The Wilson Quarterly - Surveying the World of Ideas

From the Editors: The Gospel According to Jefferson

Cullen Nutt — Wed, 16 May 2012 07:00:00 EST

Last week I ventured a few hundred yards from the WQ’s offices to see a Smithsonian exhibit of Thomas Jefferson’s theological magnum opus. Popularly known as the Jefferson Bible, its official title is more ambitious: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & English.

The original copy of the slender red volume, which Jefferson constructed in retirement in 1819 and 1820, sits on display in a glass box in the National Museum of American History. The book is open to a two page spread. Hastily sketched dividing lines break each page into two columns for a total of four across—Greek and Latin in the two on the left, French and English in the two on the right. The columns carry verses cut out from elsewhere and pasted onto the pages. The second chapter of Luke, verse 46, appears in English at the top right, separated from the modern reader by glass and a few inches. Mary and Joseph are searching Jerusalem for the 12-year-old Jesus, who went missing after the Passover feast. They discover their precocious son dazzling the religious teachers in the temple. Verse 48 reads: “And when they saw him, they were amazed: and his mother said unto him, Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing.” Then—scissor and paste work fully evident—the narrative jumps to verses 51 and 52, whereupon Mary and Joseph, Jesus safely in tow, return to their native Nazareth.

Welcome to the religious world of Thomas Jefferson, where scripture he deemed implausible or inaccurate fell to the cutting room floor. The offending two verses in this case are crucial: “And he said unto them, How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” Why, Jesus asks, did you not first search for me in the temple, where I attend to “my father’s business”? This is the first intimation in Luke’s gospel that Jesus is the son of God.

That, one guesses, is why Jefferson left it out. He doubted Jesus’ divinity, and omitted from his 84-page New Testament aggregation anything he considered supernatural. Curators Harry Rubenstein and Barbara Clark Smith, who accompanied me through the exhibit, said Jefferson was applying Enlightenment principles of reason to Christianity. Why, by Jefferson’s reckoning, sully the “most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man” with the virgin birth, miracles, and the redemption?

Jefferson was intensely private in these beliefs. Throughout his political career, both before and after the birth of the new United States, he lobbied for religious freedom. “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God,” he wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia. On the eve of the 1800 election, Jefferson’s detractors accused him of being impious or, worse, an atheist. Presbyterian minister and university president William Linn warned that electing Jefferson would “destroy religion, introduce immorality and loosen all the bonds of society.”

Jefferson won, and the republic got along fine (and, in fact, doubled in size thanks to the Louisiana Purchase in 1803). Ten years into his retirement at Monticello, at age 76, Jefferson finally began compiling his text, about which he had been corresponding with like-minded Enlightenment intellectuals for decades. None of Jefferson’s peers appears to have gone so far as to dismember and rearrange the Bible. “It’s extremely unique,” said Rubenstein. Clark Smith attributed it to Jefferson’s intellectual audacity. “It’s the same attitude he has toward the monarchy.”

Jefferson used six copies of the New Testament for his task: two each in English and French, and two more that combined Latin and Greek. The two in English—King James New Testament versions from 1804—are also on display in the exhibit. They bear gaping voids where Jefferson manually extracted boxes of text.

Jefferson meant for the final product to be private, but it didn’t remain that way. In 1895, Smithsonian librarian Cyrus Adler bought the volume from Carolina Randolph, Jefferson’s great-granddaughter, for $400. Exhibitions brought greater public awareness. In 1902, John F. Lacey, a congressman from Iowa, proposed that every member of Congress receive a copy of the book, provoking a backlash from some Christians. Lacey, himself a practicing believer, fired back: “No one that examines this little volume, whether he be saint or sinner, will rise from his perusal without having a loftier idea of the teaching of our Savior.”

Lacey’s proposal passed, and Jefferson’s work won broader readership in the 20th century, beginning with the first publication by the Government Printing Office two years later. (Senators received copies until the 1950s, when the 1904 press run was exhausted.) The original book showed its age, however. The Smithsonian eventually removed it from public display. Ninety-eight percent of the pages contained cracks or tears. A painstaking conservation process completed in 2011 restored the book’s structural integrity and brought it back into public view. (The exhibit will remain open until July 15, 2012.) Rubenstein and Clark Smith have also written an authoritative introduction to a new edition of the book, now available from the Smithsonian.

The curators said the public reception of the exhibit has been warm, and surprisingly free of controversy. Jefferson himself anticipated—and dismissed—the doubters. “I am a Christian, in the only sense in which [Jesus] wished any one to be,” he wrote to a counterpart, “sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence, and believing he never claimed any other.”

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From the Editors: Meg s Mags

Megan Buskey — Wed, 09 May 2012 07:00:00 EST

As editor of the WQ’s In Essence section, I flip through hundreds of magazines and journals each quarter in search of noteworthy articles. Most publications offer up a few satisfying bits from time to time, but some have been so consistent that discovering them in the WQ mailbox in the morning makes my day a good deal brighter. My 10 current favorites are below. These are publications that print interesting and well-honed arguments in elegant, if not always enlivening, prose.

P.S: I left many small magazines I admire off the list (Brick, The Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Paris Review, to name but a few) because they have a more distinctively literary focus.

THE AMERICAN INTEREST (Web | Facebook)

The American Interest has many of the same virtues as the WQ: It runs pieces by scholars and policy practitioners written for the intelligent and curious general reader. Unlike the WQ, the AI has a rather specific bailiwick: America’s role in the world. (It also prints in color! We’re jealous.) I particularly enjoy Walter Russell Mead’s blog on the AI Web site—the man seems incapable of writing a frivolous post.

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR (Web | Facebook)

The American Scholar has long been heralded for its commitment to the world of ideas. What makes it so special is that it does not see personal essays, fiction, or poetry as antithetical to that mission. Eighty years after it put out its first issue, it is still serving the life of the mind in all its manifestations.

CABINET (Web | Facebook)

Cabinet, a beautiful quarterly magazine with an appetite for science, never fails to enlighten. Interest rather than topicality seems to be the editors’ main criterion for selecting essays. One recurring column has a different writer consider the virtues and demerits of a single color. (The Winter 2011 issue features the novelist Tom McCarthy on blue.) But Cabinet is not just quirk. Many of its writers and editors are in or refugees from academia, giving the magazine a more rigorous feel than most.

DEMOCRACY: A JOURNAL OF IDEAS (Web | Facebook)

Democracy has some serious progressive bona fides: In its pages, contributing editor Ethan Porter outlined a vision for tax receipts that was later adopted by the White House, and Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, now a Massachusetts Senate candidate, introduced her blueprint for the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. A go-to for policy wonks, this quarterly doesn’t stiff literary-minded readers. Recent pieces from contributors David Rieff and Amy Wilentz have been delights to read.

n+1 (Web | Facebook)

If you want to know the concerns of young, intellectual New York, subscribe to n+1. Eight years after the editors pooled what little cash they had to bring out the first issue, n+1 is on its way to becoming a literary institution. And for good reason: Tremendous talents like essayist Elif Batuman got their start there. Don’t miss its Web site, which boasts standalone reviews of noteworthy books and film.

NATIONAL AFFAIRS (Web | Facebook)

National Affairs could be called the conservative sibling of Democracy (and, to extend the metaphor further, the child of the now-defunct conservative magazine The Public Interest.) Like Democracy, National Affairs eschews policy minutiae for the big ideas animating discussions on its side of the aisle. If you want to know what conservatives are debating, read this magazine.

THE NBER DIGEST (Web)

The Digest is put out by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonpartisan think tank par excellence. Each monthly issue contains cogent summaries of some of the working papers produced by its hundreds of research associates, many of whom teach at leading universities. Recent issues have spotlighted research on the effectiveness of charter schools and the impact of ethnic and religious diversity on charitable giving. For those wary of the discipline’s intricacies, be assured The NBER Digest is eminently readable, and at four pages long, a slip of a publication.

THE POINT (Web |Facebook)

The brainchild of a group of University of Chicago graduate students, The Point bares its connection to the academy proudly. But part of its mission is to insist that contemporary culture deserves the same deep scrutiny usually reserved for the canonical. Only in The Point would you find a 13,000 word essay that juxtaposes Stendhal and the notorious 1990s dating manual The Game.

RARITAN (Web)

Raritan, with its monotone covers and text-only interior, is something of a publishing throwback. The same could be said of its editorial mission, which clears space for meaty essays from many disciplines. One of my favorite Raritan pieces is Stanford anthropologist T. M. Lurhmann’s account of conducting an ethnography of women in halfway houses in Chicago. (It’s not available online, but we ran an In Essence item about it in the WQ.)

THE THREEPENNY REVIEW (Web | Facebook)

The Threepenny Review falls on the literary side of the small mag spectrum, but its interests within that space are wide: Its writers contemplate everything from film to architecture to the Flemish painter Bruegel with the same seriousness. Add to that a spare but boldly artistic design, with a nice helping of historical photos that render well in black and white.

From the Editors: Afghanistan s New Writers

Darcy Courteau — Tue, 08 May 2012 07:00:00 EST

There is a small group of Afghan women whose names—Nasima, Farahnaz, Norwan—show up in my inbox weekly. I’ve never met these women, but I’ve been helping to edit their poems and essays for nearly two years. Founded in 2009 by American journalists and writers, the Afghan Women’s Writing Project (AWWP) mentors Afghan women and publishes their work in an online magazine run by volunteers.

Once recruited, I wondered if I was right for the job. Wary of ghettoization, I’d avoided women’s studies and writing groups in college, and while earning an MFA, I took the minimum of writing workshops required—for me, writing isn’t a social activity. It isn’t therapy, either, and my favorite authors give voice to loners and reprobates. But for women writers living in a country where they are often silenced—under the Taliban, they weren’t allowed to go to school after age eight—telling their stories and getting together to talk about writing could be seen as acts of defiance. Good enough for me, I thought.

Editing for AWWP brings with it, of course, a somewhat different set of concerns than those I find at the WQ. The Afghan writers compose in English, their second language, and I’m often called to work on poetry—a form not customarily edited but for the language issue. Fortunately, the writers’ English is very good, and when it does falter, often produces serendipitous word choices. It’s the slicker idioms—“achieving success” or “making dreams come true”—that are not so great on the page. Remembering that good writers, whether American or Afghan, appreciate an honest edit, I swat buzzwords like flies. In general, the writers are delighted to see their work receive serious treatment. After getting a poem back, one wrote, “I love my poems after the edits—it is like when you iron the clothes!”

That feedback, however, is rare, passed along from the directing editor. What I’ve learned about the women is mostly through their work. There is a lot of self-affirming pride in it, devotion to Allah and to family, but also pointed questions about the justice of some traditions. Violence and the threat of violence are everywhere, in memories of war, refugee life, and domestic assault. One woman tells of a husband who beat her so viciously that she left him. “I was tired of all the sacrifices and love and I no longer wanted to be the kind girl,” she writes, even while promising him her loyalty from a distance, “so that the meaning of love will not go away." Her voice, bitter, chilled, and complicated, has stayed with me since, and I’ve asked the directing editor to let me work on her future essays.

But even in that story there is hope, and many pieces end with a pledge to help build a better country. In the past eight months, Christopher Merrill, director of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, has twice paid student groups a visit in Afghanistan. (Read his reflections on the experience for Granta here; see his WQ reviews here.) The mood was anxious, he reported, when I pumped him for details over the phone. Afghans were desperate to build civil structures like schools and courthouses before the NATO pullout in 2014. But despite the tension, the Afghan students were overwhelmingly eager to talk about poetry. They are already steeped, Chris found, in a rich literary tradition that claims Rumi as the national poet: “They know his ghazals by heart.”

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Photo by DVIDSHUB via flickr

From the Editors: Deep Throat Vitriol

Steven Lagerfeld — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

When the manuscript of contributing editor Max Holland’s Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat came my way last year, I searched in vain for an excerpt that could run in the WQ. Now I’m doubly sorry it didn’t work out, because Leak’s reconsideration of the myths surrounding Watergate is stirring useful controversy about how the scandal came to light and its lessons for today.

Leak is really two books. One is a dramatic retelling of the story of Mark Felt, the top FBI official who became Deep Throat, the famous anonymous source who helped Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein penetrate the secrets surrounding the Watergate scandal. In the mythology surrounding Watergate, Deep Throat (Felt’s identity wasn’t revealed until 2005) was a public spirited official whose revelations helped save the country from a lawless administration. But in Holland’s persuasive telling, Felt emerges as a villain worthy of Shakespeare, his only goal to win the top spot at the FBI after J. Edgar Hoover’s death. Felt talked to the two reporters only to make his rival, acting director L. Patrick Gray, appear incompetent and to convince Nixon to put the veteran Felt in charge. (And, ironically, Felt was forced out of the FBI by the machinations of another canny rival.)

The second book in Leak looks at the larger mythology surrounding Watergate and its central story line that two intrepid reporters prevailed against all odds in revealing high level malfeasance. In fact, Holland says, Woodward, Bernstein, and other reporters did excellent work, but they didn’t do much that official investigators in the FBI and elsewhere weren’t already doing. “The main effect of Deep Throat’s leaks was merely to accelerate the scandal by perhaps six months or a year.”

That’s where the shooting starts. Woodward and Bernstein, quoted in a Daily Beast article by former Post reporter Lloyd Grove, deny that they painted Felt as a hero, but much more vehemently defend the impact of their reporting. They also fired at Holland before an audience of newspaper editors.

Barry Sussman, a Post editor who worked closely with the two reporters (and later broke with them), argues that the pair drastically inflated Felt’s role in revealing the Watergate story and that Leak’s case fatally hinges on its acceptance of their view, but he defends the importance of the Post’s reporting. A good overview, with Holland’s response, is here.

Leak has inaugurated a rough and tumble argument—even John Dean has weighed in with a positive notice of the book—reviving debates that many, whether out of weariness or irritation, would prefer to leave untouched. In an interview with Grove, Bernstein tried to brush off Holland’s book, saying, “I think we live in an age of too much revisionism that oversimplifies and twists complicated events, and this is a classic example.” It may be that a Fourth Estate battered by changing economics doesn’t need another challenge. But if it isn’t interested in the pursuit of truth, what is it for?

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Photo credit: C-SPAN

From the Editors: Slideshow: Feeding the Future

Erica Bleeg — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

Nestled in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, the Salatin family’s Polyface Farm encompasses 550 acres of woodland and pasture. A working farm, it has also become a mecca for the local foods movement. (All photos © Erica Bleeg.)

By Erica Bleeg

Walking through cow pastures and hog paddocks is part of my research. I teach two university courses on writing about food, and have a keen interest in where it’s sourced. Spring is the time to see a farm’s operations in full swing, so I recently headed over to Polyface, a Swoope, Va. farm that thrives without using chemical fertilizers, herbicides, hormones, or antibiotics.

Once known predominantly among readers of the trade journal Stockman Grass Farmer, Polyface’s owner, Joel Salatin, has gained a broader audience through trumpeting his humane and ecologically sound approach to agriculture. The 55-year-old Salatin has also made a mission of cultivating new farmers. For every farmer under 35, there are six over 65, and the USDA predicts that within the next 20 years a quarter of all farmers will retire. “There’s a brain-drain of knowledge about agriculture,” said Salatin.

Beginning wasn’t easy for Salatin. After a stint as a newspaper reporter, he returned to the family farm in 1982. “It was nip and tuck,” he remembered. “We lived on $300 a month.” Now Polyface brings in about eight summer interns in their teens and twenties to help with the season’s blaze of production, and two full-time apprentices work year-round. Salatin’s son, Daniel, lives on the farm with his wife and three children and manages the operation, often directing Salatin the Elder on chores.

Polyface rents an additional 1,200 acres where younger farmers live and work as independent contractors, borrowing equipment and raising livestock that feed Polyface’s business. “They can begin with zero capital,” said Salatin. Two such contractors have since successfully launched their own businesses. “In the end,” said Salatin, “This germinates new young farmers.”

Joel Salatin encourages visiting college students to smell the mix of manure and wood chips lifted from a hog paddock. The hogs aerate it while rooting with their snouts, transforming what could be toxic waste into rich, nearly odorless fertilizer.

Just two to three months old, pigs huddle together for warmth on a brisk April morning. At nine months and weighing about 300 pounds, they’ll be “ready to go,” says 26-year-old apprentice Noah Beyeler, farm talk for “ready for slaughter.” Polyface sells about 50 percent of all pig shoulders and hams to nearby Chipotle restaurants.

With the aid of a forklift, apprentice manager Eric Barth, 26, moves a 308-pound hog feeder toward the barn paddock. Expensive equipment contributes to steep upfront costs for new farmers. According to a survey conducted by the National Young Farmers’ Coalition, 78 percent of farmers cite lack of capital as the biggest challenge to beginners, followed by access to land and credit.

Eric Barth, Daniel Salatin, and Noah Beyeler select pigs whose post-slaughter weight appears to be less than 100 pounds, typical for barbeque. These would fill orders from the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. and an Arlington, Va. restaurant. Polyface also sells its meat and eggs in an on-site store. Seeing these men capture pigs recalls a Ralph Waldo Emerson observation Michael Pollan cites in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: “You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”

Homemade pens keep broiler chickens on grass and safe from predators. The broilers go out on pasture at three weeks of age; they’ll grow for about five more weeks before reaching processing weight. Here Daniel Salatin refills their water supply. In the last three weeks of life the broilers grow over an ounce a day, he says, and “if any stress—like not enough water or feed—interrupts that growth process, you can’t get that back.”

Barred Plymouth Rock hens roam the pasture that cattle grazed only the day before. The hens follow the cattle, picking protein-rich grubs from cow patties, aerating the soil as they peck, and fertilizing it with their own nitrogen-dense droppings. In the backdrop is one of Joel Salatin’s inventions, the portable eggmobile where hens lay eggs in interior cubbyholes.

Unlike cattle finished on manure-laden feedlots, and fed a potentially poisonous mix of corn and antibiotics, the cattle at Polyface feed on grass, their natural diet.

“What you never, ever want to do is violate the law of the second bite,” Joel Salatin once advised Michael Pollan. A single bite at the top of the grass is optimal for stimulating regrowth. To prevent overgrazing, the cattle at Polyface are moved almost daily to fresh pasture, a process that takes Daniel less than five minutes.

Daniel points to two cattle bringing up the back: “See how the mother cow walks a little and then she’ll stop, waiting for her calf to catch up?”

Of continuing the work of his father’s business, “I’ve never thought of doing anything different,” Daniel says. The chore he most enjoyed as a child was herding cattle. Here, his two sons lend a hand.

Joel Salatin, a Christian, considers his work “a ministry in every sense of the word, except we’re for profit. We are in the healing business: healing the land, healing the food, healing the culture. Ultimately, if our work is not healing, it’s not worth doing.”

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From the Editors: Remote Possibilities

Steven Lagerfeld — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

Is it possible anymore to speak of a person being in a “remote location”? A writer I know told me recently of editing an essay on her iPhone while camping in Alaska, and it’s almost commonplace to note that African farmers now check commodity prices on their mobile phones. We’re all familiar with the many everyday efficiencies and pleasures—and anxieties and irritations—that come from being constantly and ever more intricately connected, but what has been the result in the larger sense? Have we been brought any closer together as individuals, groups, or nations?

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, we shape our technologies and then they shape us. But it’s not at all clear how much they shape us, or how quickly. In his essay for this issue’s cover story, “The Age of Connection,” Ethan Zuckerman, a noted observer of the Internet, points out that the new technologies haven’t yet done much to nudge people from their comfortable information pathways. Yes, social media allow people to share great quantities of material, but unless they have unusually curious and wide-ranging friends, little of what is sent their way is likely to broaden their horizons. There still is not much of an audience for news from abroad—for instance, virtually no one in the United States paid attention to the early online posts about the Tunisian street vendor whose fiery protest suicide precipitated the Arab Spring.

Tom Vanderbilt's essay on the impact of the telephone suggests another answer to the “how much, how fast” question: not as much or as fast as you might imagine. Yet Christine Rosen, in comparing the world of the handwritten letter with that of the e-mail, finds that, for better or worse, much has already changed.

“Already” is the operative term, because it suggests more to come. We are only at the beginning of what will be a long process. If we are wise, we will watch as our technologies shape us, and then reshape them according to the lessons we have learned.

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From the Editors: Terrorism s Two-Way Street

Cullen Nutt — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

Five prominent Web forums for jihadist conversation and terrorist propaganda have been mysteriously unavailable for more than a week, according to a report in today’s Washington Post. A frustrated jihadist site administrator fumed: “The media arena is witnessing a vicious attack by the cross and its helpers on the jihadi media castles.” The lengthy blackouts—the first forum went down on March 22—have all the hallmarks of a cyberattack, though the Post quotes unnamed American officials disavowing U.S. responsibility.

Whoever is behind the outage, the incident illustrates a point specialists have been making lately: The Internet is not the open avenue for terrorists we once assumed it was. As Manuel R. Torres Soriano points out in a new article in Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, the Web is a two-way street. In 2010, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (an Al Qaeda affiliate) attempted to publish step by step instructions for making a pipe bomb using kitchen ingredients. The recipe was to appear in the inaugural issue of Inspire, its English-language Webzine. But when would-be jihadists downloaded Inspire, they found a bowdlerized and garbled version of the original. Computer code lifted from a Web recipe for “The Best Cupcakes in America” had replaced the deadly bomb plans. Media outlets dubbed the incident “Operation Cupcake”; British cyber spooks had reportedly hijacked Al Qaeda’s flashy new magazine. (The original magazine with the actual bomb instructions reappeared online several weeks later, however.)

“The new opportunities available to terrorists thanks to cyberspace are balanced by new vulnerabilities,” writes Soriano, a political science professor at Pablo de Olavide University of Seville in Spain. Terrorists live in fear of hacking and surveillance. In the Arab world, they flit from one public Internet café to another to avoid detection, and constantly struggle to block infiltrators from entering their Web forums or infecting their files. Soriano quotes a senior forum administrator who gravely warns his comrades to take care. “These cafés are under tight surveillance because the tyrant security agencies are fully aware of all the IP addresses of every Internet café.”

In the current WQ we highlight Thomas Rid’s provocative article in the Journal of Strategic Studies, “Cyber War Will Not Take Place,” which in many ways echoes Soriano. Rid argues that it’s not as easy as it seems for malefactors to exploit the Web. (Rid, a reader in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and a former public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, wrote “Cracks in the Jihad” for the WQ in 2010.) Complex cyber operations require expertise and generous financing. Western militaries and intelligence agencies have plenty of both. Al Qaeda sympathizers do not. “The Web acts as a leveler,” writes Soriano, “each new advantage for the terrorists is accompanied by a new opportunity to weaken such groups.”

Photo by kirk lau via flickr

From the Editors: Kennan and the Classics

Cullen Nutt — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

John Lewis Gaddis labored as George F. Kennan’s authorized biographer for more than 30 years. And that was while Kennan, who died at age 101 in 2005, was still living. Appearing last week at the Wilson Center to discuss George F. Kennan: An American Life, Gaddis marveled: “I was Kennan’s Boswell longer than Boswell was Johnson’s Boswell.”

Gaddis spent another six years finishing what became a 784-page tome. In his review for The Wilson Quarterly, Martin Walker called it “as near a definitive biography as we are likely to get of one of the most singular and significant Americans of his century.”

Gaddis, a former Wilson Center fellow who is Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale, focused in his talk on the surprising impact of classic works of literature and scholarship on the prolific Kennan’s ideas. Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), for example, figures in Kennan’s famous article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” which proposed an American strategy of containment vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The article appeared under the byline “X” in July 1947, only to have Kennan’s name attached to it in very short order. How did Kennan’s secret get out? The answer, his secretary Dorothy Hessman told Gaddis, was obvious enough: “Of all the people in Washington, only Kennan would have cited Gibbon.”

Watch the entirety of Gaddis's appearance here.

Photo: John Lewis Gaddis at the Wilson Center

From the Editors: Is It 1837 All Over Again?

Cullen Nutt — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 07:00:00 EST

Alasdair Roberts’ forthcoming book America’s First Great Depression: Economic Crisis and Political Disorder After the Panic of 1837 reminds us that the Great Depression of the 1930s, examined in our Winter 2012 cluster, was not the country’s first experience with financial catastrophe. Roberts, a professor at Suffolk University Law School and former Woodrow Wilson Center fellow, who recently wrote about Wikileaks for the WQ, explains why the First Depression is worth remembering.

You’ve written widely on a distinctly contemporary set of topics: governance in the 21st century, government secrecy, and financial administration in a globalized economy. What prompted your interest in the Panic of 1837?

Since the financial crisis of 2007-2008, there’s been a lot of talk about the decline of American economic power. Some have said that the United States will be charting unfamiliar waters, in which it’s more vulnerable to external pressures. But that isn’t right: in fact, for most of its history, the United States hasn’t been a hegemon. It’s been subject to the ebbs and flows of the international economy. So I thought I would tell a story about what politics is like in such circumstances. The book is about the past, but it might also tell us something about the future.

As you say, Americans forget that outside of a unique period after World War II, the United States has not been an economic hegemon. What changes when we’re not on top?

When you’re not the hegemon, domestic politics is more difficult. Often, it’s the politics of constraint—that is, explaining to voters what can’t be done, because of the demands of the global marketplace. This is a difficult, unpleasant kind of politics. Indeed, it might not even be right to call it “domestic” politics at all. In a very open economy, the line between domestic and foreign policy breaks down. As I show in the book, many local issues suddenly acquire international significance. When there were riots in Philadelphia in 1844, for example, there was real concern in London—because holders of Pennsylvania bonds wondered whether the government had enough control of the population to collect the taxes needed to make its loan payments. About one third of American states were already in default to foreign lenders.

You’ve spent a lot of time reading about American economic and governmental crises, both then and now. What keeps you up at night?

Two things. The first is the strong temptation to indulge in unjustified optimism. No one likes facing the prospect of severe losses in wellbeing. So it is tempting to deny the severity of an economic crisis—to hope that the worst is over, or that we will grow our way out of the problem, or that some modest policy initiative will make everything right. These are all excuses for inaction, and sometimes delay just makes things worse.

The other problem is limited peripheral vision. When you’re a largely self-contained economy, you get used to the notion that domestic problems have domestic causes. And if you see no immediate threats to your well-being close to home, you tend to assume that all is well. But in an open economy, what happens far away still matters. For example: what happens to the U.S. economy if Greece defaults, and the European economy and financial system are badly rattled? And what other dominos like Greece are out there, and starting to wobble?

From the Editors: What We re Reading

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 07:00:00 EST

Steven Lagerfeld: E-books are so convenient that I pick them up (turn them on?) only when convenience is a top priority, so it wasn’t until I took a long plane trip recently that I got to two that I had been keen to read for awhile. The authors, Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, have both written for the WQ, and Cowen is a member of our board of editorial advisers. Not only that, but the pair are the co-proprietors of my favorite blog,Marginal Revolution.

In The Great Stagnation, Cowen makes the provocative argument that all the digital wonders of the past few decades can’t hold a candle to earlier transformative technologies such as the car and the railroad, which not only changed our lives but created countless jobs. That, he says, helps explain why Americans’ incomes have grown so little since the 1970s. I wasn’t entirely convinced, but like the many people who have been talking about this book, I found it made me rethink my assumptions.

Cowen also makes a good argument that we benefitted in the last century by taking lots of smart, undereducated kids and pushing them through ramped up public school and higher education systems. But that untapped talent pool is depleted now.

Education also figures in Tabarrok’s Launching the Innovation Renaissance: A New Path to Bring Smart Ideas to Market Fast, which I’d characterized as a flurry of sharp jabs around a theme—there’s a surprising take on what’s wrong with the patent system. In another chapter, Tabarrok argues that pushing more kids into college has led to dumbing down and grade inflation in higher education—and to too many degree-bearing bellhops. Why not improve apprentice programs and other skills-oriented education, he asks, while cutting back subsidies to English and dance majors? The chapter is the perfect counterpoint to Kevin Carey’s splendid “College for All?” in our autumn issue.

Megan Buskey: In the latest project of the brainy powerhouse edge.org, editor John Brockman dangled a tantalizing question before 165 public intellectuals: What scientific concept would improve everyone’s cognitive toolkit? The answers, which come predominantly from scientists or social scientists, make for fascinating reading. Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman thinks that we often fall prey to the “focusing illusion,” in which problems that we are thinking about seem more grave the more we think about them. Yale psychologist Paul Bloom says we need to adopt scientific reasoning in daily thinking. NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen suggests that we often lose sight of the fact that most problems we face are so complex that they defy simple definition. All 165 responses are available online. For those of us who still prefer to consume their written fare the old-fashioned way, a book has recently been published.

Cullen Nutt: “The glorious spirit of abounding youth glows throughout this fascinating tale.” So wrote the New York Times about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise when it was published in 1920. The caveat: “The whole story is disconnected, more or less, but loses none of its charm on that account.” My recent reading, 92 years later, confirms both sentiments. A coming-of-age story of Princeton University student Amory Blaine, Paradise is hardly flawless, especially compared to Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby (1925). But Fitzgerald’s first novel—published at the tender age of 23 and largely autobiographical—is a gem in its own right. Heartily recommended.

Photo by Enrique Dans via flickr

In Essence: Packing Prisoners

Mon, 14 May 2012 07:00:00 EST

THE SOURCE: “The Strategic Use of Prisons in Partisan Gerrymandering” by Jason P. Kelly, in Legislative Studies Quarterly, Feb. 2012.

Other than elections, no battles are more bitterly fought in American politics than the redistricting fights that occur after each decennial U.S. Census. Many officials are willing to resort to any trick in the book to gain an advantage for their party. Jason P. Kelly, a postdoctoral research associate at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, has uncovered a new gimmick: prisoner swaps.

In most states, prisoners are barred from voting. But the Census still counts them (almost always at their prison location, not their last home address), and they are included in the head counts of electoral districts. A shrewd gerrymanderer would put prisons in electorally safe districts, freeing up some of his party’s supporters in those districts to be drawn into competitive areas where their votes could help tip the balance.

That’s exactly what officials do, Kelly found. He studied the movement of prison populations among state senate districts in 46 states following the 2000 Census. (The impact of prison populations on House of Representatives districts is minimal because the districts are too large to be affected by a few hundred votes, Kelly says.) In states where the redistricting authority shifted to Republicans after 2000, the average number of prisoners in safe Republican districts swelled by about 300. Where Democrats took power, they added about 400 prisoners per safe Democratic district. A party that gains control of the redistricting process in a state shifts a total of about 5,000 prisoners, on average. In some states, such as Texas and Florida, the prison strategy is pursued particularly aggressively.

Maryland now requires prisoners to be counted at their last home address rather than their prison location, and New York and Delaware have similar legislation in the works. But Kelly believes that prisoners may not be the only “phantom constituents” manipulated by gerrymandering officials: Children and noncitizens also get counted but lack the right to vote.

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Photo credit: redistricting map of North Charleston, SC by North Charleston via flickr

In Essence: Wonder Bread

Mon, 07 May 2012 07:00:00 EST

THE SOURCE: “Atomic Bread Baking at Home” by Aaron Bobrow-Strain, in The Believer, Feb. 2012.

Your average loaf of sliced white bread may not inspire much wonder, but its unassuming character masks an intriguing provenance. According to political scientist Aaron Bobrow-Strain of Whitman College, industrially produced white bread emerged from a confluence of political and social needs unique to the mid-20th century.

At the beginning of the 1900s, an unprecedented surge of immigrants was landing on American shores. Industrial food products, with their predictable shapes, standardized ingredients, and hygienic assurances, enjoyed rising sales, thanks in part to Americans’ desire to avoid what was then perceived as racial contamination. As World War II approached, the federal government scrambled to think of ways to fortify a populace weakened by the skimpy diets of the Great Depression. Of the first million men screened by draft boards in 1940, at least 13 percent were rejected for reasons relating to malnutrition. It dawned on the government to spike the most ubiquitous items in American pantries with vitamins. Thiamin, niacin, iron, and eventually riboflavin became banner ingredients of enriched bread.

But how to ensure that the public would appreciate this new nutritional jewel? Bread had to be perfected for the American palate. In 1952, the U.S. Department of Agriculture joined forces with baking industry scientists to inaugurate the “Manhattan Project of bread,” as Bobrow-Strain calls it. Its objectives were not only to ascertain Americans’ ideal of white bread but also to establish a process by which large volumes could be produced quickly. Beginning in 1954, researchers scrutinized the bread-eating habits of 600 American families in Rockford, Illinois, and subjected these consumers to countless taste tests. (The subjects, it turned out, favored extremely fluffy bread, perhaps because fluffiness had once been a signal of freshness. Arguably less surprising is that their preference was 250 percent sweeter than the then-average loaf.)

On the production side, chemists developed a way for yeast to ferment independently of the baking process, whittling down the time bakers needed to wait for the bread to rise. Scientists also perfected a formula to toughen gluten strands to “stand up to the traumas” of modern processing. “Four years and almost one hundred thousand slices of bread” later, the prototypical loaf of enriched white bread was born.

The project certainly achieved its goal. By the early 1960s, each American was eating an average of a pound and a half of white bread per week and getting 25 to 30 percent of his or her necessary calories from it. Consumption may not be as great today, but bread remains a fundamental conduit of governmentally mandated nutrients—and a staple of American diets.

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Photo by iateapie via flickr

In Essence: Africa: Storms Ahead

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

THE SOURCE: “Climate Change, Rainfall, and Social Conflict in Africa” by Cullen S. Hendrix and Idean Salehyan, in Journal of Peace Research, Jan. 2012.

Many researchers have long believed that climate conditions can be tied to the civil wars that break out so often in Africa. The continent is largely dependent on agriculture, and a fluctuation in rainfall, for example, can make a huge difference in the lives of millions of people. Now the question is whether climate may affect the frequency of less severe forms of sociopolitical conflict, such as rioting and demonstrations.

Cullen S. Hendrix, an assistant professor of government at the College of William and Mary, and political scientist Idean Salehyan, of the University of North Texas, have found empirical support for this climate-turmoil relationship. Using a new database of conflicts that included riots, strikes, coups, episodes of government repression, and occurrences of insurgent violence, they compared rainfall patterns and the incidence of conflict in 47 African countries.

Hendrix and Salehyan found that abnormal rainfall levels had a statistically significant impact on domestic instability. An increase of one standard deviation (a statistic that indicates how far a quantity deviates from the mean) over normal rainfall averages was associated with a 45 percent greater likelihood of conflict. A two-standard deviation increase boosted the chance of conflict by 116 percent. Drier periods had their perils, too: A decline in rainfall averages by one and two standard deviations saw the likelihood of conflict grow by 30 and 50 percent, respectively.

Violent events were more likely to occur when rainfall was excessive, while nonviolent events, such as protests and strikes, occurred more frequently when rainfall didn’t meet expectations. The authors speculate that drier periods may see less violence because of the difficulty of sustaining combat operations when water is scarce.

Scientists predict that climate change will turn some parts of Africa drier and other parts wetter. The findings of Hendrix and Salehyan suggest that such areas may well turn more contentious, too.

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Photo by tlupic via flickr

In Essence: The Meritocracy Machine Hiccups

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

THE SOURCE: “Is a College Degree Still the Great Equalizer? Intergenerational Mobility Across Levels of Schooling in the United States” by Florencia Torche, in American Journal of Sociology, Nov. 2011.

By leveling the playing field, a college degree does something magical. A new study, however, concludes that the process runs in reverse once students reach graduate school.

In a study of several large databases, Florencia Torche, a sociologist at New York University, confirmed previous findings about the socioeconomic benefits of a college degree. Yes, children of the affluent have a better chance of getting into prestigious undergraduate institutions. But where your alma mater stands in the U.S. News & World Report rankings is not the only determinant of how you will fare in your professional life. The major you choose, what line of work you enter, and how well you are paid relative to others in your field also matter. In the end, Torche reports, things even out. Once people get college degrees, the power of their socioeconomic background to predict their future status and income is “virtually zero.”

All that changes, however, among those who take the step up to graduate school. The advantages that come with a relatively well-to-do background reassert themselves, especially for men. Among male recipients of graduate degrees, those from families in the bottom third of the income distribution may earn as little as 60 percent as much as their peers from families in the top third.

The field of graduate study men choose may be a particularly important factor in this finding. About 58 percent of men from the top third of the income tier who obtain advanced degrees get them in high-paying professional fields such as business, law, and medicine, while only 44 percent of those from the bottom tier do so.

Torche found significant pay differentials within professional fields as well. Among men with advanced degrees in computer sciences, engineering, and math, for example, those from the lower tier earned only two-thirds as much as those from the upper tier.

What’s most alarming about graduate education’s tendency to reinforce economic inequality is the fact that advanced degrees are increasingly a key to getting ahead. In 1970, only five percent of men and one percent of women held a graduate degree; by 2005 the numbers were 11 and 10 percent, respectively. If Torche’s findings are correct, America’s meritocracy machine is not running smoothly.

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Photo credit: Baxton via flickr

In Essence: Blowin in the Wind

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

THE SOURCE: “The Future of History” by Francis Fukuyama, in Foreign Affairs, Jan.–Feb. 2012.

In The End of History (1992), Francis Fukuyama famously argued that the collapse of Soviet communism marked the end of human ideological evolution. Liberal democracy had triumphed and would face no further significant challengers. He still thinks that’s true, but now he detects a different kind of challenge to liberal democracy: its own failure to respond to a changing world.

Technology and globalization are undermining the middle class, which is the foundation of liberal democracy, Fukuyama warns. While Americans enjoy the use of cell phones and other technological innovations, the financial rewards of economic change have accrued “disproportionately to the most talented and well-educated members of society.” Globalization is increasing economic inequality.

The only dynamic political response has come from the Tea Party, whose members, despite their antielitist rhetoric, “vote for conservative politicians who serve the interests of precisely those financiers and corporate elites they claim to despise.” Fukuyama, a fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (and a onetime leading neoconservative thinker who broke ranks with the movement several years ago), contends that what America needs more than anything is “serious intellectual debate” over how to respond to the new globalized capitalism. Yet despite the momentary success of Occupy Wall Street, the Left has failed to create “a plausible progressive counternarrative.”

In the universities, leftist thinkers have embraced postmodernism, feminism, and other culturally oriented intellectual trends that simply can’t mobilize popular majorities. A bigger problem is the Left’s “lack of credibility” in the political realm. It mainly defends a social-democratic agenda of “social services, such as pensions, health care, and education,” that are no longer affordable at current levels, and is unable to offer much that is new.

The Left needs to articulate an “ideology of the future” that can compete with the Right’s libertarian populism, Fukuyama contends. That ideology should “reassert the supremacy of democratic politics over economics and legitimate anew government as an expression of the public interest.” But simply defending the welfare state won’t do. “The ideology would need to somehow redesign the public sector, freeing it from its dependence on existing stakeholders and using new, technology-empowered approaches to delivering services.”

Nothing will be possible, however, unless the Left develops a strong critique of neoclassical economics, which provides the theoretical underpinning for today’s reigning ideology. Among other things, the new ideology must show that “people’s incomes do not necessarily represent their true contributions to society” and that the existing distribution of incomes is not necessarily the fairest.

Many of the elements of a new way of thinking about society are out there. Until they are assembled, Fukuyama concludes, the middle class will continue to believe that “their interests will be best served by ever-freer markets and smaller states.”

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Photo credit: Tea Party protest at the Connecticut State Capitol in 2009 by Sage Ross via creative commons

In Essence: It Was the Economy, Stupid

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

THE SOURCE: “Free Trade, Sovereignty, and Slavery: Toward an Economic Interpretation of American Independence” by Staughton Lynd and David Waldstreicher, in William and Mary Quarterly, Oct. 2011.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," may be among the most famous phrases in the English language. Similarly inscribed on the hearts of Americans are the personal liberties the Declaration of Independence enshrines. But “the final text of the Declaration was anything but a transparent ranking of all the real reasons for independence,” argue Staughton Lynd, an independent scholar, and David Waldstreicher, a historian at Temple University. Economic frustrations, not a desire for “certain unalienable rights,” planted the seeds that grew into the American Revolution.

Scholars tend to view the ideological arguments for independence as building to a critical point and preoccupying the colonists thereafter. That’s inaccurate, Lynd and Waldstreicher write: From the mid-18th century right up to the signing of the Declaration, Americans objected to a myriad of British imperial policies principally on economic grounds. The antitax sentiment of the Boston Tea Party in 1773 is well known, but Americans also protested British attempts to requisition resources during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), imperial currency manipulation that left the colonies strapped, and prohibitions on trade with the French West Indies, along with many other policies.

To make the strongest case possible, American patriots were often forced to subsume their economic frustrations within a broader argument for sovereignty, setting up the natural rights arguments associated with the Declaration. The debate over the Navigation Acts during the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1774 was one such moment. These laws required that American rice and tobacco be shipped to England so that British merchants could resell the commodities for marked-up prices and reap the rewards. “In arguing for the conclusive right of the colonists to govern the relationships among the colonies and between them and other countries, airtight precedents were lacking,” the authors note. There were no common-law traditions or charters to back up their arguments. The “principles of justice,” however, could do the trick.

There’s nothing wrong with the fact that colonists were initially motivated by economic concerns, Lynd and Waldstreicher say. What’s dismaying is that principles such as the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” seeped into the mythology of the American character at the expense of everything else and fed the belief that America is an exceptional nation. In reality, the authors assert, “the American Revolution was basically a colonial independence movement and the reasons for it were fundamentally economic.”

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Image credit: The Destruction of Tea at Boston Harbor (1846) by Nathaniel Currier via Wikimedia commons

In Essence: Brazil’s Popularity Problem

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

THE SOURCE: “A Leader Without Followers? The Growing Divergence Between the Regional and Global Performance of Brazilian Foreign Policy” by Andrés Malamud, in Latin American Politics and Society, Fall 2011.

After decades of failing to fulfill predictions that it would become Latin America's great power, Brazil seems to have made good on its singular potential. Its humming economy has earned it recognition as one of the four international up-and-comers known as the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). It took on a high-profile role in the G-20 negotiations in 2008 and 2009, and has snagged spots in the G-8+5 and other negotiating bodies. But while Brazil is enjoying its spot on the crowded global stage, it has failed to command a strong following in its own backyard, writes political scientist Andrés Malamud of the University of Lisbon’s Institute of Social Sciences.

There are several reasons for the “growing mismatch between the regional and global performance of Brazilian foreign policy,” Malamud writes. For one, “Brazil scares nobody.” The country boasts the largest defense budget in the region, but “Brazil is not—and has no intention of becoming—a military power,” preferring to be seen as a “peace-loving, law-abiding, and benign” force. And while Brazil does have the largest economy in Latin America, several neighbors—notably Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay—consistently outperform it in gross domestic product per capita and human development indicators.

Furthermore, Brazil’s success at regional power-brokering has been mixed. It was able to pioneer the notion of South America as an “autonomous political-economic area” distinct from Latin America, elbowing Mexico out of its regional foreign-policy realm and orchestrating the conditions for its own predominance. But Mercosur, the regional economic integration project Brazil helped spearhead, has seen its promise wane considerably since its heyday in the 1990s. Worse still, other countries in the region have publicly flouted Brazil’s global ambitions. In 2004 Argentina opposed Brazil’s efforts to win a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, infuriating then-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Mexico, Argentina, and Venezuela are strong competitors for influence in the region, along with the United States. Brazil will have its work cut out for it even maintaining its regional stature.

The country’s new president, Dilma Rousseff, who took office in January 2011, has been less vocal about Brazil’s foreign-policy ambitions than her predecessor. But make no mistake, Malamud says: Brazil is on the world stage to stay.

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Photo credit: Brazilian peacekeeper in Haiti by US Navy via creative commons

In Essence: Body of Proof

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

THE SOURCE: “Post-Mortem Imaging as an Alternative to Autopsy in the Diagnosis of Adult Deaths: A Validation Study” by Ian S. D. Roberts, Rachel E. Benamore, Emyr W. Benbow, Stephen H. Lee, Jonathan N. Harris, Alan Jackson, Susan Mallett, Tufail Patankar, Charles Peebles, Carl Roobottom, and Zoe C. Traill, in The Lancet, Nov. 22, 2011 (online).

Americans seem to love television dramas revolving around the work of medical examiners, but in the real world, pressure has been mounting for medicine to develop an alternative to autopsies. Grieving families shocked by the unexpected death of a loved one are often reluctant to consent to the grim procedure, and Jews and Muslims object on religious grounds. (Autopsies are most often performed in cases where the cause of death may have been unnatural.) A study by British medical scientists suggests that imaging technologies can establish an accurate cause of death in many cases, sharply reducing the number of autopsies that need to be performed.

In the study, radiologists used computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to determine a cause of death for 182 people. They also rated their confidence in their diagnosis. After the scans were completed, pathologists performed traditional autopsies. Radiologists produced a cause of death that accorded with pathologists’ findings in 68 percent of cases when they used CT scans and in 57 percent of cases when they used MRI scans. (The most frequently misdiagnosed conditions were coronary heart disease and pulmonary embolism, which are difficult to detect with imaging technologies.) More important, though, is that the diagnoses in which the radiologists used the scans and reported a high degree of confidence were correct 84 percent of the time. That success rate is high enough to give the techniques practical value.

Imaging has several advantages over autopsy, the authors note. It more accurately detects collapsed lungs and select fractures and brain tumors. It also produces a permanent record of images that can be revisited and easily audited.

The rate of error is too significant for imaging to replace autopsies altogether. But used in tandem with other methods, the technique can make formulating the cause of death easier and more accurate. The authors propose using imaging as a “preautopsy screen” that can help determine when autopsies are unnecessary. If MRI and CT scans were coupled with an angiogram to check for ailments that imaging technologies aren’t good at capturing, the authors predict, the number of conventional autopsies could be cut by about 50 percent.

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Photo credit: CT scan by Akira Kouchiyama via creative commons

In Essence: The Westphalian Mirage

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 07:00:00 EST

THE SOURCE:"To Order the Minds of Scholars: The Discourse of the Peace of Westphalia in International Relations Literature" by Sebastian Schmidt, in International Studies Quarterly, Sept. 2011.

Few serious discussions of globalization go very far before sage allusions to "the Westphalian system" start flying. The term is a catchall description for the rules of the game that have prevailed in international politics since the European treaties collectively called the Peace of Westphalia were signed in 1648. Today, we tend to measure the uncertainties created by globalization against the solid foundation established by the Peace.

The only problem, writes Sebastian Schmidt, a graduate student in political science at the University of Chicago, is that the foundation is a mirage. The Westphalian system that scholars and others confidently cite as a standard was not what it seems. The ructions of our present-day globalization may not be as unprecedented as we think.

The Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years’ War, which began as a bloody struggle between Protestants and Catholics in Germany and later drew in other European powers, and the Eighty Years’ War, fought between Spain and the Dutch Republic. That much is beyond dispute. But the Peace is also said to have replaced the unsettled state of international borders and politics with a system of “sovereign, equal territorial states” immune to intervention by outsiders. (No longer, for example, would the Holy Roman emperor meddle in the domains of German princes.)

From that perspective, the 21st century certainly looks very different. Interdependence and integration are the order of the day. The International Monetary Fund routinely tinkers with the affairs of countries that are in economic distress, while nations and international organizations such as the United Nations increasingly intervene in the internal affairs of sovereign states in the name of humanitarianism, human rights, the environment, and nuclear nonproliferation. Fierce debates surround all these issues.

But Schmidt says that we have an exaggerated view of how different our own time is. He traces the problem to international relations specialists within political science who virtually stopped thinking about what really happened in the 17th century.

In an influential 1969 essay, Princeton’s Richard Falk essentially argued that it would be more “convenient” to use a fixed conception of the Westphalian system than to continue squabbling over historical details. However, Schmidt thinks there is a lot worth squabbling over. A handful of scholars have soldiered on in the history books, demonstrating, he says, that the Peace “did not establish anything resembling the Westphalia concept.” The Westphalian system’s supposed rule against intervention by outsiders, for example, was not absolute. The Peace protected the rights of religious minorities and barred sovereigns from determining the faith of their subjects, leaving the door open to outside enforcers.

The old notion of proud Westphalian autonomy belongs in the dustbin of history, Schmidt contends. The world is better seen as a “society of states” in which no nation lives in splendid isolation.

Image credit: The Ratification of the Treaty of Münster (1648) by Gerard ter Borch the Younger via Wikimedia commons

In Essence: Mending Malpratice

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 07:00:00 EST

THE SOURCE:"Dropped Medical Malpractice Claims: Their Surprising Frequency, Apparent Causes, and Potential Remedies" by Dwight Golann, in Health Affairs, July 2011.

It's a common enough headache for American doctors: Treat a patient using a routine procedure, but instead of getting a check in the mail, get served legal papers. To add insult to injury, much of the cost and conflict of malpractice litigation is unnecessary. A surprising number of cases “simply disappear, as plaintiffs abandon them,” writes Dwight Golann, a professor at Suffolk University Law School, in Boston. Golann studied 2,094 malpractice cases in Massachusetts that closed between 2006 and 2010. Almost half—46 percent—were dropped by the plaintiff. (The remainder resulted in a settlement or went to court.)

There are plenty of checks in the state’s system that should prevent frivolous complaints from going forward, including a mandatory viability review by a screening tribunal. Medical malpractice attorneys and insurance claim managers Golann interviewed said that the primary reason so many cases are dropped is simple: During the legal process, plaintiffs uncover information about their treatment that makes them re-evaluate the merits of their claim. A patient may discover, for instance, that one step in a complex procedure he thought his doctors had skipped was just not recorded, leaving him with an inaccurate perception of the treatment he received. The length of legal proceedings—2.75 years, on average, for dropped cases—leaves plenty of time for such information to come to light.

The costs of dropped cases are consequential: Insurers in Golann’s sample spent an average of $44,200 on each dropped case in 2010. These costs are passed on to medical providers and, eventually, patients through such mechanisms as higher insurance premiums.

Remedies are available, Golann says. A University of Michigan Health System initiative that made a cornerstone of quickly and aggressively investigating malpractice claims saw the number of malpractice cases filed within its system dip by 36 percent, case resolution times shrink by 30 percent, and case expenses, including payments offered by insurers, drop by 44 percent.

Lawyers for both plaintiffs and the defense should take a cue from Michigan and disclose information at the outset instead of waiting for it to be unearthed during the costly discovery process, Golann says. And when a claim is found to have validity, the defense should offer a good-faith settlement in a timely manner. Medical malpractice litigation still won’t be a walk in the park, but it should cause fewer headaches.

Photo by zpeckler via flickr

Current Books: Noble Savages

Jag Bhalla — Mon, 14 May 2012 07:00:00 EST

MORAL ORIGINS:
The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame.
By Christopher Boehm.
Basic Books. 418 pp. $28.99

The stories we’ve been told about the role of competition in our evolution have been unnaturally selective. Sound-bite pop science, of the “red in tooth and claw” and “selfish gene” variety, has left out much that is essential to human nature. Anthropologist Christopher Boehm aims to resurrect some of those missing elements in Moral Origins. In his view, cooperation, along with the traits and rules needed to make it work, was as essential to our survival as large brains.

Boehm has spent 40 years studying hunter-gatherers and the behavior of our primate cousins. His book’s explanatory quest started with a 10-year review of all 339 hunter-gatherer cultures ethnographers have described, 150 of which were deemed representative of our ancestors. Fifty of these have so far been coded into a detailed database. Boehm says this deep data set shows that we have been “vigilantly egalitarian for tens of thousands of years.”

The dominant view of human evolution against which Boehm deploys his arguments and data is well summarized in evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’s hugely influential 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins famously warned that “if you wish . . . to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature.” In nature, he declared, there is “no welfare state.” Indeed, he wrote, “any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it.” These ideas, aided by others’ similar claims, became barrier beliefs, preventing further analysis for decades.

Boehm’s story begins when the survival of our ancestors became a team sport. About 250,000 years ago, collaborative hunting of big game became more successful than solo hunting. Teams that chased the game toward hunters could be much more productive—but only if the profits were sustainably shared. A further complication arose in harsh environments where success depended on luck as well as skill. Both problems were solved, then as now, by the logic of shared profits and risks. Even the best hunters, when unlucky, benefited from rules that required meat sharing. Solving this collective carnivores’ dilemma radically changed the rules of our evolutionary game. Those who were skilled at cooperating fared better, as did those with the fittest sharing rules. Our ancestors, Boehm writes, went through a “major political transition,” developing from “a species that lived hierarchically” into one that was “devoutly egalitarian.”

Dawkins argued that the benefits enjoyed by selfish exploiters, or free riders, are a key constraint on the viability of generous cooperation. Though he was right about that, he was deeply wrong in being so pessimistic about evolution’s ability to overcome such hurdles. Boehm marshals extensive evidence showing how hunter-gatherers use rigidly enforced social rules to suppress free riding today, providing a model for how our ancestors could have cooperated in a natural “welfare state” that was crucial to their survival.

A key new insight Boehm provides is that humans are both able and inclined to “punish resented alpha-male behavior”—for example, when powerful individuals hog more than their fair share of meat. He illustrates this phenomenon with examples from present-day hunter-gatherer societies, in which social rules are used to prevent excessive egoism, nepotism, and cronyism. For example, meat is never distributed by the hunter who made the kill, but by another stakeholder. Rules of this kind are socially enforced by means of “counterdominant coalitions” and techniques such as ridicule, shaming, shunning, ostracism, and, ultimately, the death penalty. (Typically, the task of execution is delegated to a kinsman of the condemned to prevent escalating revenge by other relatives.) The result is a sort of inverted eugenics: the elimination of the strongest, if they abuse their power. Astonishingly, such solutions aren’t rare; rather, they’re nearly universal. Our ancestors likely unburdened themselves of the “Darwinian” overhead costs of Hobbes’s “war of all against all.” Lincoln’s principle of government “of the people, by the people, for the people” ran deeper than he knew.

Socially enforced rules create powerful new environmental pressures. The lowest-cost strategy to avoid social penalties becomes preemptive self-control. Many evolutionary psychologists commit a grave error when they assume, for example, that our epidemic of obesity is a result of our evolved preference for fatty meat, which is irresistible in an environment of excess. Impulse control has likely long been adaptive, especially in regard to social rules.

This premium on self-control nurtured a capacity to internalize behavioral rules—to feel instinctively that some behaviors are definitively right or wrong. These rules tended to balance immediate selfish gain with longer-term or group interests. The enlightening moral emotions, such as shame and guilt, that implement these constraints created a means to administer a social contract without “policemen, judges, and juries.”

At some point we transitioned from an “apelike ‘might is right,’ fear-based social order to one also based on internalizing rules and worrying about personal reputations.” And conscious, reputation-based social selection for collaborative activities became dominant. If you were known not to cooperate generously, you were less likely to reap group benefits, and less likely to be selected for the massively resource-intensive collaborative venture of raising human offspring. Those who played by the moral rules tended to breed with others who did the same. Boehm describes these directed selection processes as “auto-domestication.”

When one is thinking about human evolution, a common error—which Boehm tends to repeat—is to fixate on genetically influenced behaviors. Much of what humans do is nowhere in our genes. For example, neither you nor I have genes coded specifically for what we are each doing at this precise moment. Writing and reading are marvels of our educability, learned at large cost—unlike spoken language, which is innate and emerges effortlessly.

Boehm’s book contains many important ideas, but its flaws risk reducing their impact. His fresh thinking is mired in a musty, baggage-laden vocabulary. For example, a less loaded term for “morals” would be “social coordination rules.” A better term for “conscience” might simply be “social rule processor,” very similar to our “language rule processor.” We easily absorb and use the rules of both. Because Boehm aims at two not easily compatible audiences, the general reader and the student-practitioner, he goes into too much detail in some places, and in others he assumes too much knowledge on the part of the reader. But those who persevere will be well compensated.

Boehm estimates that our dependence on social rules evolved some 250,000 years ago. That’s 10,000 generations. In comparison, only 15 generations have elapsed since Enlightenment thinkers began promoting the idea that self-interested social coordination rules were politically and economically viable. And it’s been perhaps two generations since those ideas began to prevail over the theory that unfettered egoistic competition is good and natural. Boehm shows that whatever the intellectual fashions are, our nature has long included adaptive constraints to counter the costs of unproductive competition. Models of our nature and social organization that lack these balancing forces ignore inalienable traits that have long served us well.

Scientific descriptions of human nature are particularly susceptible to Rorschach readings. Victorian capitalists and imperialists aggressively promoted the “survival of the fittest” strain in Darwin. (English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, a key popularizer of Darwin, went so far as to describe the merciless natural world a “holocaust . . . in every hedge.”) These ideas came to define what “Darwinian” meant, to the point where Darwin’s less convenient ideas were ignored. But that bitterly pessimistic view has too long held sway. As Charles Darwin himself wrote in The Descent of Man (1871), “Social instincts, which no doubt were acquired by man, as by the lower animals . . . will from the first have given to him some wish to aid his fellows.” Indeed, Darwin goes on to call any man who does not harbor such instincts an “unnatural monster.” Boehm helps us see again that we need not be so monstrously at odds with our social natures.

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Current Books: Leader of the Pack

Laura Claridge — Mon, 07 May 2012 07:00:00 EST

JULIETTE GORDON LOW:
The Remarkable Founder of the Girl Scouts.
By Stacy A. Cordery. Viking. 382 pp. $28.95

Millions of American women have worn a Girl Scout uniform, including Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, Lucille Ball, Mariah Carey, and Sandra Day O’Connor. Aside from those ubiquitous boxes of thin mint cookies, the organization, which today claims more than three million members, is synonymous with the best values of American culture, including devotion to public service and chipper self-sufficiency. It owes its existence to the vision of a vibrant if eccentric promoter of opportunities for girls, as historian Stacy A. Cordery recounts in Juliette Gordon Low: The Remarkable Founder of the Girl Scouts.

Low, known all her life as Daisy, was born in Savannah in 1860, on the brink of the Civil War, to a Confederate captain and his Yankee wife. As a young woman, she grew smitten with William Mackay Low, a rich squire with a likewise geographically divided pedigree: His mother was a local belle and his father was British. After months of Southern romance, “Willy” left for Oxford, where he was too busy carousing with other women to answer Daisy’s letters, though he spent every summer with her. Once he decided to settle down, however, the two became engaged—Daisy evidenced the fine breeding he required in a bride, and she was attracted to his wild streak.

Already having lost most hearing in one ear because of an improperly treated infection, Daisy suffered a freak accident at their wedding in 1886 when a grain of rice thrown by a celebrant lodged in the same ear and led to complications in both ears that left Daisy almost entirely deaf. Seeking treatment for the disability, as well as for tuboovarian abscesses that left her childless, preoccupied Daisy as Willy returned to his libertine ways.

Living most of each year in London, and manipulating their life until he was Daisy’s only priority, Willy became “everything to her and simultaneously despised her for it,” Cordery writes. Unfortunately, she fails to provide much insight into the personalities of Willy and Daisy, whetting our interest without giving satisfaction. The book, though gracefully written, lacks the bite of Cordery’s biography of Alice Roosevelt Longworth—probably because Daisy was a nicer person and because her life produced a comparative dearth of primary sources.

In 1905, just after Daisy had accepted the inevitability of divorce, her husband died suddenly. With the help of her family, she fought successfully to claim the inheritance Willy had left to his lovers and friends instead of to his wife. By 1908 Low was accompanying relatives and friends to Pompeii, Egypt, Africa, and India. But once back in her London home, she would complain of boredom and loneliness. Yet when she filled her house with guests, she would disappear until the frantic servants found her upstairs. (One wishes Cordery had plumbed such eccentricity—or buried hostility—more deeply.)

Low’s life changed in 1911, when, at the age of 51, she met General Sir Robert Baden-Powell, a Renaissance man who had recently founded the Boy Scouts in England. Having long felt that women were treated as secondclass citizens (especially when, as in Low’s case, the member of the “weaker sex” had a physical disability), Baden-Powell convinced her that she could achieve for girls what he had for boys. Low headed home to Georgia, where she telephoned a friend to say, “Come right over. . . . I’ve got something for the girls of Savannah and all America.”

Low organized the first troop meeting of 18 girls in her hometown on March 12, 1912. When the United States declared war on Germany five years later, she and her troops registered voters, rolled bandages, planted victory gardens, learned Morse code, and made vast numbers of “smokeless trench candles” with which soldiers could warm their rations. At last, Juliette Gordon Low had found herself useful.

The organization grew quickly; within eight years, it numbered over 67,000 members. Low remained at the helm until shortly before her death from cancer in 1927. As a leader, she was far from perfect. She was frequently bossy and unwilling to share authority with others. Her eccentricity coupled with her deafness could make her whimsy appear more imperious than charming. But her belief that women could overcome any adversity convinced her that public service was a perfect fit for typically underoccupied girls and women.

Initially unsure about the wisdom of racially integrating the Girl Scouts at the troop level, Low formed the first all-black troop in 1917. Other racially and culturally defined troops soon followed. In 1956, Martin Luther King Jr. lauded the Girl Scouts as “a force for desegregation”: Troops were frequently integrated by then. Today, Low’s ethos of acceptance endures. This past October, a Denver Girl Scout troop told seven-year-old transgender Bobby Montoya that he could not join. But a national spokesperson for the organization later said the decision had been a mistake: “If a child is living life as a girl . . . we welcome her. We do not require proof of gender.”

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Current Books: India s Underbelly

Bharati Mukherjee — Mon, 07 May 2012 07:00:00 EST

BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS:
Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity.
By Katherine Boo.
Random House. 256 pp. $27

In Behind the Beautiful Forevers, a portrait of a slum in Mumbai, India, Katherine Boo sketches characters with Dickensian vividness against the black machinations of communal enmities, caste and ethnic politics, class prejudice, sexism, and corruption. Boo, whose long-form journalism on the American poor has earned her a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, and other awards, set herself a difficult task with this, her first book: to dramatize the effects of poverty and corruption on everything they touch. The poverty in Mumbai—indeed, in all the developing world’s megacities—can reinforce ties among neighbors; more often, it breeds suspicion, gangs, and lethal jealousies.

To illustrate her global concerns, Boo ratchets them down to events in a single community. It is 2008 in Annawadi, a Mumbai squatter settlement of 335 huts built next to an international airport. Palm trees, razor-wire fences, and glass towers of luxury hotels ring the slum. In a hut, a teenager named Abdul Husain is putting up a shelf on which his mother, Zehrunisa, can store her cooking supplies. On the other side of the wall where the shelf is to be mounted lives Fatima, or “One Leg,” a Hindu woman named for a congenital deformity that forced her into marriage with a sickly, elderly Muslim. Now she is a luridly made-up, indiscriminately promiscuous madwoman on crutches, with an irrational hatred of the more successful Husain family. Abdul’s taps against the wall send brick dust drifting into a pot of rice on Fatima’s stove, triggering a chain of events that will bring death to Fatima and economic ruin to the Husain family.

In the eyes of their city, all Annawadians are criminals, squatters on airport property, so they cannot open businesses. Most are trash sorters, selling metals and plastic they gather from random sources or buy from children who risk their lives nightly to pluck bits of the recyclables from a roadway. Some of the garbage, however, is obtained by trespassing on hotel grounds, or is stolen from construction sites. Whenever a family purchases a television set, improves its property, or sends a child to school, a policeman’s first suspicion is that the money must have come from some sort of illegality. The only way to avoid jail is to pay off the police, who share their take with judges and lawyers. It is a sordid game, its rules understood and played by all.

Of the slum’s 3,000 inhabitants, only six have full-time jobs, yet by government standards Annawadi does not fall below the poverty level. Most of the men and boys, including Abdul, his tubercular father, and Fatima’s TB-ridden husband, are model entrepreneurs, recyclers with an eye to the burgeoning Chinese metals market on the eve of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. It has been a memorable year for Indian trash sorters such as Abdul, leading, in his case, to new tiles on the floor and the in installation of the fatal cooking shelf. His father is too sick to work much, so Abdul is singlehandedly supporting his family on the equivalent of about $11 a day.

On the July day when brick dust ruins her rice, Fatima decides to trap the Husains by drawing them into a public brawl. An outdoor shouting match ensues, witnessed by all the neighbors. Zehrunisa calls Fatima a prostitute; Abdul, ever the conciliator, pulls them apart, and Fatima then takes a rickshaw directly to the police station, where she reports that the other woman has assaulted her. Within a few minutes, Zehrunisa arrives to contradict Fatima’s story, but too late. Fatima is sent home, her complaint largely ignored, but Zehrunisa is forced to stay, and the extortion process begins. The shakedown starts modestly at 1,000 rupees (about $20), to be given to Fatima—and shared, of course, with the policemen.

As Zehrunisa languishes in the police station, the Husains’ oldest daughter, Kehkashan, charges Fatima with the lies that landed her mother in custody, while hundreds of neighbors look on. Mr. Husain, who was out trying to buy floor tiles and missed the original encounter, now threatens to give Fatima a real beating.

I must intervene here, to point out one of many background details that leap off the page. Kehkashan has recently left her husband—a cousin whom her family arranged for her to marry when the two were toddlers—because she found pictures of another woman on his cell phone. The young, urban Indian underclass is not inexperienced in the ways of modern technology. Its members play video games and watch movies, but, like their peers in other megacities, they are not really part of the larger metropolis. Only arrests and detentions, albeit frequent, tend to take them out of Annawadi and its immediate environs. Still, all of them dream of leaving, and believe they will.

Back at her hut, Fatima plots her next move: She will set herself on fire, then quickly douse the flames with water and blame the Husains for trying to burn her. Once the plan is set in motion, though, she doesn’t extinguish the flames quickly enough. Carried to a hospital, she dies of an infection three days later. But a small, cruel, incomprehensible revolution has been launched. No one in authority believes that the Husains murdered Fatima, whose own young daughter witnessed the burning incident and told what she saw. Even so, without bribes or the intervention of higher-ranking authorities, corrupted justice marches on. The rest of the book traces its expanding implications.

Boo never underestimates the force of class jealousy. Arrests and jailings, especially of the relatively successful, are first-rate entertainment for the neighbors. Early on, Boo summarizes the view of Asha, a would-be slumlord and local power player who lives near the Husains: “She had by now seen past the obvious truth—that Mumbai was a hive of hope and ambition—to a profitable corollary. Mumbai was a place of festering grievance and ambient envy. Was there a soul in this enriching, unequal city who didn’t blame his dissatisfaction on someone else? . . . Everyone, everywhere, complained about their neighbors.” Asha understands the link between envy and corruption. It can be used. Others’ yearnings, exploited smartly, are openings to wealth and power. Asha’s perfect daughter, Manju, might—with luck—become Annawadi’s first college graduate.

If there’s hope, it lies with the children. Many are orphans, or effectively so, given the ravages of drink and tuberculosis, but they retain many of the charms of childhood: enthusiasm, knacks for mimicry and tale telling, and a readiness to act the daredevil. Many will fall to drug abuse, road accidents, and suicide. Arranged marriages, gang violence, preventable diseases, and incarceration will claim even the most hopeful. But they are true believers in the rising economic tide. Boo muses, “Annawadians now spoke of better lives casually, as if fortune were a cousin arriving on Sunday, as if the future would look nothing like the past.”

For opportunists such as Asha, Boo writes, that fortune can arrive in many forms. “In the West, and among some in the Indian elite, this word, corruption, had purely negative connotations; it was seen as blocking India’s modern, global ambitions. But for the poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained.” In other words, everyone on top is out to squeeze you. Not destroy you—they need their share of your services, often sexual, and great chunks of your income. With corruption the one constant underneath the narrative of a progressive and prosperous India, there’s no reason you can’t profit, as Asha does, from dalliances with police inspectors and politicians.

Everyone below you will scheme and lie, and, yes, try to destroy you, because the surest mark of success in Annawadi is to witness, or cause, a neighbor’s fall. Schadenfreude could have been an Annawadian invention. And the competition is not simply economic: If your children are in school and doing well, aspersions will be cast—who are you sleeping with? If you manage to fix up your hut, install a shelf, tile the floor, or buy a television set, you’ll attract the scorn of your neighbors—what did you steal? Conspicuous success will eventually earn police attention.

This has been an uncomfortable book to read, more so because I trust the reporting. Boo, whose husband is Indian, lived for several months in Annawadi over a three-year period. She does not speak the languages (Hindi, Urdu, and Marathi), but relied on translators and multiple interviews. The dynamics all ring true. An uncle of mine used to say, of the joint family, in which many generations of an Indian family live communally, “In times of stress, a fortress. Otherwise, a madhouse.” Those words convey the atmosphere of Annawadi, where the smallest incident can incite a riot, and an act of generosity can mend a rift.

Boo’s take on India and the people she obviously loves (in an exasperated way) shows that the country’s ancient social structures run more like the joint family than a class system. The great terror is not incarceration but exclusion, or, finally, banishment. The old caste-and-class conflicts are weakening—especially in the cities, where India’s future is being written—but they still trump the call to collective revolt against corrupt and arrogant overlords.

The future in Annawadi, even for the more privileged, is still unreadable. Boo’s last words in Behind the Beautiful Forevers are cautionary and apply universally: “If the house is crooked and crumbling, and the land on which it sits uneven, is it possible to make anything lie straight?”

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Current Books: The Urban Future

Joel Garreau — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

THE GREAT INVERSION AND THE FUTURE OF THE AMERICAN CITY.
By Alan Ehrenhalt.
Knopf. 276 pp. $26.95

Is gentrification the “fifth great migration,” that will fill old downtowns with upper-middle-class white folks, while the tract mansions of the outer ring become slums for immigrants? So suggests Alan Ehrenhalt, the former executive editor of Governing magazine. In The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City, he proposes that a demographic shift is under way that is reversing generations of suburbanization and white flight.

This book will gain Ehrenhalt nothing but friends, admirers, and speaking engagements among the New Urbanist set, just as Richard Florida, perhaps today’s best-known urban theorist, has made a good living with his work. Ehrenhalt believes that “the massive outward migration of the affluent that characterized the second half of the 20th century is coming to an end.” Soon, he predicts, scarcely anyone “will be buying large, detached single-family houses 30 miles from the city limits.” And, more specifically, “Chicago in 2030 will look more like the Paris of 1910 than like the Detroit of 1970.”

As corroboration of this vision of the future, he notes the undeniable fact that the ’burbs have not been lily white for decades. Their good jobs, good schools, property values, and low crime rates continue to attract great numbers of hard-working, middle-class African Americans and immigrants. Meanwhile, as some inner-city neighborhoods become safer, they are drawing the market segment that developers refer to as “the risk oblivious.” Often, these are intrepid young white people without school-age children who recognize that it was always nuts to ignore the marvelous real estate near the old downtowns. Frequently, they are followed by the somewhat less adventurous and more affluent.

For those of us who have long admired Ehrenhalt’s astuteness, however, this book’s theme is undercut by some real head scratchers: His “great inversion” thesis isn’t supported by the 2010 Census data, the location of high-paying white-collar jobs, or the rise of the Internet as a social and economic force.

As demographer Wendell Cox and others have noted, suburbs are capturing a growing share of the population increase in the nation’s major metropolitan areas. “Historical core municipalities accounted for nine percent of metropolitan area growth between 2000 and 2010,” Cox writes, “compared to 15 percent in the 1990–2000 period. Overall, suburban areas captured 91 percent of metropolitan area population growth between 2000 and 2010, compared to 85 percent between 1990 and 2000.”

The old real estate mantra “location, location, location” applies to American jobs, too. If you imagined the map of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area as a waiter’s tray, with each white-collar job assigned the same weight, you’d discover that the balance point was just east of the “edge city” of Tysons Corner in Fairfax County, Virginia. New residential areas such as wealthy Loudoun County, Virginia, are booming because of their proximity to concentrations of high-paying jobs around Dulles International Airport, Reston, Fair Oaks, and Tysons.People living in these areas can go years without visiting the District of Columbia, much less commuting to it.

Because the Internet is, in effect, a transportation device, it is transforming the built environment. There are nearly 100 classes of real estate—including grocery stores, warehouses, and offices—from which cities are built, noted the late urban theorist William J. Mitchell of MIT. All are being transfigured more swiftly and dramatically than they were by the rise of the automobile.

In addition, the Internet is, counterintuitively, putting a new value on face-to-face contact. This has led to the rise of village-like places where people can easily meet. Some are embedded in old downtowns—the sort of places Ehrenhalt cites, such as Chicago’s University Village. Some are part of what traditionally have been regarded as suburbs. But the fastest-growing segment consists of places such as Santa Fe, New Mexico. Home to a world-renowned opera, charming architecture, distinguished restaurants, quirky bookstores, sensational desert and mountain vistas, and a great deal of diversity, Santa Fe, with a population of 68,000, is also little more than a village, far from the nearest metropolis. It represents aggregation and dispersal.

If and when real estate begins to increase in value, it may be instructive to look at the metropolitan areas that were appreciating fastest before the recent crash. Number one was Wenatchee, Washington. On the dry, east side of the Cascade Range, it has lots of sunshine, great skiing, and beautiful views, and thus attracted a lot of hip people who brought with them the arts, cafés and restaurants, and increased educational opportunities. Then came the Seattle-area software people, who extended their outdoorsy weekends using cell phones and laptops to stay in touch with the office, eventually moving there and starting their own businesses. Almost the entire top-20 list of fast-appreciating metro areas similarly became urbane without really becoming urban.

Ehrenhalt is absolutely correct that “we are moving toward a society in which millions of people with substantial earning power or ample savings will have the option of living wherever they want.” Whether that choice will amount to a great inversion, in which the roles of cities and suburbs “will very nearly reverse themselves,” remains to be seen.

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Current Books: Human Circuit Board

Eric Hand — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

CONNECTOME:
How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are.
By Sebastian Seung.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 359 pp. $27

Who are you? Once, that question was answered by philosophers. Today, it’s often the province of geneticists who parse our DNA for clues to our identity. In Connectome, Sebastian Seung, a neuroscientist at MIT, proposes a different source. The essence of personhood, he says, lies not so much in our genetic code as in the way the 100 billion neurons in each of our brains are wired to one another.

“Genes alone cannot explain how your brain got to be the way it is,” Seung writes. “As you lay nestled in your mother’s womb, you already possessed your genome but not yet the memory of your first kiss.” Forging memories, imagining the future, acquiring a skill—these acts all require changes in the brain that cannot have been preordained by your DNA. Key to Seung’s view is the way that structures in your brain—and the behavior of your person—evolve over your lifetime, in contrast to your genome, whose content is fixed. Neurons are plastic, constantly creating and destroying connections with one another. Moreover, the electrical sparks that course through them can spike with varying degrees of strength.

Though Seung adopts the tone of the genial professor in his lessons on neural circuitry, his aim is quite earnest: to sound a rallying call to map uncharted territories. He wants nothing less than a complete snapshot of every neural connection in the human brain: a connectome. The task will be immense. In 1986, neuroscientists published the first and only definitive connectome—for the nervous system of Caenorhabditis elegans, a lowly roundworm one millimeter long. After images were taken of several thousand worm slices, the 7,000 connections made by the worm’s 302 neurons were traced by hand, a project that took more than 12 years. If one were to apply the same manual approach to the far denser circuitry of the human cortex, Seung tells us, it would take a million person-years just to map a cubic millimeter.

Seung describes some of the advances that have put a human connectome in view, if not in reach. Diamond-tipped knives can slice brain matter into wafers less than 50 nanometers thick. (It takes a billion nanometers to make a meter.) These wafers are slapped onto a conveyor belt that brings each slice under an electron microscope for imaging. The limiting factor is not the gathering of these images but the identification of the neurons within them, and the sequential tracing of these neurons through the slices. Seung’s lab at MIT is developing software that could automate the identification of the pathways.

Critics of the connectionist view say that a complete map of the pathways still doesn’t constitute a comprehensive understanding of the brain. The shifting chemical bath in which neurons sit is also important. And the neurons themselves cannot be modeled as simple transistors, governed by binary rules. There are hundreds of types of neurons, each with different behaviors. The brain, Seung suggests, is not so much a tangled forest as it is a tropical jungle, rich in biodiversity.

But there is no denying that a map would be a major first step toward a completely mechanistic understanding of the brain. In the last two chapters of Connectome, Seung proposes some logical, if speculative, ends. If an aging brain is just a machine—an old car in need of new parts—why accept death? For $200,000, Alcor, a cryonics company, will freeze clients in liquid nitrogen and promises to thaw them when scientists can repair and revive their neural pathways. (Storage of just one’s sawed-off head is a better deal, at $80,000.) Even stranger are the dreams of transhumanists who see the connectome as the key not just to outlasting the body but transcending it. If the circuits can be perfectly known, why not upload that information onto a computer and live happily ever after as a simulation?

It’s hard to tell how seriously Seung takes these dreams of an afterlife. He is far more optimistic that a connectome can help in the here and now, in the development of therapies for connection disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. A connectome would mark a turning point in human history, he says. In several million years of evolution, humans have used their brains to create technologies. In the age of the connectome, we would be creating technologies to change the very brains by which these technologies were conceived.

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Current Books: One Nation Under God

Charles Hill — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

SWORD OF THE SPIRIT, SHIELD OF FAITH:
Religion in American War and Diplomacy.
By Andrew Preston.
Knopf. 815 pp. $37.50

The modern era has defined itself against religion. At worst, religion is reviled; at best, it is regarded as a subject not to be mentioned in the corridors of power. It wasn’t always so. In the premodern world, religion was pervasive, respected, and powerful. The turning point came with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years’ War, a horrendous, religiously motivated scouring of much of Europe. From then on, the states of the international system were expected to keep their holy scriptures off the diplomatic negotiating table.

But America has always been saturated in religion. As I made my way with increasing fascination through the pages of Cambridge University historian Andrew Preston’s monumental study Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith, I recalled my long-ago work as a member of a team preparing a proposal to reconstitute the old Patent Office building in Washington, D.C., as the National Portrait Gallery. In deciding the criteria by which to select portraits of the most influential Americans, we could pick those whom we regarded as major figures in the present, or those who had been most influential in their own time. If we chose the latter course, we suddenly realized, most of the portraits would be of clergymen.

This book solidifies Preston’s reputation as one of the foremost younger scholars working in the great tradition of historical interpretation of war, diplomacy, and peace. Over nearly 800 pages (disclosure: I am mentioned in the acknowledgments),Preston describes how America’s religion has been far more intimately intertwined with its statecraft and foreign policy than is generally understood.

His achievement is to provide a convincing explanation of why the rest of the world finds the United States so weird and perplexing. Political scientist Samuel Huntington, in his 1968 book Political Order in Changing Societies, argued that the United States is a premodern polity that formed just before Hobbes’s theory of the social contract centralized modern European state power in a secular form that would be carried to every other region of the world. Preston deepens and elaborates upon the difference. This is not the new master narrative of America, but it is close enough.

America’s sense of security, protected as the nation was by two oceans, allowed freely chosen morality to influence policy. The American conception that liberty’s task was to oppose concentrated power produced a sense that the country had a mission to reshape the world in a form much like its own, and enlarged a conviction that America was God’s country, with an exceptional and newly chosen people. The American civil religion that emerged was presided over by presidents who aimed to carry out reformation on a grand scale.

Preston’s American Revolution sits atop nearly a hundred pages of analysis of colonial creedal struggles that transferred Puritan ideas into politics. We see the French and Indian War of 1754–63in a religious dimension animated by fervor against Catholics and their demonical Indian adjuncts, as vividly depicted in James Fenimore Cooper’s classic 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans. Preston calls the American Revolution an “American Revelation,” a label that helps to explain the wild rhetoric of the upheaval, stimulated by the colonists’ fear of domination by the Church of England. George Washington restored confidence and calm. The real meaning of his Farewell Address was that a free republic could spin out of control unless its citizenry was virtuous—and the surest source of virtue was religion.

John Quincy Adams’s sense of imperial destiny, as Preston tells the story, exemplifies Alexis de Tocqueville’s perception that in America, uniquely, religion and liberty were compatible. Adams prefigured Tocqueville in the conviction that “democracy flowed from religion, just as religious liberty was made possible by democratic freedoms.”

Preston sees the War of 1812 as a turning point: Religion was used both for and against the war as the first pacifist antiwar movement emerged; no longer could the federal government claim a monopoly on righteousness. At this point, Sword of the Spirit begins to evolve into something of a religious epic, with two sides locked in a contest for supremacy: those professing faith, hope, and charity as they turn the other cheek, versus those in the tradition of Augustine’s “Christian Prince” who must make hard decisions about the management of this fallen world. The outcome of the War of 1812 strengthened the latter camp’s vision of the United States as divinely destined for greatness.

Manifest Destiny would spread both faith and commerce across the North American continent, while missionaries dispatched abroad became “accidental imperialists.” The Civil War turned the American Religion’s moral vision on itself. Abraham Lincoln, not really religious at the outset, became a spiritual leader; his second inaugural address served as an American “Sermon on the Mount.” The war was contained within the nation’s borders, but it profoundly affected Americans’ mission to the world, as the duty to bring freedom to the South was transposed into “a redemptive platform for America to save the world.”

Somewhat problematically, Preston depicts the United States as subsequently launching a sporadic series of “crusades,” an overworked, never quite apt term. The first was the Spanish-American War of 1898,as shaped by Secretary of War Elihu Root, bred in New York State’s feverishly devout “burned-over district,” by naval historian and theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan—for whom religion was indispensable—and by the “muscular Christianity” of Theodore Roosevelt, who declared that “we stand at Armageddon.”The war was a “humanitarian intervention” to halt the “cruel, barbarous, and uncivilized” practices of Cuba’s Spanish colonial rulers.

The second crusade was Woodrow Wilson’s. The 1917 declaration that signaled the United States’ entry into World War I was at odds with the sentiments of key American religious leaders, but out of it came an “idealistic synthesis,” a grouping identifiable as “America’s first-ever liberal internationalists.”Although Wilson, a son of the manse, did not take the United States into war for a specifically religious reason, it was “a war for the good of the world to ensure perpetual peace.” The idealistic war aims he announced in his Fourteen Points speech were founded on the golden rule, and “Wilsonianism was essentially an expression of Christian reformism.” It was not by chance, Preston observes, that Wilson insisted on calling the League of Nations a covenant, nor that the organization was headquartered in Geneva, “the birthplace of Calvinism.”

The third American crusade emerged from the “simple faith” of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was the very embodiment of the country’s civic religion and the first president to give faith itself first place as the essence of democracy. While FDR “tolerated all faiths, he could not tolerate a lack of faith,” Preston writes, explaining how World War II can be seen as a struggle for religious liberty.

The name of Reinhold Niebuhr appears frequently in Preston’s account. For two decades after Wilson, Christian pacifism had been ascending. Now an exciting new religious thinker took an oppositional stance, declaring with authoritative irony that the only Christian doctrine that had been empirically proved was original sin. From the halls of Union Theological Seminary and Yale Divinity School came “a theology and a morality for military intervention.”

World War II, Preston shows, was not the “good war” of nostalgists. On the one hand, it spawned such sentiments as “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition” and “God is my co-pilot.” On the other hand, mainstream religious liberals had a hard time overcoming their World War I revulsion toward ultra-patriotism and were deeply troubled by the draft, the demand for unconditional surrender, the internment of Japanese Americans, and strategic—and ultimately atomic—bombing. A new antiwar wave of liberal resistance was formed.

The Cold War can be recognized as a fourth crusade. Harry Truman’s Baptist faith encouraged him to see it in religious terms. Even the Presbyterian anticrusader George F. Kennan was shaped by the duality of his beliefs—in pessimistic original sin and optimistic providence—to struggle with the paradoxes of his containment doctrine. NSC-68, the founding document of America’s Cold Warthat spelled out that doctrine, derived phrasing and meaning from the reformed Protestant tradition, declaring the Soviet Union a spiritual as well as political and military threat, “animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own.” The 1950s thus produced another “Great Awakening” of religiosity. During these years the markers of the Cold War were steeped in religion, including the recognition of the State of Israel, the insertion of the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, and the assumption of a leading role by Dwight D. Eisenhower and presidents since in the National Prayer Breakfast.

Once again, Preston astutely demonstrates that retrospective consensus is a myth; the country was divided along a “Great Schism,” with one side represented by Billy Graham’s unflagging support for every president, and the other by pastors and priests who favored dialogue, disarmament, development, the United Nations, and recognition of communist China, and were increasingly sharp in their critique of segregation and capitalism. Mainline Protestantism was on the way out. Black Power and liberation theology marched hand in hand. The anti–Vietnam War movement was only one of several cultural revolutions that swept America in the 1960s and ’70s. New Age beliefs and strange foreign religions appeared; Hare Krishnas danced in airports.

Neither Richard Nixon’s Quaker background nor Henry Kissinger’s Jewish upbringing approached anything like the faith of Lincoln, Wilson, FDR, or Truman. The exception was Nixon’s insistence, in the depth of their travails in 1974, that he and Kissinger fall on their knees to pray. Though both men were profoundly patriotic, they nonetheless conducted an almost Metternichian foreign policy, centered on détente and the adroit shifting of great-power relationships. But in the eyes of those on the religious right, détente was defeatist, the opening to Mao’s China a betrayal. Nixon and Kissinger found themselves surrounded by a resurgence of traditional Christian religion and morality, fiery in its opposition to the 1970s leftist world agenda.

Christian Zionism, inflamed by the 1975 UN General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism, re-emerged as well. Nixon and then Gerald Ford were surprised by opposition from what they had assumed was their side. Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson, Democrat of Washington, took up the cause of Soviet Jewry’s right to emigrate. Kissinger, Preston writes, was slow to appreciate the muscle behind this drive, “and in the end it cost him détente.”

Today, after all the studies and biographical analyses of Ronald Reagan, he remains, his biographer Edmund Morris concluded, impossible to fathom. But not for Preston, who locates President Reagan’s Cold War successes almost entirely in his religious beliefs and his adept handling of religion’s symbolic power. Reagan had that sixth sense, and “reconfigured the Judeo-Christian civil religion from what it had been since the 1930s—a way to foster inclusiveness—into a rhetorical device to attack liberalism and secularism.”

Reagan was engrossed by the Book of Revelation and the idea of Armageddon, but that fascination didn’t color his outlook with nihilism; instead, he used it to snatch U.S.-Soviet relations back from the brink. Suppression of religion, Reagan believed, was the linchpin of atheistic communism; remove that, and the Soviet Union would change. Reagan focused on a group of radically religious Siberian Pentecostals who had taken refuge in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow during the Carter administration. If the Soviets let the Pentecostals leave the country, Reagan promised he wouldn’t crow about it. He kept his word, establishing a new basis for trust between the two superpowers.

President George H. W. Bush claimed born-again status, and evangelicals composed much of his electoral base, but once in office he prioritized order over justice and stability over human rights. President Bill Clinton, religious enough, appeared to have no larger vision for the world beyond the news cycle. President George W. Bush, who expressed his personal faith more openly than any previous chief executive, sought after 9/11 to return to the tradition of using religion to frame foreign policy. But Bush’s sense of global mission was challenged by an array of religious Americans. Preston summarizes all the evidence for President Barack Obama’s Christianity, from the influence of Martin Luther King Jr. to Obama’s erstwhile place in the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s congregation, but this has not translated into a religion-based vision for the world.

If Sword of the Spirit is an epic in which the story of Christianity is recapitulated through American foreign policy, the last couple of decades in Washington seem to have caught up with the metahistory of the ages, as religion, in the United States and, indeed, the world, struggles to come to terms with a newly secular global age. At the end, this engrossing book makes its point about religion indisputably: “Those who conduct U.S. foreign policy ignore it at their peril.”

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Current Books: Continental Rift

Brian Bow — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

THE NORTH AMERICAN IDEA:
A Vision of a Continental Future.
By Robert A. Pastor.
Oxford Univ. Press. 264 pp. $24.95

Robert Pastor is an extraordinary thinker who happens to have extraordinarily bad timing. His previous book on North America, Toward a North American Community, brought together all the best arguments for a post-NAFTA deepening of regional cooperation among the United States, Canada, and Mexico. But it was published just before 9/11, after which no one in Washington wanted to hear about “streamlining” America’s borders, especially if the proposal was framed as lessons drawn from European integration.

Since then, most of those who had jumped on the North American bandwagon have jumped off again, but Pastor, the founding director of the Center for North American Studies at American University, has stuck tenaciously to his call for a trilateral community. His new book, The North American Idea, was not written with the aim of influencing bureaucrats and business leaders, but rather of convincing the broader “attentive public” and rising political leaders to set aside old conceptions of sovereignty and move toward a regional future. Even as he was writing the book, however, Mexico was overwhelmed by a wave of violent crime and the United States was staggered by a financial crisis that turned into a deep recession that was also felt in Canada and Mexico. And again the political confidence and creativity Pastor was counting on seem to have evaporated.

The core of the book is Pastor’s argument for a rejuvenation of trilateral policy coordination, aimed at creating a regional community of nations (not, as he is at pains to make clear, a political union like that in Europe). He argues that the North American Free Trade Agreement, which went into effect in 1994, was generally good for all three economies. But its benefits and limitations were not well understood, and it stirred up deep-seated anxieties about national identity and sovereignty. After 9/11, political leaders weren’t able to work together on security challenges, the result being onerous border restrictions that rolled back the extraordinary economic growth NAFTA had unleashed. Now North America is faced with a new set of transnational challenges, including immigration, drug trafficking, and infrastructure building, that call for new regional initiatives.

For years, Pastor has been vilified by critics on both the left and the right as the mastermind behind an elite conspiracy to pursue “integration by stealth.” Here he turns that argument upside down, making the case that the general public in all three countries is actually supportive of (or at least open to) closer cooperation, and that the real opponents are blowhard pundits (e.g., the United States’ Lou Dobbs) and antiglobalization activists (e.g., Canada’s Maude Barlow), along with lazy, shortsighted business leaders and politicians.

Pastor argues that the status quo—three sets of national policies working at cross-purposes, “dual bilateralism,” and a general tendency to fight fires rather than coordinate proactively—is growing more and more dysfunctional. His accounts of NAFTA’s limitations and the pernicious effects of political neglect are compelling. He makes the case, for example, that trivial differences in the regulated height and weight of trucks on U.S., Canadian, and Mexican highways are a persistent form of hidden protectionism. Consumers end up paying for the cost of transferring a load of, say, produce to several different trucks in its trip from a Mexican field to an American supermarket.

Most readers will probably agree that each government has something to gain from closer cooperation with its neighbors, and that the region’s governments need to build some kind of new institutional structure. But many in the United States will balk at Pastor’s arguments that some post-9/11 border security measures should be replaced with a new system based on preclearance of previously screened travelers and transport companies, and that support of Mexico’s economic development will produce dividends for the United States.

The most problematic part of the core argument is the pitch for a specifically trilateral community, as opposed to the established tendency to rely on bilateral talks, even within supposedly regional forums such as the Security and Prosperity Partnership. Ultimately, Pastor’s argument for trilateralism boils down to his pointing out that dual bilateralism hasn’t worked. This is a sensible argument, but it is not likely to win over the skeptics, especially in Canada, where many still worry that Mexico is a dead weight and believe they are better off focusing on the bilateral “special relationship” with the United States.

Pastor concludes with an overview of specific policy areas that would benefit from greater trilateral coordination: development assistance, transportation and infrastructure, customs, and regulation. Policy specialists may be frustrated at the lack of practical guidance, but that is not what this book is for. When Toward a North American Community was published in 2001, there was political momentum for trilateral dialogue, and policy advice was what was needed. Today, the challenge is to renew the dialogue itself, and that is what The North American Idea is all about.

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Current Books: No Man’s Land

Michael Bustamante — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

GUANTÁNAMO:
An American History.
By Jonathan M. Hansen.
Hill & Wang. 428 pp. $35

Perhaps no single word evokes images of the divisive legacy of the war on terror more vividly than “Guantánamo”: orange jumpsuits, chainlink fences, “enhanced” interrogations. No wonder we forget that Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, is a beautiful place, and not solely the site of one of the world’s most notorious prisons. In Guantánamo, Jonathan Hansen, a professor of intellectual history at Harvard, captures both the natural splendor and the troubled past of the United States’ oldest naval outpost overseas, placing it front and center in the annals of American empire.

Occupying 45 square miles along Cuba’s southeastern coast, U.S. Naval Station Guantánamo Bay sits astride the bay’s picturesque southern channel. According to the terms of a lease agreement between the United States and Cuba, signed in 1903 in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War and renegotiated in 1934, the base can only revert to Cuban jurisdiction with U.S. consent. Thus, although formal diplomatic relations between the two countries ended in 1961, every year the U.S. Treasury Department issues a perfunctory $4,085 rent check to the government of Cuba, which authorities in Havana steadfastly refuse to cash.

Foreign interest in Guantánamo predates the Founding Fathers. Hansen masterfully reconstructs the little-known British occupation of the bay in 1741 during a war with Spain for control of Atlantic trade. The participation of George Washington’s half-brother and several hundred other American colonists in this escapade sets the stage for what follows: an account of creeping U.S. aspirations to seize Cuba, from the early days of the Republic (Thomas Jefferson was among the first U.S. politicians to regard Cuba’s acquisition as inevitable) through the mid-19th-century annexation intrigues of agitators in the South who saw Cuba as a place to expand slave territory. Readers acquainted with the long arc of U.S.-Cuba relations will find much of this history familiar, but Hansen also digs up less known tales, including the aborted plans of Spanish reformers to transform the bay into a major trading port.

In 1898, in the aftermath of a mysterious explosion that destroyed a U.S. battleship, the Maine, in Havana harbor, the United States declared war on Spain and began an overt intervention in Cuba’s ongoing war for independence. The Platt Amendment of 1901 subsequently forced Cuba, by then putatively independent, to concede partial sovereignty over its internal affairs as a condition for ending U.S. military occupation—and mandated the creation of the U.S. naval station. Hansen’s exploration of the conflicted relationship between the base and Cuban society—including the emergence of “Gitmo” as a Cold War hotspot after the Cuban Revolution—draws noticeably on Tulane historian Jana Lipman’s 2009 study Guantánamo: A Working-Class History Between Empire and Revolution. Nonetheless, Hansen’s work stands out for its impressive synthesis and use of new sources (including original interviews with Charles Ryan, a former base resident gone AWOL to join Fidel Castro’s fighters in the late 1950s).

In time, U.S. policymakers learned to take advantage of Guantánamo’s ambiguous legal status. Because it is subject to U.S. “jurisdiction and control” but not U.S. “sovereignty,” according to the lease, the base became a convenient place to bypass domestic strictures on whom the United States could detain, for how long, and under what conditions.

Hansen barely alludes to the tens of thousands of raft-borne Cubans held at Guantánamo for several months in 1994 before they were permitted to enter the United States. Instead, he focuses on the plight of Haitian refugees stuck in immigration limbo at the base during the late 1970s and the early 1990s. The significance of this story quickly becomes clear: The arguments the U.S. government advanced for denying due process to “enemy combatants” after 9/11, and indeed for bringing them to Guantánamo in the first place, drew on earlier court rulings concerning the rights of Haitians that held that the Constitution does not always follow the flag.

The Haitian story thus leads to a final chapter in which Hansen indicts Washington’s use of the base in the post-9/11 era. Hansen’s take on these matters certainly packs a political punch, but it is both moving and analytically rigorous. As one former base official remarks, “Gitmo is a silent bridge between history past and history future.” Guantánamo: An American History strongly attests to such links.

Current Books: Jesus H. Jones

Mark Reutter — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

UNPRECEDENTED POWER:
Jesse Jones, Capitalism, and the Common Good.
By Steven Fenberg.
Texas A&M Univ. Press. 611 pp. $35

He rode out of Texas in the depths of the Depression and was credited, during his reign as chairman of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), with saving American capitalism and mobilizing the nation for World War II. “You’d better see Jesse” became a mantra in New Deal Washington, referring to the pug-faced, fast-drawling Houston banker named Jesse Holman Jones.

Under Jones’s watch, the RFC and its subsidiaries lent hundreds of billions (in today’s dollars) to farmers, banks, railroads, and city and state governments, as well as various “incubator” enterprises, such as the Rubber Reserve Company, which pioneered synthetic rubber. Given his unprecedented power—which provides the apt title of Steven Fenberg’s meaty new biography—it’s no wonder that in 1941 Time magazine dubbed Jones the second most powerful man in Washington (after President Franklin D. Roosevelt). Roosevelt himself teasingly called him “Jesus H. Jones.”

Fenberg, a community affairs officer at a Houston foundation Jones founded, has two objectives: to tell the story of this largely forgotten figure and to demonstrate how his ideas could be relevant to our present financial crisis. He is successful on the first count, drawing from archival research a comprehensive account of a man who built much of Houston’s downtown skyline before he went to Washington in 1932 and made his mark there.

The second quest is more elusive. Creating a “usable past” seems a prescription for platitudes. And Fenberg tosses them around in his opening pages—about how government “can help people” and become “a catalytic force for progress”—before he lets the lessons from Jones’s life grow organically out of the narrative.

Born on a Tennessee farm in 1874, Jones dropped out of school at 13 to help run his father’s tobacco business. The urge to see a wider world, spurred by a trip to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, led him to Dallas, where he secured a job with his uncle, and eventually to Houston.

It took Jones several years to channel his energies, diluted by a fondness for poker and fancy clothes, into the art of making money. But once he started, he was unstoppable. He formed the South Texas Lumber Company in 1902 and was a millionaire five years later. From lumber he jumped into construction, erecting some of Houston’s first steel-framed buildings, then blazed into banking, which not only paid for his buildings but was a natural habitat for a mind that “could read and analyze a balance sheet or a financial statement like a high-speed computer,” Fenberg writes.

Lesson 1: Leverage your debt conservatively. When Jones took out a loan, he kept part of it in reserve. Thus he endured unscathed the Panic of 1907, which scalded many of his fellow builders. Lesson 2: Use your powers to “do good” while doing well. For example, Jones championed a joint local-federal effort to straighten and deepen Buffalo Bayou so that Houston could be connected to the Gulf of Mexico, paving the way for the city’s rapid expansion.

Jones’s success as a banker handed him a national platform. As the Depression’s headwinds gathered force in 1932, President Herbert Hoover, a Republican, appointed Jones, a Democrat, to the board of the RFC, which had been established to shore up the country’s financial system by buying the preferred stock of banks. Many conservative politicians, not to speak of bankers, saw the agency as stepping too close to private enterprise. To Jones, though, the RFC “was entirely too timid and slow.”

Calling for bold government lending to farmers, small-town banks, and railroads, Jones became the chair of the RFC and the go-to guy when Roosevelt’s New Deal swept into Washington in 1933. Roosevelt found the structure of the RFC very useful: It had been set up as an executive agency with the ability to obtain funding through the Treasury. Thus, it could finance a variety of projects and programs without obtaining legislative approval. In today’s parlance, the RFC was a “special vehicle” whose transactions were “off the books” and therefore not reflected in the federal budget.

What made a situation fraught with pork barrel politics work, according to Fenberg, was Jones’s resistance to letting others, including Roosevelt, sway his decisions. “Neither a theorist, an ideologue, or an intellectual,” Jones was a banker seeking a reasonable return on his investment. Thus another lesson: Best business practices applied to government lending could yield steady and sometimes spectacular earnings to the taxpayer. This was especially true as the RFC, almost single-handedly, militarized American industry in anticipation of World War II.

The success of the RFC ultimately speaks to the character of its top leadership, not to the elephantine rules and preset formulas that characterize government contracting today. Except for $18 million lost investing in Howard Hughes’s Spruce Goose airplane experiment, no major scandal sullied the agency during Jones’s 12 years at the helm.

In 1945, the banker was forced out of the agency in a political reshuffle, and returned home to become a leading Texas philanthropist. When he died, in 1956, he was eulogized with equal reverence by Democrats, Republicans, businessmen, government bureaucrats, and workers. Fenberg’s comprehensive biography should revive interest in this remarkable capitalist and public servant.

Current Books: True Believers

Darcy Courteau — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 07:00:00 EST

A THOUSAND LIVES:
The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown.
By Julia Scheeres.
Free Press. 307 pp. $26

On November 18, 1978, more than 900 Americans living in a socialist collective in Guyana were murdered or took their own lives. Many poisoned themselves with Flavor Aid laced with cyanide. Their bodies were found scattered around Jonestown, the plantation they’d carved out of the jungle four years earlier at the behest of their leader, Jim Jones. He had promised his followers an egalitarian utopia, but Jonestown defectors had returned to the United States calling the place a prison. Leo Ryan, a Democratic congressman from California, led a small entourage to Guyana to investigate. When Jonestown gunmen killed Ryan and several others, Jones ordered aides to roll out stockpiles of poison; he and his followers would find peace in death before the authorities arrived.

Americans have been darkly fascinated with the event ever since—it’s the subject of numerous books and documentary films. Today, we mock blind followers of any stripe by saying they have “drunk the Kool-Aid.” In A Thousand Lives, journalist Julia Scheeres attempts to correct that unsympathetic characterization of the Jonestown faithful. She knows evangelism’s destructive side intimately—in her 2005 memoir, Jesus Land, she described how her zealot parents packed her and an adopted brother off to a brutal Christian reeducation camp in the Dominican Republic.

Scheeres brings her special understanding to bear on the lives of five Jonestown residents, most of whom survived the mass suicide: a man trying to keep his troubled family together, his rebellious son, an elderly black woman searching for a desegregated house of worship, an idealistic schoolteacher, and a kid from the Oakland ghetto determined to stay out of jail. Scheeres is a gifted storyteller, and her characters’ reconstructed conversations and thoughts are a testament to extensive interviews and research that relied, in part, on the hundreds of audiotapes and 50,000 pages of diaries and personal notes the FBI recovered from the site.

When Jones founded his Peoples Temple in the mid-1950s in Indianapolis, desegregation was a cornerstone of the church—a majority of his followers were black. (Jones himself was a white man born in rural Indiana.) A decade later he moved the congregation to California, where he performed phony healings even as he trashed the Bible and claimed personal divinity.

The Temple’s live-and-let-live ethos soured. Jones slept with congregants, demanded their paychecks, and meted out spankings with a belt. Eventually, a journalistic exposé spurred his retreat to Jonestown, whose remote jungle location allowed for even greater abuses. People worked soil too poor to feed them while Jones feasted on barbiturates, chicken dinners, and Diet Pepsi. Naughty children were fed hot peppers or dangled upside down in a well. And Jones staged a series of “White Nights,” during which he pretended that Jonestown was under attack, and conducted suicide drills with fake poison.

Jones’s actions were horrific, but some of the book’s most anguished accounts are of the cruelty his followers heaped on each other, ratting out family members or offering to kill a captured runaway. Ultimately, however, Scheeres concludes that the people of Jonestown were “noble idealists” and innocent victims betrayed by a single man.

The reality seems more complicated than that. It is true that not everyone who died at Jonestown freely chose to cash it in. An iconic photograph of Jonestown corpses shows a pair of tiny legs lying in a stack of jeans-clad rumps. Among the dead were 304 children; dozens of adults were forcibly injected with poison. Certainly, many of the faithful ended up being exploited instead of finding the equality they sought: Blacks slaved in the plantation’s fields, and women became Jones’s concubines. But it is also true that camp guards carrying weapons they could have used for self-defense forced their comrades to die and finally killed themselves. The man who terrified and seduced wasn’t all-powerful.

Indeed, Jones was so messed up on downers by the time he summoned the cyanide that he slurred his words as he recorded what now circulates on the Internet as the “Death Tape”: Residents, each carrying a private mix of reasons they’d sought to live in Jonestown—fears, loyalties, ideals, the need to be close to a father or to absorb just a bit of Jones’s power—have crowded around. For several minutes, Christine Miller, a black woman, argues with Jones. There are alternatives, and it isn’t right to kill the children. “We all have a right to our own destiny as individuals,” she tells Jones, who listens patiently, paternally—before allowing the others to shout her down.

Findings: Noisy Library

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

When a presidency ends, the campaign for history’s approbation begins. The battleground is often the president’s official library, according to Benjamin Hufbauer, the author of Presidential Temples: How Memorials and Libraries Shape Public Memory 2005. In the library devoted to his life, Richard M. Nixon seems to be losing this final campaign. Forty years after the break-in, Watergate remains the decisive, divisive issue. When it opened in 1990, the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, was funded and operated by the private Richard Nixon Foundation. Bob Bostock, who helped Nixon research two of his post-presidency books, wrote the text of the original Watergate exhibit in the library, and the former president gave it his blessing: “Bob—A brilliant presentation.” The exhibit was unapologetically partisan, declaring that “even complete disclosure would not be enough to satisfy those who wanted Nixon’s head.” Then, in 2007, the National Archives took over the library. Bostock’s handiwork was removed, and an extensive new exhibit opened in 2011. In The Journal of American History December 2011, Hufbauer lauds it as “the most detailed account ever given of a scandal in a presidential museum,” one that makes “a significant original contribution to scholarship.” To Bostock, the new exhibit is not only “very biased against President Nixon,” but also contravenes the spirit of presidential libraries. “There are lots of sources people can consult for critical analysis of a presidency,” he said in an interview. “The beauty of these libraries is that they give that president’s perspective. Go to the FDR Library and see what they have on the internment of the Japanese—not a lot. One might wonder whether interning tens of thousands of people without cause might be a greater constitutional violation than 17 wiretaps. . . . The Kennedy Library takes a very hagiographic approach. There’s virtually nothing on the Bay of Pigs, nothing on his medical issues.” If Nixon is the only president excoriated by his own presidential library, there’s a reason. Earlier presidents treated their records as personal property. They decided what to turn over to the National Archives, what to keep, and what to torch. Nixon figured he’d get the same opportunity. Instead, four months after his resignation in 1974, Congress passed a law decreeing that his White House materials—42 million pages of documents and 880 recordings—were government property. Had Nixon held on to his records, it’s a safe bet that the most damning items, such as the 1971 tapes in which he is heard ordering aides to find out how many Bureau of Labor Statistics officials are Jewish, would never have seen the light of day. In another first, the 1974 law instructed the National Archives to reveal “the full truth . . . of the abuses of governmental power popularly identified under the generic term ‘Watergate.’ ” So the National Archives got a uniquely unvarnished documentary account of a presidency and a directive to focus on the worst of it—hence the Nixon Library’s current Watergate exhibit. Even so, Bostock believes that the exhibit falls short: It lacks the context necessary for grasping “the full truth” about Watergate. “You’d think Nixon was the only guy who ever wiretapped, the only guy who ever thought about using the IRS [against adversaries], the only guy who ever thought about going after leaks,” he said. “These had been standard operating procedure under previous presidents. . . . Nixon himself had been the victim—his campaign plane was bugged in 1968. This is not to excuse it, but to understand Watergate, you’ve got to know all these other things.” For altogether different reasons, some of Nixon’s long-standing critics also decry an overemphasis on Watergate. By e-mail, linguist and leftist Noam Chomsky dismissed Watergate as “insignificant.” In his view, the break-in “probably became an issue because [Nixon] irritated people with power,” such as Establishment Democrats McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and Thomas Watson Jr., the head of IBM. “It’s okay to slaughter Cambodians ... but not to call McGeorge Bundy, Thomas Watson, and other worthies bad names,” Chomsky wrote. The unending feud over the import of Watergate reinforces an observation President Nixon made on August 7, 1974, the day before he announced his resignation. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had assured him, “History will treat you more kindly than your contemporaries.” Nixon responded, “It depends on who writes the history.”

Findings: The Periodical Table

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

Ron Unz, Silicon Valley software entrepreneur, former candidate for governor of California, and publisher of The American Conservative, has started a new venture: a prodigious online library, featuring works by some 400,000 authors. Along with books and videos, unz.org has about 25,000 issues of 122 different periodicals. Some, such as The American Spectator and The Washington Monthly, still appear on newsstands. But most are no longer published, including Saturday Review, Scribner’s, Collier’s, Encounter, The Reporter, I. F. Stone’s Weekly, and H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury. A browse through The Bookman, a New York-based journal published from 1895 to 1933, unearths some astringent literary pronouncements. Of the second installment of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, published in French in 1919, the reviewer declared that he was “a little surprised to find any but the professional student of letters reaching more than his first half-dozen pages.” In 1922, the novelist and critic Arnold Bennett said of James Joyce’s Ulysses, “As I finished it, I had the sensation of a general who has just put down an insurrection.” Unz’s library has plenty of politics, too. Sounding like an Occupy Wall Street manifesto, an 1890 article in The North American Review refers to “gigantic corporations, whose greed and cupidity have extended all over the country, fleecing the poor of millions of dollars.” The author: William McKinley, Republican congressman and future president. If he were alive today, McKinley probably wouldn’t be writing for The American Conservative. In The Literary Digest, you can find the infamous Poll to use the magazine’s reverential capitalization on the 1936 presidential election. The Digest distributed more than 10 million ballots by mail and received some 2.3 million responses, on the basis of which it predicted that Alf Landon would trounce President Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Will we be right in the current Poll?” the Digest asked on Halloween 1936. “That, as Mrs. Roosevelt said concerning the President’s reelection, is in the ‘lap of the gods.’” The gods favored FDR. The following year The Literary Digest inaugurated “For the Record,” a new department. “Magazines, newspapers, and writers make strange errors,” the Digest said, inviting readers to “send in those you run across in any publication—even in this magazine.”

Findings: The Debate Debate

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

The campaign for this year’s Republican presidential nomination has featured some two dozen debates. Have the real winners been the American people, as the bromide insists? Far from it, according to two new studies—and journalists are to blame. In a paper issued in January by Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, political consultant Mark McKinnon argues that the debate moderators of 2011 sometimes seemed more interested in stoking conflict than in eliciting meaningful answers—and the candidates weren’t given enough time for meaningful answers anyway. In addition, the surfeit of debates cut into candidates’ time with voters. McKinnon quotes Howard Fineman, editorial director of the AOL Huffington Post Media Group: “Debates have allowed the press to elbow their way in front of voters for commercial purposes.” Complementing McKinnon’s research, media scholar Jay Rosen and his students at New York University analyzed the questions journalists asked at debates. During the 20 debates between May 5, 2011, and mid-February 2012, the NYU team counted 46 questions about social issues abortion and gay rights, four about the Arab Spring, two about climate change, one about small business—and 113 about campaign strategy and negative advertising. Of the 12 questions categorized as fluff, seven came from John King of CNN, who said he wanted to illuminate the personal side of the candidates. Puzzlers from King included “Elvis or Johnny Cash?” Michele Bachmann refused to commit, “Leno or Conan?” Rick Santorum said he doesn’t watch either one, and “Spicy or mild?” Mitt Romney declared, “Spicy. Absolutely.”. Rosen believes that the debates are part of a larger problem: The presidential campaign doesn’t address voters’ true concerns. Via polls, social media, and other tools, he and his students are learning what issues particularly animate the electorate this year. In turn, journalists from the London-based Guardian are using the NYU data to help direct campaign coverage for their American Web site. If Rosen and his team succeed, the Guardian will focus on issues that get slighted by more fluff-prone news outlets. More filling, less spicy.

Findings: The Spirits of Independence

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

Few history books mention Mrs. Clappams in Boston, Tondee’s Long Room in Savannah, or other 18th-century taverns. Baylen J. Linnekin wants to change that. Taverns were the era’s “most essential” public spaces, Linnekin argues in The Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly Spring 2012. Colonists may have come for the booze—before independence, the typical American drank the equivalent of some six ounces of strong liquor a day—but they stayed for the ideas. Over whiskey, rum, claret, and hard cider, they made history. When a tax dispute prompted the royal governor to dissolve the Virginia assembly in 1765, George Washington, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and other assemblymen hied to a tavern, where they agreed to boycott British goods. Similarly, in a New York City tavern, some 200 merchants pledged to stop buying anything British until Parliament repealed the Stamp Act. And by one account, Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in a Philadelphia tavern. In Linnekin’s view, the authors of the First Amendment guaranteed “the right of the people peaceably to assemble” partly because of their experience with tavern gatherings. He believes that other parts of the Bill of Rights also reflect concerns about food and drink. For example, the right to bear arms in the Second Amendment protects hunting. On occasion, the Founders explicitly linked comestibles and liberty. In the early 1780s, Jefferson wrote that “the legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others,” and cited France’s ban on potatoes as an example of officialdom’s overreach. Linnekin has an agenda: He heads Keep Food Legal, a nonprofit that opposes efforts to ban or restrict foods, from bacon-wrapped hot dogs to artisanal cheeses. Through his research, he hopes to give his arguments for “culinary freedom” a historical pedigree. So go ahead. Eat foie gras and wash it down with raw milk. It’s the American way.

Findings: Spreading the Word, Bit by Bit

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is burnishing its brand. Since 2010, the church has spent millions of dollars on cheery TV ads and billboards featuring diverse Americans—a surfer, a veteran of the Iraq war, a black woman who’s the mayor of a Utah town—with the tag line “I Am a Mormon.” Scott Swofford, one of the architects of the campaign, told The Los Angeles Times that the goal is to show that “Mormons are not that strange.” With less fanfare, backers of the church are promoting it online, too. A prominent role is being played by the More Good Foundation, launched in 2005 by David Neeleman, founder of JetBlue Airways, and James Engebretsen, an associate dean at Brigham Young University. One of the objectives of the foundation is to make it more likely that people looking for Mormon-related information via Google or another search engine will end up on church-friendly turf, rather than on hostile sites run by evangelical Christians, ex-Mormons, and others. Search engines evaluate a Web site’s importance based partly on how many other sites link to it, so the More Good Foundation creates networks of pro-Mormon sites. As a consequence, the top-ranked results of Mormon-related searches increasingly reflect the church’s perspective, Chiung Hwang Chen writes in The Journal of Media and Religion November 2011. She compares the top 20 results of various Google searches in 2005 and 2011. A search for “beliefs of Mormonism” led to five pro-Mormonism sites in 2005 and 11 in 2011. “Mormonism” went from zero to eight positive sites. And “Mormon underwear”—the temple garments that many Mormons wear beneath their clothes—increased from one to eight positive sites. “Marketing Mormonism through missionaries and other devices has long been a part of Mormon identity,” Chen writes. “Internet marketing continues the tradition.”

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.”

A Small World After All?

Ethan Zuckerman — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

When the Cold War ended, the work of America’s intelligence analysts suddenly became vastly more difficult. In the past, they had known who the nation’s main adversaries were and what bits of information they needed to acquire about them: the number of SS-9 missiles Moscow could deploy, for example, or the number of warheads each missile could carry. The U.S. intelligence community had been in search of secrets—facts that exist but are hidden by one government from another. After the Soviet Union’s collapse, as Bruce Berkowitz and Allan Goodman observe in Best Truth: Intelligence in the Information Age (2002), it found a new role thrust upon it: the untangling of mysteries.

Japan Shrinks

Nicholas Eberstadt — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

In 2006, Japan reached a demographic and social turning point. According to Tokyo’s official statistics, deaths that year very slightly outnumbered births. Nothing like this had been recorded since 1945, the year of Japan’s catastrophic defeat in World War II. But 2006 was not a curious perturbation. Rather, it was the harbinger of a new national norm.

Japan is now a “net mortality society.” Death rates today are routinely higher than birthrates, and the imbalance is growing. The nation is set to commence a prolonged period of depopulation. Within just a few decades, the number of people living in Japan will likely decline 20 percent. The Germans, who saw their numbers drop by an estimated 700,000 in just the years from 2002 to 2009, have a term for this new phenomenon: schrumpfende Gesellschaft, or “shrinking society.” Implicit in the phrase is the understanding that a progressive peacetime depopulation will entail much more than a lowered head count. It will inescapably mean a transformation of family life, social relationships, hopes and expectations—and much more.

The Call of the Future

Tom Vanderbilt — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

In 2009, the United States crossed a digital Rubicon: For the first time, the amount of data sent with mobile devices exceeded the sum of transmitted voice data. The shift was heralded in tech circles with prophetic fury: “The phone call is dead,” pronounced a blogger at the Web site TechCrunch. Writing in Wired, journalist Clive Thompson observed, “This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways: texting, chatting, and social network messaging.” And the online news network True/Slant declared a paradox: “We’re well on our way to becoming an incredibly disconnected connected society.”