the private sector may lose their salience. Kling and Schulz predict that “the struggle for power over these sectors will be the focal point of American domestic politics in the 21st century.”

Photo credit: Ahmad Nawawi via flickr

In Essence: Married to Google

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 07:00:00 EST

THE SOURCE: “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips”by Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, and Daniel M. Wegner, in Sciencexpress , July 14, 2011.

In an age when most information is just a few keystrokes away, it’s natural to wonder: Is Google weakening our powers of memory? According to psychologists Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University, Jenny Liu of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Daniel M. Wegner of Harvard, the Internet has not so much diminished intelligent recall as tweaked it.

The trio’s research shows what most computer users can tell you anecdotally: When you know you have the Internet at hand, your memory relaxes. In one of their experiments, 46 Harvard undergraduates were asked to answer 32 trivia questions on computers. After each one, they took a quick Stroop test, in which they were shown words printed in different colors and then asked to name the color of each word. They took more time to name the colors of Internet-related words, such as modem and browser. According to Stroop test conventions, this is because the words were related to something else that they were already thinking about—yes, they wanted to fire up Google to answer those tricky trivia questions.

In another experiment, the authors uncovered evidence suggesting that access to computers plays a fundamental role in what people choose to commit to their God-given hard drive. Subjects were instructed to type 40 trivia-like statements into a dialog box. Half were told that the computer would erase the information and half that it would be saved. Afterward, when asked to recall the statements, the students who were told their typing would be erased remembered much more. Lacking a computer backup, they apparently committed more to memory.

In another version of this experiment, the participants were informed that the statements they had keyed in were saved in various folders with forgettable names such as “facts,” “points,” and “items.” Still, they did a better job of remembering the folders than they did retaining the information itself. The researchers say this shows that people are better at remembering where information is to be found.

There’s nothing alarming about any of this, Sparrow and colleagues insist. What some psychologists call “transactive memory” is a familiar feature of the human mind. Married couples often divide memories—the wife may remember the Social Security numbers of everyone in the family, while the husband might remember when the cars need an oil change. Each knows to ask the other when the need arises. Perhaps one way of looking at the Internet age is that we haven’t lost our memories but have gained a new spouse, and its name is Google.

Photo credit: ASurroca via flickr

In Essence: Capitol Hill’s Heroines

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 07:00:00 EST

THE SOURCE: “The Jackie (and Jill) Robinson Effect: Why Do Congresswomen Outperform Congressmen?” by Sarah F. Anzia and Christopher R. Berry, in American Journal of Political Science, July 2011.

Women may be underrepresented in Congress, but those who get elected to office are no shrinking violets. Research by political scientists Sarah F. Anzia of Stanford University and Christopher R. Berry of the University of Chicago shows that congresswomen are more effective on Capitol Hill than their male counterparts. Female legislators secure nine percent more federal discretionary spending for their districts than congressmen do—on average, a difference of $49 million per district annually. They also sponsor about three more bills per Congress than their male peers (the average per member is 18), and cosponsor roughly 26 more bills.

Would Congress be more effective if more women were elected? (They’ve held an average of just 17 percent of the seats in recent years.) It’s not likely, Anzia and Berry say. Congresswomen aren’t overachievers because women are intrinsically better legislators, the authors argue, but because the barriers to entry for women in congressional politics are so high that those who succeed simply have more talent and put in more effort than the average man who wins at the polls. If those barriers were to fall, so would the performance level of most female legislators.

The authors attribute women’s superior performance in Congress to what they call the “Jill Robinson effect.” Like the famed African-American baseball player Jackie Robinson, whose combination of great athletic talent and outstanding character persuaded the major leagues to desegregate, congresswomen have to prove their mettle and then some before they can win entry to the fortress that is Capitol Hill. The persistence of discrimination against female politicians, even in the wake of the 2008 presidential campaign, in which Hillary Clinton finished a close second for the Democratic nomination, is indicated by a recent survey that found 23 percent of American adults believed men to be more emotionally suited for politics than women. In another survey, 11 percent said that they wouldn’t vote for a woman for president even if she were qualified for the job.

Women are conscious of the bias, and it discourages all but the most competitive would-be female congressional candidates from entering the electoral fray, Anzia and Berry argue. One study found that 90 percent of women with a suitable profile for political office reported believing that there would be prejudice against them in political contests because of their gender.

Female candidates running in conservative districts have to be especially tenacious. Yet there is a considerable payoff that comes with electing a woman in these locales, Anzia and Berry find. Conservative congresswomen bring home even more federal dollars than their female colleagues from liberal districts.

Image credit: **Lucky Cavey** via flickr

In Essence: The Mighty Spud

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 07:00:00 EST

THE SOURCE: “The Potato’s Contribution to Population and Urbanization: Evidence From a Historical Experiment” by Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian, in The Quarterly Journal of Economics , May 2011.

Consider the potato: It’s dull in color, bland in taste, and prone to rot. Europeans initially suspected the spud of being poisonous because it bore a resemblance to the skin of leprosy victims. But the humble tuber has spurred great things, according to economists Nathan Nunn of Harvard and Nancy Qian of Yale. The significant increase in population and urbanization in Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries owed a good deal to the incorporation of the spud into regional diets.

The potato’s unappealing exterior masks an abundance of virtues. “Because potatoes contain nearly all important vitamins and nutrients, they support life better than any other crop,” Nunn and Qian report. Add milk, with its stores of vitamins A and D, and you’ve got a diet that humans can live on. Potatoes are also packed with energy. An acre of spuds yields about three times more calories than an acre of wheat, barley, or oats. Plus, potatoes are easy to grow in tandem with other crops, and they make great fodder for cattle and other livestock.

The potato is native to South America, and was brought to the Eastern Hemisphere by Spanish explorers in the 16th century. Most of the countries of Europe were lucky enough to have the kind of rocky, fertile soil suitable for growing this modest-seeming wonder food. They began to cultivate the potato in earnest in the early 18th century.

Living standards and life expectancies in potato-friendly areas soon improved, pushing up fertility rates. The average height of males grew half an inch. After controlling for a variety of factors known to influence population growth such as religion and trade relations, Nunn and Qian credit the introduction of the spud for about 26 percent of the population growth in Europe between 1700 and 1900—a time when its population exploded from 120 million to 390 million people.

The potato also influenced where Europe’s growing population lived. The profusion of potatoes pushed down their market price, sending farm folk into cities to look for work—a trend that is plainly seen in city population numbers 50 years after the introduction of the potato. Nunn and Qian found that 27 to 34 percent of the increase in the rate of urbanization in potato-suitable areas could be traced to the spud.

Western Europe enjoyed a series of advances during the 18th and 19th centuries that made it the richest, most developed region of the period. While there are many reasons for Europe’s success, the potato seldom gets the credit it deserves.

Photo credit: Russian fingerlings by Dag Endresen, via flickr

In Essence: India’s Sensual Past

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 07:00:00 EST

THE SOURCE: “From Kama to Karma: The Resurgence of Puritanism in Contemporary India” by Wendy Doniger, in Social Research , Spring 2011.

Attacks on stores and restaurants that celebrate Valentine’s Day. Protests against artists and writers who link Hindu gods with sexuality. The arrest of couples who put their arms around each in public. These incidents in India today aren’t isolated, argues the Indologist Wendy Doniger of the University of Chicago. Throughout much of the country, Hindu fundamentalists are engaged in “pervasive and often violent moral policing.” Many of them blame the West for tainting India with lasciviousness, but they’re pointing a finger in the wrong direction, Doniger writes.

India has a rich tradition of eroticism, and a tradition, just as old, of what Doniger calls “Hindu Puritanism.” The Rig Veda, India’s earliest Hindu sacred text, written around 1500 BC, “revels in the language of both pleasure and fertility.” Various other texts, including the Upanishads and the Tantras, which appeared in subsequent centuries, refer to ritual sex. But sexual acts coexisted with the path of meditation and asceticism—some interpreted the acts as intended to occur only on a symbolic level—and so a kind of religious doublethink arose that fostered tolerance.

The more secular Kamasutra, a book that today is referred to much more often than it is read, appeared in the third century AD. Some of the views that the author, Vatsyayana, expressed about women and homosexuality are liberal even by today’s standards in India. Yet “the Kamasutra plays almost no role at all in the sexual consciousness of contemporary Indians,” in part because it is largely known through the ham-handed translation by Sir Richard Francis Burton (and various others who generally aren’t credited) published in 1883. In any case, Burton and other Britons who celebrated India’s erotic traditions were outnumbered by Protestant British colonizers and missionaries who were put off by Hinduism’s “amatory excesses,” exemplified by gods such as Krishna—“all those arms, all those heads, all those wives.”

Many elite Hindus admired the British colonizers and adopted their views of Hinduism. “The fraction of Hinduism that appealed to Protestant, evangelical tastes at all was firmly grounded in . . . the philosophical, renunciant path,” Doniger writes. Rammohan Roy (1772–1833), one of several religious leaders who toned down Hinduism’s sexy side, developed a strain of religion that combined monistic Hindu beliefs with elements of Islam, Unitarianism, and even the ideas of the Freemasons.

Nineteenth- and 20th-century liberal Indian intellectuals tended to explain the shift from appreciation of to embarrassment about Hinduism’s erotic past by blaming marauding Mughals and British Victorians. While there are elements of truth in these generalizations, they ignore the Mughals and the Britons who celebrated the Hindu erotic arts, while downplaying India’s own history of “Hindu antieroticism.”

What India has picked up from the West is the bad habit of censorship. The erotic and the ascetic have a long history of coexistence in India that is endangered today, but the ancient “erotic path” won’t be easily eradicated, Doniger suggests, in a country where two-thirds of young adults say they would have casual sex before an arranged marriage.

Image: The Hindu god Krishna surrounded by ladies, from the British Museum

In Essence: Polluting Young Minds

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 07:00:00 EST

THE SOURCE: "Air Pollution Around Schools Is Linked to Poorer Student Health and Academic Performance” by Paul Mohai, Byoung-Suk Kweon, Sangyun Lee, and Kerry Ard, in Health Affairs, May 2011.

Air pollution is not good for anybody, but it’s particularly harmful to children. With their high respiration rates, kids take in more polluted air relative to their body weight than adults do. And because their bodies are still developing, they are especially vulnerable to pollution’s effects. Lead and manganese, for example, have a direct impact on children’s brains. “Children exposed to air pollution perform worse on cognitive functioning tests and have impaired neurological function and lower IQ scores compared with other children,” report Paul Mohai, who teaches environmental policy at the University of Michigan, and three colleagues. In light of this evidence, say the authors, it’s bad news that many schools are located very close to significant sources of air pollution.

In a study of Michigan’s 3,660 public schools, Mohai and colleagues found that almost half were in the most polluted parts of the state. Two-thirds of students were attending schools sited in the bottom fifth of geographic tracts in terms of air pollution. (Each tract is one square kilometer.) Moreover, within individual school districts, most schools were located in the worst-polluted neighborhoods. The authors also uncovered stark racial disparities: While 44 percent of white students were attending schools in the worst-polluted tenth of geographic tracts, 82 percent of their black peers and 62 percent of their Latino peers were enrolled in such schools.

Mohai and colleagues found that the levels of air pollution surrounding schools are “statistically significant predictors” of academic outcomes, even when the data are adjusted to account for rural-urban disparities and other factors. The 40 percent of schools exposed to the highest level of air pollution had significantly worse attendance rates and academic performance than other schools.

Schools wind up in bad spots chiefly because the land there is cheaper. Only seven states prohibit school construction near sources of industrial pollution: California, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Utah, and West Virginia. Indiana is the only state that sets a minimum distance (500 feet). The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released a set of school siting guidelines last year, but they are voluntary.

Tougher rules are long overdue, Mohai and his colleagues contend. More can be done both to prevent air pollution from infiltrating schools and to minimize indoor sources—by using paint with nonvolatile organic compounds, for example. Even measures as obvious as preventing buses from idling near schools would help.

Photo credit: michaelgoodin via flickr

Current Books: Pointed Questions

James Reston Jr. — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 07:00:00 EST

GOD’S JURY:
The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World.
By Cullen Murphy.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 310 pp. $27

The history of Vatican City stretches back to the first century ad, and it is a story filled with more heroes and villains, saints and sinners, high-minded visionaries and lowbrow crooks, than Hollywood’s morgue of B-movie scripts. Everyone who has done research in the exquisite Vatican Library comes away with a few experiences that can enthrall any dinner party. When, in 1991, I was researching the life of Galileo, I was escorted by a bloodless German priest, the head of the Vatican Archives, through the narrow corridors of the stacks, up serpentine staircases, past multiple locked doors and glass cases filled with the golden gifts of kings to popes over the centuries, into an inner sanctum. There, I would be shown the transcript of the Inquisition’s four withering interrogations of Galileo. The priest removed a strap lock across a steel cabinet and reverently opened a middle drawer, reaching for the leather-bound record. Next to it was another volume.

“What’s the other book?” I asked.

“Oh, those are the letters between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn,” he answered.

Like me, Vanity Fair editor Cullen Murphy is a member of the Vatican Archives fraternity. In Are We Rome? (2007), he plumbed the history of the ancient empire for parallels to modern America. His provocative new book, God’s Jury, examines the Catholic Inquisition for insight into our own time.

Early in God’s Jury, Murphy introduces himself as a Catholic and an American. This suggests that perhaps his book will be a personal journey into the moral center of his faith and his citizenship. “I ventured into the world of the Inquisition and its offspring in the 1990s, motivated at first by the Vatican’s attempts to silence or censor a significant number of prominent theologians, some of whom I had come to know,” he writes. Issues of torture and domestic surveillance surfaced after 9/11. And so, he thought, the Inquisition offered a “lens” through which to view—or a “template” against which to contrast—issues of our time.

He divides the historical Inquisition into three major categories—the Medieval, the Spanish, and the Roman—and analyzes its later globalization. For Murphy, an authentic inquisition must consist of five elements: a bureaucratic machine, secret monitoring and surveillance, censorship, paranoia about an enemy operating secretly within, and, perhaps most important, moral certainty. “Moral certainty,” he writes, “ignites every inquisition and then feeds it with oxygen.”

The machinery of the Inquisition was established in the early 13th century, when the Roman Catholic Church was confronted with the so-called Cathar heresy in southern France. (The Cathars deviated from official doctrine with their belief in a Manichaean world of good and evil, in which God could be responsible only for the good, not the evil. They viewed Rome as the offspring of the Whore of Babylon and regarded its priests as licentious and corrupt.) After the assassination of a papal legate in Languedoc, Pope Innocent III initiated a bloody holy war called the Albigensian Crusade. When agents of the Church massacred all the residents of a town to rid it of the few heretics in its midst, the mantra was, “Kill them all. Let God sort them out.”

With this anecdote, as with many sprinkled throughout the book, Murphy leaps from the past to the present, linking episodes of medieval history to current reality. In this instance, he points out that the same rallying cry appears on bumper stickers and T-shirts at U.S. military installations.

After the violence subsided and the heretics moved underground, the Dominican Order came into existence, named for its founding father, St. Dominic. The Dominicans were to be the Church’s policemen, charged with defending and protecting official doctrine by rooting out the wayward. These militant priests became known as the Hounds of God.

In the decade that followed the end of the Albigensian Crusade, the rituals, procedures, and punishments of the Medieval Inquisition were codified. At the Council of Tarragona, in 1242, the varieties of heresies were given definition and graded for severity. Record keeping and data collection became a central element of the Inquisition. This could be pushed to absurd lengths, such as accounting for the cost of wood and straw for burning the worst heretics, along with the fee for the civilian executioner. Burning convicted heretics at the stake, a procedure known as “auto-da-fé” (in Portuguese, “act of faith”), was delegated to a secular arm, for a priest was forbidden to shed blood. And so the culprits were “relaxed” to laymen for the dirty work. Hence begin the euphemisms for aberrational punishment. Peering through his lens, Murphy cites “extraordinary rendition” in our time as one such modern euphemism for an act that really means kidnapping, spiriting away to secret prisons, and, usually, torture.

The infamous Grand Inquisitor, Tomás de Torquemada, presided over the Spanish Inquisition, which has become synonymous with the most hideous and perverted extremes of this system for enforcing doctrinal purity. In each case before the tribunals for the Holy Office, precise notes were kept, including a record of everything said or screamed during interrogations. In 1998, the Vatican opened its Inquisition records to scholars. This new access is partially responsible, Murphy asserts, for the golden age of Inquisition scholarship. In a number of rooms in the Vatican Archives, millions of pages await perusal.

One of the more intriguing interviews Murphy conducts is with the preeminent Inquisition scholar, Henry Kamen. Together they focus on the most profound question in this undertaking, at least as it applies to America after 9/11: “What turns a society, any society, from one thing into another? What combination of factors—economic distress, ethnic hostility, physical threat, moral fervor, latent envy, political manipulation—can alter the historic character of a people or place?” But we do not get an answer.

Murphy’s bold purpose is to link the past and present and suggest their relationship. Suggest he does, but occasionally the links can be breathtaking. After briefly treating the Spanish Inquisition’s methods of torture, for example, he jumps to George W. Bush’s methods. “The Bush administration’s threshold for when an act of torture begins is the point at which the Inquisition stipulated that an act of torture must stop.” Earlier, we were told that Torquemada burned 2,000 people at the stake.

When Murphy turns to his brief overview of the Roman Inquisition, the focus shifts to censorship. The Index of Forbidden Books was established in 1542 as a response to the challenge of Martin Luther. Luther is mentioned only briefly in God’s Jury, and this seems like a missed opportunity. Luther’s wrangles with Rome over his many deviations from Catholic doctrine are among the most dramatic examples of pushing back against this awe-inspiring, fear-inducing institution. That rebellion, of course, was a turning point in Church history.

Murphy misses another opportunity for drama as well as explication with the trials of Galileo a century later, first in the examination by Cardinal Robert Bellarmine over the nature of scientific proof, but more important, in the four interrogations of the scientist by the Grand Inquisitor, before Galileo’s humiliating recantation on the altar of the Basilica di Santa Maria sopra Minerva in 1633. The transcripts of these crushing interrogations were released in the early 1990s as part of the Church’s re-examination of the Galileo case.

As a prelude to the onset of the third millennium of Christianity, Pope John Paul II announced that the Church would engage in a process he called historical purification, forthrightly addressing the darkest aspects of its history. This bid for renewal began unsteadily with the Galileo case; the re-examination took 13 years before the Vatican feebly admitted that errors were made without saying who made them. The next case was supposed to be that of Jan Huss, the 15th-century Bohemian reformer whose offenses included challenging the hierarchical power structure of the Church and questioning the use of papal indulgences. Huss refused to abjure his beliefs and was burned in 1415. But the Huss case has not been formally reopened.

Roman Catholicism maintains a “ban” or excommunication on Luther and all his followers, even to this day. When two years ago I asked the provost of the Cathedral in Worms, Germany (where Luther was examined for his disobedience at the Diet of Worms in 1521), whether, after 500 years, the Church shouldn’t, in the spirit of ecumenism, scrap its anti-Luther stance, he replied, “The time has not yet come to lift the ban.”

But the elephant in the room remains the Inquisition. The most the Church could muster by way of apology was John Paul II’s pastoral letter in 1994 admitting that some “children” of the Church may have “departed from the spirit of Christ and his Gospel,” and a penitential Mass at St. Peter’s in the Jubilee Year of 2000 in which the pope asked for forgiveness for all the transgressions committed by sons and daughters of the Church. Murphy leaves it to the Vatican scholar Carlo Ginzburg to provide the response: “What I didn’t hear the pope say today, and what I haven’t heard anybody in this discussion say, is that the Catholic Church is ashamed of what it did. Not sorry. Sorry is easy. I want to hear the Catholic Church—I want to hear the pope—say he is ashamed.”

Cullen Murphy has written a wonderfully interesting and courageous book. His command of Inquisition literature is impressive, as are his interviews and the literary and biblical connections he makes in his argument. The questions he raises about repression, torture, censorship, corruption, and contrition are profound. If God’s Jury is also a frustrating book, perhaps it is because, as a Catholic and an American, Murphy cannot quite bring himself to argue pointedly what this link between past and present means for his church and his country. Is it fair to talk about an American Inquisition after 9/11? Did the repressive measures that were brought to bear after that devastating attack fundamentally change the nature of the land? With the abuses of Abu Ghraib, enhanced interrogation, and extraordinary rendition, has America lost the moral high ground? And did America ever really occupy that lofty perch? Murphy does not ask these questions, much less answer them.

Current Books: New Life for Old Cities

Patrick Piuma — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EST

SMALL, GRITTY, AND GREEN:
The Promise of America's Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World.
By Catherine Tumber.
MIT Press. 211 pp. $24.95

Not long ago I caught sight of a bumper sticker that read “86-64” affixed to a bicycle parked outside Harvest, a popular new locavore restaurant in Louisville’s burgeoning arts district. One of Harvest’s founding partners is a Kentucky farmer and leader in the urban agriculture movement that is taking hold in this riverfront municipality of nearly 600,000 residents. The sticker referred to a controversial grassroots initiative to tear down an elevated section of Interstate 64 that separates the city from the Ohio River and replace it with a tree-lined boulevard and an expansion of Waterfront Park. It struck me that here was yet more proof that Louisville, an aging midsize industrial city, is undergoing a transformation.

Louisville isn’t alone. Across America, small and midsize cities, particularly those that traditionally have relied on manufacturing, are struggling to forge new identities in a globalized world gripped by recession. Many are seeking to move toward a “green economy” that reduces reliance on fossil fuels and uses resources efficiently. In Small, Gritty, and Green, journalist and historian Catherine Tumber proposes that the undervalued assets of such cities—including their proximity to agricultural lands, skilled manufacturing work forces, and greater flexibility compared to their larger counterparts—poise them to capitalize on the green economy trend.

Tumber traveled the Midwest and the Northeast to interview people in more than two dozen Rust Belt cities that are often portrayed in the media as has-beens: Syracuse, New York; Peoria, Illinois; and Janesville, Wisconsin, to name a few. She presents a range of views—from the crusading talk of self-proclaimed “environmental Nazis” to the nuanced statements of public policy makers and the brutal assessments of skeptics. As a woman in a rural Illinois convenience store tells Tumber when asked about the wind turbines on the surrounding farmland, “We have to live with these ugly things, but the electricity goes to New York City. We have to live off coal.”

Tumber covers a lot of territory quickly, including the budding urban agriculture movement, cities’ efforts to foster “smart growth,” and the rise of green manufacturing. She cautions that midsize cities need to rein in suburban sprawl, which destroys the small farms and other agricultural land close to urban cores that give them an advantage over large metropolises. Cities that were hollowed out as a result of white flight, urban renewal, and other misfortunes are examining ways to put vacant and underutilized land to productive use, at least temporarily, through urban farming initiatives.

Some Rust Belt cities also have begun to retool their work forces and economic development goals to mesh with the emerging low-carbon practices of the green economy. I was surprised to learn that Muncie, Indiana, a town only a three-hour drive from my Louisville home, is becoming a major producer of wind turbine components. Proximity to a major wind corridor and a work force whose skills were honed manufacturing automobile transmissions place the city in a green technology sweet spot.

Of course, not every city is in a wind corridor or has the manufacturing base to create products that will be needed in a low-carbon economy. But Tumber is right that many small and midsize cities share a number of characteristics that could be the basis for an economic renaissance. Their futures depend on what they do with those assets. As Tumber suggests, the quality of a community’s education is one significant determinant. Residents of Louisville know about the challenges of engineering education policy all too well—in 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the city’s attempt to integrate its classrooms with race-based school assignments.

Small, Gritty, and Green offers inspiration and hope for older manufacturing cities that have been written off by the rest of the country as casualties of globalization. If cities like Louisville are able to adapt, their best years may be yet to come.

Current Books: Papa s Beginnings

Michael Moynihan — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EST

THE LETTERS OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY:
Volume 1, 1907-1922.
Edited by Sandra Spanier and Robert W. Trogdon.
Cambridge Univ. Press. 431 pp. $40

Fifty years after he ended his life, Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) resides in the American consciousness mostly in caricature. The brilliant war journalist and writer of spare, evocative fiction has been overtaken by the macho, absinthe-swilling bohemian, the writer’s life having become more important than the writer’s writing.

There is, of course, something to these cartoonish portrayals. In The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 1, 1907–1922, the first of a slated dozen or so volumes of his complete, unexpurgated correspondence, the future Nobelist recounts, often in tedious detail, his love of fishing, his heroics on the Italian front, and his burgeoning friendships with expatriate American writers Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Unlike previous collections of Hemingway’s letters, this one leaves nothing on the cutting room floor. (The volume begins with a note from an eight-year-old Hemingway to his father.)

Much of the material in this collection, meticulously edited by Hemingway scholars Sandra Spanier and Robert W. Trogdon, will be of interest only to academics and obsessives. The earliest material is a slog: anodyne correspondence with family members, quotidian letters about school life, an exhaustively detailed expense report to his employers at The Toronto Star.

But the multiple accounts of his wounding in World War I—boastful, repetitive, and sometimes stingy with the truth—are fascinating, offering a glimpse of Hemingway’s late teenage worldview. The young men he encountered in Italy, the cannon fodder for Kaisers and kings, would ultimately provide the contours of his most famous literary creations (Nick Adams, Jake Barnes), though the famously economical prose style isn’t on display here; his letters are slang filled and overwritten, providing few hints of the crisp style that characterizes his first story collection, In Our Time (1925).

It’s commonly believed that Hemingway was emotionally scarred by his experience in the Great War. Indeed, Thomas Putnam, director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, which houses many of these letters, argued in an essay a few years ago that “in reaction to their experience of world war, Hemingway and other modernists lost faith in the central institutions of Western civilization.” In A Farewell to Arms (1929), Frederic Henry, a character largely drawn from Hemingway’s experiences in Italy, famously declares, “Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene.”

But if Hemingway believed that Western civilization was in crisis, these letters suggest that his views were arrived at after the armistice. For writers including Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Wilfred Owen, the battlefield was where their antiwar beliefs were forged. Hemingway’s opinions were likely influenced by the intellectual ferment of Paris, where he and his wife lived for several years in the 1920s.

In a 1917 letter to his sister, Hemingway writes that he “cant [sic] stay out much longer,” and that he is considering enlisting in the Canadian military if America remains on the sidelines. When a munitions plant explodes at the front, Hemingway writes to a friend that it was his “baptism of fire” and that he is “having a wonderful time!!!” He mentions a field “black” with corpses, not to reflect on the hideousness of the fight, but to explain the provenance of his pile of war souvenirs, and he later confesses that “what makes me hate this war” is that there is no place to fish. The Hemingway of 1918 is more Ernst Jünger than Erich Maria Remarque.

It is only when Hemingway and his new bride, Hadley Richardson, relocate to Paris in 1921 that the reader notices the emergence of a distinct voice, full of the stylistic flourishes and vivid descriptions that would become his trademark. In letters to Pound, Stein, and novelist Sherwood Anderson, whose attention and validation he craved, Hemingway writes to impress, taking significantly more care than in any previous correspondence. The juvenilia are replaced with comments on T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and anecdotes about teaching Pound to box.

This volume ends just as Hemingway is getting started. It’s a collection whose existence goes against his wishes; he had instructed that “none of the letters written by me during my lifetime shall be published.” We can be grateful that his wish was betrayed.

Current Books: The Uncontainable Diplomat

Martin Walker — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EST

GEORGE F. KENNAN:
An American Life.
By John Lewis Gaddis.
Penguin Press. 784 pp. $39.95

A week after the death of Joseph Stalin, in March 1953, the new U.S. secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, called in George Frost Kennan, America’s most illustrious diplomat, to inform him that there was “no niche” for him in the Eisenhower administration. Nominally still the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, which had declared him persona non grata the previous year, Kennan (1904–2005) was not simply the leading American expert on the country, but also the author of “containment,” a strategy for resisting Soviet expansion by all measures short of war.

That was the trouble. Although containment had been (and was to remain) the cardinal principle of bipartisan foreign policy since shortly after Kennan had coined the term in 1946, it was deemed by the Republicans, in the age of McCarthyism and loyalty checks, to be too passive an approach. Dulles, with an eye to the ethnic vote in the 1952 presidential election, had replaced it with a clarion call for the liberation of the captive nations of Eastern Europe. Kennan believed this was lunacy. There was no place in foreign policy, he declared in a speech in Pennsylvania the day after Dulles had stressed his commitment to liberation during his confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for “emotionalism, the striking of heroic poses, and demagoguery of all sorts.”

Bizarrely, on the day Dulles fired him and the whole Western world was pondering the implications of Stalin’s death, Dulles asked Kennan for his views, saying, “You interest me when you talk about these matters. Very few other people do.” It was, Kennan wrote, as if Dulles had asked his wife for a divorce, but added that he liked the way she prepared scrambled eggs and would she cook a quick plate for him before leaving.

Yet there was some method to Dulles’s apparent madness. Kennan was a national treasure, but a difficult and often wayward subordinate, who nurtured some very odd and lugubrious views about his own country that only seemed to ripen with time.

After his forced exit from the State Department, Kennan found refuge at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1957, he accepted a visiting professorship at Balliol College, Oxford, and an invitation to give that year’s prestigious Reith Lectures, an annual series of talks on public issues broadcast over the BBC. On the ocean liner heading for Europe, recounts Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis in his excellent new biography, Kennan drafted a lecture plan “that would begin with the sterility of American society, point out the overpopulated nastiness of the rest of the world, and conclude by proposing a new country composed of Great Britain, Canada, and the healthy parts of the United States (the South, Texas, and California would go elsewhere), with its capital to be near Ottawa. Democracy would then save itself from itself by half a century of benevolent dictatorship.”

Part of the difficulty that so many of his colleagues had with Kennan was that they were never sure if he had his tongue in his cheek, or indeed if he was capable of irony. The evidence of Kennan’s diaries, strewn with waspish rants about the awfulness of American culture and politics, suggests that he might have been serious. (Gaddis received full access to the diaries, from which Kennan had published only selected excerpts in his memoirs.) In the event, for the lecture he decided on a less controversial topic—the West and the Soviet Union in the age of the atom.

Kennan being Kennan, the lectures he gave proved controversial anyway. He proposed a withdrawal of North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Soviet forces from Germany, which would be allowed to reunite on condition that it remain neutral. He also suggested that since the atomic arms race was suicidal, NATO was outliving its usefulness and its member states might reduce their armed forces to militias “somewhat on the Swiss pattern.” The Soviet Union, he could assure everyone, represented no military threat to Western Europe, so to strengthen NATO was to risk war, and to maintain it was to delay peace.

Only the year before, Soviet tanks had brutally re-established communist rule in Budapest after crushing the Hungarian revolution. At the same time, the Eisenhower administration had used its financial muscle to bully the British and French into ending their military intervention in Egypt to seize the Suez Canal. Since the Soviet leadership had simultaneously threatened “to rain missiles” on London and Paris if they did not withdraw their forces, this U.S. repudiation of its main allies had thrown NATO into deep confusion and dismay. Kennan was also speaking in the wake of the Soviet Union’s triumphant launch of the Sputnik satellite, an act of extraordinary technological prowess. So Kennan’s views, coming from a man still regarded as the strategic sage of the free world, caused great alarm in West Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Anxious diplomats pestered their American colleagues to ask if Kennan was speaking for America, or perhaps for the Democratic Party.

It fell to that other great American diplomat and Kennan’s former boss, Dean Acheson, to put Kennan in his place and to stress in a public statement that his views “most categorically” were not representative of Democratic policy. While Kennan was a great expert on Russian history and on Marxist-Leninism, Acheson said, he “has never, in my judgment, grasped the realities of power relationships, but takes a rather mystical attitude toward them.” As for Kennan’s personal assurance that the Red Army was no military threat, Acheson asked, “On what does this guarantee rest, unless Divine revelation?”

Acheson knew Kennan well and admired him, though Acheson—a martini-loving lawyer and bon viveur—had little in common with the scholarly and self-doubting Kennan. The New England statesman and the insecure midwestern visionary had worked fruitfully together in that glorious postwar period of American grand strategy when the Marshall Plan and NATO were formed to wage the Cold War by nonmilitary means. Kennan had the ideas, and Acheson had the political talents to give them practical shape and get them implemented with (in the crucial early phases) bipartisan support.

Moreover, the Kennan whom Acheson had worked with in the Truman administration had been much tougher and more pragmatic than the Kennan of the Reith Lectures. His famous “Long Telegram” from the Moscow embassy in 1946 had galvanized the U.S. establishment out of its sentimental wartime view of Stalin. As Gaddis writes, “Only Kennan had the credibility to show, at a time when too many Americans still viewed the Soviet Union as a wartime ally, that for reasons rooted in Russian history and Marxist-Leninist ideology, there could never be a normal peacetime relationship with it: Stalin’s regime required external enemies.” Kennan’s genius lay in his parallel argument, that there was no need for despair, nor for appeasement, nor for war; the Soviet Union could be managed with “a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies” until the regime toppled under the weight of its own inefficiencies and its deepening unpopularity in its Eastern European empire.

From that grand design, Kennan, as head of policy planning at the State Department, and as State’s representative on the newly created National Security Council, helped craft the tools of political, economic, and covert war, which included an Office of Special Projects within the Central Intelligence Agency. The stakes were high; at one overheated moment Kennan even suggested military occupation of Italy if it appeared likely to vote in the Communists in the 1948 elections. He later came to regret the support he had lent to covert operations, but at a time when the Soviet Union had recently taken over Czechoslovakia in a postelection political coup, such measures were wholly consistent with the containment strategy he had devised.

It is extraordinary that a man of such influence and vision enjoyed a relatively limited career. Head of policy planning and ambassador to the Soviet Union and to Yugoslavia were the most senior posts he reached. But real power is not always measured by rank. Many far more senior and ostensibly successful figures had only a fraction of Kennan’s impact. As Henry Kissinger wrote in White House Years (1979), Kennan came “as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history.”

Yet Kissinger too found some of Kennan’s later advice to be outlandish, including one warning against the Kissinger-Nixon opening to China, which Kennan said would alarm the Soviets to a dangerous degree. But there were moments where Kennan chose correctly to challenge the conventional wisdom of the American foreign-policy establishment, and his first public critique of the Vietnam War, in December 1965, followed by his electrifying and nationally televised testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee two months later, was a classic example.

The argument he made was realist rather than idealist: “There is more respect to be won in the opinion of this world by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant or unpromising objectives.” And given that he had been the first American diplomat to recognize in Marshal Tito’s Yugoslavia that cracks could be opened and widened in the Soviet bloc, and that local nationalisms would eventually trump Moscow’s priorities, his suggestion that Ho Chi Minh was no puppet of Moscow or Beijing carried force. Kennan’s bombshell may have contributed to the steep drop in early 1966 in the proportion of Americans who approved of how President Lyndon Johnson was handling the war.

More than 30 years ago, Kennan chose Gaddis, a professor at Yale and doyen of Cold War historians, to be his biographer, and granted him access to all of his papers. The resulting book is as sensitive to the quirks of the man as it is scholarly on the broader context of Kennan’s career. But this is no hagiography; Gaddis clearly rejects Kennan’s contemptuous dismissal of Ronald Reagan’s role in the Cold War endgame and finds some of Kennan’s fastidious critiques of American society and of democracy in general to be more than eccentric. To his credit, he deals with Kennan’s complex private life and his love affairs with judicious care, and persuasively scotches the rumor, circulated in Moscow in the 1950s, that Kennan had exposed himself to Soviet blackmail through an affair with a Russian woman. In sum, this is as near a definitive biography as we are likely to get of one of the most singular and significant Americans of his century.

It was always when he was most pragmatic and hardheaded that Kennan had the most influence, however much he was taken up by liberal and pacifist opinion. But in his anguished vacillations between idealism and realpolitik he was quintessentially American, embodying the characteristic schizophrenia of America’s global engagement with eloquence and grace.

Current Books: Rushing to Judgment

Daniel Akst — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 07:00:00 EST

THINKING, FAST AND SLOW.
By Daniel Kahneman.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 499 pp. $30

Body and soul, reason and passion, yin and yang—expressions of twoness pervade the world’s cultures, perhaps because duality comes naturally to creatures divided into males and females and destined to live through daily cycles of light and dark.

Dualism is the organizing principle of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, a genial survey of human irrationality that serves as an admirable summa of the author’s extraordinary life’s work. His pioneering research mapping the vast territory of human irrationality, much of it done with the late Stanford psychologist Amos Tversky, helped Kahneman win the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics—even though he’s a psychologist.

Since then, irrationality has become a growth industry, both for scholars such as Duke psychologist Dan Ariely and popular science writers including Jonah Lehrer, but few authors have thought as long or as deeply about the subject as Kahneman. The central message of this accessible book is that most of us simply have no idea how illogical, impressionable, and downright inept we are when it comes to making judgments.

Imagine, for instance, a man described as meek, shy, tidy, and helpful. Is he more likely to be a librarian or a farmer? Most of us will answer librarian, thereby falling for what Kahneman calls the representativeness heuristic. It may be true that librarians tend to fit the description, but there are 20 times as many male farmers as male librarians in this country. So it’s much likelier that the man described grows food for eating rather than catalogues food for thought.

Our divided nature is partly to blame for our bad judgment. Broadly speaking, humans have a hasty and appetitive instinctual side, and a more patient, forward-looking reasoning side that supposedly provides some sort of supervision. Kahneman describes them as System 1 and System 2, respectively. The former provides most of the processing that gets us through our days. System 1’s snap judgments are often correct, but on more complex matters it can too easily victimize us. It can be “primed” through the power of suggestion, for example. And it’s susceptible to mere repetition, which it credulously mistakes for veracity. System 2 is our conscious, more rational self, and ought to ask, for instance, whether we are sure there are very many male librarians. But it’s lazy and easily tired, often bestirring itself just enough to certify that System 1 was right after all.

A second dualism in Kahneman’s book is the one between what behavioral economist Richard Thaler dubbed the Econs, the imaginary species whose members, found only in textbooks, act in rigid conformity to the models of economists, and the Humans, who instead act like real people, illogical though they may be. This distinction pervades the book, just as it pervades the author’s work. (It’s the reason a psychologist was awarded a Nobel in economics.) Finally, there is the division between the experiencing self and the remembering self, a dualism that is the basis for a fascinating meditation on how we make judgments about whether we are happy, which of these “selves” we choose to serve when we plan a vacation, and why we discount years of happy marriage or productive work if they end in a divorce or layoff (because endings loom disproportionately large in human memory).

Kahneman’s work should be of profound interest to policymakers, whose job, after all, is making difficult choices for society. He cautions against the human tendency to vastly overweight unlikely events, for example, as well as the tendency to answer an easy question (do I like this person?) when we can’t answer the hard one at hand (how good a surgeon is this?). Overconfidence and delusional optimism are rampant, so we should rely whenever possible on simple formulas and checklists that measure things strongly associated with a desired outcome. Dumb luck explains a lot more of life than most of us realize, so we must beware of our tendency to create narratives that conjure causality. Kahneman even dispenses advice on how to improve your meetings: “Before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position”; otherwise, whoever talks first and most will likely sway the others.

Kahneman observes that we are often disastrously content with the inadequate information before us, but he doesn’t address how we are to know when we have enough data to make a good enough choice. Humans must constantly assess whether the cost of searching—for new information or additional options—has become too high. Working at a newspaper, according to an old saying, involves making judgments about the world with too little time and too little information. The problem, unfortunately, is even worse in life.

Current Books: Animals Are Us

Emily Anthes — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 07:00:00 EST

THE WILD LIFE OF OUR BODIES:
Predators, Parasites, and Partners That Shape Who We Are Today
By Rob Dunn.
Harper.
290 pp. $26.99

For humans, nature has never been less threatening. We have conquered many of the diseases that felled our ancestors when they were half as old as the average person lives to be now, and few people die anymore in the jaws of predators. Antibiotics keep bacteria at bay, and the spread of cities and towns has pushed lions and tigers and bears away from our doors. We call this progress. Who would want to go back to, say, a time before penicillin?

But driving other species out of our lives has had some unintended consequences, argues biologist Rob Dunn in his provocative book The Wild Life of Our Bodies. For most of human history, we lived in proximity to countless other species. We evolved in concert with these life forms; everything from the tiniest microbes to the most fearsome predators shaped the bodies and brains we’re walking around with today. “What happens,” Dunn asks, “when humans leave behind the species their bodies evolved to interact with, whether they be cheetahs, diseases, honeybees, or giant sucking worms?”

The answers Dunn provides aren’t pretty. Without these other life forms, he argues, many features of our own bodies have “become anachronistic or worse.” The unlikely Exhibit A: Crohn’s disease, a chronic inflammation of the bowel that is on the rise in developed nations. Crohn’s and other autoimmune disorders are most common in exactly those places where public health seems to be most advanced—where, for instance, the intestinal parasites that plagued humans for much of history, such as hookworms and tapeworms, have become staggeringly rare. What if, scientists wondered, the absence of these parasites was somehow leaving us more vulnerable to various maladies of the immune system?

The idea sounds crazy—and the experiments conducted to test it even crazier. In 1999, one scientist enlisted 29 patients with intractable Crohn’s and asked them to infect themselves with parasites. Each swallowed a glass of whipworm eggs. Six months later, after the worms had had a chance to take up residence in these patients’ guts, 21 of the volunteers were symptom free.

Soon, other researchers were linking most or all autoimmune diseases to our missing parasites—as well as many allergy and asthma cases. Reintroducing intestinal worms has been shown to alleviate the symptoms of inflammatory bowel syndrome, diabetes, heart disease, and multiple sclerosis. Whatever the exact mechanism—scientists are still working it out—intestinal parasites appear to help train the immune system to work properly. (Perhaps, without parasites, the immune system looks for something else to attack—such as the body itself.) But prescribing parasites is still a counterintuitive and controversial idea that doctors and patients find hard to swallow.

The disappearance of our intestinal parasites is but one stop on Dunn’s breathtakingly broad look at the other species that have shaped human evolution. He moves seamlessly from the physiology of the digestive system to the circuitry of the brain. He explains, for instance, how the disappearance of most of the animals that preyed on humans has left us with outdated fear circuitry. (Primed to detect threats that no longer exist, some brains remain on hyperalert, giving their owners chronic stress and anxiety disorders.)

Dunn does this all in prose that not only evokes the wonder of scientific discovery but illuminates the human struggles behind it. Though the picture he paints is sometimes bleak, he leaves the reader with a bit of hope. We needn’t restore our environments to their original wild state, Dunn says, and it’s a good thing, since that would be nearly impossible. Instead, we could embark upon some targeted rewilding, reintroducing specific parasites to our guts or chugging down cocktails of beneficial bacteria. It wouldn’t hurt to curb our use of antibacterial soaps, as well as antibiotics and other medicines, since they destroy bacteria indiscriminately, without consideration of whether some of the bugs might do us good.

And we could create natural oases, such as urban farms, which could bring certain plants and animals back into our lives. “Given the choice of which and how many species to live around (a choice we still have, though not forever), why not consciously garden a greater diversity of life around us?” he writes. It’s a tall order, but Dunn makes a compelling case that our health and happiness may depend upon it.

Current Books: The Natural

Aaron Mesh — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 07:00:00 EST

LIFE ITSELF:
A Memoir.
By Roger Ebert.
Grand Central.
435 pp. $27.99

Before I loved the movies, I loved Roger Ebert. As a teenager, I spent hours lying on my bed, engrossed in a fat purple volume of his Home Movie Companion, with its summaries of “grownup” films I had never dared to see: Leaving Las Vegas, Flirting, Natural Born Killers. Later, I would understand how much more grownup Ebert’s reviews were than many of the movies themselves, but at the time, I just knew he was genuine. His informal prose, often suggesting a chat between intimate friends, radiated a nearly aching romance with cinema. He retold other people’s stories, and sometimes I recognized my own.

My reading was a solitary pleasure, though hardly a unique one. Just about everybody loves Roger Ebert. Instantly recognizable from his long-running television shows Sneak Previews and At the Movies, he didn’t so much teach us to take movies seriously—at a time when critics such as Pauline Kael were enshrining films as high art—as make criticism seem like a universal pastime. His naysayers, who are not without their ammunition, charge that he never became much of a student of cinema, and deride his plainspoken, democratic style as artless. But for more than 40 years, he has celebrated the joy of moviegoing and given his readers confidence in their ability to read a film intelligently without being snooty about it.

Since 2006, when thyroid cancer and complications of surgery deprived him of his jaw, his ability to eat and drink, and his speech—his communication is now limited to the written word and the thumb that for years warred with that of the late Gene Siskel on television—Ebert has been granted the chance, like his boyhood hero Huckleberry Finn, to sit in the back of the church for his own eulogies. Even as the tributes pile up, Ebert, now 69, keeps expanding his following. Pundits wondered if there could be an Ebert in the Internet age; it turned out that that new-media critic was—Ebert. His Web site, rogerebert.com, attracts more than 100 million visitors a year. Ebert is one of the few movie critics working today who is comfortable engaging his readers as equals in online comment threads. With this new audience, he has also broached a new subject: himself.

From the personal blog posts that mingle with his reflections on movies have emerged Life Itself, a discursive, companionable memoir that foremost confirms what fans have long known: Ebert is a natural born writer. But the book also makes clear how little we have known of a person who seems to have lived so much of his life in public. For all the years wags spent ridiculing the once rotund Ebert’s fondness for food, we never knew that his real, dangerous weakness was booze. The book’s most compelling essays are sober considerations of alcohol. Ebert celebrates a rollicking Chicago journalists’ dive called O’Rourke’s, then makes an impassioned case for the honest self-appraisal offered by Alcoholics Anonymous. (Of the barroom he remarks, “We knew who we said we were, who we wanted to appear to be, and who O’Rourke’s thought we were, and that was knowing each other well enough.”) He also celebrates his history of interracial romances—his wife, Chaz, is African- American, and he once tried, unsuccessfully, to date Oprah Winfrey.

Though Ebert never cites it explicitly, the book that Life Itself most closely mirrors is A Child of the Century, the 1954 autobiography of the fluent Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht, a former reporter who wrote His Girl Friday. Like Hecht, Ebert spends more time chronicling Windy City newsroom capers and childhood idylls than he does contemplating the pictures he liked or didn’t. And the two men, each a writer working at the edges of a temporal art, give special place to the enduring quandaries: God and girls. For Ebert, these two are inextricably linked: His mother wanted him to be a priest, and he resisted, keeping “as much of my life as possible a secret from her” as she slipped into angry alcoholism. He remains anguished about the relationships he let slip away, sheltered in movie theaters watching other lives.

It is perhaps with these losses in mind that he offers his ultimate philosophy. “To make others less happy is a crime,” he writes. “To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts.” This book will bring others happiness, because the author so deeply feels pleasure and so honestly acknowledges its obstacles.

Current Books: The Lunacy to Lead

Charles Barber — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 07:00:00 EST

A FIRST-RATE MADNESS:
Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness.
By Nassir Ghaemi.
Penguin.
340 pp. $27.95

In September 2001, I was working in Manhattan as an assistant director of a homeless shelter in which lived 200 men. Each had a psychotic illness. For two days after the 9/11 attacks I was unable to get into Manhattan, but I made it to work on Thursday, September 13, taking the bus over the George Washington Bridge. The city felt like a war zone. The acrid smell of smoke suffused the air; sirens and alarms sounded constantly; armed soldiers or police officers stood on every corner. I steeled myself, expecting the shelter to be, well, more insane than usual.

I was astonished to find everything at the shelter as it always was—if anything, a little calmer. When I asked the residents if they had any concerns, someone pointed out that the hot water was not working very well. No one mentioned the fact that a large portion of lower Manhattan was no longer there. At last I felt compelled to bring up the attacks. The men said they felt bad for those who had suffered, but all of that had happened a couple of days ago. At first I was indignant at their seeming apathy, but over time I realized that 9/11 was for many of them the day the level of crisis in the world met their own. Functioning in a crisis mode was something they knew how to do very well.

This phenomenon is more or less what Nassir Ghaemi adroitly explores in A First-Rate Madness. The book, though psychologically nuanced, has a simple thesis: Leaders who have mental illness or have experienced periods of mental abnormality are often better able to handle crises than their mentally healthy peers. When it comes to wars and depressions, it’s better to have someone at the helm who has suffered than someone who has not. In Ghaemi’s formulation, George W. Bush, a fairly untroubled soul once he got past his substance abuse, was ill equipped to handle 9/11. In his response to the tragedy, he was rigid, insufficiently empathic, and overly optimistic. Abraham Lincoln, depressed and tortured, would have done a lot better.

Ghaemi, a psychiatrist at Tufts University School of Medicine and author of a number of distinguished books on psychiatry, sees four potential derivatives of mental suffering: creativity, realism, empathy, and resilience. Mania, for example, is strongly associated with torrents of new ideas. People who have suffered from depression often see the world in more realistic and pragmatic terms than “normal” people, who have been shown in studies to be overly sanguine about the world and their place in it. Those who have suffered any illness tend to be more empathic, understanding that life is fragile and difficult. And those who can survive mental illness (and there’s the rub) learn skills of resilience that are applicable to any of life’s hardships.

Through a series of deft and highly perceptive case histories, Ghaemi explores how figures including Lincoln, Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman, media mogul Ted Turner, British prime minister Winston Churchill, father of Indian independence Mahatma Gandhi, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., and Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, all of whom either suffered from mental illness or sustained periods of mental abnormality, brought special attributes to the crises of their times and ultimately became great leaders and innovators. (The pool of female political leaders from which to draw is admittedly small, but the fact that Ghaemi’s sample does not include a woman is a shortcoming.)

Ghaemi’s thesis is a provocative one, and like a lot of ideas that push our cultural narrative forward, it simultaneously holds water and does not. A First-Rate Madness is at its most convincing in its analyses of individuals whose depression (Lincoln, Churchill) or bipolar disorder (Sherman, Turner) was either self-admitted or, based on the historical record and personal diaries, indisputable. While Lincoln and Churchill lived in a largely preclinical age, one cannot read their writings about the depths of their periodic suicidal states and not be absolutely convinced that they suffered from major depression for most of their lives. These were men who stared into the abyss early and often, and thus were able to take wars and secessions in stride. For these great figures, as for my men in the shelter, crisis was normal, and they were able to retain the ability to function.

The novelist Walker Percy, a major depressive himself, wrote of the phenomenon of the ex-suicide: the person who almost kills himself but chooses not to. Take a man waiting for the bus on a March day in the rain, Percy said. Life is dull, annoying, and vaguely painful. Take that same man waiting for the bus, having just escaped his own suicide: Life is an unexpected gift, profound and joyous. Everything is gravy—he had not expected to be alive. Lincoln and Churchill were ex-suicides many times over. “I don’t like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing through,” Churchill told his doctor. “A second’s action would end everything.” Having survived chronic inner anguish, Lincoln and Churchill found the battles at Gettysburg and on the Normandy beaches relatively manageable.

The chapters on Kennedy and Roosevelt are less persuasive. Ghaemi argues that FDR and JFK were mentally abnormal—that at the very least, they suffered from hypomania (a mood state characterized by loquacity, an excess of energy, an inordinate need for sex, and general recklessness). Though Kennedy’s sexual voracity was indeed abnormal, it seems to me that both his and Roosevelt’s abnormalities were more physical (Roosevelt’s polio, Kennedy’s severe Addison’s disease) than mental. Roosevelt’s struggle with the physical impairments of polio led him to become more empathic and less of a rich, arrogant dandy. Kennedy’s enormous resilience seems more a reflection of his personality and his unbridled ambition than a product of his mental state.

Nonetheless, A First-Rate Madness has important implications for public policy and how we view the stigma of mental illness. Perhaps we should be more tolerant of our leaders’ foibles, indiscretions, weaknesses, diagnoses, and, yes, psychiatric histories. In Bush and Barack Obama, we’ve had stable, “mentally healthy” presidents who arguably have not been particularly adept at managing crises. I have no doubt that someone who had faced the abyss would have done a better job of leading the country as it faced a decade of abysses.

Ghaemi makes clear from the outset that his troubled but great leaders are best for times of crisis, not tranquility. When peace and prosperity reign, he writes, “mental health is useful. One meets the expectations of one’s community, and one is rewarded for doing so.” Yet in reading A First-Rate Madness I kept thinking of Dwight Eisenhower, a figure absent from its pages. As a military commander Eisenhower functioned on the brink in World War II and on D-Day, and as president he led the country during the relatively placid 1950s. He had his flaws, and he may not have been flashily creative or intellectual. But as a victorious general he was humane, he was profoundly realistic (warning us of the dangers of the evolving military-
industrial complex), and he was enormously resilient. Yet Eisenhower, I submit, was about as sane as any man who ever lived, or at least as sane as anybody who ever wished to be president. Perhaps the true value of Ghaemi’s book is that it shows how diverse the wellsprings of leadership are, from the fervor of madness to staid and prosaic sanity.

Current Books: A Singular Voice

Michael O Donnell — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 07:00:00 EST

ARGUABLY:
Essays by Christopher Hitchens.
Twelve. 788 pp. $30

For years, it has been easy to take Christopher Hitchens for granted, and now we are losing him. The incomparable British polemicist, contrarian, essayist, bon vivant, and bullhorn of the anti-totalitarian left has advanced throat cancer, and may have won his last motion in the debating hall and blown his last smoke cloud into the face of tyranny. Fortunately for his readers, Hitchens’s voice is not yet silenced. Arguably is a massive, engrossing collection of essays produced over the past 10 years. Like his brilliant memoir of 2010, Hitch-22, it reminds us of all we stand to lose.

Hitchens made himself somewhat tedious from about 2003 to 2007 with his relentless defense of the Iraq war and his apparently spiteful flirtation with conservatism. Arguably covers other ground. Those familiar with Hitchens only from his pugnacious television appearances and his Fighting Words column in Slate magazine will benefit from exposure to his literary side, especially his splendid review essays in The Atlantic. For those who like a little splatter, he can be just as brutal panning a book as attacking an apologist for fascism. He writes that, in composing the 2006 novel Terrorist, John Updike gives “the impression of someone who has been keeping up with the ‘Inside Radical Islam’ features in something like Newsweek,” producing “one of the worst pieces of writing from any grownup source since the events” of 9/11.

The essays on literature and literary biography are erudite and often very funny. Here is a précis of the poet Philip Larkin’s libido: “Larkin may not have been highly sexed in the conventional sense, but he was a heroic consumer of pornography and amateur composer of sadomasochistic reveries, which he often shared with his worldly friends Robert Conquest and Kingsley Amis.” Perhaps nothing recommends Hitchens more than his taste in literature. He returns again and again to W. H. Auden, Evelyn Waugh, Vladimir Nabokov, and Saul Bellow. If only more of our political writers read such fine stuff between columns.

A master of circumlocution, Hitchens writes with a spontaneous, understated, digressive style, orbiting a target with asides and allusions until it is all but lost from sight. Then, like Muhammad Ali, he suddenly stops dancing and punches with his whole arm. Two pieces in Arguably exemplify this pattern: one on Gore Vidal (of the far left) and one on Patrick Buchanan (of the far right). At times all the ironical, wordy sentences and name-dropping can feel like obfuscation, as when Hitchens smirkingly floats this judgment of Hungarian-born writer Arthur Koestler: “It has been plausibly alleged that in his compulsive seductions—of Simone de Beauvoir, for one—he did not always stop quite short of physical coercion.” Well, did he commit rape or not? But more often, Hitchens’s luminous style and his development of an argument thrill. In an age of sound bites delivered to yawning members of mostly empty chambers, he actually persuades his listeners to change their minds.

This is particularly the case at the intersection of literature and politics, Hitchens’s natural home. Two themes preoccupy him: solidarity and totalitarianism. The former he prizes from his early years on the Trotskyite left; it manifests itself in an honor-bound and borderline- violent refusal to unlink arms with old comrades in places such as Kurdistan, Iran, and Cyprus. The loathing of totalitarianism in all forms comes from the right half of the Left—the territory of George Orwell, Hitchens’s well-chosen hero. (Few could have predicted that a writer as verbose as Hitchens would champion the master of the 12-word, comma-less sentence.)

No one writing today beats Hitchens in crushing an argument of moral equivalency between Nazi Germany and Allied Britain, say, or between terrorists who kill as many innocents as possible and American troops who try to avoid civilian casualties. In this regard it must be said that even though his Saddam-loathing case for war in Iraq was not quite persuasive, it was by far the most persuasive case on offer. He waited a lifetime for his Iraq—a chance, as the Spanish Civil War was for Orwell, to stand firmly against the forces of totalitarianism, alone if necessary. Reading Hitchens today, one clearly sees that he would do it the same way again.

At one point he quotes a novelist’s description of a newspaper hack who “possessed that opportune facility for turning out several thousand words on any subject whatever at the shortest possible notice.” Although Hitchens does not generally shy away from boasting, he is too polite to claim this mantle for himself. It is his. Reading him is like riding in a luxurious sedan upholstered in leather and cornering sharply: It does not really matter where we go because we will get there in style. And of course, we’ll let down the window for our host’s cigarette.

Current Books: The Marriage Gap

Emily Bernard — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 07:00:00 EST

IS MARRIAGE FOR WHITE PEOPLE?
How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone.
By Ralph Richard Banks.
Dutton. 289 pp. $25.95

Ralph Richard Banks borrows the provocative title of his book from an anecdote relayed by an African-American journalist who taught a class to a roomful of black sixth graders in Washington, D.C., a few years ago. When the journalist offered to invite married couples to speak to the students about raising children, one boy sneered, “Marriage is for white people.”

The black family has long been a topic of public discussion. In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in what became known as the Moynihan Report, famously described single-parent (and overwhelmingly female- headed) black families as a “tangle of pathology.” Today, black women are peculiarly unpartnered—as many as three out of 10 may never marry. With movies such as Diary of a Mad Black Woman (2005) and Why Did I Get Married? (2007), black filmmaker Tyler Perry has built a fortune on the subject of black female loneliness and the precarious nature of relationships between black women and black men.

The decline in the marriage rate among poor African Americans has gained most of the attention, given that it’s especially pronounced, but the scarcity of married couples is increasingly apparent among affluent blacks as well. In this accessible and comprehensive study, Banks focuses on the plight of middle-class black women, who marry at higher rates than poor black women but are still twice as likely as white women never to wed.

An implicit theme of Banks’s book is the universality of black experience. He suggests, as others have, that perhaps the institution no longer suits the needs of men and women today, who don’t feel compelled to marry in order to gain economic or romantic partners. And divorce and single-parent child rearing have become both more socially acceptable and financially feasible. Today, 40 to 50 percent of all marriages in the United States end in divorce. While the marriage rates of blacks have dropped off more steeply than those of whites, Banks notes that in regard to marriage and child-rearing trends, “white follows black.” The proportion of white children born to single mothers is now equal to the percentage of black children born to single mothers 50 years ago.

Banks proposes that both blacks and whites have set such high standards for mates and for marriage itself that they cannot possibly be met. Still, African Americans, as Banks observes, “are the most unmarried people in the nation.” And divorce rates among blacks are double those of whites. Why?

Is it because blacks have yet to overcome the effects of slavery, which made lasting unions impossible? (This proposal is partially undermined by the fact that the marriage gap developed a century after abolition.) Is it because, by some estimates, more than a quarter of all black men in the United States will spend time behind bars during their lives? Is it because more than one out of five black men marry outside the race—a fact that black women deeply resent? Is it because black women greatly outdistance black men in the educational and professional realms and can’t find a partner whom they regard as a peer? Or is it because black men have so many options in the romance “market” that they resist being forced to commit to one?

Banks concedes that his research provides only partial answers, and that his findings are not drawn from firsthand experience. In his acknowledgments, he indicates that he is happily married. He confesses that he found this book difficult to write for the same reason that—I must confess—I found it difficult to review: It exposes “some uncomfortable truths about relationships between black men and women.”

Despite its disheartening revelations, Is Marriage for White People? is compelling reading. The book is not the standard academic text that Banks, a Stanford law professor, set out to write. His arguments are buttressed by sound reasoning and incontestable statistics, but the book is not overrun with numbers. As Banks conducted interviews to supplement his research, the project grew into an effort to illuminate the experiences of the black middle class, which have long been obscured as attention “oscillates from the black poor to everyone else.” His selection of interviewees consists mainly of black women within his peer group: lawyers with Ivy League degrees.

However limited his pool of participants, the stories these women entrusted to Banks put human faces on the distressing conundrums he explores. For example, he opens the book with a portrait of Audrey Jones, a 39-year-old multilingual business consultant who has been exceptionally successful. She is also unmarried, though she doesn’t want to be. A woman with boundless professional opportunities who is also a “good catch,” in Banks’s estimation, is facing a lifetime of loneliness, according to statistics. “This may not be the life that I had hoped for,” Jones says, “but this is the life I have to live.”

What to do about the black family is a dilemma that has preoccupied sociologists, psychologists, journalists, screenwriters, novelists, and ordinary people for decades. Few have unreservedly advocated the refreshing solution Banks offers: interracial marriage. While black men have long felt free to choose white mates, he notes, black women are “more segregated in the intimate marketplace than any group in American society.” They view interracial relationships as too complicated and see partnering with black men as an expression of a larger commitment to the race itself; often, black women aren’t as attracted to men of other races as they are to black men. But Banks urges them to overcome these reservations.

He ends his book with an uplifting story about Joe, who is white, and Teresa, who is black. They are complete opposites in personality and background, but have a joyful and mutually supportive relationship. Banks uses their story to illustrate the core of his argument, which is that unions between black women and white men actually benefit intra-racial relationships, because such relationships shift the “power, ever so slightly, in favor of black women” as the gender imbalance among single blacks becomes less severe. “If more black women married nonblack men,” Banks muses, “more black men and women might marry each other.” His controversial conclusion may rankle, amuse, or vindicate, but it provides a new chapter to an old story about the distressing state of black marriage.

Findings: Fluid Faith

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 07:00:00 EST

The Volstead Act of 1919 served to bring Americans closer to God, Daniel Okrent reports in Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Scribner. The ban on intoxicating liquor included an exemption for religious uses. In Napa Valley, California, the Beaulieu Vineyards netted over $100,000 a year by selling sacramental wine to the Catholic Church. Some priests bought 120 gallons at a time, which Okrent figures is enough for 46,000 Communion sips. He suspects that quite a few bottles got diverted to parishioners. Rabbis diverted, too. Some opened stores selling kosher wine “for sacramental purposes.” A customer could sign up as a member of the synagogue and buy a bottle of wine, all in one visit to the store. The rabbi might be a new convert himself, according to Okrent. In Detroit, Rabbi Leo M. Franklin claimed to know of at least 150 men who, “without the slightest pretense at rabbinical training or position,” were claiming to be rabbis in order to market liquor. Franklin charged, “They simply gathered around them little companies of men; they called them congregations; and then, under the law as it now exists, they were privileged to purchase and distribute wine.” The abuses prompted some embarrassed rabbis to advocate repealing the religious exception altogether. Congress didn’t act, but in 1926 the Prohibition Bureau began enforcing the rules more rigorously. After that, shipments of wine for Jewish ceremonies dropped by 90 percent in some cities. And, presumably, the ranks of the new godly evaporated a bit.

Findings: Marketing Cocaine

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 07:00:00 EST

The energy drink called Cocaine got off to a rocky start when it went on the market a few years ago. As we reported Summer 2007, the Food and Drug Administration sent a menacing letter to the manufacturer, Redux Beverages. Illinois and Connecticut threatened to sue Redux, and Texas barred the company from selling Cocaine there. In Dallas, agents of the Department of State Health Services raided a warehouse full of Cocaine. Street value: $200,000. Now, Cocaine is back. California-based Redux tweaked the typeface for the name on the cans—the original looked too much like white powder for regulators—and got rid of the slogan “The Legal Alternative.” In a disclaimer printed on the cans, Redux now declares, “This product is not intended to be an alternative to an illicit street drug, and anyone who thinks otherwise is an idiot.” These changes satisfied the FDA, though not Texas, which still bans the beverage. Peru won’t allow it either, according to Jamey Kirby, president of Redux. Peruvian officials maintain that the name is misleading. To market the drink there, Redux would need to add extract of coca leaf.

Findings: Bad Wiring

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 07:00:00 EST

In games of skill, a near miss can mean you’re improving. Not so with games of chance. At a slot machine, almost hitting the jackpot doesn’t increase your odds of cashing in with the next push of the button. Our brains, however, may not recognize the distinction. For gamblers and nongamblers alike, the same region of the midbrain is activated by both near misses and jackpots, Henry W. Chase and Luke Clark report in The Journal of Neuroscience May 5. The strength of the near-miss response in the brain correlates with the degree of gambling addiction—that is, problem gamblers exhibit a stronger response to near misses than casual gamblers do. The researchers speculate that the neurotransmitter dopamine gives gamblers a jolt of pleasure when they come close to winning. So they keep playing. And hoping.

Findings: Alliterative Illusion

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 07:00:00 EST

Spiro Agnew famously derided reporters and commentators as “nattering nabobs of negativism.” David Broder, Helen Thomas, Tom Wicker, and countless other journalists have cited the quotation as a classic example of the Nixon administration’s assault on the press. But they’re all wrong, Norman P. Lewis writes in American Journalism Winter 2010. Vice President Agnew did give two speeches in 1969 that condemned the national press as biased and error-ridden. President Richard Nixon fine-tuned the language in one of them and declared proudly, “This really flicks the scab off, doesn’t it?” “Nattering nabobs,” however, came in a 1970 speech in San Diego, when Agnew was campaigning for Republicans in the midterm elections. The “nabobs” were opponents of Nixon administration policy, especially in Vietnam. “You have it right—the Agnew speech in San Diego, which I wrote, criticized the defeatists in general rather than the press in particular,” speechwriter-turned-columnist William Safire e-mailed Lewis in 2006. Safire died in 2009. “I suppose many in the media delighted in being attacked by Agnew and so assumed they were his target in that speech. Over the years I would occasionally point this out, but it’s tough to go up against a myth.” Press coverage at the time of Agnew’s speech placed the phrase in its correct context. But less than a year later, a Newsday columnist cited “nattering nabobs” as an attack on the press. The New York Times and Time soon followed. “Journalists who wear the ‘nattering nabobs’ phrase as a badge of honor,” Lewis observes, “are merely proving that Agnew was right about their penchant for repeating inaccurate information.”

Findings: Anchor Rancor

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 07:00:00 EST

The most trusted man in America had little affection for his successor. When Dan Rather replaced him as anchor of The CBS Evening News in 1981, Walter Cronkite planned to appear in CBS documentaries and news specials. But his appearances soon dwindled. The network canceled the series Walter Cronkite’s Universe in its third season and made little use of him on the Evening News. “Dan Rather and company shut me out,” Cronkite told historian Don Carleton, in an interview that appears in Conversations With Cronkite University of Texas Press. Cronkite, who died in 2009, wished he had resigned from the network in protest, but he didn’t. “Quite frankly, I was venal,” he said. “They just bought me with a million dollars a year.” In 1986, Laurence Tisch took over CBS. “Tisch was making public statements about how he expected to return the news department to the great days of Murrow and Cronkite,” the former anchor recalled. “Rather panicked. He came to see me, and we had a very interesting hour of his pleading that none of this was his fault, that he hadn’t had anything to do with keeping me off the air. I felt that he was trying to get right with me because he thought I had Tisch’s ear. . . . He pleaded what a great friend he’d always been of mine, what a great admirer he was of mine, and how he looked forward now that the air was being cleared [to] our working closely together. It was the biggest bunch of crap I ever heard.” Rather, Cronkite added, “just reeks of insincerity.”

Findings: Infantile

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 07:00:00 EST

During the 1932 presidential campaign, Eleanor Roosevelt spent a few months as an editor. Publisher Bernarr Macfadden—whose New York Evening Graphic, a gossip rag, was nicknamed “the Pornographic”—recruited her to edit his proposed “high-class” magazine on child care, Babies, Just Babies. According to Mark Adams’s biography of Macfadden, Mr. America Harper, Roosevelt received $500 per issue, with a proviso that the fee would increase to $1,000 if her husband won the presidency. “Babies!” editor Roosevelt wrote in the inaugural issue. “Can you think of anything more wonderful?” Adams says Babies, Just Babies “was a source of more ridicule than revenue—the Harvard Lampoon published a parody called Tutors, Just Tutors.” After the election, Mrs. Roosevelt resigned. It seemed “the most sensible thing to do,” she told Macfadden. And Babies, Just Babies stopped publishing.

Findings: Disinforming the World

Wed, 19 May 2010 07:00:00 EST

Around the world, lots of people have discerned a U.S. government conspiracy behind AIDS. Much of the blame for that belief falls on the Soviet Union, Thomas Boghardt reports in the Central Intelligence Agency’s journal Studies in Intelligence December 2009. In 1983, the KGB arranged for an anonymous letter to appear in The Patriot, an Indian newspaper funded by the Soviets. Purportedly from an American scientist, the letter said that AIDS “is believed to be the result of the Pentagon’s experiments to develop new and dangerous biological weapons.” The letter referred to the “virus flu” rather than the flu virus; KGB English was often shaky. In 1985, a Soviet newspaper published the AIDS allegation and cited the seemingly independent Patriot as its source. The disinformation campaign next passed to the East Germans. Soviet bloc spies frequently relied on what they called “useful idiots.” Operation INFEKTION, as it was known, found one in Jakob Segal, a respected East German biophysicist. “How Segal was actually brought into the process is not known with certainty,” Boghardt writes, “but in all likelihood ‘evidence’ of the U.S. origins of AIDS would have been given to him in personal meetings.” Segal came to believe that AIDS most likely stemmed from an experiment gone awry. The American government had developed the disease as a biological weapon and infected prisoners with it, not realizing how quickly it would spread once the men were released. Reporters took Segal seriously. By late 1987, his theory had appeared in more than 200 periodicals in 80 countries, according to Boghardt. In a meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that year, Secretary of State George Shultz complained about the AIDS disinformation as “bum dope.” The effects of the campaign outlasted the Soviet empire. In 1990, Britain’s Channel 4 aired AIDS: The African Legend, a credulous West German documentary about Segal’s ideas. In the early 1990s, news outlets in Canada, Sweden, and elsewhere published interviews with him. A 1992 survey found that 15 percent of Americans considered it probable or certain that “the AIDS virus was created deliberately in a government laboratory.” “Once the AIDS conspiracy theory was lodged in the global subconscious,” Boghardt writes, “it became a pandemic in its own right.”

Findings: Nobel Peace Price

Wed, 05 May 2010 07:00:00 EST

The Nobel Peace Prize doesn’t always promote peace. In Political Science Quarterly Winter, Ronald R. Krebs argues that it sometimes fuels repression. After the Dalai Lama won in 1989, Tibetans grew more forceful in their protests. Krebs says they believed that “with the world focused upon them, thanks to the prize, the Chinese authorities would prove more lenient.” Instead, China forbade public religious ceremonies, imprisoned and executed dissidents, and staged an intimidating military parade. “If the Nobel Committee was sending a message, so too was the Chinese government,” Krebs observes. He thinks a similar dynamic played out when Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar won the Nobel in 1991 and when Shirin Ebadi of Iran received it in 2003. “When awarded to promote domestic change, as it has been more often in recent years,” Krebs writes of the prize, “it in fact mobilizes the forces opposed to change and impedes liberalization.”

Findings: Total Recall

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 07:00:00 EST

The historian Robert Dallek thinks it’s time to put an additional safeguard in place against presidential malfeasance. Writing in Presidential Studies Quarterly March, Dallek faults the impeachment process as unwieldy. Better, he says, to let the voters decide whether a president should continue in office. Under Dallek’s plan, which would require a constitutional amendment, 60 percent of the House and Senate could place a recall measure before the electorate. If a majority voted in favor, the president and vice president would be ousted and the Speaker of the House would become president. “There seems little danger that the recall provision would be abused. Only two governors have been recalled in the last century, including Gray Davis in California, where Arnold Schwarzenegger has given the recall a good name,” Dallek remarks. A national recall could “help keep our all-too-flawed presidents and their administrations on the straight and narrow.”

Findings: Touched

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 07:00:00 EST

The piano virtuoso Glenn Gould was known for his eccentricities. Some of his recordings feature him humming or, to some ears, groaning over the music. He wore coats and gloves even in hot weather. And he hated physical contact. One instance of unwanted touching provoked him to cancel concerts and file a lawsuit, Brian Dillon recounts in The Hypochondriacs Faber & Faber. In late 1959, Gould visited the Steinway & Sons piano company in New York City. An employee named William Hupfer, in Hupfer’s account, patted him on the shoulder. Gould said, “Don’t do that; I don’t like to be touched.” Hupfer apologized. Within a few weeks, Gould was complaining of severe pain in his left hand. “When X-rayed the shoulder blade was shown to have been pushed down about one-half an inch,” he claimed in one letter. In another, he wrote, “At the moment it looks very grim.” In 1960 and 1961, he canceled many of his concerts and spent a month in a full-body cast. One of his physicians later said that Gould was physically fine. A year after the incident, Gould filed a $300,000 suit against Steinway. He claimed that Hupfer had “brought both his forearms down with considerable force on plaintiff’s left shoulder and neck,” thereby injuring “the nerve roots in his neck and spinal discs in the neck region.” A few months later, Gould met with Henry Z. Steinway, president of the company, to discuss a settlement. Gould said he would drop the suit for just $9,372.35—his medical and legal expenses, omitting the costs he had incurred for canceled concerts. Steinway, relieved, agreed. Evidently no longer in pain, Gould resumed his concert and recording schedule as well as his relationship with the piano company. Steinway instructed his staff to treat Gould politely when he appeared at the offices, but never to touch him. “The reasons for this,” he said, “are self-evident.”

Man as Machine

Max Byrd — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EST

Once or twice a year France's National Museum of Technology, on the nondescript rue Vaucanson in Paris, announces a special demonstration. On the second floor, at the end of a corridor of antique steam engines and jacquard looms, the museum’s Theater of Automates swings open its doors. At the bottom of a small, dark auditorium, the Keeper of Automates takes a few of his oldest, most fragile exhibits from their locked glass cases.

White gloved, wearing a lab technician’s spotless coat, he places the items gently on a table. A capacity crowd of perhaps 80 people, nine-tenths of them (it seems) screaming children, leans forward as he spreads out his gaily painted mechanical toys—automates—and under a single focused light winds them up, one by one.

My Own Private Nietzsche: An American Story

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EST

On Sunday, April 27, 1914, 67-year-old Jennie Hintz of Yonkers, New York, penned the first of two long letters to Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister and literary executor. Hintz, a self-described “spinster,” introduced herself as a “great admirer of your brother’s philosophy and his morals.” There was so much to tell Förster-Nietzsche, so much to reflect on—with every stroke of her rusty German Schrift, Hintz etched her longings and disappointments into the stationery. She shared a bit of her background (she was born in Königsburg, moved to Boston at age 10, and now lived in Yonkers with her sister’s family), chronicled her break from Christianity as a teenager, and confessed her frustrations in trying to find her own “voice.” She explained that she felt drawn to Nietzsche precisely because “in many points I had already arrived at these truths before He expressed them, but I remained mute keeping them for myself.”

Revisiting the Great Depression

Robert J. Samuelson — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EST

The Great Depression cast a dark shadow over the 20th century. It arguably led to World War II, because without the Depression, Adolf Hitler might never have come to power. It discredited unfettered capitalism—which was blamed for the collapse—and inspired the expansion of government as the essential overseer of markets. This economic catastrophe has long fascinated historians and economists, but for decades serious reflection on the Depression didn’t extend much beyond the scholarly world. It couldn’t happen again. We knew too much. There were too many economic and regulatory controls. But the Great Recession has made us wonder. Can we learn from the Depression? Are there parallels between then and now? Most ominously, could we suffer another depression? The conventional wisdom still says no. Unfortunately, the conventional wisdom might be wrong.