Yesterday, Huffington Post Money ran an article by Michael R. Powers, professor of risk management and insurance at Temple University’s Fox School of Business and distinguished visiting professor of finance at Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management, and author of Acts of God and Man. In his post, “Are High Gas Prices a Boon to Auto Insurers?”, Powers discusses how gas prices affect insurance costs for both providers and consumers.
Powers begins by addressing the common claim that auto insurers benefit financially from any rise in gas prices. At first glance it seems reasonable that higher gas prices lead to fewer people driving and that fewer people driving lead to fewer accidents, resulting in less of a financial burden on insurance companies. However, as Powers says, “it’s fair to say that ‘not all’s the same ‘twixt the pump and the claim’ — not even the same as it used to be.”
A brief comparison of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ gasoline and motor vehicle insurance CPIs offers some support for the combined effect of the above three premises. In particular, the insurance index plateaued while gas prices rose during both the periods from 1998 to 2001 and from 2004 to 2008. However, the continued rise in the insurance CPI through the beginning of the global financial crisis to the present — at a time when the gasoline CPI experienced extreme volatility followed by a fairly steady upward climb — hints at an underlying structural change that doesn’t bode well for auto insurers or their customers.
Last Wednesday, in an interview with Robin Roberts, President Obama stated that he supported same-sex marriage. For Ludger Viefhues-Bailey, however, the way that President Obama framed his support of same-sex marriage was as important as the announcement itself. Viefhues-Bailey is the
Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Gender, and Culture and the Director of the Gender and Women Studies Program at Le Moyne College, and the author of Between a Man and a Woman?: Why Conservatives Oppose Same-Sex Marriage.
While the President and Mr. Romney disagree on whether or not it is right to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples, they agree on another point: the battle over marriage reform is a battle over American values and as such it is a battle over the kind of Christianity that should guide our polity.
In his interview with ABC news, Mr. Obama recounted that young people – including his daughters and even young Republican college students – “believe in equality” if it comes to marriage. While he endorses this belief of the young, Mr. Obama turns to religion to explain his and Michele’s position: “When we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule, you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated.”
Thus, Mr. Obama does not simply reiterate a constitutional or secular moral argument for giving same-sex couples the right to commit to each other in matrimony. Rather, his support for treating same-sex couples equally before the law is grounded in a specific Christian conviction. Respecting the claims of same-sex couples for equal protection before the law is the right thing to do because it is the Christian thing to do.
Christianity for the Obamas is, “at the root,” about Christ’s sacrificial atonement and about the Golden Rule, thus combining a universalizing appeal to ethical equality with a (at least potentially) limited appeal to Christian salvation. Confessing Christ as the sole savior for humankind should go hand in hand with following his commandment that Christian Americans should treat all with equal ethical care. Doctrinal differences should not overrule Christian ethical universalism.
“And I think that’s what we try to impart to our kids and that’s what motivates me as president and I figure the most consistent I can be in being true to those precepts, the better I’ll be as a as a dad and a husband and, hopefully, the better I’ll be as president.”
While Mr. Obama’s endorsement of marriage rights for same-sex couples is a matter of personal opinion, his religious convictions are the basis for better governance in general. The more truly Christian he is, the better he will be as a president.
Mr. Romney presented a very similar theory of Christian governance in his commencement speech at the evangelical Liberty University. “People of different faiths, like yours and mine, sometimes wonder where we can meet in common purpose, when there are so many differences in creed and theology. Surely the answer is that we can meet in service, in shared moral convictions about our nation stemming from a common worldview.” Mr. Romney identifies this shared worldview as America’s “Judeo-Christian tradition, with its vision of the goodness and possibilities of every life,” a tradition that for him includes Mormonism.
Like the president, Mr. Romney contrasts divisive creedal differences (for example the fact that unlike his Evangelical audience the Governor believes not in a Trinitarian Godhead but in a divine heterosexual couple) with a unifying moral code: here, the national importance of restricting marriage to heterosexuals and of a “culture of life” that is mainly concerned with criminalizing abortions.
Both Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney agree that American politics, sexual and otherwise, must be grounded in some version of Christianity. The president champions a Christianity that (certain creedal differences aside) is at its root about fairness, emphasizing that we are created equal before God and the law. Mr. Romney’s Christianity (certain creedal differences aside) is about respecting an allegedly traditional heterosexual order of family as the basis of a nation that functions because we as citizens are substantially different. Men, women, rich or poor: The goal is not to equalize these differences but to make sure that each segment of society does their job. If men are men and women are women, if the rich enjoy their riches and the poor are hardworking, then the nation will thrive.
As for November, it seems that we have to chose between a Christian America based on the values of fairness or one based on those of stratification, heterosexual and economic. But Christian America it is, whether red or blue!
Question: When did you begin your study of Solomon Schechter and his rabbinical students? What drew you to this research?
Michael R. Cohen: This research actually began for me as an undergraduate. While working on my senior thesis, which analyzed the Jewish community of Portland, Maine, I came across a rabbi who failed spectacularly in his attempt to bring Conservative Judaism to Portland in the 1920s. Pressed by my adviser Maud Mandel to dig deeper, I tried to figure out if this rabbi’s colleagues struggled as much to bring Conservative Judaism to their own communities. My research suggested that while they did struggle mightily, they were ultimately the ones responsible for the creation of Conservative Judaism in the United States. I decided to explore this topic in greater depth with Jonathan Sarna, who was also deeply interested in the ways in which Conservative and Orthodox Judaism separated and became distinct movements.
Q: Much of your research took place in incredible archives including the archive of the Jewish Theological Seminary and the American Jewish Archives. Can you describe some of the documents you worked with?
MRC: Some of the most fascinating documents I discovered were letters between the disciples, where they debated the meaning of a movement, the qualities that bound them together, and the future of American Judaism. What really shone through in these materials were the close personal friendships that remained with them throughout their lives. I also found letters between Schechter and his disciples, which vividly showed both the difficulty faced by the disciples in the field as well as the mutual respect and friendship between Schechter and his students.
Q: You draw some distinctions between the vision Solomon Schechter had for Conservative Judaism and the reality of its present form. How do you think Schechter’s Conservative Judaism differs from twenty-first-century Conservative Judaism?
MRC: Most importantly, Schechter never saw his form of Judaism as a third, separate movement. Instead, he believed that it would unify the American Jewish community. So, in that sense, twenty-first-century Conservative Judaism is far from his vision. But, in another sense, his broad platform of traditional Judaism infused with English, decorum, and modern education had failed miserably at the time of his 1915 death, but now, today, it characterizes the movement. In one sense, then, Schechter’s vision came true and in another sense it did not.
The Poetry of the Taliban, edited by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn and due out in July is already garnering a lot of discussion both positive and negative.
Richard Kemp, a former commander of British troops in Afghanistan criticized the book in The Guardian, cautioning readers against “being taken in by a lot of self-justifying propaganda”.
However, Michael Dwyer, managing director of Hurst & Co., the British publisher of The Poetry of the Taliban, views the book as an important part of their list of books focusing on Afghanistan: “All these books, including Poetry of the Taliban, contribute to our knowledge of Afghanistan and the vicissitudes endured by its people in recent decades.””
In the New York Times blog At War, C. J. Chivers argues that the book Reading The Poetry of the Taliban as a way of better understanding the Taliban and Afghanistan:
Whatever the current controversy, “Poetry of the Taliban” serves as a martial and social artifact from a broken land. Its poems are variously political and pastoral, one moment enraged and the next heavy with sorrow … They capture ambitions, loneliness, resolve and fear. Many passages crudely mock the West. Others sketch the Taliban’s foes in harsh but lyrical caricature, including a passage in “Death is a Gift” that acidly describes Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, as among “those who have one mouth but utter fifty different words and have fifty different thoughts/Like Karzai; I will not behave like a juggler.”
On Thursday, May 10, the New York Times ran an article by Kara Newman in which she looks back at her first experiences pouring drinks. Newman is a self-described “Writer, Author, Tippler,” and the Spirits Editor for Wine Enthusiast. She is also the author of the forthcoming book, The Secret Financial Life of Food.
Newman begins her story with an introduction to life as an intern at a New York magazine company in the early 1990s. While she loved the magazine life, she was less fond of interning:
I hated being an intern. My main duty was replying to writers who’d submitted articles, typing form rejections on beautiful letterhead stationery (and yes, on a typewriter, though it was one of the few left in the office). So when a new assignment arrived, I was relieved. For the two weeks around Christmas, I would sub for the assistant to the magazine’s editor in chief, who was a powerful man in his mid-50s, an arbiter of taste and my boss’s boss’s boss. I was scared to death of him.
This coming Sunday, May 13, is Mother’s Day. In honor of the occasion, we are featuring two guest posts this week discussing popular conceptions of motherhood. Today’s article is written by Julie Stephens, an associate professor in sociology and politics at the School of Social Sciences and Psychology, Victoria University, Australia, and author of Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory, and Care.
The gift-exchange that is Mother’s Day can provide insight into cultural meanings around the maternal, particularly at a time when there is so much anxiety around human dependency and care. It is easy to identify the obvious commercialism and sentimentality surrounding the day when public and private attention is supposed to be focused on mothers. Uneasy contradictions nonetheless emerge when the work of nurture, care, preservation and sacrifice is marketized and made visible in ways difficult to reconcile with the actual work of mothering. In this respect, both the giving and receiving of gifts that so clumsily attempt to symbolize a non-market relationship, can feel somewhat tainted.
Sara Ruddick, the feminist philosopher and author of Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace, viewed mothering as ‘a work with ideals’. While depicting it as a strange mix of play, organization, attentiveness, panic, boredom, lack of attentiveness, infatuation and emotion, she also recognized mothering as a social process, involving moral and ethical thinking and decision-making. Accordingly, the practice of maternal care produces a form of moral reasoning and a different way of seeing, knowing and acting in the world. Such conceptions have little to do with the market, and indeed serve to complicate standard political divisions between public and private.
By contrast, Mother’s Day reinforces these divisions by bringing so-called ‘private’ caring relations into public view. The fact that it is celebrated as one ‘special’ day in the year also reproduces the fiction that on the other days, home is somehow separate from and uncontaminated by the ‘unfeeling’ market. This way of imagining home can be traced back to early capitalism. Yet such understandings of home, or of the maternal as situated in a pure and private affective domain, can only be sustained through cultural representations based on nostalgia and longing. Mother’s Day is a perfect vehicle for such representations. Read the rest of this entry »
In today’s post, we offer some more photographs fromPicturing Algeria. The extraordinary photographs were taken during the years of 1957-1960 when Bourdieu was working there as a university lecturer. Taken during the Algerian War, Bourdieu’s photography offer a sympathetic and insightful portrait of a country and a people, who were ostensibly the enemies of France.
This week was been a big one for Barack Obama, as he openly announced his support for same-sex marriage in an interview Wednesday, a move that will has wide-ranging social and political implications. The OUPblog ran a guest post by Elvin Lim about America’s perception of Obama’s record on Tuesday, before any hint of the Wednesday interview had leaked out. It would be very interesting to see how different a similar article written after the Wednesday interview might be.
Jamie Moyer made his official MLB debut in 1986. He’s still pitching today. This week, his Side of the Pond, the Cambridge University Press blog, featured a fantastic article on Moyer by Stephen Partridge. My favorite Moyer statistic: Moyer has faced ~9% of all players to have an at bat in MLB history. That’s incredible!
Yale University Press’s blog is running a series of posts for Mothers’ Day and Fathers’ Day focusing on good parenting. This week, they ran a very interesting post looking at the work of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl on “childism.” It’s a great read on a subject that isn’t intuitively obvious. Young-Bruehl claimed, “Childism is the hardest form of prejudice to recognize because children are the one group that, many of us think without thinking, is naturally subordinate.”
At the Harvard University Press Blog, Jessica Gerhardstein Gingold has a guest post in which she looks at the education reform ideas of Meira Levinson. Levinson’s project, laid out in her book No Citizen Left Behind, calls for additional civic involvement in schools, particularly for poorer students.
This week is Teacher Appreciation week, and in honor of the occasion Beacon Broadside ran a series of posts on educators and education. Perhaps the most moving of these posts is a heartfelt article by former teacher David Chura on how the standardized test system in America keeps students who have fallen behind in their studies from catching back up, even when they want to and are helped by hard-working and talented teachers.
From the Square, the blog of NYU press, has an interesting piece by Andra Gillespie on Newark Mayor Cory Booker. Booker recently made headlines for saving the life of a neighbor from a burning building. Unfortunately, Gillespie claims, the popular conception of Cory Booker as a hero hurts Cory Booker as a politician.
The story of the Spanish conquest of Central America is amazingly complicated. The UNC Press blog tackles the political side of the story in an interview with Laura E. Matthew on indigenous conquistadors and how the cooperation with the Spanish has left complicated legacies of racial identity in modern Guatemala.
As always, please leave any suggestions, questions, or criticisms in the comment section!
In today’s post, we are featuring some of the photographs fromPicturing Algeria. The extraordinary photographs were taken during the years of 1957-1960 when Bourdieu was working there as a university lecturer. Taken during the Algerian War, Bourdieu’s photography offer a sympathetic and insightful portrait of a country and a people, who were ostensibly the enemies of France.
Starkman’s article, which was published in the Columbia Journalism Review, and is now available as a digital short for Kindle, Nook, and iPad, takes on what has become a dominant perspective on the future of news in the digital age as personified by three well known media thinkers — Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky, and Jeff Jarvis — who have dominated the “future of news” debate. Starkman makes a powerful case that the perspective that these three represent, despite their many useful insights, is in the end corrosive to public-service journalism.
Starkman writes:
According to this consensus [as elaborated by Shirky, Rosen, and Jarvis], the future points toward a network-driven system of journalism in which news organizations will play a decreasingly important role. News won’t be collected and delivered in the traditional sense. It will be assembled, shared, and to an increasing degree, even gathered, by a sophisticated readership, one that is so active that the word “readership” will no longer apply. Let’s call it a user-ship or, better, a community. This is an interconnected world in which boundaries between storyteller and audience dissolve into a conversation between equal parties, the implication being that the conversation between reporter and reader was a hierarchical relationship, as opposed to, say, a simple division of labor.
Conceived as a plan that was both logical and a reflection of the democratic values of the American republic, the grid has stood the test of time thanks to both its rigidity and its flexibility and has allowed for the city’s geographical and economic expansion. As the book and the accompanying exhibit at the Museum of the City of New Yorkreveal, the grid is a reflection of and has shaped the city’s political, economic, and cultural character for more than two hundred years.
* The commissioners of the 1811 plan noted rather scornfully that they had eschewed the “circles, ovals and stars which certainly embellish a plan” in favor of “convenience and utility.”
* New York’s grid plan was to first to eliminate named streets altogether (the names came later). The rationality behind Manhattan’s street numbering system—Cartesian analytical geometry—also underpins early modern conceptions of space more generally.
* The key to the greatness of the grid is variety. It is not made up of evenly spaced, similarly sized blocks. The blocks, which are all 200 feet wide (north to south), vary in length (east to west) from less than 250 feet to more than 900 feet. Most east-west streets are 60 feet wide. However, seventeen of them are 100 feet wide. Most, but not all north-south avenues are 100 feet wide. Madison and Lexington Avenues (each 80 feet wide) were introduced after the 1811 plan to accommodate additional traffic.
* The original surveyors were regularly obstructed, attacked, and sued for damages for cutting branches to complete their work.
* The 1811 commissioners who laid out the grid had assumed that it would take several centuries for urban growth to reach above 155th Street.
Given that the grid has been altered since it was first planned in 1811, the Architectural League of New York, in partnership with the Museum of the City of New York and Architizer, issued a Call for Ideas inviting architects and urban designers from around the world to speculate about how Manhattan’s grid might be adapted, extended, or transformed in the future. It asked them to consider issues such as how the grid might be modified to respond to climate change or new transportation infrastructures; how new digital technologies might affect the form and function of the buildings in which we live and work and the impact they might have on the city’s streets and public spaces; what the most pressing issues are facing the city today and into the future; and what solutions might emerge out of (and in turn modify) the street grid.
You can view a side show of the different proposals which include:
* A second grid 700 feet above the existing street grid. This new grid relieves street congestion, creates new sites and facilities for tourism, and redefines Manhattan as a truly three-dimensional grid.
* Extending the existing grid with “informal” configurations of blocks along the waterfront, creating both new sites for building and novel spatial experiences for pedestrians.
* The creation of a virtual grid which is overlaid on the existing physical grid, a digital platform onto which residents can upload ideas for their block, neighborhood, or the city as a whole. The ideas are then accessed by New York architects, who in turn upload design responses to the same virtual grid, which are visible to everyone using smart phones and social networks.
In the book, Betts takes a skeptical look at the use of American force in the postwar era and analyzes, sometimes critically, the use of force by recent presidents. The following are excerpts from the book’s introduction:
When the United States became more secure it became more forceful. Since the Cold War ended it has spent far more than any other country or coalition to build armed forces; it has sent forces into combat more frequently than it did in the era of much bigger threats to national security; and it has done so much more often than any other country. The United States has been, quite simply, “the most militarily active state in the world.” To many in the mainstream of American politics this is as it should be because the United States has the right and responsibility to lead the world—or push it—in the right direction. To others, more alarmed by the pattern, U.S. behavior has evolved into “permanent war.”
Some of this belligerence was imposed on the United States by Al Qaeda on September 11, 2001, but the terrorist threat cannot account for the bulk of blood and treasure expended in the use of force over the past two decades. In the first half of the post–Cold War era, until complications in Iraq and Afghanistan, American national security policy was driven not by threats but by opportunities—or rather what an overambitious consensus in the foreign policy elite mistakenly saw as opportunities. Instead of countering immediate dangers, American policy aimed to stabilize the world in order to prevent dangers from arising. There is no evidence, however, that this activism short-circuited more dangers than it generated. And at the same time, American force has been ambivalent, trying to do too much with too little. Policy elites who wanted to make the world right sometimes held back for fear that costly ventures would lack public support. Sometimes they have chosen the worst of both worlds, compromising between all-out effort and doing nothing at all, but with the result of action that is both costly and indecisive.
Last week brought the very sad news of Christopher Hitchens’s passing after a struggle with cancer. We were fortunate enough to have been able to include some of his writing inThe Best American Magazine Writingseries. In2007, his piece “The Vietnam Syndrome” was included in the collection while in2008, his article “So Many Men’s Rooms, So Little Time,” was selected.
The2011edition includes his essay “Unanswerable Prayers,” in which Hitchens discusses his illness and the reactions of friends and those perhaps not-so-friendly. In the following excerpt from the piece, Hitchens talks about how the illness has affected, or better stated, has not affected his lifelong skepticism about religion and the belief in God:
An enormous number of secular and atheist friends have told me encouraging and flattering things like: “If anyone can beat this, you can”; “Cancer has no chance against someone like you”; “We know you can vanquish this.” On bad days, and even on better ones, such exhortations can have a vaguely depressing effect. If I check out, I’ll be letting all these comrades down. A different secular problem also occurs to me: what if I pulled through and the pious faction contentedly claimed that their prayers had been answered? That would somehow be irritating….
Pursuing the prayer thread through the labyrinth of the web, I eventually found a bizarre “Place Bets” video. This invites potential punters to put money on whether I will repudiate my atheism and embrace religion by a certain date or continue to affirm unbelief and take the hellish consequences. This isn’t, perhaps, as cheap or as nasty as it may sound. One of Christianity’s most cerebral defenders, Blaise Pascal, reduced the essentials to a wager as far back as the seventeenth century. Put your faith in the almighty, he proposed, and you stand to gain everything. Decline the heavenly offer and you lose everything if the coin falls the other way. (Some philosophers also call this Pascal’s Gambit.)
Ingenious though the full reasoning of his essay may be—he was one of the founders of probability theory—Pascal assumes both a cynical god and an abjectly opportunist human being. Suppose I ditch the principles I have held for a lifetime, in the hope of gaining favor at the last minute? I hope and trust that no serious person would be at all impressed by such a hucksterish choice. Meanwhile, the god who would reward cowardice and dishonesty and punish irreconcilable doubt is among the many gods in which (whom?) I do not believe. I don’t mean to be churlish about any kind intentions, but when September 20 comes, please do not trouble deaf heaven with your bootless cries. Unless, of course, it makes you feel better.
“I think we overestimate our soft power. Americans understandably like to think of themselves as a model for the world, as a society that other societies want to be like. To some extent, this is true, but we tend to exaggerate the extent to which our soft power really shapes others’ policies.”—Richard Betts
Richard Betts believes that defense could and should be cut given the current economic situation in the United States. He calls for a “mobilization strategy,” which would offer a more modest and less expensive approach to our role in the world:
The United States should move towards more of a “mobilization strategy”—which means that we should take advantage of the reduced threat to our security that came with the end of the Cold War, and have a more modest view of the need to intervene abroad as long as direct threats to our national security are limited. We should orient our military planning and organization to what might be called a “readiness to get ready,” that is to focus on training, research and development, organizational structures and their maintenance, and all of the infrastructure for military power that can be used as a base for rapid buildup when conditions change and the world situation deteriorates.
This more restrained approach, Richard Betts argues, is largely shared by the American public if not elite policymakers.
A variety of Columbia University Press authors have been asked to comment on recent events in North Korea, including Victor Cha coauthor of Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies, who appeared on PBS Newshour to discuss the death of Kim Jong-il and its possible impact on North Korea and the United States.
Meanwhile, Cha’s coauthor David Kang spoke about the legacy of Kim Jong-il on NPR. In the interview, Kang addressed the possibility of a kind of “Arab Spring” happening in North Korea:
We tend to focus in America on the repressive side because there is certainly – it’s a police state. And there are 100, 200,000 people in prison camps. There’s a massive military and police presence. At the same time, as Sandra pointed out, this is the only game in town and so it’s very hard – if you imagine people who maybe unhappy down in a village somewhere, for them to organize and get together and actually engage in an Arab Spring is extremely difficult in North Korea.
So, in many ways I think the idea that there’ll be a popular uprising is really unlikely and what most of us think about is it would be some kind of palace coup or some top-down kind of problems that would eventually lead to an overthrow in North Korea. Not necessarily bottom-up with people taking to the streets.
Earlier this year, Richard Betts, author of American Force: Dangers, Delusions, and Dilemmas in National Security, wrote a much-discussed article in Foreign Affairs exploring the controversial visions of world politics put forth by Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, and John Mearsheimer. He discussed the article at the Carnegie Council and below is a video of his talk (you might need to adjust the player by scrolling).
In introducing Richard Betts’s talk, Joanne Myers of the Carnegie Council said,
Although all satisfied the demand for new paradigms, with greater or lesser success, Professor Fukuyama’s rang truest when the Berlin Wall fell, Professor Huntington’s did so after 9/11, and Professor Mearsheimer’s may do so once China’s power is full-grown.
Professor Betts reminds us that theories, however powerful, oftentimes do not always hold up as reliable predictors of particular developments. Still, all three ideas remain beacons, as the issues they flagged and their policy recommendations continue to shape the debate on Capitol Hill today.
As world events are rapidly changing and none of these three visions rings completely true today, perhaps it is time, as our guest writes, “to integrate the most relevant elements of these three approaches into a fourth, one that would penetrate the American political mainstream of today.
“The non-scholarly and unstoppably influential book of all time for me is The Communist Manifesto. Even today, reading it gives me a thrill.”—Partha Chatterjee
We have been fortunate enough to publish in the United States books from the great Indian publisher Permanent Black , which is known for its titles in South Asian history, politics, and culture.
In the interview, Chatterjee discusses democracy in the non-Western, Indian context, how Lineages of Political Society relates to his other work, and contemporary Indian politics. The interview is also notable for Chatterjee’s more personal reflections. Here he is on the impact of his upbringing in Kolkata (Calcutta):
I am sure the experience [of growing up in Kolkata] has been central to my intellectual formation. The Kolkata I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s was often described as the most horrifying example of urban degradation anywhere in the world. I vividly remember as a college student waiting at bus stops besieged by begging mothers with infants in their arms; vast swathes of the city’s pavements were inhabited by homeless people from the countryside…. I also think the relative isolation of Kolkata in the academic life of India and its lack of well-endowed universities and institutes actually helped me to stay out of the obligations and temptations to which those located in Delhi, for instance, are subject. I had the chance to improvise, innovate, and think outside the prevailing orthodoxies.
Betts describes himself as a Cold War hawk who became a post–Cold War dove. In this collection of essays, he addresses all the central issues of recent U.S. strategy: the maintenance of primacy and the prospective rise of China, humanitarian intervention and the struggles in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the problems posed by weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and the possibility of a link between the two. This is not mainstream international relations scholarship. Betts combines serious thought, common sense, and deep historical knowledge, rather than simply applying abstract theories, and his conclusions are expressed in plain English, rather than with mathematical models. His judgments are therefore contingent, but they are always considered and often incisive. Betts is not opposed to the occasional use of force for the right purposes, and he explains why it is difficult to get strategic policy right. But he deplores the persistent American tendency toward military activism, especially in pursuit of what he describes as a “liberal empire.” As he himself recognizes, he is by no means a lone voice arguing for American restraint, but he is certainly among the most articulate.
In the conclusion to his bookAmerican Force: Dangers, Delusions, and Dilemmas in National Security, Richard Betts explores some of the possible dangers that might confront the United States in the coming years. In particular he considers issues and possible threats such as China, terrorism, the Middle East, and U.S. dependence on foreign oil. He also briefly discusses the possible options and their consequences:
Terrorists’ acquisition of usable weapons of mass destruction. Typical terrorism has a fearsome psychological impact, but it actually inflicts few casualties compared with even small wars and does not pose a serious material threat in itself. If terrorists could deploy nuclear or efficient biological weapons, however, the potential casualties would be far higher. Unless U.S. intelligence could find, fix, and pounce on such weapons, there is little chance of preventing their use since terrorists are not easily subject to deterrence. Acquisition of WMD by dangerous regimes like North Korea or Iran is also a severe threat, but at least is more manageable since rogue states have a return address and thus are more subject to deterrence.
What to do? For counterterrorism, first, business as usual (which means energetic intelligence collection and special operations), and second, better civil defense preparations. For dealing with nuclear proliferation by states, diplomatic and economic carrots and sticks, and covert action to disrupt and retard nuclear development programs where it can be effective. None of these actions assures success, but more ambitious efforts at overt preventive war are likely to accelerate the threat more than suppress it.
We were sad to hear of the recent death of notable philosopher Michael Dummett, author of The Nature and Future of Philosophy (2010) and other titles. Both the Guardian and the Telegraph published excellent obituaries on Michael Dummett highlighting his important contributions to analytic philosophy and his standing as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century.
On top of his impressive contributions to philosophy, particularly his work on Frege, and his influence on other philosophers, Dummett was also a leading campaigner against racism in England and for the protection of immigrant rights. Dummett criticized the political system in Britain and particularly the Home Office for encouraging hostility to immigrants and non-whites in Britain.
In 2010 we were fortunate to have the opportunity to publish Dummett’s The Nature and Future of Philosophy, which in many ways offers a kind of encapsulation of his ideas about the discipline of philosophy. In the book, Dummett analyzes the current state of philosophy as it is practiced in academia and elsewhere. Despite the proliferation and growth of philosophy departments, the discipline’s between the analytical and continental camps has obscured its relevance. Dummett sets forth a proposal for renewal and reengagement by returning to a focus on the nature of philosophical inquiry as it has developed for centuries, especially its exceptional openness and perspective—which has, ironically, led to our present crisis. He discusses philosophy in relation to science, religion, morality, language, and meaning and recommends avenues for healing around a renewed investigation of mind, language, and thought. Employing his trademark frankness and accessibility, Dummett asks philosophers to resolve theoretical difference and reclaim the vital work of their practice.
We wanted to wish everyone a Happy New Year and thank readers of our blog and Columbia University Press titles for their interest in our books and our authors. In a seemingly ever-shifting publishing environment, we are grateful for the continuing interest among readers for serious, thoughtful books that offer new ways of thinking about politics, culture, society, and the world around us. We published a range of titles in 2011 that we felt made a difference and below is our Spring 2012 catalog which offers a sampling of what you can look forward to in the coming months. (Click on the view in full screen icon to get a better view.)
The exhibit currently at the Museum of the City of New York upon which the book is based was also featured in today’s New York Times. As the article points out the grid, now at 200, while not always appreciated for its aesthetic value has served the city well allowing it to expand, and became a model for other cities. Among the more obvious benefit of making the city more navigable, the grid also has promoted sociability, ecological efficiency, and of course allowed some landowners. to make a lot of money
In describing reactions to the grid, Sam Roberts writes in his review of the book The Greatest Grid:
Some planners despised the grid for its rigidity and for its contribution to gridlock, a term popularized during the 1980 transit strike by the Traffic Department engineers Sam Schwartz and Roy Cottam. But others hailed it as a utilitarian, egalitarian and resilient tool that fostered development in a city of pedestrians. It imposed a Cartesian orderliness on the city, much as this book does on its subject matter.
Similar to our list in animal studies, the field itself has expanded to include works coming from a range of fields in the humanities, including philosophy, art, literature, film, theater, and religion. The expanding number of classes and programs in the field consider issues ranging from the treatment of animals and the ethical questions that raises to exploring what animals think and what they have to “say.”
Among the various scholars interviewed about the nature and direction of animal studies is Kari Weil, author of the forthcoming book, Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now?. In the article Weil considers how environmental science had laid a foundation by giving humans “the sense that we are a species among other species and [are] subject to the forces of nature.”
The following is a letter from Columbia University Press’s editorial director and associate directorJennifer Crewein response to a recent article in The Chronicle Review on books in translation.
I would otherwise wholeheartedly applaud Carlin Romano’s article “American Readers’ Translation Privation” (The Chronicle Review, November 18, 2011), if it were not for the fact that he makes no mention of university presses, many of which are seriously committed to making available seminal works of fiction and nonfiction in translation.
In the past 12 months, Columbia University Press alone has published 15 new books in translation, including works by the European philosophers and cultural critics Gianni Vattimo, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Rancière. Our fiction offerings include a Bengali novel by Tarashankar Bandopadhyay, a book of Chinese stories by Huang Fan, and A Room Where the Star-Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard—a translation from the Japanese of a novel by an American writer, Levy Hideo, who is the first Western novelist to write in Japanese. In addition, we published 11 paperback reprints of translations, ranging from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks to a work by the French chemist and father of molecular gastronomy, Hervé This.
These books constitute 19 percent of our total output in the same period, significantly more than the 3 percent that is usually invoked for American publishers.
This level of commitment to translation can be found at many university presses. We understand the importance of making global thought and world literature available to American readers unable to read them in the original language, and that is why we go to the extra trouble of finding peer reviewers who are fluent in other languages, applying for funding, and supervising translators. Anne Solange-Noble knows that we know who she is!
In her newest book, Kristeva explores artistic representations of severed heads from the Paleolithic period to the present. Surveying paintings, sculptures, and drawings, Julia Kristeva turns her famed critical eye to a study of the head as symbol and metaphor, as religious object and physical fact, further developing a critical theme in her work—the power of horror—and the potential for the face to provide an experience of the sacred. The following is an excerpt from the book:
One drawing remains etched in my memory, given to me without ceremony but as a sign of favor, in the way that only gifted beings and mothers know how. It was one of those cold, white winters that freeze the Balkans and bring families together around their coal stoves. Hunched over the glowing grate, I warmed my icy cheeks and numb fingers as I listened absentmindedly to a children’s radio show: “What is the quickest means of transportation in the world? Send us your answer, with a drawing to match, on a postcard, to the following address . . . ” “I know, it’s an airplane,” my little sister piped up. “No, it’s a rocket,” I countered, pleased at having the last word. “I’d say instead that it’s thought,” Mama proposed. I could only concede, but not without my usual smart remark: “Maybe, but you can’t draw a thought, it’s invisible.” “You’ll see.” I can still picture the card that she drew with my name on it, which won me first prize in the radio contest. To the left, a big snowman in the process of melting, his head falling off, as though severed by the invisible guillotine of the sun. To the right, the planet earth in its interstellar orbit, offering its imaginary expanses for armchair travels
In fact, there was nothing special about that drawing. Certainly, the spareness of the sketch, the vacuousness of the melting body, the severed head all merged with an ingenious idea: only the speed of thought exceeds the speed of bodies, whether cosmic, human, or products of human technology. But, to my young eyes, it subtly demonstrated that quickness of thought I so admired in the answer my mother had proposed. The drawing let it be seen, as much in the concision of its concept (a perishable body transcends itself and conveys itself through the power of reason) as in the cheerful quickness of the line (without collapsing into caricature, the nervous, spirited line betrayed the melancholy of our mortal condition as well as the triumphant irony of deep reflection).
My Life with the Taliban
Abdul Salam Zaeef; Translated from the Pashto and Edited and Introduced by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn; Foreword by Barnett R. Rubin
In the most recent issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, Dean Starkman, co-editor of the forthcoming The Best Business Writing 2012, writes about the development and the recent history of the business press
Starkman terms this development the “CNBC-ization” of business news which has made coverage “more granular, insider-dependent, hurried and riveted on (short-term) needs of investors.” This type of journalism, Starkman suggests, focuses less on covering business and instead becomes an extension of the financial system. Placing this shift in a historical context, Starkman writes, “The shift also seems to represent something less modern: a return to the business press’s early twentieth-century roots as a servant to markets—and a retreat from its later role as watchdog over them.”
In concluding the article, Dean Starkman writes:
Investor-focused reporting was ascendant as the twenty-first century dawned, just as the financial system was entering a fateful phase. At the same time, the media business itself was undergoing a radical dislocation, one that continues. We have crossed over into a new media era, one in which the rules, norms, forms, and whole institutions are in flux. There’s reason for both hope and despair.
Still, the choice facing business journalism in the wake of the Crash of 2008 isn’t so different from the one facing the field after the Crash of 1929: you can shrug off the event and double down on market-serving news. Or you can step back, rethink the mission, and relearn the lesson of the great Barney Kilgore [former editor of The Wall Street Journal]: serve the market while also looking beyond it. That is to say, there’s really no choice at all.
This week we will be featuringThe Severed Head: Capital Visions by Julia Kristeva and in conjunction with this, we are also giving away other titles by Kristeva.
To enter the giveaway please submit by email your name and mailing address by 1 pm eastern time on Friday, January 13th to pl2164@columbia.edu. The winner will be drawn at random. (Unfortunately, the giveaway is only available to those living in the United States or Canada.)
In addition to the Severed Head, we will also be giving away the following books by Julia Kristeva:
Most managers probably don’t consider themselves designers—they manage people and processes. But consider this: Instead of just thinking about who does what, how and when, what if managers began to think about how these tasks interact with customers, how the space these activities are done in (both the real space and metaphorical space) create efficiency, buy-in, job fulfillment, and profitability? By treating management as a design process, managers can create systems that have quality built in rather than simply offering rules and guidelines for employees to follow. This book is the guide to making that shift, and is an important resource for those who lead people.
For more on the book here is Tim Ogilvie discussing Designing for Growth:
In the following passage fromThe Severed Head: Capital Visions, Julia Kristeva explores the iconography and symbolism of beheadings during the French Revolution:
More Roman, Marat takes great pleasure in what he believes to be the “serene joy” of the people contemplating “the head of the tyrant [that] had just fallen under the sword of the law” and salutes “a religious holiday.” In effect, we are witnessing a “syncope of the sacred,” which only suspends one religion with the ambition of immediately founding another.But this new religiosity is lacking in imagination and rudimentary in symbolism: the passage to the act itself takes the place of culture and justice.
The jubilation of the masses before this spectacle has been compared to prehistoric skull rituals and the totemic meal. This comparison does not flatter modernity, to say the least. The gritty rhetoric, the repression or denial of death often takes the mediocre, infantile aspect of the bawdy story. A few engravings tragically emphasize the “caustic forms” of this Dantean era. Less numerous, it seems, than the royalist images, most of the figurations are republican caricatures representing the head of Louis XVI. The most widespread and widely imitated engraving in France and abroad is signed with two pseudonyms, “Fious,” for the draftsman, and “Sarcifu,” for the engraver. Redundant imagery characterizes these productions, which are limited to representing three essential subjects: the severed head is displayed on the Place de la Révolution, like a Medusa head, as some present-day historians note; the portrait of the guillotine victim is engraved without any narrative context, for the voyeuristic pleasure of “sacred” vengeance; the king is accompanied on his descent into Hell.
In the concluding chapter toThe Severed Head: Capital Visions, Julia Kristeva speculates on some of the meanings and legacies of representations of sacrifice and the severed head:
Because the sacred, or the nostalgia for it that remains, turns out to reside not in sacrifice after all, or in some aesthetic or religious tradition, but in that specifically human, unique, and bitter experience that is the capacity for representation.
And the mother goddess, in these capital visions pushed to their ends? What becomes of the fabulous mirage, the archaic source of the depressions that call us to speech and thought, the primordial prehistoric figurine, the heads of Medusa, Gorgon, Jezebel, and, in the form of their phallic conspiracy, the woman masters, the Judiths and Salomes? What remains of the final depths of the sacred? And what do they make of it, the man and the woman, when they know where that comes from?
They remember. They pass it and pass it again. And they laugh at it. “The Woman with 100 Heads” of Max Ernst may not be the most inspired figuration of that indispensable allusion, in which the sacred gets frankly tiresome, whereas its absence resigns itself to robotics. But this horrible, naive, vulgar, surrealist cartoon, which mocks women, heads, decapitations, fascinations, horrors, and their capital of beliefs, still allows us to remember our capital visions. And maybe to die of laughter, while keeping a cool head, in the grip of our fantasies, our ancient or modern religions, ever tenacious and thoroughly ridiculous. Let us not finish it off too quickly, this sacred vision. Let us remove the head, let us keep on passing.
As Jonathan Lyons explains, in page 99 he examines the West’s failure to take seriously the accomplishments in philosophy and science from the Muslim world. This, he argues, has been one of the West’s most persistent and ultimately damaging misunderstandings about the Muslim world. The other two relate to Islam and women and Islam and violence.
Jonathan Lyons writes
The Western narrative of Islam and science, like those of Islam and women and Islam and violence, is part of a 1000-year-old discourse that shapes what we say – and more importantly, what we cannot say – about Islam and the Muslims. This, in turn, has left us intellectually unprepared and politically unable to respond to some of the most significant challenges of the twenty-first century: the global rise of Islamic political power; the more narrow emergence of religious violence and terrorism; and clashes between established cultural values and multicultural rights on the part of growing Muslim immigrant populations.
To enter the giveaway please submit by email your name and mailing address by 1 pm eastern time on Friday, January 20th to pl2164@columbia.edu. The winner will be drawn at random. (Unfortunately, the giveaway is only available to those living in the United States or Canada.)
Michael E. Mann suggests that what we are facing is not so much the politicization of science but the scientization of politics. More precisely, science is being used to advance political causes. Mann also discusses how certain groups, particularly oil companies, have effectively shifted the terms of the debate regarding climate change. Climate deniers have played a role in making the media view human-caused climate change as a subject of debate when in fact the science is definitive.
What’s at stake according to Mann is that public and political discourse has been hijacked by climate deniers when what is needed is a sustained discussion on how to combat climate change.
Last week Siddharth Kara, author of Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery, was interviewed by Rahim Kanani on forbes.com. Kara who advises the U.N., the U.S. government , and other governments on anti-slavery research and policy, describes how he became involved with the anti-slavery movement as an undergraduate and working at a refugee camp in Kosovo.
In the interview, Kara explains why human slavery is so profitable, far more so than drugs and other illicit businesses. He also describes some of the advances being made in combating human trafficking and what further advocacy is necessary.
Here is an excerpt from the interview:
Rahim Kanani: What are some of the biggest challenges to ending trafficking and other forms of contemporary slavery?
Siddharth Kara: A lack of detailed understanding of how and why slave-like exploitation functions in various sectors of the global economy is a primary barrier to a more effective response. Much effort in the field of combating modern slavery has focused more on anecdote and sensationalism than on actual analysis of the problem. A paucity of resources deployed to understanding and combating slavery is another primary barrier. The US government spends 350 times more money each year to combat drug trafficking than slavery. This does not mean that we will end slavery by simply throwing money at the problem, but it gives a sense of the anemic level of resources that have been allocated towards this issue. And by the way, the US government spends more money to combat slavery than most any other government in the world, so that gives you a real sense of how big the gap is globally. Another primary challenge has to do with the inability of activists in the field to catalyze a more unified grassroots movement to combat the issue. The antislavery movement remains highly fragmented, and as a result, its ability to mobilize social opinion and lawmakers on the issue has been hampered.
“The Bush administration adopted and perpetuated the established discourse of Islam and women for the benefit of specific Western interests—in this case, the military occupation and political and economic domination of Muslim societies…. Bush and his fellow social conservatives were able to obscure their own opposition to women’s advancement at home by contrasting the freedoms of Western women with those of women suffering under Islam.”—Jonathan Lyons, Islam Through Western Eyes
In his bookIslam Through Western Eyes: From the Crusades to the War on Terrorism, Jonthan Lyons examines Western, frequently misguided views on Islam. In the chapter on Islam and women, Lyons “traces the emergence of th[e] discourse of Islam and women from within the greater anti-Islam narrative, commencing with the Enlightenment and progressing to the war on terrorism.” This discourse, Lyons argues, has been used to further various political and ideological agendas.
Lyons concludes the chapter by examining how in recent years, the West, particularly the media, has looked to the veil and women’s sexuality as a kind of barometer of progress and modernity. Here is an excerpt from the chapter:
This narrative of the veil, sexuality, and Western notions of modernity and progress reaches its height, however, whenever the subject is postrevolutionary Iran. Since the victory over the U.S.-backed shah in 1979 and the creation of the Islamic Republic, Iranian women have been required to veil in public. In the early years, dress requirements were extremely strict—no hair showing, no makeup or nail polish, no open-toe shoes, and so on—and at times brutally enforced by religious vigilantes. These practices have been relaxed significantly in recent years, and some middle-class and upper-class urban women now adopt colorful and personal expressions of the hijab that do little to disguise the figure or fully cover the hair.
Both the official line and public opinion toward this dress code have a complex and nuanced history (Abdo and Lyons 2003), but the Western media have universally seen and shown it as a reliable barometer of progress or lack thereof by secular civil society at the expense of the ruling religious establishment. In this schema, then, the more lipstick and hair visible to visiting foreign correspondents, the less secure the conservatives’ grip on power and the better the chances of popular revolt against the Islamic system.
“This model, then, calls for the compilation of a new, hidden history of Islam that fills in those areas declared off limits by the anti-Islam discourse. But, first, we must radically rephrase the West’s favorite polemical question—What’s wrong with Islam?—to a less comfortable query: What’s wrong with us?”—Jonathan Lyons
I propose a new model for approaching the world of Islam—a “hidden history,” as it were, of its practices, beliefs, and culture. To begin with, we must acknowledge that the established Western discourse of Islam does not—or, at the very least, does not necessarily—reflect the reality of Islam itself, what I have referred to earlier as “Islam qua Islam.” Rather, this discourse is the product of a process that has embedded a particular discursive formation in Western thought. Here, then, are the roots of what Sutton and Vertigans have identified as the prevailing “caricature of Islam” (2005:31). Chapters 4, 5, and 6 established ample grounds for such an assertion, and many more examples beyond the scope of this inquiry might likewise be marshaled in support.
Next we must deliberately remove the central pillars of the thousand-year-old anti-Islam discourse and examine what remains behind. Or, to return to the question posed at the outset, we must ask, When we open this particular window, what is it that we see that has not been seen before? Were we to set aside these central notions—that Islam is inherently violent and spread by the sword; that Muslims are irrational, antiscience, and thus antimodern; and that they are sexually perverse and hate women—as flawed representations of the nondiscursive reality of Islam, then whole new vistas of possible relationships between East and West will begin to open up before our eyes.
We are pleased to announce that the much-discussed My Life with the Taliban, by Abdul Salam Zaeef is now available in paperback.
My Life with the Taliban is the autobiography of Abdul Salam Zaeef, a former senior member of Afghanistan’s Taliban and a principal actor in its domestic and foreign affairs. Translated for the first time from the Pashto, Zaeef’s words share more than a personal history of an unusual life. They supply a counter-narrative to standard accounts of Afghanistan since 1979.
For more on the book, you can read the chapter No War to Win and below is an interview with the editors of the book Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn.
“Careful descriptions of the methods and models behind climate change science bear out that assertion, proving that the only way to counter dangerous lies is to expose the truth, however inconvenient it might be.”—Publishers Weekly review of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars
In this meticulous and engaging brief on climate change research and the political backlash to legitimate scientific work, Penn State professor Mann narrates the fight against misinformation from the inside…. The persuasiveness of the “hockey stick,” as it was dubbed, made Mann an instant political target. In the 2009 hacking scandal known as “Climategate,” emails discussing the mathematical models he used to create the figure were said to prove an international conspiracy to dupe the public. That controversy, Mann writes, is only the latest attempt by deniers to discredit scientists one by one; for decades, powerful interests have spent untold millions to tarnish legitimate research and the reputation of scholars who have dedicated their lives to understanding our world….. Mann balances the statistical analysis with charming personal anecdotes from his life and work. Careful descriptions of the methods and models behind climate change science bear out that assertion, proving that the only way to counter dangerous lies is to expose the truth, however inconvenient it might be.
As part of our week-long focus on Acts of God and Man, we are also giving the book away for free along with five other titles from Columbia Business School Publishing to one lucky winner!
In addition to Acts of God and Man you can also win:
To enter the giveaway please submit by email your name and mailing address by 1 pm eastern time on Friday, January 27th to pl2164@columbia.edu. The winner will be drawn at random. (Unfortunately, the giveaway is only available to those living in the United States or Canada.)
Powers discussed how page 99 from his book reflects some of the ideas in his book Acts of God and Man. Here are some excerpts:
Reports abound that the realm of risk and insurance – with its chary underwriters, cynical claim adjustors, and calculating actuaries – is dry and forbidding. In Acts of God and Man, I challenge this notion by proposing a “science of risk” that entails:
* a fundamentalist Bayesian (i.e., subjective/judgmental) approach to modeling uncertainty and assessing probabilities;
* a formal distinction between the primarily natural “aloof” risks of insurance and the largely artificial “non-aloof” risks of other financial markets; and
* a personalized scientific method that casts off the shackles and inconsistencies of more orthodox methods too burdensome for the study of risk.
“China’s escalating popular violence against local authorities and humble petition to the central government in the last two decades should be understood in light of [a] longstanding Confucianist conception of authority. This conception persists despite all the ideological and political revolutions of the twentieth century….”—Ho-fung Hung
The recent protests against land grab in Wukan and a polluting power plant in Haimen in South China have captured the world’s attention and lead many to ask whether something significantly different from China’s many other local protests is happening., The Wukan villagers’ orderly exercise of self-governance after the CCP authorities fled the village, as well as their political demand for local democracy, is rare if not unprecedented. So is the Haimen protesters’ occupation of the local government building.
The Wukan protest, in particular, resonates with many great uprisings in China’s history such as the Leiyang rebellion of 1844. In the early 1840s, local intellectuals in Hunan’s Leiyang County adamantly petitioned higher authorities against local tax abuses. The arrest and torture of a leading petitioner unleashed an armed revolt in which villagers seized the county seat and set up their own local government, which was short-lived and was crushed by imperial government forces. After the crackdown, the grievances against the Qing state continued to brew in the area and prepared many locals to embrace the Taiping Rebellion that shook the very foundation of Qing rule in the 1850s.
Despite their democratic demand and parallel with uprisings in Chinese history, we should also notice the Wukan protesters’ emphasis of their loyalty to the central government and their begging for mercy and aid from the highest authorities. In the Haimen protest, we likewise see protesters kneel during their action to beg for intervention from higher authorities to stop the construction of a second power plant. In this regard, these protests are not much different from most other recent local protests that are militant against local authorities but submissive toward the central government. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, China watchers rested much hope on such confrontational local protests and cast them as precursors to larger-scale movements that could radically change the status quo. But these waves of unrest came and went and the party-state remained in control.
Here is a description of the series from “Living Proof”:
Dr. Joshua Miller discusses the many types of disasters that affect people around the world and how to help individuals and communities recover. He highlights the social ecology of disaster and the consequences of different types of disasters on individuals, families, and communities. Dr. Miller proposes an alternative to traditional, individually-focused mental health approaches, called Psychosocial Capacity Building, which is multi-systemic and addresses collective cultural orientations and helps foster access to the social support and connections that exist in groups and communities.
In his book, Acts of God and Man: Ruminations on Risk and Insurance, Michael R. Powers discusses how risk impacts our lives, health, and possessions and proceeds to introduce the statistical techniques necessary for analyzing these uncertainties.
In today’s business world, professional risk managers often construct extensive lists of pure and speculative risks, including every imaginable type of uncertainty to which individuals and firms are exposed. Among pure risks, one finds traditional “insurance” perils such as fire, wind, theft , disease, and professional negligence, along with more complex hazards such as substandard construction, inadequate security, technological obsolescence, and political instability. Speculative risks include real estate, common financial securities (stocks, bonds, commodities, etc.), and interest and currency-derivative products, as well as market- specific changes in the prices of raw materials, human capital, and end-of-line goods and services.
Fortunately, a remarkable simplicity underlies these myriad risks. Despite the great number of individual sources of risk, there are only a very few exposures subject to risk. These fundamental exposures are life, health, and possessions.
One then might ask: Why should we be concerned about the quality of life? I would argue that the following two principles provide the answer:
• The Morbidity Principle. An individual/corporation/society whose quality of life is damaged will have a greater chance of imminent death.
• The Lost-Gratification Principle. An individual/corporation/society whose quality of life is damaged may not have the opportunity to enjoy recovery of health or restitution of possessions before death occurs (i.e., “a good quality of life today is worth more than a good quality of life tomorrow”).
Roy challenges the Western prejudice which sees Islam as incompatible with democracy and the Islamist victory as necessarily being a threat to the ideals of democracy, pluralism, and good governance that characterized the Arab Spring. Ultimately, as Roy suggests, the Islamists will have to respond to the current situation in Egypt and the fact that the Arab Spring did not have the kind of Islamic ideological component of the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Roy writes:
The Islamists are certainly neither secularists nor liberals, but they can be democrats. It is not the convictions of political actors that shape their policies but the constraints to which they are subject. The Islamists are entering an entirely new political space: this was not a revolution in which a dictatorship was replaced by a regime that resembled its predecessor. There have been elections and there will be a parliament. Political parties have been formed and, whatever the disappointments and fears of the secular left, it will be difficult simply to close down this new space, because what brought it into being in the first place – a savvy, connected young generation, a spirit of protest – is still there. Islamist movements throughout the region are constrained to operate in a democratic arena that they didn’t create and which has legitimacy in the eyes of the people.
In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the U.S. insurance industry confronted billions of dollars in unanticipated losses. In addition, major global reinsurers quickly announced that they no longer would provide coverage for acts of terrorism in reinsurance contracts. Recognizing that historical loss forecasts had failed to account sufficiently for terrorism events and facing an immediate shortage of reinsurance, many U.S. primary insurance companies soon declared their intention to exclude terrorism risk from future policies. This pending market disruption led the U.S. Congress to pass the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA) of 2002 to “establish a temporary federal program that provides for a transparent system of shared public and private compensation for insured losses resulting from acts of terrorism.” Subsequently, Congress passed the Terrorism Risk Insurance Extension Act (TRIEA) of 2005, which was similar (but not identical) to the TRIEA.
From the U.S. Treasury Department’s perspective, the TRIA was intended to provide protection for business activity from the unexpected financial losses of terrorist attacks until the U.S. insurance industry could develop a self- sustaining private terrorism insurance market. However, during the debate over the TRIEA, representatives of the U.S. property liability insurance industry argued that the industry lacked sufficient capacity to assume terrorism risks without government support and that terrorism risks were still viewed as uninsurable in the market.
Given that the TRIEA was extended for a further seven years at the end of 2007, the debate over the need for a federal role in the terrorism insurance market is far from over. Although the federal government does not want to serve as the insurer of last resort for an indefinite period, it is clear that there are major obstacles to developing a private market for terrorism coverage.
“As art becomes a progressively abstract play of non-referential signs, so increasingly abstract financial instruments become an autonomous sphere of circulation whose end is nothing other than itself.”—Mark C. Taylor
According to Taylor this is not a new phenomenon unique to our present form of finance capitalism. As the overall economy has moved from industrial to consumer to financial capitalism, a parallel process has occurred in the art world, which has undergone three stages the commodification of art, the corporatization of art, and the financialization of art. In this essay, the first of a series, Taylor considers the work and careers of Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons, two artists keenly aware of art’s place as a commodity and a business. Taylor argues that whereas Warhol’s appropriation of consumer icons and his factory system of mechanizing art challenged, Koons’s art is crafted to reassure. Noting Koons’s former work as a stock broker, Taylor argues, “Unapologetically embracing banality and freely admitting his ignorance of art history, Koons sounds more like Joel Osteen than Marcel Duchamp….Having learned his trade on the floor of commodity exchanges, Koons does not move beyond the commodification of art.”
Sure you love a great grilled cheese sandwich but do you know the science behind what distinguishes a good from a bad sandwich? Test your knowledge of the science and psychology with this quiz based onThe Kitchen as Laboratory: Reflections on the Science of Food and Cooking, edited by Cesar Vega, Job Ubbink, and Erik van der Linden.
1. What is the ideal pH for a good melting cheese in a grilled cheese sandwich?
a) ~0–2.6
b) ~2.7–3.4
c) ~5.3–5.5
d) ~6.8–7.0
2. The crunchy sound of an apple being bitten into is mostly transmitted:
a) through airwaves
b) through the skull
c) through scent
d) through touch
3. When onions are cooked to a dark color—resulting in a smooth texture, a sweet taste, and an intense scent—this is due to a chemical reaction known as the:
a) tenderizer
b) onion tears
c) onion discoloration
d) Maillard reaction
4. The ideal temperature range for the Maillard reaction to occur is:
a) 0–32ºF (–17–0ºC)
b) 90–98.6ºF (32–37ºC)
c) 113–158ºF (45–70ºC)
d) 230–340ºF (110–170ºC)
5. What term is used to describe the swelling of granules and an increase in viscosity when starch is heated with water?
a) gelatinization
b) freezing point
c) boiling point
d) foaming
While reading Genny Beemyn and Susan Rankin’s The Lives of Transgender People for his review of the book in Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee was struck by some of the rather dispiriting findings in the book.
Beemyn and Rankin’s book builds upon their extensive survey of transgender individuals about a variety of issues confronting their lives. McLemee points to the survey’s revelations regarding the continuing harassment that many transgender individuals face. McLemee asked the authors whether their data is as depressing as he first thought. Beemyn and Rankin argue that while there are still many challenges for transgender individuals, things are getting better as younger generations are becoming increasingly understanding of transgenderism. Here is an excerpt from the article:
“In my mind,” responded Beemyn, “the study shows dramatically different experiences by age. While it may have been largely depressing for people in previous generations, it is often much less so today. Younger trans people in general are not going through prolonged periods of denial, self-repression, and uncertainty; have connections with other trans people from a young age; have role models and mentors; and are able to find friends and partners who support their gender identity.”
We are happy to announce that The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines by Michael E. Mann is now available as a book and an e-book. Please note that two corrections will be made to the upcoming second printing of the book. The 1995 IPCC report referenced in the epigraph on page 1 and on page 108 is the Second Assessment Report, not the Third Assessment Report.
A further correction will be made to the next printing of the book. On page 18, the following figures will be corrected: “another 2C (3.5F) warming…” should be “another 1.5C (2.5F) warming,” “(for a total of 3C or 5F warming)…” should be “(for a total of 2C or 3.5F warming)…,” and “another 2C of warming…” should be “a total of 2C of warming…”
In a recent episode of The Leonard Lopate Show, Michael Neuman discusses Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience, which he co-edited with Claire Magone and Fabrice Weissman. The book has been published on the 40th anniversary of the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)
In the interview, Michael Neuman considered the practical realities of conducting humanitarian negotiations in complex situations. He also addressed the evolution of humanitarian goals, the resistance to these goals, and the political arrangements that overcame (or failed to) this resistance.
Why do certain varieties of cheese make great grilled cheese sandwiches? The secret lies in understanding how the molecules within cheese influence the ooey-gooey melted goodness that is the essence of a perfect grilled cheese sandwich.
It all begins with the cow (or goat or sheep). After all, cheese, no matter the variety, gets its start from milk. Even though milk is made of 80 to 90 percent water (in most hoofed species), it is still a very good source of proteins (casein and whey), carbohydrates (lactose, or milk sugar), and minerals (especially calcium). These three components, along with milk fat, are the essential ingredients for making cheese. Proteins (primarily caseins) give cheese its structure and allow the fat and a small amount of moisture to be retained while the majority of the water is removed. Lactose provides a food source for the growth of bacteria, which lend individual cheese varieties their distinctive flavor. The calcium in the milk determines how the proteins interact and this interaction ultimately dictates the softening, melting, and stretching characteristics of the heated cheese in a grilled sandwich.
Before milk is converted into cheese, the casein proteins are arranged in individual clusters, called micelles, which are suspended in what is known as the aqueous phase. They contain two-thirds of the milk’s total calcium and have a net negative charge that prevents them from aggregating together. To convert milk into cheese, however, the proteins must aggregate and form a curd, trapping both fat and water. To achieve aggregation, the negative charge must be eliminated from the casein micelles. This is accomplished either by adding acid and neutralizing the negative charge or by adding an enzyme and cleaving the portion of the cluster that contains the negative charge. While the transformation from protein aggregation to cheese is complicated, the main steps include cooking the curd and draining the whey, followed by salting and pressing the curds together. Aging is the final step, which allows for structure and flavor formation.
The ideal cheese characteristic needed to make a grilled cheese sandwich is melt. Who does not love to cut into a hot grilled cheese sandwich and see smooth, creamy melted cheese oozing from between the slices of grilled bread. But why do some cheeses melt better than others? Why do certain varieties melt as homogeneous molten masses, while others as oily lumps? Again, we go back to the molecular interactions within the cheese, primarily the interactions between the casein proteins and the calcium. The casein proteins are held together in the micelles by calcium bridges, and the number of these bridges is influenced by the acidity of the cheese. As cheese ages, more of the lactose is converted to lactic acid, causing the pH of the cheese to decrease and become more acidic. This, in turn, causes a dwindling in the number of calcium bridges within the casein micelles as the calcium solubilizes and moves from its position among the proteins to the entrapped water within the curd. The fewer the number of calcium bridges, the greater the mobility of the proteins as their connections give way.
In an interview with Columbia Business School’s Ideas at Work, Patrick Bolton discussed sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) and the new book he co-edited with Joseph Stiglitz and Frederic Samama, Sovereign Wealth Funds and Long-Term Investing. (A sovereign wealth fund is a state-owned investment fund composed of financial assets such as stocks, bonds, property, precious metals or other financial instruments. Sovereign wealth funds invest globally. Most SWFs are funded by foreign exchange assets.)
In the interview, Bolton expalins why SWFs have become more attractive investment and even a potential savior for the rattled global economy. SWFs offer a more prudent investment but also have social benefits as well. In the final question of the interview, Patrick Bolton discusses how SWFs influence climate change and sustainability. Here’s his response:
One of the biggest risks the very large funds face is uncertainty over the future price of carbon. Investors working on a 50-year horizon know that carbon pricing is coming their way, but they don’t know when, and they take a very different view from the typical investor who works on a five- or 10-year horizon who just takes a bet that carbon prices aren’t going to rise much in the next five years. The long-term investor has to think today what it means to be exposed to that risk and how it can reduce the costs of the future price of carbon — and has more to gain by investing more in renewable energy than in carbon-dependent industries like oil, automobile production, or airlines.
One last thing — until the financial crisis, the difference between long-term and short-term investing was underappreciated. We are now seeing research emerge that emphasizes that difference, with implications for portfolio composition, risk analysis, and so on. There is an opportunity for SWF fund managers to tap into that research and gain a better understanding of how to think about portfolio management.
“Whether used as a breakfast meat, a cooking ingredient, or strictly for flavoring, bacon is one of the most universally enjoyed foods in the world. It is hard to deny that bacon is an important part of our most fundamental culinary experiences.”—Timothy Knight from his chapter ‘Bacon: The Slice of Life’”
Bacon is magical. It can transform an ordinary meal into an extraordinary delight. With just one bite, you get an irresistible crunch, a distinctive smoky flavor, and an unmistakable sense of deliciousness. This chapter takes you through the finely honed mandatory steps that turn a humble piece of pork into the mouth-watering slice of “meat candy” that we know and love. So hang on tight. You are about to embark on a journey behind the magical bacon curtain, where you will learn how a lowly pork belly becomes the meat that makes your life complete.
A Brief History of Bacon
For more than three thousand years, bacon was made on farms using traditional practices that involved salt curing, dry curing, and smoking pork bellies. During the 1770s, John Harris, an industrious farmer in Wiltshire, England, established himself as the first large-scale bacon manufacturer in the modern world by using so-called wet-curing methods. With the onset of the industrial era came Philip Armour’s refrigerated rail cars and the development of more advanced preservation techniques by Gustavus Swift, both of which paved the way for the development of bacon as we know it today. In 1924, Oscar Mayer took his rightful place on the smoky-salty bacon throne by introducing the first presliced bacon. However, shoppers still had to get their bacon from the in-store butcher. So, in 1948, Mayer introduced the first prepackaged bacon, a durable cellophane-wrapped slab of sliced bacon on a thin sheet of cardboard. This allowed shoppers to select packages themselves from the retail case. In 1962, with the onset of new polymer-film technologies, Oscar Mayer began vacuum packaging his bacon (and other processed meats), once again revolutionizing retail meat packaging. An airtight envelope protected the bacon against spoilage. The back-of-package window, which allowed shoppers to see exactly what they were purchasing, was embraced in 1973.
It All Starts with a Pork Belly
A pork belly does not come off a hog resembling anything like bacon. In fact, it is not actually the belly or the stomach; rather, it is the lean and fat from the side of the hog that remains after the ham, shoulder, ribs, and loin are removed. Each hog has two “bellies.” The anatomy of a pork belly is complex, having several distinct and interspersed layers of lean and fat, which can be readily identified when looking at an individual strip of bacon. These layers are not consistently proportioned or spaced throughout the length of the belly, which is why individual slices of bacon look different (figure 18). Trimming removes sections that are too fatty to make into bacon. White bacon is made from the abdominal region of the hog and is nearly devoid of lean meat. This fatty cut is used primarily for flavoring. In some cultures, the fat from this cut is slowly melted out of the meat structure. The remaining bacon then solidifies as a crispy-crunchy “chip.”
“We strongly believe that the proper use of the scientific method in the areas of food design, production, and distribution can be of great benefit to society.”—Cesar Vega and David J. McClements
We conclude our week-long feature on The Kitchen as Laboratory: Reflections on the Science of Food and Cooking, edited by Cesar Vega, Job Ubbink, and Erik van der Linden, with an excerpt from the final chapter “On the Fallacy of Cooking from Scratch.” The authors of the chapter Vega and David J. McClements argue for the importance of science and scientific research to provide more nutritious food and better distribution. They challenge the conventional view that food science is somehow opposed to healthy eating by producing “food-like substances.”
We also wanted to let you know that Cesar Vega will join two of the book’s contributors, Anne McBride and Thomas M. Tongue Jr. in a discussion of the book at the92nd Y in Tribecaon February 17th at 12 pm. Seats are still available for the event!
Better Food Through Science
We strongly believe that the proper use of the scientific method in the areas of food design, production, and distribution can be of great benefit to society. Indeed, as candidly put by C. P. Snow in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959) and extrapolated to the realm of food, this is our responsibility as scientists. The benefits—which are often overlooked or taken for granted—range from the production of a diverse range of ingredients and foods to the generation of stimulating insights into the reasons different foods look, taste, and feel the way they do. This knowledge complements the insightful observations of food scholars around why we eat what we eat.
As scientists, with a deep sense of responsibility toward the community we live in, we strongly oppose Pollan’s (2008) and other food writers’ and activists’ denigration of the food science profession. One would get the impression that food scientists spend all their time in corporate laboratories creating “foodlike substances” to trick consumers into purchasing more fat, sugar, and salt. This is far from fair and does not give an accurate and thorough view of what food scientists actually do. It is true that some food scientists work for food companies, developing or improving processed foods that are high in fat, sugar, and salt. It is also true that overconsumption of these foods leads to a poor overall diet that negatively impacts health. Nevertheless, even these foods—for example, ice cream, potato chips (crisps), soda, and hamburgers—can be enjoyed for their desirable sensory attributes if they are consumed in moderation. Food scientists are involved in many other activities that demand the application of the basic principles of physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering to improve the manufacturing, storage, distribution, quality, safety, and nutritional attributes of foods.
Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of the book but we are also offering a free copy of the book to one lucky winner.
To enter our book giveaway, simply e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu with your name and address (U.S. and Canadian mailing addresses only, unfortunately). We will randomly select one winner on Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck and spread the word!
Praise for The Restructuring of Capitalism in Our Time:
“Of all the many books on the economic crisis, this is the best. William K. Tabb has absolute command of his subject and provides the clearest account yet of the financial folly that has brought the United States to its knees. Eminently readable and reasonable, his book cuts through the clouds of obfuscation by politicians and economists alike to draw a clear lesson: financialization is a cancer running through the American economy, one that continues to suck the life out of industry, corrupt capitalists, and Congress, generating more froth than real growth or jobs. A wonderful book and a real pleasure to read.” — Richard Walker, University of California, Berkeley, and author of The Capitalist Imperative: Territory, Technology, and Industrial Growth
“An incisive analysis of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, this book ranges over topics that transcend the narrow confines of traditional specialists, producing an overall analysis of the origins, development, and implications of financialization that will be discussed intently by scholars today and in years to come.” — Martin Wolfson, University of Notre Dame
Not long ago the near collapse of the financial system discredited the excessive financialization central to contemporary American capitalism. By the end of 2010 total output in the U.S. economy had regained prerecession levels (although not on a per capita basis, and spending increases by those below the richest 10 percent of households had increased only modestly). As banks and the stock market recovered, the conversation moved to worrying about public debt. Financial reform was presumed to have been achieved; the financial crisis safely consigned to history. This book is a protest against this premature dismissal and suggests we need to understand the damaging role finance has assumed in the economy, the continuing problem of global capital flow imbalances, and the danger of a still worse crisis.
“The expropriation of the rhetoric of women’s rights under Islam in order to unleash deadly violence on Muslim nations shows just how much the struggle for women’s equality has become a discursive one rather than a material one.”—Jonathan Lyons
The harem, which once dominated Western perceptions/fantasies of the Muslim world, has been replaced by the harem, which has come to be a symbol of the sexist and anti-modern nature of Islamic society. Lyons writes:
By the early twentieth century, the institution of veiling had for the most part supplanted the more exotic harem as the focal point of Western attention. Still, the underlying logic of the discourse of Islam and women remains firmly in place today. The end result has been a “sexualization” of the Western view of Islam, one in which the totality of Muslim beliefs and practices and even the entire Islamic civilization are too often reduced to Western perceptions and assessment of the male–female dynamic.
Exhibit A may be found in our obsession with the hijab, or veil, as a barometer of social progress and overall well-being within Islamic societies, to such a degree that it has become a commonplace of Western mass-media coverage, social activism, and political discussion alike. For years, the veil has been a staple of endless news articles, books, and documentaries, and it is captured in magazine and television images – all as shorthand for a society, a civilization, or a system that is backward, alien, immobile, and inherently antithetical to human rights and dignity.
“What the decision-makers at the Fed and Treasury appear not to have learned is the most important lesson of all: that the financial sector has grown too large, too dangerous, and too parasitic.”—William K. Tabb
In the concluding chapter toThe Restructuring of Capitalism in Our Time, William K. Tabb examines some of the lessons learned in the wake of the Great Recession and those not learned, at least among those making decisions. Here is an excerpt from the chapter:
What the decision-makers at the Fed and Treasury appear not to have learned is the most important lesson of all: that the financial sector has grown too large, too dangerous, and too parasitic. To prevent new and even more costly financial crises, it needs to be shrunk and restructured to fulfill its central purpose of mediating between savers and those who can use capital to increase the productive capacity of the economy. They did not learn that the unregulated reliance by major financial institutions on the short-term repo markets is too dangerous to be tolerated. Their failures stem from the difficulty of relinquishing the core of mainstream financial economic theories that have reigned for the previous three or four decades.
Some lessons have been learned. For one thing, we are less naïve concerning systemic safety and the benefits of presumed portfolio diversification. It has become clear that if asset holdings are diversified similarly, the system as a whole lacks diversification, and that financial institutions following similar strategies take on similar risk and render the entire system vulnerable. Second, as Minsky leads us to expect, the system is subject to tipping points where there is a sudden discontinuity and reversal in Keynes’s animal spirits. Third, focusing on the importance of financialization to the global neoliberal SSA makes clear the role of credit overextension in causing such crises. Fourth, the complex networks of counterparty exposure are better understood, as is the recognition that reregulation requires a global perspective.
In the most recent issue of Peace Studies Journal, Michael Marder, author of the forthcoming Plant Thinking: Toward a Philosophy of Vegetative Life, examines the recent Occupy movements and its possible connections to vegetal life. Arguing that the politics of the Occupy movement is the politics of space, Marder suggests that the movement conforms to the unique ontology of plants and “point toward the possibility of a plant-human republic emerging from it.”
Marder writes:
The politics of space, privileging the sedentary component of bodies largely exposed to the elements (tents are a poor protection from rain and cold) and gaining increasing visibility thanks to this exposure, is, I would argue, one we have learned from vegetal life. Standing for non-violence par excellence, the plant has been identified in the history of Western thought with a living icon of peace, a non-oppositional being, wholly included in the place wherein it grows, to the point of merging with the milieu….
The Association of American University Presses (AAUP) was officially founded on February 8, 1937 (Happy Birthday). Yesterday the AAUP web published an essay by Brenna McLaughlin looking at what led university presses to form an association.
(According to the AAUP, there’s more brewing for the 75th anniversary year—from a continued historical review, to festivities in Chicago this June, and—most excitingly—a University Press Week to be held November 11-17. We’ll keep you posted on the details.)
Starting in the 1920s, various university press directors began talking about the possibility of starting an association and finding ways to coordinate their efforts. However, the idea for an association gained momentum at a meeting in 1928 at the Waldorf-Astoria, in a variety of representative from presses focused on “problems of advertising and selling, including both more efficient marketing to a core audience of scholars, and affordable ways to sell to a wider trade audience” (some things never change!).
Though in the words of the attendees the meeting ended with “a perfect score of no resolutions and no officers, but…’100% harmony,” momentum was set in motion for a more formal organization. The meeting did however initiate “Shelfward Ho!” a joint catalog of university press titles that achieved limited success. Meetings continued through the 1930s and in 1937 a constitution was adopted forming the Association of American University Presses with twenty-two members.
“The White House, whether under the management of Republicans or Democrats, was never ready for such a business-like approach. Ironically the abuse the administration would take for being ‘socialist’ would keep any chief executive from considering a protaxpayer, hardheaded business approach to banking.”—William K. Tabb on the possibility of adopting the “Swedish solution” for bailing out U.S. banks.
In chapter six ofThe Restructuring of Capitalism in Our Time, William Tabb explores some of the responses to the Great Recession and what the Bush and Obama administrations did and did not do. In this section, Tabb explores the option of nationalization:
The Road Not Traveled—Nationalization
Prominent economists expressed skepticism over the bailouts, including Joseph Stiglitz, a former chair of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers; Paul Krugman, Princeton professor and New York Times columnist and, like Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winner in economics; and Simon Johnson, MIT professor and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. In an essay titled “The Quiet Coup,” Johnson (2009a) suggested that the finance industry has captured the government of the United States and continues to guide its rescue efforts in its own interests and not those of the country. From an international regulator’s perspective, it all looked familiar. He describes what he calls “a classic Kremlin bailout technique,” the assumption of private debt obligations by the government, which acts to squeeze ordinary citizens and make taxpayers and service recipients bear the cost of financial-sector debt. That is to say, the ruling class of the United States and its dominant fraction, finance capital, manipulates government policy in much the same way the Kremlin or a rent-capturing elite of any global South debtor country might. In this view American crony capitalism reflects the collusive relation of the financiers, their regulators, and elected officials. Johnson writes, “If you hide the name of the country and just show the numbers, there is no doubt what old IMF hands would say: nationalize troubled banks and break them up as necessary.”
Communism, we have been told, has been consigned to the dustbin of history. Not so, according to Santiago Zabala, most recently the co-author with Santiago Zabala of Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx.
In a recent article on Aljazeera, Santiago Zabala that many of the issues confronting us today—the breakdown of capitalism, possible war with Iran, etc.—are existential and touch on the question of Being. Unfortunately, he suggests, many philosophers, particularly analytical philosophers confine themselves to technical issues that are oblivious to the large sociopolitical issues of the day.
Zabala argues that communism might help reinvigorate philosophy’s engagement with sociopolitical questions. In fact, many leading contemporary philosophers are already rethinking communism. Zabala writes:
[F]or readers … still interested in the existential nature of philosophy, where our own Being is always at stake, communism might become a way to return to philosophy’s original sociopolitical task. After all, it should not be a surprise that distinguished contemporary philosophers who focus on existential matters (such as Alain Badiou, Gianni Vattimo and Slavoj Zizek) have also reconsidered the meaning of communism for this new century.
We conclude our week-long feature on William K. Tabb’s The Restructuring of Capitalism in Our Time, with Tabb’s own conclusion in which he explores how the United States can reduce the impact of finacialization on the economy. Tabb argues that the much-discussed but rarely acted upon need to improve the United States’ infrastructure provides a real way to move away from a dependency on financialization. As he argues, government investment has worked for other nations and has worked for the United State in the past.
It may be argued that reliance on the market, on the U.S. capacity for self-renewal, will unleash an era of growth and job creation in the country if only taxes are lowered and government gets smaller. However, one needs to ask why China is the leader in wind power and other emerging alternative energy technologies such as solar panels. The answer is its government subsidies and insistence of policy makers that the country’s power grid utilize alternative energy before any other source and do so under long-term contracts that guarantee dependable markets for startups and their new technologies. Public financing for wind turbines, solar panels, and other low-carbon initiatives has also grown dramatically in European countries like Germany where government supports green technologies. China spends 9 percent of its GDP on infrastructure, Europe 5 percent, and the United States half of that—differences apparent to anyone who has traveled on European high-speed trains or landed at one of China’s new, efficient airports.
While other countries pursue active industrial policies that facilitate gaining leadership in twenty-first-century industries, in the United States such investment is portrayed as un-American. Such criticism reflects the same nostalgia and desire to go back to the world of an imagined past, erasing the role that government has in fact played in promoting investment, from subsidizing the transcontinental railroad to supporting state research universities. It seems shortsighted to reject serious government encouragement of industries that could promote more sustained growth and create large numbers of jobs. The usual answer given is that the government cannot do this. But in other countries there is a clear record of constructive use of incentives.
While a most of the reviews of the book are quite strong and thoughtful, others give the book a 1-star rating. As reported in Climate Science Watch a popular global warming denialist web site told its readers to go to Amazon and give poor reviews to The Hockey Stick and the Climate . This tactic, according to climatecrocks.com, which also examined the reviews of Mann’s book on Amazon, is not uncommon and it posted a video of a Tea Party activist explaining how to use reviews as a way to discredit others.
The Amazon reviews of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars is also discussed on the blog Get Energy Smart! NOW!. In the post, the author considers what is the best response to this tactic:
Clearly, Amazon is not about to step in to provide some meaningful enforcement beyond what exists (such as “Amazon verified purchase”) to remove 1-star ratings, put meaningful reviews ‘higher’ in the queue despite the flood of ‘not useful’ ratings shortly after the WUWT [Watt's Up With That -- a denialist Web site] call to action.
One option would be a call to action: go to Amazon and uprate all five-star reviews and down-rate all 1-star reviews. That, however, would be simply inappropriate. Another option is to simply ignore which, in the larger scheme of things, is likely a better use of most people’s time. A third option, one that would actually require far more time than option 1, would be to go to Amazon and actually read the 5 star and 1 star reviews. If you find a review helpful, no matter what the star rating, let Amazon know and do the same if you find it unhelpful. While I have a good idea what the resulting ratings would be from a reality-based community, this is an ethical way to react to anti-science syndrome sufferering swarming within the flawed Amazon rating system.
Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of the book and we are also offering a free copy of the book to one lucky winner.
To enter our book giveaway, simply e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu with your name and address (U.S. and Canadian mailing addresses only, unfortunately). We will randomly select one winner on Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck and spread the word!
Praise for Who Killed Hammarskjold?:
“This is an extraordinary story, narrated with clarity and devastating effect. Susan Williams is to be congratulated for shining a light onto a very strange and disturbing incident. The result is a gripping and astonishing read.” — Alexander McCall Smith, novelist, author of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series
While serving as United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) representative to Zambia from 1998-2005, Margaret O’Callaghan spoke at a memorial service upon the anniversary of UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjold’s death. In an article originally published by the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and reprinted on the Hurst Blog, O’Callaghan writes about how she might have felt at the memorial had she read Who Killed Hammarskjöld?: The UN, the Cold War, and White Supremacy in Africa, by Susan Williams, at that time.
In Who Killed Hammarskjöld?, Susan Williams re-examines the plane crash that took Hammarskjold’s life as he traveled to the Congo, a hot spot during the Cold War. O’Callaghan writes:
Williams is not just raking over old ashes but shining a bright light into the dark recesses of government archives and other sources, and revealing new information which clearly indicates that the crash was no accident. She produces evidence which shows that a number of governments, themselves member organisations of the fledgling UN, along with powerful business interests, played crucial roles in the event. This is perhaps why the book is causing such a stir – despite the half century which has passed.
For Ruti, love “ushers us to frequencies of human life that we might find difficult to access otherwise,” and allows us a break from the pragmatic preoccupations that dominate our everyday life. Drawing on the ideas of Julia Kristeva and Alain Badiou, Ruti writes that love, “adds a layer of luster to our mundane existence, making us feel empowered and self-connected even as it ‘decenters’ us from our customary concerns.”
In considering the potential for disappointment and disillusion that comes with love or love’s failure, Ruti writes:
The problem, of course, is that we can’t access the depths of love without opening ourselves to its risks – that the price of allowing ourselves to experience love’s mystery is utter vulnerability. This is why it’s easy to refuse love’s summons, to decline its invitation to self-transformation. And those who have already been burned by love may find this invitation even more challenging. This is why I have been arguing that it might help to stop thinking about love’s disenchantments as the antithesis of love and see them, instead, as an essential part of love’s trajectory. It might help to conceive of romantic failures as love’s way of teaching us the kinds of lessons we might never otherwise learn. When it comes to love, our so-called failures are often (not always, but often) merely new opportunities for growth, new opportunities for singularizing our character. Those who understand this are more likely to welcome love’s summons because they know that the happily-ever-after is only one aspect of love – that to love is, among other things, to accept the possibility of disappointment.
Upon publication ofWho Killed Hammarskjöld?: The UN, the Cold War, and White Supremacy in Africa, theHurst Blog, published an essay by Adrian Begg, who was then a 20-year-old officer in the Northern Rhodesia Police when Dag Hammarskojld’s plane crashed in 1961. In this essay, he describes that fateful day and the mystery that surrounds the crash. We thank Hurst and Mr. Begg for allowing us to reprint the article on our blog. To view Begg’s photographs from the site, please visit theHurst Blog.
It began as a normal, quiet Sunday shift at Ndola’s central police station, where I had been stationed as a young assistant inspector since completing my training six months earlier – but it soon became obvious there was something big on the go. Officers were being called in from home, and in the early afternoon I was sent with a squad of other officers to secure Ndola Airport and put it in security lockdown in readiness for VIP arrivals. The word quickly spread among us that Dag Hammarskjöld was expected.
We recently published Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing, by renowned Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o. In the book, Ngugi wa Thiong’o summarizes and develops a cross-section of the issues he has grappled with in his work, which deploys a strategy of imagery, language, folklore, and character to “decolonize the mind.” Ngugi confronts the politics of language in African writing; the problem of linguistic imperialism and literature’s ability to resist it; the tension between national and world literature; and the role of the literary curriculum in both reaffirming and undermining the dominance of the Western canon.
In this 2010 video with Granta, Thiong’o discusses some of these issues as well as his life growing up in Kenya, contemporary African writing, and modern Kenyan history:
The recent success of Islamist parties in elections in Tunisia and Egypt has led many to conclude, a little hastily, that political Islam has hijacked the Arab Spring. In the current context of turbulence and uncertainty in the Middle East, it is more important than ever to understand what Islamism is, what drives it, and what its future role is likely to be.
I wrote The Muslim Revolt: A Journey through Political Islam in an attempt to explain and demystify Islamism, drawing on my experiences as a journalist who had been lucky enough to travel through large parts of the Muslim world. The book argues that, in its origins, Islamism represented a double revolt—against foreign dominion and against local autocracy. Like other anti-colonial movements, its driving force was opposition to European rule; but unlike its secular counterparts, it rallied the faithful under the banner of a ‘return to Islam.’ This was, in Robert Leiken’s terse phrase, ‘anti-imperialism exalted by revivalism.’
But even if these two elements, the external and the internal, remain its defining characteristics, we should not conclude that Islamism is monolithic and unchanging. In the light of the Arab Spring, we can now see Islamism as having passed through three crucial, and very different, phases:
* Its birth and early expansion from the late 1920s to the early 1950s.
* Its revival in the 1970s (especially following the Iranian revolution).
* Its emergence as an actor with new-found importance in the Arab uprisings of today.
Williams’s book and the BBC report describes some of the evidence that have surfaced in recent years that have cast doubt around the official explanation of how Hammarskjold’s plane crashed. Raising doubts is the way the crash scene was handled, a mysterious hole in Hammarskjold’s head that had been airbrushed from official photographs, and another plane which was spotted around Hammarskjold’s DC-6.
“I think you are now going to see the scientific community almost uniformly fighting back against this assault on science. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future but I do know that my fellow scientists and I are very ready to engage in this battle.”—Michael Mann
The recent leaks of documents from the libertarian think tank The Heartland Institute, revealed a systematic and well-funded, by the Koch brothers among others, campaign to challenge and discredit climate science and particularly the evidence that suggests global warming. One of the most prominent targets of climate change “skeptics” has been Michael E. Mann, a noted scientist and professor, and the author of the recently published The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines.
In light of the revelations in the wake of the Heartland documents, the Guardian interviewed Michael Mann about the campaign against him personally as well as climate science more broadly. (There is also an excellent video to accompany the article.)
On 14 March 1962, six months after Hammarskjöld’s death, President John F. Kennedy invited Sture Linnér [a Hammarskjöld aide], who had by now left the Congo and was at UN headquarters in New York, to the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. He told Linnér that he wanted to apologize for the pressure that had been put on Dag to implement US policy in the Congo—a pressure which Dag had refused to heed. The Secretary-General’s strategy had been straightforward: ‘I do not intend to give way to any pressure, be it from the East or the West; we shall sink or swim.’ Equally clear were his instructions to Linnér: ‘Continue to follow the line you find to be in accordance with the UN Charter.’
Kennedy explained to Linnér the reasons for US opposition to Dag’s policy in the Congo. For his own political survival, said the President, he had felt obliged to heed the deep aversion towards Communism and left-wing views, which even after McCarthy’s heyday played an important role in American politics. He then said that because it was now too late to offer an apology to Hammarskjöld, he wished to do so to Linnér. ‘I realise now,’ said Kennedy, that in comparison to [Dag], I am a small man. He was the greatest statesman of our century.’
Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of the book and we are also offering a free copy of the book to one lucky winner.
To enter our book giveaway, simply e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu with your name and address (U.S. and Canadian mailing addresses only, unfortunately). We will randomly select one winner on Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck and spread the word!
Praise for The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars:
“Michael Mann has been the most important, resilient, and outspoken warrior in the climate battle—responding to threats and persecution with courage and resolve every step of the way. Anyone who cares about the climate issue must read his fascinating—and enraging—story.” — Chris Mooney, author of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future
Chris Mooney begins the interview by praising Michael Mann for his intellectual and personal courage in his work and willingness to stand up to the various forces and individuals who have challenged him and climate science more generally. Mann also discusses how he went from being a computer nerd to becoming a climate scientist.
In discussing more recent issues, Mooney and Mann consider the ideological and financial motivations shaping the opposition to climate science among coal and oil companies as well as libertarian organizations. At a time, when those who challenge climate science are exploring ways of influencing science education for K-9, they consider how scientists can make sure the public is getting the right information regarding global warming.
In his short afterword to David Foster Wallace’s undergraduate philosophy thesis Fate, Time, and Language, Jay Garfield, Wallace’s thesis advisor, describes Wallace as “a philosopher with a fiction hobby.” Wallace is famous today as a novelist, short story writer, and essayist, but his philosophical background shines through in all his writing, from his shorter pieces—notably his analysis of the aesthetics of athletics in his essay on Roger Federer and his reflection on the morality of eating lobster—to the frequent allusions to Wittgenstein in his most explicitly philosophical novel, The Broom of the System.
While Wallace was writing The Broom of the System as his undergraduate honors thesis in creative writing during his senior year at Amherst College, he was also working on Fate, Time, and Language, his attempt to overcome Richard Taylor’s argument for fatalism. Wallace took issue with “Taylor’s central claim, … that just a few basic logical and semantic presuppositions … lead directly to the metaphysical conclusion that human beings, agents, have no control over what is going to happen.” The idea that human decision-making has no impact on the future deeply disturbed Wallace. Years later, Jay Garfield remembers being “struck by the fact that David’s reaction to Taylor’s argument and to the failure of so many philosophers to have solved it was righteous indignation.” In Fate, Time, and Language, as in his other less academic but no less philosophical works, Wallace used his understanding of logic and argument as a way to reinforce his very human instincts and feelings.
“We’ve lost three years to do something about climate change, and that’s a huge opportunity cost. Each year we wait, it gets that much more difficult to stabilize carbon dioxide concentrations below levels that might very well be dangerous. I think that [Climategate] was a crime against humanity. It’s a crime against the planet.”—Michael Mann
Discussion about The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, by Michael Mann continues. The book was recently reviewed by the Daily Kos and Michael Mann was one of the authors of an open letter regarding the leaking of e-mails from the Heartland Institute. While the fallout regarding Peter Gleick’s obtaining of documents from the Heartland Institute continue, it is important to point out, as the authors of open letter do, that groups that deny climate warming have hacked into scientists’ emails, including Michael Mann’s.
Mann discusses being the target of organizations that deny global warming and other aspects of his scientific work in a recent interview with Scientific American. In the interview Michael Mann discusses the scientific data and research that led to his conclusions regarding human-caused global warming. How the hockey stick became a symbol of climate warming and how it feels to be the “whipping-boy” of climate deniers.
Here are some excerpts from the interview:
Q: How do you feel about being called the whipping boy of climate science?
At times I felt like: “Bring it on.” I’m confident about the robustness of our scientific work. I think that if the climate change deniers thought they had found an area of the science that they could discredit by trying to go after a single scientist—me—I think they’ve been in for a disappointment.
The e-mails stolen in 2009 included some of yours, though they weren’t the most controversial. What was that like?
The people who stole these e-mails and posted them: How would they like someone to take their diaries, their private communications and expose them to the world out of context? The fact that climate change deniers needed to resort to criminal activity to try to discredit our science on the one hand disgusted me. It angered me. It angered, I think, many of us in the scientific community.
There was a concerted campaign to use these stolen e-mails to manufacture an echo chamber of climate change denial propaganda in the lead up to the Copenhagen summit. There was an attempt to use misrepresentations, false allegations, smears based on these out-of-context e-mails to have scientists fired.
At one point, an influential Republican legislator in the state of Pennsylvania threatened to withhold funding for Penn State if the university didn’t take some sort of action against me because of the purported improprieties. So it was ugly.
We’ve lost three years to do something about climate change, and that’s a huge opportunity cost. Each year we wait, it gets that much more difficult to stabilize carbon dioxide concentrations below levels that might very well be dangerous. I think that [Climategate] was a crime against humanity. It’s a crime against the planet.
“I thought of David as a very talented young philosopher with a writing hobby, and did not realize that he was instead one of the most talented fiction writers of his generation who had a philosophy hobby.” – Professor Jay Garfield
Jay Garfield, a philosophy professor at Hampshire College, was David Foster Wallace’s undergraduate honors thesis advisor, working with Wallace on the project that eventually became the centerpiece of our collection of essays, Fate, Time, and Language. In his moving afterword to Wallace’s thesis, Garfield looks back on what it was like to work with David Foster Wallace, the philosophy student:
This was all a long time ago, and I cannot be sure that my memory is entirely accurate, especially regarding details; but David was memorable enough that I think that most of our time together is burned into my brain. I was teaching then at Hampshire College. My close friend and colleague Bill de Vries, then teaching at Amherst College phoned (e-mail was still a rarity) late in the fall semester to ask me if I would be willing to talk with an honors student he was advising. Much of my work at the time was on natural language semantics and logic; Bill knew that I was supervising another student—Jamie Rucker—on a semantics thesis; and he suspected that his student’s thesis was headed in that direction. He did mention that this student was uncommonly talented, that he was the son of the renowned philosopher James Wallace, that he was simultaneously writing honors theses in philosophy and English, and that the English thesis was to be a novel. I agreed to meet with him, and a few days later David Wallace turned up in my office.
It was evident immediately that Bill was right about the talent. David’s passion and aptitude for philosophy were obvious. He wanted to talk about Taylor’s fatalism paper, the many failed attempts to refute its argument, and he proposed to explore a new refutation. David came prepared. His grasp of the literature was sure, even professional. His insight into the reasons that prior attempts to reply to Taylor failed was not just accurate but also nuanced and precise. He felt that Brown was on the right track but also saw the inadequacies of his approach and wanted to talk about how to develop Brown’s ideas. It all came out in a torrent, but a carefully constructed torrent. I probably guessed at the time that it was rehearsed, but over the ensuing months in which I worked closely with David, it was clear that he simply thought and spoke so clearly that I now guess that this unlikely introduction was most likely spontaneous.
“Once again we are face to face with what dependency feels like in an area of the world almost completely dominated and controlled by US and European foreign interests.”—Luis Barrios and David Brotheron on the Dominican Republic
Their essay, “Dominicans’ dance with want,” was written in the aftermath of the recent tragedy in which a boat capsized off the Northern Dominican coast, leaving at least 12 dead and 39 still missing. The Dominicans who died were looking to escape the desperate conditions facing the nation, whose already fragile economy had been severely hurt by the global recession. As Brotherton and Barrios point out, about 50% of the country is either unemployed or underemployed. The authors write, “Further, about one third of the country’s population live in poverty, i.e., exist on less than 7 US dollars per day, while the top 12 percent continue to own almost 60 percent of the nation’s wealth, although again these figures are misleading since they do not include wealth owned abroad by the Dominican elite. Moreover, the government spends less than 2% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on health, almost the lowest in the region.”
This week our featured book is Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience, edited by Claire Magone, Michael Neuman, and Fabrice Weissman, published on the fortieth anniversary of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières.
Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of the book and we are also offering a free copy of the book to one winner.
To enter our book giveaway, simply e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu with your name and address (U.S. and Canadian mailing addresses only, unfortunately). We will randomly select one winner on Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck and spread the word!
Praise for Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience:
“The book brings out the perennial dangers of silence and stresses the continuing need to highlight the hidden victims of ‘just wars.’ It also exemplifies Médecins Sans Frontières’s tradition of self-criticism and internal disagreement, traditions now more valuable than ever.” — David Keen, London School of Economics and Political Science
In recent weeks, Santiago Zabala, coauthor of Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx, has been writing about the importance of continental philosophy in addressing some of the current political, economic, and even existential crises.
In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, How to Be a European (Union) Philosopher, Zabala argues that the hermeneutic tradition, which has largely been forgotten by those making policy for the European Union, continues to offer a vital tool for the way we live and give meaning to our lives. Zabala writes, “We exist first and foremost as creatures who manage to question our own being and in this way project our lives. Without this distinctiveness we would not exist; that is, our lives would be reduced to a predetermined subordination to the dominant philosophical or political system.”
The E.U. with its emphasis on technocratic governance has relied on classification and hierarchies. This is not merely an objective system of governance but rather a system of thought that excludes various individuals and has ethical implications. The type of policy approaches used by the E.U. has ultimately served to exclude other types of thought that might challenge neoliberal orthodoxies.
Zabala concludes by writing:
The fact that the European Research Council funds predominantly analytic philosophy projects, as well as those subservient to the hard sciences, perhaps is an indication that they prefer intellectuals who submit “reality to reason” rather than fighting the ongoing exclusion of the most vulnerable citizens by those in power. The work of a philosopher in Europe must involve guarding being, namely the existential lives of those not in power, from systems of thought that seek to exclude them. Before the parentheses in this article’s title can be removed, the European Union must reconsider the existential nature not only of citizens but also of philosophy itself since it seems to have forgotten both.
On the occasion of its fortieth anniversary, the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has published Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience exploring the practical realities of conducting humanitarian negotiations in complex situations.
In a recent interview with PRI’s The World, Duncan Mclean, who helps to manage the group’s work in an area of Somalia controlled by the Islamist group al-Shabab, discussed some of the challenges working in this dangerous area.
The group’s work in al-Shabab-controlled areas of Somalia has been complicated by their policy of treating everyone, including al-Shabab soldiers. This has led the African Union to claim the Doctors Without Borders is the opposition’s surgeons. Further complicating the matter is that al-Shabab recently announced it is merging efforts with al-Qaeda militants.
As Duncan Mclean explains these types of complexities are part of the experience of Doctors Without Borders and that aid efforts in general raise difficult issues. Mclean says:
“There are many, many parts of the world where we basically accept that a certain degree of aid that we’re providing will be used for other ends than what we intended it to be. And it would be naive to consider it otherwise to sort of maintain this idealistic image of aid work that only goes in greatest need, only civilians, only the intended beneficiaries are receiving. In our case, it’s medical aid, but we could be talking about food aid, water, sanitation programs, we could be talking about all sorts of things. That’s simply a fact of humanitarian work today I would say as much as it’s unpleasant to consider.”
“Excessive or opportunistic professions of faith can only damage the political process when the truth is distorted in the name of religion to the point of absurdity.”—Denis Lacorne
Recent news about the Republican primary has seen its fair share of discussion on the role of religion in public life. Of course, most prominently there was Rick Santorum’s “throw up” remark regarding John F. Kennedy’s famous speech to ministers in Houston regarding how his Catholicism would and would not shape his decisions as President. However, as Denis Lacorne, author of Religion in America: A Political History, argues in a recent essay in Huffington Post, Romney and Gingrich have also put forth positions regarding the separation of church and state that reflect a dubious understanding of the constitution.
Referring to a speech Romney gave last October, Lacorne concludes that Romney sees that “there should be no real separation between church and state.” Lacorne also suggests that it seems as if Romney, Santorum, and Gingrich feel obliged to take on the Republican’s “Southern Strategy” by adopting the viewpoints of Southern fundamentalist Protestants.
Needless to say, Lacorne sees a real danger. He writes:
This reversal of viewpoints on the role of religion in politics, from Kennedy’s Houston speech to the present position defended by the Republican candidates, points to the danger of calling into question the existence of a wall of separation between church and state. If politics cannot be separated from religion, the political debate about the common good and the future of the U.S. democracy is likely to turn into an endless scholastic babble about abortion, contraception, prenatal testing, fertilization treatments and “aspirin between the knees” as a form of abstinence. In attacking the Obama’s administration decision to require faith-based institutions to cover the cost of contraception (before Obama’s “compromise”), conservatives, Republican candidates and Republican Congressional leaders made it a constitutional issue: Obama had violated the “Free Exercise clause” of the First Amendment, concerning freedom of religion and freedom of conscience. But conservative Republicans forget that the First amendment has a dual purpose: it also prohibits support for an official or privileged religion as stated in the “Establishment clause.” The tension between the two clauses of the First Amendment is far from being resolved and Justices of the Supreme Court are still struggling with this dilemma.
The authors ofHumanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experiencerecount their experiences with Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). In particular they focus on some of the practical and frequently difficult experience of having to work with unfriendly governments or warring factions. While Doctors Without Borders is committed to providing medical assistance to all individuals civilian and combatant alike, they must be wary of being used for political purposes.
The following excerpt is from the chapter, “Afghanistan: Regaining Leverage,” by Xavier Crombe (with Michiel Hofman) describing MSF’s return to the country. In this passage Crombe describes MSF’s dealings with opposition groups, including the Taliban:
Full compliance with MSF’s “no weapon” policy was to be the starting point for the medical programmes. They were launched officially in Kabul in October, but remained effectively on hold in Lashkar Gah until January 2010. The teams were on the wards, but had to wait for drug supplies to arrive as their transport by truck from Kabul to Helmand depended on obtaining permission from the Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan (IEA), the most influential armed opposition group, also known as “Quetta Shura”. This was in essence a sovereignty issue, as most districts in the southern provinces, and consequently road traffic, were under effective control of this group.
Since MSF’s return to Afghanistan, there had been several setbacks in engaging the Taliban leadership. Getting approval for the Kabul project had been relatively straightforward as MSF’s initial opposition contacts judged the selected hospital located in a Pashtun area to be easily accessible by their constituency, and planned surgical activities opened up the prospect of treatment for their wounded combatants. But the scant interest and commitment they had shown from the outset regarding MSF’s intended projects in the southern provinces, including Helmand, known to be the heartland of the IEA, had cast doubts over the breadth of their connections.
February 24 was the birthday of famed philosopher Judith Butler. Butler is a prolific scholar of diverse interests. She has published important books on feminist and queer theory, modern French philosophy, literature and literary theory, political ethics, and Jewish philosophy. In honor of her birthday, we wanted to take a brief look at her career as an “oft-cited academic superstar.” Butler’s newest book, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, will be released in July.
Judith Butler first rose to prominence with her critique of traditional notions of the essential nature of gender. In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Butler’s hugely influential bestseller, she claims that, rather than being purely biological and thus set at birth, gender is primarily the result of the performance of culturally dictated acts. These acts are largely responsible for the binary way that gender has been viewed historically. By recognizing the effect that cultural pressure has on our conceptions of what it means to be masculine and feminine, we can gain a more flexible understanding of personal identity, a conception that serves as one of the bases of Queer Theory as an academic discipline.
While Gender Trouble was incredibly popular and influential, rather than be limited by its popularity, Butler moved into other areas of interest, expanding on her ideas about gender performativity. She has written on censorship and power, on the way our limited knowledge affects our ethical responsibilities, and on Kierkegaard and Kafka. She has been able to bring her unique understanding of a wide array of philosophical ideas (particularly those of Hegel) to bear on literary figures, making her an important member of the literary theory scholarly community. In Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, Butler brings a fresh perspective to the oft-discussed Antigone, claiming that Antigone’s complex family relationships place her in opposition to the binary heterosexual norms of the state.
In a chapter fromHumanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience, Caroline Abu-Sada recounts and analyzes some of the complications Doctors Without Borders//Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has grappled with in Palestine. Specifically, Doctors Without Borders has had to navigate a perilous political situation between Hamas and Fatah as well as the tensions between Palestine and Israel. In this excerpt from the chapter “Gaza Strip: A Perilous Transition,” Abu-Sada describes the pressure put upon Doctors Without Borders by Hamas as well their dealings with the Israelis.
MSF saw the Hamas government as wishing to impose both health policy choices and its own vision of society and did not want to be dictated to on how it should behave and how it should run its activities. This stance was due partly to a political desire to limit its collaboration with Hamas and partly to its difficulty in understanding the deep mutations underway in Gaza. The organisation gave the ruling authorities the impression that it had put itself beyond their reach at a time when there was a real need to organise services for the population and consolidate their legitimacy.
Hamas finally left MSF no choice but to negotiate the scope of the organisation’s operations in the Gaza Strip. These negotiations focused on both medical and administrative issues. However, after the political and military defeat of Fatah, its long-standing interlocutor in the Gaza Strip, MSF’s relations with Israel were to be determined by matters of a completely different nature.
Israel and the Humanitarian Management of the Gaza Strip
Israel had evacuated its settlers and the military from the Gaza Strip in August 2005 as part of a non-negotiated withdrawal. However, it continued to control all entries and exits. For MSF, maintaining its activities therefore depended to a large extent on its relations with the Israeli authorities. This was all the more true after the Gaza blockade had been set up which, in theory, allowed through certain essential goods and humanitarian aid. In reality, however, orders of medical supplies and medicines sometimes remained stranded for days or even weeks if all the necessary permits hadn’t been obtained, or if the contents of the crates contravened some aspect of the relatively vague rules governing the embargo—or even for no apparent reason.
The podcast discusses a variety of the essays but on his blog Religion in American History, Paul Harvey points our attention to some of the great essays in the volume not mentioned. One of the essays is Linford Fisher’s “Colonial Encounters.” Harvey quotes from an interview with Fisher in which he discusses the the connection between religion, consumer goods, and Native practices in colonial New England:
In terms of religion, one of the biggest ways we can trace the effects of this influx of consumer goods is through funerary objects in Native graves. One of the most poignant examples of this comes from a late seventeenth century grave at Mashantucket, Connecticut. In a young teenage girl’s grave, amongst the more traditional funerary items such as a pestle and beads archaeologists in 1990 found a medicine bundle that contained fragments of a Bible page and a bear paw. I wrestle with the meaning of this a bit in the introduction to my book, but it seems to me it is a clear example of how the physical presence of the Bible and the teachings contained in it had become part of funerary practices and—perhaps equally as important—one additional potential means for providing in the afterlife or a deceased relative. But even more broadly, the educational and evangelistic efforts made by the colonists in Native communities meant that in churches and schools Natives were presented with an astonishing array of new material goods, such as all kinds of books and primers, inks and quills, eyeglasses (for reading), benches and tables, and European clothing and foods.
There was never any room for compromise in the myth of the “French doctors”. Aid was a moral imperative, full stop. Like all doctrines founded on such an absolute (not to say absolutely self-righteous) conception, moral ambiguity was taboo, and the need for negotiation seen as, at best, a necessary evil. To be sure, most international relief groups, and certainly MSF [Doctors Without Borders], have moved beyond this kind of vulgar Kantianism which Bernard Kouchner once championed so insistently. Nonetheless, in the collective memory of modern humanitarianism, the comforting illusion endures that there was a time when relief NGOs were largely free to act as they saw fit, taking into account only the needs of the populations they sought to help, and the limits imposed by their own charters. Populations in danger, to use an expression that MSF made into a commonplace of the humanitarian lexicon more than a decade ago, were assumed to have the right to be helped but, just as saliently, international relief groups took it as read that they had an absolute right to help. In reality, humanitarian action cannot afford to be absolutist in, say, the manner of the human rights movement, which, because it is law based, is absolutist, at least in principle, or it is nothing. All effective humanitarian action is based on negotiating compromises with the relevant political actors, including of course insurgent groups, donors, and with other stakeholders (including beneficiaries, themselves never monolithic in their viewpoints or requirements), and trying to reconcile competing agendas, not only between NGOs but within NGOs as well. For a humanitarian organisation to believe and, far more importantly, to behave as if this were not the case is to court disaster, as a number of the case studies in this book painfully illustrate.
The need for compromise in almost every situation in which an organisation like MSF operates or is likely to operate emphatically does not imply that, where the compromises on offer are unacceptable from a relief NGO’s perspective, it is imperative to act anyway.
The book was also recently featured on The Bowery Boys, which calls The Greatest Grid “invaluable.” The review continues, “Published in a slender landscape binding, the book condenses the exhibition but allows for unabated curiosity and imaginative wanderings over vivid prints of aged topography.”
For those who can’t make it to the Museum of the City of New York, the review suggests that the book makes an excellent alternative, comparing it to the companion to the Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art:
[The Greatest Grid], stuffed with short essays and full-bodied artifact descriptions by museum staff, reprints almost every image from the show.
Many such exhibition books suffer from the transfer. As an extreme example, last year’s lustrous, blockbuster Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was rendered into a diminutive curio with its accompanying companion book. ‘The Greatest Grid’ suffers no such problem, especially to those of us who find tinted topographical maps and black-and-white images of old New York as scintillating as haute couture.
Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of the book and we are also offering a FREE copy of the book to one winner.
To enter our book giveaway, simply e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu with your name and address (U.S. and Canadian mailing addresses only, unfortunately). We will randomly select one winner on Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck and spread the word!
Praise for Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-Pop:
“Michael K. Bourdaghs’s compellingly readable Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon imaginatively conceives an original account of how Japan, in the postwar and Cold War years, broke with a historical narrative centered on the United States military occupation and Japan’s subsequent confinement within the American imperium to enter the actual world.” — Harry Harootunian, Duke University, author of Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan
This award, named in honor of Governor Herbert H. Lehman, is part of the New York Academy of History’s mission to promote and honor outstanding historical research and writing. The Prize is made possible through the generosity of the Herbert H. Lehman Foundation.
For more on the book, you can read the introduction, A Perfect Storm of People or browse the book in Google Preview. And here’s Kenneth Jackson on the book:
Triumph of Order is one of the most important and provocative books to appear in recent years. Beautifully written, thoroughly researched, and impressively illustrated, it shatters our assumptions about freedom in even the greatest of cities, and it forces us to reconsider our priorities as the British and American governments use the excuse of both terror and traffic to resist even the possibility of public expression in public places.
In Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-Pop, Michael Bourdaghs discusses the aesthetic, cultural, and geopolitical implications of a range of musical styles that were popular in post-war Japan. Rockabilly first gained a wide audience in Japan in the late 50s due in large part to the popularity of Elvis Presley and Gene Vincent. Among Japanese musicians Sakamoto Kyu not only found a legion of fans in Japan but his single “Ue wo muite aruko” (1961) became an international hit under the title “Sukiyaki.” Below is a promotional video for the song:
“Chinese history suggests that its foreign policy behavior is highly sensitive to its relative power. If its power continues to increase, China will try to expand its sphere of influence in East Asia…. Brace yourself. The game is on.”—Yuan-kang Wang
Like other nations, most notably the United States, China has a sense of exceptionalism based in large part in large part on the Confucian character of its politics. Wang argues that Chinese think “of of historical China as a shining civilization in the center of All-under-Heaven, radiating a splendid and peace-loving culture.” They have not, as many of the West fear, been an aggressive power that is poised to dominate present-day Asia through violent means. Ultimately, China’s rise, according to Chinese exceptionalism, will be peaceful.
In the post, Wang dissects and challenges three key myths about Chinese exceptionalism regarding their relations with other nations: 1.) China did not expand when it was strong; 2.) The Seven Voyages of Zheng He demonstrates the peaceful nature of Chinese power; 3.) The Great Wall of China symbolizes a nation preoccupied with defense. Wang shows how each of these fall short of the complete truth.
In the early 1970s, more Japanese rock bands started to sing in Japanese rather than English. One of the first groups to do this was the folk-rock group Happy End. Some might be familiar with the band from their song “Kaze Wo Atumete,” which was on the soundtrack for Lost in Translation. Below is a tribute video to the band, in which you can hear their song “Natsu Nandesu”:
In a discussion of the band from his book Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical History of J-Pop, Michael Bourdaghs discusses Happy End in the context of the politics of 1960s Japan and Japan’s struggle with its past. In this passage Bourdaghs discusses the debates and meanings surrounding Happy End’s choice to sing in Japanese:
The assertion by Happy End that rock could be sung successfully in Japanese challenged this common sense and provoked a sharp and sometimes negative response. Skeptics pointed out that the rock-in-Japanese position was self-contradictory. As one noted, “If you’re going to say, sing it in Japanese because we’re Japanese, then why don’t you just go the whole way and come out in favor of enka sung in naniwabushi style and reject rock? Neither rock in Japanese nor folk in Japanese can lay claim to any traditional lineage.”But Happy End sang in Japanese not to lay claim to an authentic tradition: the band explicitly denied that any authentic tradition was available to them. Rather, they chose to sing in a form that no reference to the past could authenticate, precisely so as to create a new authenticity in the present.
Yesterday, March 8, was International Women’s Day, held every year as a celebration of the advances in women’s rights that have already been made and a reminder of the advances in women’s rights that are still to come. In honor of the occasion, we are taking a look at three of our recent and upcoming titles in Women’s Studies that emphasize the historical depth and modern breadth of the Women’s Rights Movement.
Through a detailed discussion of the Iraqi women’s fight for fair treatment over the past century in Women in Iraq, Noga Efrati offers a reminder that the Women’s Rights Movement is not a solely a product of the modern West. Efrati examines the social and political effects of the British occupation and subsequent British-backed Iraqi government in marginalizing the interests of women. However, far from simply being a story of oppression by various governing bodies and acquiescence by Iraqi women, Efrati’s account is one of s constant fight by generations of Iraqi women for political and social rights. While Efrati does not shy away from the fact that there have been setbacks for Iraqi women—in her worrying epilogue, she points out similarities between the British occupation and withdrawal after World War I and the American occupation and withdrawal still in progress today—it is impossible to come away from Women in Iraq without an appreciation of the wide and varied history of the global Women’s Rights Movement.
Bourdaghs’s discussion focuses on the ways in which the song, reflected concern about shifting gender roles in Japan. Bourdaghs writes:
It is also hardly surprising that the lyrics reflect a celebration of heterosexual, romantic marriage. As the chorus insists, all will be right if you (the woman [kimi]) simply say yes to me (the man [boku]). But the persona of the singer is not entirely self-assured [and] betrays a touch of panic, of hysteria. The man is insisting that the woman say yes precisely because he is not certain that she will. The man tries to define for the woman her own thoughts, a paranoid stance that tries to preempt alternative and (from his perspective) undesirable responses to his proposal. The weakened stance of the male speaker can be read as another manifestation of the strategy of male feminization.
Here is a video for the song:
Later in the chapter, Bourdaghs continues his discussion of how the song reflected the political and geopolitical concerns of 1990s Japan:
Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of the book and we are also offering a FREE copy of the book to one winner.
To enter our book giveaway, simply e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu with your name and address (U.S. and Canadian mailing addresses only, unfortunately). We will randomly select one winner on Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck and spread the word!
Praise for The AIDS Conspiracy: Science Fights Back:
“Nicoli Nattrass does a wonderful job uncovering the dangerous consequences of following fringe ideas in health and medicine. Her new book puts medical myths and misinformation square in front of us, and she tells the story with such passion, we dare not look away.” — Seth C. Kalichman, Ph.D., University of Connecticut, author of Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience, and Human Tragedy
In the following interview, Nicoli Nattrass, author of The AIDS Conspiracy: Science Fights Back, discusses the issue of AIDS denialism as well as her work on AIDS in South Africa:
Nattrass argues that a small group of AIDS denialists have kept alive the myth that antiretroviral treatment (ART) is harmful and that HIV science has been corrupted by commercial interests. Even though these claims have been disproved by science, they have hindered the battle to stop and treat AIDS. South African President Thabo Mbeki, debated the issue of the effectiveness of ART, holding up treatment and leading to the unnecessary death of 330,000 South Africans.
Nattrass also discusses the contested work of University of California virologist Peter Duesberg, another Denialists as well as activist Christine Maggiore, seen as a key icon for the Denialist movement: “Maggiore campaigned against the use of ART to prevent mothers passing HIV to their babies, Despite her 3-year-old daughter’s succumbing to AIDS, Maggiore remained staunchly opposed to HIV science and ART. She opted for alternative therapies and died at the age of 52, from AIDS-related infections.”
The discussion focused on the the distinction between reporting for investors and the general public, the the press’s ability to shape public debate, and the role of non-business reporters in covering business scoops. As evident in the video below of the event, the discussion often turned heated and revealed some of the challenges journalists face in covering business and financial news.
The Conspiratorial Move Against HIV Science and Its Consequences
Most people do not believe conspiracy theories about the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). But suspicions that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) may have been created in a laboratory, and that the pharmaceutical industry invented AIDS as a means of selling toxic drugs, persist on both sides of the Atlantic. During the 2008 US presidential campaign, Barack Obama had to deal with politically embarrassing revelations that his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, believed the government had created HIV to harm blacks. Four years earlier, the Nobel Prize–winning Kenyan ecologist Wangari Maathai stunned the world with her casual observation that HIV had been “created by a scientist for biological warfare.” Most tragically, conspiracy theories about HIV were promoted in the early 2000s by then South African president Thabo Mbeki and his health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang—with devastating consequences for AIDS policy.
1. Reading the book will hone your contextual intelligence—the practical wisdom that allows you to understand the types and dimensions of context and how to frame them. For a context is not just a hard, unchangeable thing “out there”; it is also very much a product of how we make sense of the world “in here.” Thus, we can often alter a context by changing how we name and frame a situation, and this book helps you do that.
2. The purpose of understanding contexts and their importance is to enable you, in your roles as both manager and leader, to design, evoke, and even control some of them and anticipate others so that you can either counter or, at the very least, prepare for them. The ability to design, evoke, control, anticipate, and counter contexts may be the most powerful skill that you have. You can use it to find and focus the behaviors that produce the results needed by the organization, its stakeholders, and the community and society at large. I call this ability the architecture of choice.
3. This book will show you how and why organizations and their internal contexts change. It turns out that stability and change, far from being opposites, are inextricably bound up with each other. They are complements. You can’t have one without the other. It is our failure to appreciate this subtle relationship that accounts for the fact that we are continually surprised by crises of all kinds and that the world often appears to be more chaotic than it really is. I will give you a new way of looking at this relationship using an ecological perspective.
We conclude our week-long feature onThe AIDS Conspiracy: Science Fights Back, by Nicoli Nattrass with an excerpt from her conclusion in which she considers the challenges in confronting AIDS denialists particularly in the Internet Age:
Will This Popular Enlightenment Project Work?
Defending science is a quintessentially enlightenment project. It assumes that progress is possible through reason and the accumulation of evidence, and that the scientific method is persuasive and can be made more so. Those who engage in the defense of science necessarily reject relativist approaches to the truth as unreasonable, defeatist, and dangerous….
Reasserting the enlightenment project of progress through reason and evidence is one thing. But whether such progress is possible remains an open question. How easy is it to persuade people through factual corrections of their misperceptions? The answer seems to depend a great deal on the individual. For example, AIDS denialists like [Christine] Maggiore are impervious to corrective evidence about HIV science because they are, as Kalichman observes, in a psychological state of encapsulated delusion. They are impossible to argue with, and indeed it may even be counterproductive to do so. According to recent research in political psychology, providing people who are ideologically committed to a particular view with “preference-incongruent information” can “backfire” by causing them to support their original argument even more strongly. This could be because they misread or reinterpret the information to support their original position, or because they “counterargue” the information in their minds, thereby increasing their intellectual commitment to it.
Our semi-regular roundup of recent blog posts and features from other university presses:
Just in time for March Madness, Princeton University Press provides an interview with Tim Chartier on how math can be used to predict the winners of “March Mathness.”
At the University of North Carolina Press blog, guest blogger Karen L. Cox is disgusted with how Republican candidates are approaching the south as well as how MSNBC is covering the campaigns.
MIT Press celebrates Brain Awareness week with an interview of Olaf Sporns, Head of the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Indiana University Bloomington.
The University of Georgia Press is doing a series of videos highlighting authors in their Early American Places series. The second of these videos features Michele Reid-Vazquez discussing her book, The Year of the Lash.
At the University of Michigan Press blog, guest blogger Dennis Wild discusses the sad saga of the double-crested cormorant in America.
Beacon Broadside’s blog features a religious defense of love, homosexual as well as heterosexual (despite what Kirk Cameron may think) by guest blogger Jay Michaelson.
Harvard University Press takes a look back at Carol Gilligan’s landmark book In a Different Voice, one of the most important social science works of the 20th century.
Yale University Press explains the experience of publishing books about the Arab Spring while the events in the Middle East were actually taking place.
Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of the book and we are also offering a FREE copy of the book to one winner.
To enter our book giveaway, simply e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu with your name and address (U.S. and Canadian mailing addresses only, unfortunately). We will randomly select one winner on Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck and spread the word!
Praise for Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy:
“In a climate in which the art market is continuing to break records without explanation, Mark C. Taylor offers a unique parallel between the workings of finance and the fine art arena. The initial pages of this book contain the clearest description I’ve read regarding the mechanics of finance in this new millennium. Moreover, Taylor’s appreciation of work by Jim Turrell and Andy Goldsworthy, two of my favorite artists, caught me completely off guard with his philosophic depth and aesthetic sensitivity, all from recounted personal experiences.” — Stephen Hannock, painter
“It’s all about the fat.”—Mark C. Taylor on Fat Chair, by Joseph Beuys
InRefiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy, Mark C. Taylor explores these four artists’, whose work, unlike that of Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, or Takashi Murakami, “makes absolutely no economic sense. Indeed, this work is designed not to be marketable.
In four separate chapters, Taylor discusses works by Beuys, Barney, Turrell, and Goldsworthy. In the opening to his chapter on Beuys, Taylor considers his Fat Chair. Here’s an excerpt:
It’s all about the fat: the way it looks, smells, feels—the way it oozes and seeps, jiggles and ripples, molds and melts—the way it is stored and burnt. During an era in which art was becoming ever more abstract and, thus, increasingly thin, Beuys made art fat. Real fat. Fat is one of the most unlikely materials with which to make art. Traditionally associated with excess and waste, fat is supposed to be slimmed, trimmed, and eliminated; it is unseemly, inelegant, and ugly. There is something gross, even grotesque about fat. Far from aesthetically appealing, fat is undeniably abject. Yet fat is vital to life: while too much fat can be fatal, bodies live by metabolizing fat to create the energy necessary for bodily functions. The transformational process through which material substance becomes the immaterial is the alchemy of life.
Nicoli Nattrass: The central AIDS conspiracy theory is that HIV was created in a laboratory (perhaps with the help of the CIA) to inflict harm. Ironically, the idea that U.S. scientists invented HIV was initially promoted by the Russian KGB and the East German Stasi in a genuine conspiracy to spread misinformation. There are now many local variants of AIDS conspiracy beliefs–for example, in South Africa a common story is that HIV was created by the apartheid government’s chemical warfare program, with assistance from the United States.
Q: Why does AIDS conspiracy theory matter?
NN: AIDS conspiracy beliefs matter because they reflect and reinforce broader suspicions toward medical science. AIDS conspiracy believers in the United States and South Africa are less likely to use condoms, less likely to test for HIV, and less likely to take antiretroviral treatment. Why did you write the book? I was concerned about the way that AIDS conspiracy theories had been promoted at the highest levels in South Africa, and continue to resonate today. The book is the product of my exploration of how these ideas travel and take root, why they resonate socially, and what can be done to fight them. Read the rest of this entry »
As he explains in Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy, Mark C. Taylor was initially skeptical of Matthew Barney. However, as he became more familiar with Barney’s work, his opinion changed. In the following excerpt he explains the religious nature of Barney’s work, particularly The Cremaster Cycle, and its similarities withJoseph Beuys.
Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, Matthew Barney is the most spiritual and perhaps even most religious artist working today. The roots of his artistic vision can be traced to ancient Greek philosophy—especially the pre-Socratics and Neoplatonists—as well as ancient pagan and Christian myths and rituals. This philosophia perennis rests on five fundamental principles:
1. Divine reality is not merely transcendent but is also immanent in the world.
2. The self is inseparably related to or even identical with divine reality.
3. This primal unity is lost when human beings fall into a condition of division and conflict.
4. The goal of human life, as well as the cosmos as a whole, is to return to this original unity.
5. The only way to achieve this goal is through the enlightenment brought by spiritual practice.
Today, March 21, is the birthday of perhaps the most talked-about figure in academia today, Slavoj Žižek. Žižek, born in Slovenia and now a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana (among many other positions), is famous for his incisive and often biting cultural critiques as well as his rambling, insightful, endlessly entertaining writing and speaking style. Columbia University Press publishes the Insurrections series, which is edited by Žižek, along with Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, and Jeffrey W. Robbins. On the occasion of Žižek’s birthday, we wanted to take a quick look at the questions of religion, politics, and culture that he has found so fascinating.
Žižek himself is known for his use of Lacan’s psychoanalysis in interpreting German idealism and Marxist political thought, and for his application of this interpretation to modern cultural phenomena. Of particular interest to him has been the role that religion plays in the private lives of individuals and the public sphere. Žižek has been one of the leading academic voices bringing attention to the ways in which ostensibly secular aspects of the modern world are incorporating religious ideas. Read the rest of this entry »
“Our national dialogue about climate change remains broken. The Journal‘s decision to publish Ms. Jolis’s review has done nothing to repair it.”—Michael Mann
As Mann explains in his response, the Journal‘s review exemplifies much of what has gone wrong in the discussion about climate science in the United States. Rather than being treated as scientific data, Michael Mann and other scientists’ research is being treated as a polemic. As Mann explains:
Every national academy of science in the world, including our own, agrees that climate change is due to increased fossil fuel use. Only politicians and ideologues want to argue about basic, established science.
Ms. Jolis repeats criticisms of research I conducted that showed modern-day temperatures are unusually high (“the hockey stick”). My book explains that research, its critics and independent studies that have since validated and extended its original findings. But Ms. Jolis tries to dismiss these scientific discussions as “score-settling” and “sound bites.”
“Roden Crater is the most ambitious work and might well turn out to be the most important artwork of our time. For pilgrims fortunate enough to journey into Turrell’s work, the world is, indeed, transformed.”—Mark C. Taylor
The more I studied Turrell’s work, the richer it became and the more difficult it was to locate his work on traditional maps of art history. Turrell’s medium is light—he paints with and sculpts light. From one point of view, his work can be understood as a logical extension of impressionism. While impressionist canvases shift attention from illuminated objects to the experience of illumination, Turrell dematerializes the medium to create works of art as effervescent as the act of apprehension itself. From another point of view, his work resonates in certain ways with minimalists like Donald Judd, Richard Serra, and, most obviously, Robert Irwin. He shares Judd’s and Irwin’s interest in light and, like Serra, he has a long-standing interest in the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which grows out of his concern with the act of perception more than the crafted object. Such similarities should not, however, obscure the very different motivation informing Turrell’s art. Having been raised a Quaker and having studied psychology at Pomona College, Turrell and his work cannot be understood simply in terms of art history. Turrell creates his art through a unique combination of painterly and sculptural strategies, scientific experiment, and, in ways that are not immediately obvious, religious myth and ritual. Like mystics ancient and modern, as well as Eastern and Western, Turrell is obsessed with vision. While mystics stage rituals to create visions they believe will transform consciousness, Turrell combines artistic practice and scientific experiment to create a transformative experience by turning vision back on itself in order to see seeing. To see seeing is to grasp the world as a work of art and to apprehend vision as a cosmogonic act once attributed to the gods.
Goldsworthy’s preoccupation with place is often misunderstood. Some critics summarily dismiss him as a druidic figure devoted to Celtic paganism and occult mysticism. It is important to acknowledge that some of his comments tend to encourage this reading of his work. Goldsworthy often writes about a common energy that circulates through both nature and his art. Responding to criticisms of his art for being merely decorative, he leaves himself open to attack on other grounds. “Color for me,” he explains, “is not pretty or decorative—it is raw with energy. Nor does it rest on the surface. I explore the color within and around a rock—color is form and space. It does not lie passively or flat. At best it reaches deep into nature—drawing on the unseen—touching the living rock—revealing the energy inside.” The more carefully one studies Goldsworthy’s work, however, the clearer it becomes that his vision differs from New Age spirituality in important ways. While New Age believers preach a gospel of harmony and light, Goldsworthy acknowledges the violence and darkness of natural processes. He probes this darkness in a series of works that figure holes. “The hole,” he explains, “has become an important element. Looking into a deep hole unnerves me. My concept of stability is questioned and I am made aware of the potent energies within the earth. The black is that energy made visible.” Turrell might well have written these words. Over the course of his career Goldsworthy has explored holes in a variety of media—rocks, stones, sand, mud, flowers, leaves, twigs, snow, ice, frost, wool, feathers, even water
Our semi-regular roundup of recent blog posts and features from other university presses:
The Hurst Blog has reprinted an article detailing important new clues to the death of Dag Hammarskjold in 1961, written by Christopher Merrett. Working with Robin Barnes, a journalist in Ndola at the time of the famous plane crash, and Susan Williams, author of the Hurst/CUP book Who Killed Hammarskjold?, Merrett unearths new evidence in the death of the former Secretary-General of the United Nations.
NYU Press has a powerful piece on the recent death of Trayvon Martin, placing his killing in the context of extralegal racial violence throughout the history of the US, written by Kidada E. Williams.
The OUPblog features an examination of the Kony 2012 video by Adam Branch, a scholar studying and living in Uganda. According to Branch, he “wouldn’t have known about Kony 2012 if it hadn’t been for the emails I’ve been receiving from the US. And that, I think, is telling. Kony 2012 and the debate around it are not about Uganda, but about America.”
On a happier note, the McGill-Queen’s University Press Blog has a preview of Leave No Doubt, an inspirational book by Mike Babcock, current coach of the NHL’s Detroit Red Wings and coach of the 2010 Olympic Gold-winning Canadian hockey team.
The UNC Press Blog featured a guest post from Sarah S. Elkind on why we should view “the perpetual national chorus demanding a smaller, more efficient federal government” with suspicion.
Beacon Broadside and William Ayers take a detailed look at education and society in 21st century America. Ayers is worried by the focus on testing and instead supports a “pedagogy of questioning, an approach that opens rather than closes the process of thinking, comparing, reasoning, perspective-taking, and dialogue.”
The University of Illinois Press has a fascinating question-and-answer post with the authors of their new book, The Ecology of the Spoken Word, on an Amazonian tribe, the Napo Runa.
Cambridge University Press has a fun quiz that lets you learn with which great judge you have the most in common. And on the more serious side, they continue their “Women in Science” series in a conversation with three of their science editors.
Princeton University Press has a guest post from Andrew Gelman, an expert in election data, in which he breaks down voting patterns among white voters in America over the last few elections.
Texas A&M University Press has a brief interview with and sample poem from Athena Kashyap in which she discusses what it was like trying to find a place in America as an immigrant, similarities between borders of differet kinds, and losing yourself in the unknown.
Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of the book and we are also offering a FREE copy of the book to one winner.
To enter our book giveaway, simply e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu with your name and address (U.S. and Canadian mailing addresses only, unfortunately). We will randomly select one winner on Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck and spread the word!
Praise for Foundations of the American Century:
“With Foundations of the American Century, Inderjeet Parmar has produced the most wide-ranging and sophisticated historical account of the international role of American philanthropic foundations to date. It will be of interest to … anyone interested in the nature of American power and liberal internationalism.” — Nicolas Guilhot, author of The Democracy Makers: Human Rights and the Politics of Global Order
“Switzerland Exposed,” screamed the title of a book I happened to see recently, drawing a wry smile—and a feeling of “you can’t be serious!” And that’s the usual response when people hear about my book on American philanthropic foundations, which argues that they are not so “cuddly” a bunch as their image suggests. Although they do contribute to society in positive ways, the big U.S. foundations—Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie—made fundamental contributions to America’s rise to global leadership, a global imperium sometimes more benignly promoted as the “American century.”
This includes some of the darkest chapters in American foreign policy—hubristically guiding economic-development policies that exacerbated problems in the newly independent Nigeria and played a role in its slide into civil war; sponsoring and guiding opponents of the leftist Sukharno administration in Indonesia and contributing to the bloodshed that accompanied the rise of the right-wing militarist Suharto regime; and funding and training right-wing economists as well as their centrist and even leftist opponents in Chile as it careened into the bloody military coup of 1973.
Widely perceived as major sources of America’s power of attraction—its “soft power”—the foundations’ own records, open and broadly accessible to academic researchers, show in great detail that beneath a glossy, liberal, philanthropic exterior, the Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations had a far more sinister side, a fist in the velvet glove.
Since the end of the Cold War, however, U.S. foundations have continued to affect U.S. foreign policy and the development and direction of globalization. Foundation networks were central, for example, in elevating and refining what has become the central rationale of U.S. national-security strategy since the collapse of the Soviet threat—democratic peace theory (that democracies do not fight one another), as embodied in the Bush doctrine as well as in the policies of the Obama administration.
There’s been a great expansion in the number of U.S. foundations, the variety of grant-making activities, and total philanthropic assets. Since 1987 the number of foundations in the United States has grown from 28,000 to about 50,000, and these new foundations hold some of the enormous recent growth in American wealth. Their assets have expanded from $115 billion in 1987 to over $300 billion today. Their international giving also topped $3 billion in 2002. Record increases in international philanthropic giving have been recorded since the mid-1990s, prompted by a strong world economy and the rise of new fortunes, especially Bill Gates’s Microsoft Corporation and his accompanying foundation.
In the essay entitled “Tales of Buffalo Billy” (Wilder was named after the famous Western hero by his America-infatuated mother), Isenberg recounts Wilder’s life from his early days in World War I Vienna to his success as an expatriate director in Hollywood. Along the way, Wilder lived in Berlin, where he got his start in the film industry and where he moved from to come to America, sensing the impending danger of Hitler.
Isenberg offers an appreciation of the many virtues of Wilder’s films. He was a director, who did not take himself too seriously, and a man of “uncommon wit and unforgiving sarcasm.” As Isenberg points out, one of the most enduring influences on Wilder’s work was fellow émigré director Ernst Lubitsch. In the following excerpt, Isenberg discusses how Wilder’s admiration of Lubitsch had an impact on his handling of eroticism in film:
Part of what Wilder admired most in Lubitsch was the handling of eroticism in his films, always suggestive rather than explicit. In 1975 Wilder said of Lubitsch, “he could do more with a closed door than most of today’s directors can do with an open fly.” Of course, Wilder proved to be the master of his own domain in moments such as the scene in Double Indemnity when Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) drops by the bachelor pad of hard-boiled insurance man Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) for an evening quickie; we observe Walter lying on the couch enjoying what appears to be an après l’amour cigarette while Phyllis touches up her makeup. Asked many years later whether the scene was to suggest, in a sly evasion of censorship, that Phyllis and Walter had just copulated, Wilder responded unambiguously: “Of course, and very good sex, or how could she persuade such a man to kill her husband? I learned from Lubitsch that the scene between two lovers the next morning tells you much more about their sexual behavior than actually showing them having sex.”
At Cambridge University Press, Shaheen Shariff and Courtney Retter examine the ethical and legal issues behind cyberbullying, in wake of the trial of Dharun Ravi, the former Rutgers University student accused of spying on his roommate Tyler Clementi.
Harvard University Press discusses the new exhibition at the British museum, Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam.
The University of Minnesota Press offers a video with good advice for prospective academic authors.
UNC Press offers responses by two historians to Trayvon Martin’s killing that approach the issue from very different standpoints.
On a lighter note, MIT press offers a sequence of posts detailing some of the best pranks in MIT history in preparation for April Fools’ Day.
The American Management Association Books Blog continues their very informative “Ask AMACOM” series with a new installment of “Ask a Business Book Publicist.”
The reviewer, Leland de la Durantaye, describes Brian Boyd’s discussions of his involvement (or “stalking”) of Nabokov as a reader, critic, and biographer of Vladimir Nabokov. De la Durantaye writes:
Chronicling this man’s life and art was Boyd’s task. Imagine it.
For this reason, one of the greatest points of interest in “Stalking Nabokov” is the tale of that telling: how Boyd first encountered Nabokov (“Lolita” secreted under his pillow lest his parents discover what he had), and how he came quite literally halfway around the world (from his native New Zealand) to write the biography. When he ran short of money while doing research at Cornell, he writes, he would climb aboard Greyhound buses moving like metronomes in the rural night so as to save the price of a room. He tells of the personal drama that arose from his publishing details he knew Nabokov would have wanted kept secret. And he tells of sifting through “masses of garbling, misconstruction and decomposing gossip.” The better the biography the less the reader has a sense of all the accident and incoherence out of which it was formed, and in this and many other respects Boyd’s biography is absolutely excellent. “Stalking Nabokov” gives its reader a sense of the difficulty of moving through the sheer mass of that material, out of which Boyd needed to tell a tale that would be true to the art and life of its subject.
“Ideal theories of justice only stand in the way of sound judgment.”
–Albena Azmanova
Albena Azmanova is the author of The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment. This post is the first of a three-part series we will be posting in which Professor Azmanova discusses The Scandal of Reason, theories of political judgment, and ways in which political philosophy can become more helpful in the actual political process.
What problems does The Scandal of Reason confront?
Political judgment is always trapped in the choice between taking action and failing to act, poised to commit either “crimes of commission” or “crimes of omission” (as Hannah Arendt named them). Intervening to stop the carnage in Syria has risks as perilous as not intervening. Allowing the building of an Islamic cultural center next to Ground Zero is as problematic as banning it. How do we know what is the right thing to do? How should judgment be directed? Can political philosophy be of help to real politics? What is a politically relevant theory of justice that can effectively guide judgment? These are the questions prompting my writing. Read the rest of this entry »
“So [Obama] appointed the right people, but then he didn’t really let them move forward on this issue. He says the right things sometimes, but then appears to retreat from them.” — Michael Mann on Barack Obama’s policy on climate change
Increasingly, Mann argues, climate change has taken backseat in Obama’s speeches and his statements and policies reflect a step back on this issue relative to those of Bill Clinton. In discussing Obama’s appointees on energy and the environment, Mann suggests that Obama has not taken full advantage of their abilities to offer a bold plan:
It’s like [Obama] had this all-star basketball team, but he wouldn’t let them go out on the floor and play. With the exception maybe of [Steven] Chu, who’s been out there talking about these issues, they all seem to have been on a very short leash in terms of speaking up publicly about the energy challenge and the need to deal with climate change.
I know that they all have very enlightened view on this because I know some of them and I know what they’ve written and where they’ve stood on this issue for some time. So he appointed the right people, but then he didn’t really let them move forward on this issue. He says the right things sometimes, but then appears to retreat from them. The bottom line is that at the very least he appears conflicted between where his own heart is -– my guess is that his own heart is with moving forward and dealing with the problem of climate change — and his instincts as a politician.
“Preoccupation with economic redistribution, gender equality, cultural diversity, and action against sexual harassment appeared all too smug to me when set against the evils of life under political oppression and bankrupt economic systems”
- Albena Azmanova
Albena Azmanova is the author of The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment. This post is the second of a three-part series in which Professor Azmanova discusses The Scandal of Reason, theories of political judgment, and ways in which political philosophy can become more helpful in the actual political process. Today, she addresses how her personal background influenced the writing of her book.
The story of The Scandal of Reason goes back in a straight line, and a long one at that, to my revolutionary past of twenty years ago. Quite unawares, and certainly without the armament of a grand doctrine, I became involved with the dissident movements in the late 1990s in my native Bulgaria as a first-year student at Sofia University. I recall distinctly that what drove us to act was a sense of frustration, and although I ended up writing up the demands of the students—whose strike triggered the downfall of the regime—I did so not because we had a creed, but because a television reporter asked after our goals and we had to come up with something on the spot. When I spoke later on behalf of the students at the Council of Europe, I was bewildered that telling of our frustration seemed not to be enough. Instead, I was pressed to specify positive goals, to name the tenets of our movement. To this day I find it a great pity that instead of trying to understand the proper causes of our frustration, we rushed into formulating (and simply borrowing) grand plans for a new future. A precious opportunity was missed in this way. The construction of (some semblance of) liberal democracies in post-communist Eastern Europe was in no way a response to the specific grievances that had prompted us to reject the old order. Alas, we rushed into a project of “what is right” before really figuring out what was wrong, what was missing. Read the rest of this entry »
Just in time for National Poetry Month, The Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry proudly presents the smartphone app Columbia Granger’s Poem of the Day, offering everybody a free daily passport to Granger’s.
The free app enables users to download a daily featured poem and poetry trivia chosen and curated by Granger’s expert editorial team. Often linked to a calendar event such as a holiday or the anniversary of a poet’s birth or death, the featured poems and trivia questions are an endlessly stimulating sampling of the finest poetry from the past and today. The app is available for both the iPhone and Android-based smartphones.
“[Through public discussion,] we can learn how we are all complicit in the production of social injustice, even when we appear to be victims. ”
- Albena Azmanova
Albena Azmanova is the author of The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment. This post is the third of a three-part series in which Professor Azmanova discusses The Scandal of Reason, theories of political judgment, and ways in which political philosophy can become more helpful in the actual political process. In today’s final post, she addresses how public discussion can play a crucial role in the political process.
In the model I detail in The Scandal of Reason, discussion and deliberation have a narrower but sharper role than they have in the most popular models of deliberative democracy. Public discussions cannot, and should not, replace the judgment public authority has to make. I find the contemporary hype about deliberative democracy dangerous, as it absolves political actors from their duty to make decisions and to assume the responsibility for these decisions—this fashion is a sort of colonization of political action by public deliberations. Public discussions, in my account, have two important functions. Read the rest of this entry »
A recent report that got widely disseminated claimed that “that subjects who ate chocolate more frequently had lower body mass index compared to those who consumed it less often, and this was not affected by taking calorie intake or level of physical activity into account.” The notion of chocolate as a new weight-loss strategy obviously has it appeal but what about the science behind this study and the methods applied?
In the piece, Kabat questions and faults the way in which the study was conducted:
This is a cross-sectional study, meaning that the information analyzed was collected at one point in time. Thus, it tells us nothing about weight gain or weight loss or factors contributing to these changes.
Furthermore, the researchers obtained information about the usual consumption of over a hundred foods by means of a “food-frequency questionnaire.” The authors do not tell us how many other food items and other behaviors were correlated, either positively or inversely, with body mass. What about nuts, broccoli, jello, coffee, beer, veal? What about the frequency of other behaviors – going to the movies, sexual intercourse, ice-skating?
“The AIDS denialist community includes many ‘cultropreneurs’ who cast doubt on medical science whilst offering unproven remedies in its place…. It is true that science proceeds via contestation—which is why universities are reluctant to take action against contrarians. But this tolerance is tested when suspicions arise that the motivation for promoting AIDS denialism is not just to further science, but possibly to line one’s pocket.”—Nicoli Nattrass
There is a substantial body of evidence showing that HIV causes AIDS and that antiretroviral drugs help prevent and treat it. Yet a small group of “AIDS denialists” reject this evidence as irredeemably corrupted by the pharmaceutical industry, claiming instead that antiretrovirals are toxic, even a cause of AIDS. Tragically, South African President Thabo Mbeki took these claims so seriously that he delayed the use of antiretrovirals in the public health sector. More than 330,000 people died unnecessarily as a result.
Precisely because AIDS denialism kills people, HIV scientists and pro-science activists have devoted a great deal of energy to contesting it. This initially took the form of conventional scientific engagement, such as discussions in conferences and publishing rebuttals in scientific journals. But as none of this had any impact—AIDS denialists infamously regard all HIV science as inevitably flawed and untrustworthy—scientists have increasingly resorted to other forms of direct action.
Thus, when Peter Duesberg (an academic at UC Berkeley and leading proponent of the view that HIV is harmless and antiretrovirals themselves cause AIDS) and others published a paper in the journal Medical Hypotheses defending Mbeki’s actions and claiming that there is no African AIDS epidemic, a group of AIDS activists and HIV scientists, including Nobel prize-winner Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, complained to the publisher, Elsevier. They pointed out that Medical Hypotheses had not reviewed the paper properly (indeed, at the time, the journal had a principled stand against peer review). Elsevier investigated, and after a panel of reviewers unanimously recommended rejection, Elsevier permanently withdrew it and forced Medical Hypotheses to introduce editorial review. The scientists also complained about a paper by Italian AIDS denialist Marco Ruggiero (a molecular biologist at the University of Florence), and this too was reviewed and withdrawn.
Recently Peter Heehs, author of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo was denied an extension of his visa to stay in India despite the fact that he has spent the last four decades there. His visa denial is a result of the continuing controversy surrounding his book about Sri Aurobindo, the revered Indian freedom fighter, religious leader, poet, scholar, and political and cultural theorist, who died in 1950.
Heehs’s book has been challenged by a small minority of Sri Aurobindo’s followers, who have successfully put appealed to Right-wing politicians in the Indian government to ban the book in India. On the Indian program Face the Nation, two followers of Sri Aurobindo and two scholars discuss the controversy and the increasing frequency on bans of and threats to writers and scholars in India.
Our weekly roundup of recent blog posts and features from other university presses:
As this year’s elections draw closer, Princeton University Press is providing a series of posts explaining the complexities of the American political system in their Election 101 series. Earlier this week, David R. Mayhew wrote a post explaining Presidential elections.
Continuing the political theme, at the UNC Press Blog, Michael H. Hunt and Steven I. Levine offer a detailed explanation and historical analysis of President Obama’s Asia policy.
At the OUPblog, Matthew Flinders claims that, though it has become fashionable to decry the democratic political process, “politics delivers far more than most people appear to realise.” He calls for a rejection of the popular politics of pessimism in favor of a new politics of optimism.
Multiple provisions of the Kyoto Protocol are due to expire at the end of this year, and at Cambridge University Press’s blog, Maxwell T. Boykoff takes a (somewhat worrisome) look at how our ideas of climate change are shaped by the mass media.
Meanwhile, Earth Day is coming soon (April 22) and The MIT PressLog is running a month-long series celebrating the occasion. This week, they take a statistical look at the jungles of Costa Rica .
The Trayvon Martin killing is still causing waves in the media, and Beacon Broadside offers a number of different takes on the significance of the case.
The Chicago University Press blog features a post on Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s performance art pieces in the 1960s critiquing Wall Street (complete with photographs of the naked participants) and how the Occupy movement echoes Kusama’s convictions. The post is perhaps best described by its title, OBLITERATE WALL STREET MEN WITH POLKA DOTS.
The Harvard University Press Blog draws startling comparisons between the professions of Chef and Surgeon, and shows how neither profession is benefiting from a forty-hour work week.
Yale University Press features an examination of and link to a conversation between poet and translator Yves Bonnefoy and author and translator Hoyt Rogers (who translated Bonnefoy’s latest book of poetry to English from French) on the complicated art of translation.
The University of Illinois Press offers a wide-ranging and fascinating interview with scholar Talmage A. Stanley on the history of the “Poco Field,” a coal-rich region comprising parts of mountainous southwest Virginia and southern West Virginia, and a place known for its “militant particularity.”
Like something? Think we left something out? Let us know in the comments!
Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of the book and we are also offering a FREE copy of the book to one winner.
To enter our book giveaway, simply e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu with your name and address (U.S. and Canadian mailing addresses only, unfortunately). We will randomly select one winner on Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck and spread the word!
“Paul G. Hackett presents the compelling story of the early years of the American exploration of Indian and Tibetan Buddhist spirituality through the figure of one of its most colorful but forgotten adventurers—a real-life ‘Indiana Jones’! … Part mystic, part explorer, and part con man, Theos Bernard comes to life in a tale that is both captivating and enlightening. It is a must read for anyone interested in Eastern religions in America.” — Robert A. F. Thurman, Columbia University
“There’s a whole century of experimentation with language which is completely ignored. There’s many, many ways to construct novels. We actually just tend to construct novels quite similarly. Just a call to open things up. Let’s a get a little more contemporary.”—Kenneth Goldsmith
Earlier this month Kenneth Goldsmith, author of Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age, discussed his new book and the need for writers to think about language in new ways in an interview with To the Best of Our Knowledge. In the interview Goldsmith also recounted his experience of reading at the White House, in which he read from Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, and his own work, Traffic, which appropriated traffic reports from a local radio station. As Goldsmith explains, the excerpts from these traffic reports elicited the biggest reaction from his audience, including the president:
They were howling. There’s a shot of Obama leaning back in his chair with a giant smile across his face listening to the traffic report. Maybe it’s vernacular. I mean maybe this is just language that people can understand, right…. What people care about is the language that’s around them and of course these are Washington bureaucrats so they had ideas about gridlock and congestion and delay. There really is narrative in there as well in a way that Whitman gives you impression or Crane gives you disjunction, I’m actually giving you narrative. But I didn’t write any of these. So this is the weird thing. The most avant-garde, the most unoriginal, the most uncreative work was the work that went over the very best in the White House.
Goldsmith also discusses his class at the University of Pennsylvania in uncreative writing, in which students, among other assignments, must plagiarize other work. The interview concludes with Goldsmith looking at the Man Booker prize and the ways in which the selection of books reflects the sense that contemporary literature has become a bit stale. Without denying the value of novels in being able to move or enlighten a reader, he argues that the novels selected for the Man Booker:
Are constructed are fairly conventional and fairly similar. Again, there’s a whole century of experimentation with language which is completely ignored. There’s many, many ways to construct novels. We actually just tend to construct novels quite similarly. Just a call to open things up. Let’s a get a little more contemporary.
“How few ever think that there will be one around to check up on them.”— Theos Bernard
Before he had even set foot on his home soil on his return from Tibet in the fall of 1937, Theos Bernard declared to a reporter for London’s Daily Mail, “I am the first White Lama—the first Westerner ever to live as priest in a Tibetan monastery, the first man from the outside world to be initiated into Buddhists’ mysteries hidden even from many native lamas themselves.”
Over the weeks and months that followed, Theos’s account of his life and the events that befell him in Tibet would grow greater and greater in proportion, coming to nearly obliterate any trace of his actual activities. By March of the following year, having called in a few favors back home, he arranged an alumnus lecture at the University of Arizona, and arriving in Tucson, he pulled out all the stops.
When the curtains parted before a packed house, all in attendance saw Theos Bernard, religion scholar, explorer, and mystic, seated in a chair on a dais in the middle of the stage, next to a movie projector and surrounded by ritual artifacts and Tibetan robes. “Come with me,” he invited the audience, “in a flight in the Clipper Ship of the imagination from San Francisco across the vast Pacific . . . into the heart of Asia, the Land of the Lama—Tibet!” and with a carefully practiced grandiose style, Theos Bernard, “the White Lama,” unfolded his story, explaining how he had fulfilled an ancient Tibetan prophecy and become “the first white man ever to live in the lamaseries and cities of Tibet . . . initiated into the age-old religious rites of Tibetan Buddhism [and] . . . accepted by the Tibetans as one of them”—or so he claimed.
April is National Poetry Month, and over the next three weeks, we will be posting poems from our poetry titles and from those of our distributed presses. Our first selection is taken from Chinese University Press’s new collection of poetry, Words & the World. This collection is available in paperback form, in an expanded box set, and in small chapbooks featuring individual poets.
In talking about Theos Bernard, there are a number of different ways of approaching him. It is possible to speak of Bernard in terms of his accomplishments in his role as a pioneer. As a first-generation American explorer in Tibet, he was only the third American to successfully reach Lhasa, the capital, and the first “Westerner” (American or European) to do so as a religious pilgrim. While there, Bernard amassed what would be the largest collection of Tibetan texts, art, and artifacts in the Western Hemisphere for more than thirty years and documented, in both still photography and 16-mm film, an age-old civilization on the eve of its destruction. Bernard presented the first dissertation in religion at Columbia University in 1943 and in doing so was the catalyst for the founding of the religion department there. Bernard was the first Westerner to recognize the uniqueness of the scholar Gedun Chöpel (dge ’dun chos phel, 1903–51) when they met in 1936, and attempted to bring him to America in 1941. Bernard was also the first American student of Geshe Thupten Wangyal (thub bstan dbang rgyal, 1901–83), who would later teach at Columbia University before establishing himself as a teacher in New Jersey and, like Dezhung Rinpoche in Seattle, would become the guru and paramguru to a large contingent of today’s American scholars of Tibet. Bernard’s list of “firsts” could be continued.
In the chapter “Yoga on Fifth Avenue,” Paul Hackett describes Theos Bernard’s return to New York City and his efforts to bring the teachings of Buddhism and Yoga to the United States. Eventually setting up a school and studio at the Hotel Pierre, Bernard sought to bring the knowledge and wisdom he had gained during his travels in Tibet to an American audience whose views of the country had been shaped by Lost Horizon and other fictional or mythical treatments.
Before his first book had been published, Theos had begun to receive a substantial amount of fan mail from across both America and Europe, and it only increased once Penthouse of the Gods hit bookstore shelves. As ostentatious as the claims he made in his book and articles were, they often could not begin to compare with the mythic images of Tibet already in circulation. In his interviews, lectures, and books, Theos actively courted the “Lost Horizon” crowd of Tibetophiles and otherwise hopeful spiritual seekers. He drew on—and had to contend with—many people who had taken their inspiration from other sources: the readers of Baird T. Spaulding, Talbot Mundy, Edwin J. Dingle, Theodore Illion, and others.
A self-proclaimed expert on Tibet, Baird T. Spaulding—who, more accurately speaking, was to Indo-Tibetan studies what Geoffrey T. Spaulding was to African ethnology—had wowed the most gullible segment of “Eastern mysticism” neophytes with his series of books, The Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far East—until it was discovered that he had spent most of his life as a gold prospector in Wyoming and a minor script writer for Cecil B. DeMille. Nonetheless, fans of Spaulding’s Teaching of the Masters found inspiration from newspaper accounts of Theos’s experiences in Tibet. One fan wrote to him, asking:
“I’ve read Baird T. Spaulding’s books, “Life and Teachings of the Masters of the Far East.” While you were in Tibet, were you privileged to see Jesus in person; to see food appear on the table, and to see people who were several hundred years of age?
I like the teaching of these people as told by Mr. Spaulding, but would like to know more.”
Careful not to alienate his consumer base, Theos had a standard form letter crafted for quick replies, thanking his fans for their interest in himself and informing them that “the answers to your questions can be found in my recent book, Penthouse of the Gods.”
By the fall of 1939, with a lucrative business tutoring students—individually and in small classes—Theos was ready to break out on his own. Interviewed once again by his now friendly contact, Stewart Robinson at Family Circle magazine, Theos declared: “The general public is 99% wrong about what Yoga is. It is not a religion, although it is most distinctly a way of life. No one need sacrifice an iota of his religion to engage in Yoga.”
Over the next couple weeks, New York City is going to be treated to a couple of unique events featuring CUP author Udi Aloni and CUP Insurrections Series editor Slavoj Zizek.
First, this coming Sunday, April 15th, Israeli filmmaker Udi Aloni and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek are presenting a multifaceted theatrical performance loosely based around Aloni’s recent book, What Does a Jew Want?. After the performance itself, there will be some discussion and a book signing. Here are the details: Read the rest of this entry »
April is National Poetry Month, and over the next three weeks, we will be posting poems from our poetry titles and from those of our distributed presses. Our second selection is taken from Hiroaki Sato’s translation of the kanshi of Ema Saiko, Breeze Through Bamboo. Kanshi is a Japanese term that refers to poems written by in classical Chinese, and Ema Saiko was famous in her lifetime as one of the best female Japanese writers of kanshi. The four poems below are a set of four poems on the four seasons. Breeze Through Bamboo is part of Columbia University Press’s Translations from the Asian Classics series. Read the rest of this entry »
Our weekly roundup of recent blog posts and features from other academic presses:
It is National Poetry Month, so we’ll kick things off this week with an excellent poem posted on the Minnesota Historical Society Press blog, the 10,000 Books Weblog. It’s hard to go wrong when reading poetry about rhubarb!
Earth Day is April 22, and the MITPressLog is running a series of posts in honor of the occasion. This week, Samantha MacBride gives a number of facts about the dark side of recycling in the bigger picture of environmental action. Meanwhile, David Rothery writes a post on a very extraterrestrial topic at the OUPblog: Is there life on Mars?
A less happy upcoming occasion is Tax Day, April 15. The American Internal Revenue Code is famously tangled and confusing, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Press Log has recruited historian Molly Michelmore to try to explain exactly why this is so.
Harvard University Press features a guest post by and video conversation with scholar Robin D. G. Kelley on the fascinating history and surprising origins of jazz. In particular, he takes issue with the idea that musicians in the 1950s saw themselves as part of a uniform group playing “jazz” music.
If you are unacquainted with the legends of the Golden Dog, a tablet in Quebec City, McGill-Queen’s University Press offers a chance to catch up on the “heroic past and promising future of the Dominion of Canada” with an excerpt of William Kirby’s 1877 Le Chien d’or, or The Golden Dog.
The Temple University Press blog, North Philly Notes, has a detailed interview with political expert Hal Gullen on the Pat Toomey-Joe Sestak Senate race of 2010, one of the most closely contested and important contests of that election year, and on some ideas that candidates running in 2012 should keep in mind.
Princeton University Press continues their excellent Election 101 series with an article by sociologist Jennifer Lena on the use of music in political branding, complete with a selection of campaign songs from “I Like Ike” to “Game On – a Song for Rick Santorum.”
Yesterday, April 12, was the anniversary of the death of the great Roman tragedian and philosopher Seneca. The multiple means of his suicide (he tried slitting his wrists and taking hemlock before finally managing to do the deed in his bath) are well known, but at the OUPblog, Emily Watson looks back at the other reasons Seneca is still discussed today (complete with a tragic quiz).
Beacon Broadside takes on a topic that will grow in importance over the next few decades: what will the first generations to be medicated with various psychiatric drugs en masse be like as adults?
Questions of gender and sexuality are hugely important in modern Islam, and at the UNC Press Blog, Sa’diyya Shaikh has a guest post about the work of famed Sufi poet and scholar Ibn ‘Arabi and it’s relevance to gender debates in Islam today.
Following from last week’s excellent interview about the art of translation, Yale University Press announces the creation of a new website aimed at providing English translations of overlooked but important works from all around the world.
Like something? Feel that we missed something? Let us know in the comments!
So what happened to Theos Bernard? From the information I was able to gather, the primary sources at my disposal, and my hopefully correct inferences drawn from analyzing it all over several years, I had a consistent and plausible narrative in my head.
Sitting in Kalimpong in the spring of 1947, Theos Bernard was on a mission to compile enough raw materials for another sensationalistic return to America. While he and his father, and Helen as well, had ambitious plans for the future—a Tibetan language school, a yoga studio, perhaps even a retreat center—their ploy to fund it all with Ganna Walska’s money had failed. To recruit students and attract benefactors, Bernard’s return to America would have to make a big impression.
In 1947, if he could make it to Lhasa, he could try to meet the young Dalai Lama to receive his blessing; perhaps he could even secure the release of Gedun Chöpel from prison and bring him back to America. But Gould and Richardson had reserved the honor of conferring with His Holiness for themselves and were not about to let Theos anywhere near Lhasa, much less before the young ruler. Theos had fallback plans as well, so he petitioned Nepal for an entry visa. If he could not go to Lhasa, he could try to go to Sakya and western Tibet. But the British authorities were determined to keep him out—for reasons not that different from the ones that motivated Bernard—so that ploy also failed.
Bernard still had one last fallback plan—indeed, it had been part of his plan all along: an audience with a great lama or yogi and a great discovery as well. Although he had visited Ladakh and Hemis Monastery in 1936 with Viola and his father, he had not known then what he knew now, so he was determined to go back. For in the library of Hemis, he had discovered, lay the manuscript of the secret life of Jesus in India, and he, Theos Bernard, would be the one to bring that manuscript back to America.
Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of the book and we are also offering a FREE copy of the book to one winner.
To enter our book giveaway, simply e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu with your name and address (U.S. and Canadian mailing addresses only, unfortunately). We will randomly select one winner on Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck and spread the word!
“Peter Decherney shows how the copyright system shaped the American film industry and how film in turn shaped copyright. This is cultural history at its best.” — Siva Vaidhyanathan, University of Virginia, author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity
April is National Poetry Month, and over the next couple weeks we will be posting poems from our poetry titles and from those of our distributed presses. Our selection today is taken from Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds, edited by Billy Collins. “Christmas Sparrow” is a poem written by Collins himself. Read the rest of this entry »
In the following video, Peter Decherney, author of Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet, discusses how Hollywood has benefited from works being in the public domain and why its current legal strategy regarding copyright might be wrong-headed:
April is National Poetry Month, and yesterday, April 17, was National Haiku Poetry Day. In honor of the occasion, our selection today is taken from Far Beyond the Field: Haiku by Japanese Women, an innovative anthology of haiku by female poets, edited by Makoto Ueda. Ueda selected poems from twenty poets living between the 1600s and the 2000s. We have selected a few haiku from five of the poets featured in Far Beyond the Field for today’s post. Read the rest of this entry »
Peter Decherney’s expertise on the importance of the public domain for Hollywood led him to file anamicus briefthe Supreme Court case of Golan v. Holder that discusses Hollywood’s reliance on the public domain. (Watch avideo of Peter Decherney discussing public domain.)
In this excerpt from the amicus brief, Decherney, author ofHollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internetdescribes how Hollywood relies on public domain in times of crisis and how it allows a freedom for technological innovation:
More recently, Hollywood producers have regularly returned to the well of the public domain during times of crisis in the industry. In the 1990s, for instance, the Miramax Company, New Line Cinema, and other independent film producers began to make significant inroads into the American box office and home video markets with literate films, including My Own Private Idaho (1991) (based on Shakespeare’s Henry IV) and a string of Jane Austen and Henry James adaptations, all based on public domain works. Hollywood studios responded with their own cycle of adaptations of European and American public domain literature, including The Last of the Mohicans (1992), The Three Musketeers (1993), The Age of Innocence (1993), and Romeo + Juliet (1996).
Hollywood is in crisis mode again today, responding to competition from other forms of entertainment, combating piracy, and trying to justify heavy investments in 3-D technology. In this environment, original films such as Avatar (2009) are aberrations. As they have in the past, Hollywood studios have returned to tried and trusted titles. It is telling that the second most successful 3-D film after Avatar is Tim Burton’s new take on Alice in Wonderland (2010). As has been the case for over 100 years, the name recognition and familiar characters of Alice continue to smooth the transition to new technologies; when audiences decide to spend more money to experience the novelty of a 3-D film, it is easier to imagine how a trusted public domain property will look than to hazard their extra dollars on a new film.
To emphasize his point, Decherney provides a list of U.S. films influenced by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (he also provides a list of remakes):
“When writing the book, I thought about the following: if you were sitting in a room with me, and I was explaining what “transgender” means in the simplest terms possible, what would I say?”
– Nicholas Teich
In an article and slideshow posted today on the Huffington Post, Nicholas Teich, author of Transgender 101: A Simple Guide to a Complex Issue, explained the story behind Transgender 101 and lays out “15 essential things to know” about what “transgender” really means. Teich claims that experiences dealing with parents learning their child is transgender provided the impetus for the book: Read the rest of this entry »
“After all, it’s not how we produce animal products that ultimately matters. It’s whether we produce them at all.” — James McWilliams
Last Friday, the New York Times ran an op-ed by CUP author James McWilliams, author of A Revolution in Eating and American Pests, entitled “The Myth of Sustainable Meat.” McWilliams is an associate professor of history at Texas State University-San Marcos and a recent fellow in the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University.
In his editorial, McWilliams claims that, while “factory farming is the epitome of a broken food system,” nonindustrial food sources–typically small, organic farms–are not a significantly better way to convert animals into food for humans. Throughout the article, he addresses and rebuts various arguments that are commonly used to support small-scale farming operations, from claims that nonindustrial farms are more natural: Read the rest of this entry »
In the following excerpt fromHollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet, Peter Decherney discusses how Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising influenced other filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese and Todd Haynes. Specifically, Anger’s use of public gave them creative inspiration for their own work. In Scorsese’s case it helped him develop his signature use of music in his films while Todd Haynes’s now-famous Superstar became a cautionary tale.
One member of the audience was particularly struck by Anger’s soundtrack: then New York University film student Martin Scorsese. Scorpio Rising, he explained,
had been banned, but the shocking thing about it wasn’t the Hell’s Angels stuff, it was the use of music. This was music I knew, and we had always been told by our professors at NYU that we couldn’t use it in student films because of copyright. Now here was Kenneth Anger’s film in and out of the courts on obscenity charges, but no one seemed to be complaining that he’d used all those incredible tracks of Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson and the Rebels. That gave me the idea to use whatever music I really needed.
Scorsese’s reminiscence points to a number of ways that copyright and fair use functioned in the worlds of avant-garde, student, and amateur film. His professors, the gatekeepers in his community, had set the fair use parameters for student projects. But in this instance, Scorsese learneda lesson from observing another film. It happened to be an erroneous lesson, based on the assumption that Anger had not cleared the rights to his soundtrack. But even this lesson based on too little information spurred Scorsese to use unlicensed rock music in his student films. And his student experimentation paved the way for his breakthrough use of (licensed) music in his early feature films like Mean Streets (1973) and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974). In this information economy, the actions of gatekeepers, the spread of rumors, and the activity (or inactivity) of copyright holders created an ad hoc system of fair use. One of the designs of such a community is that misinformation can be as powerful as accurate information.
Inspired by Joseph Cornell, Bruce Conner, Andy Warhol, and of course Kenneth Anger, video artists have created new kinds of remixed work, using copyrighted material….
Amidst all of the creative uses of copyrighted material reused in video art, there is one well-known example of a piece of experimental video that was suppressed by copyright holders: Todd Haynes’s 1987 film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. In the film, Haynes used Barbie dolls to tell the life story of popular singer Karen Carpenter, who had died a few years earlier from complications of an eating disorder and abuse of medication. Carpenter’s family was sensitive to an exposé about her life, and her brother and collaborator, Richard, sent cease-and-desist letters to Haynes, complaining of music copyright infringement. Superstar used several complete Carpenter songs as well as segments of songs by Elton John, Gilbert O’Sullivan, and the Carpenters.
“This netroots infrastructure has proven to be an important corrective to the backroom policymaking of the past.”—Peter Decherney
In the conclusion toHollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet, Peter Decherney looks at how academics and netroots movements are shaping the debate regarding copyright. Decherney argues that these groups have offered an important corrective allowing for greater fair use.
“Copyright lobbying is not a sport for amateurs,” proclaimed legal scholar Jessica Litman after the passage of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Litman neatly and accurately summarized the previous 300 years of copyright history.1But things have changed since 1998. The internet has brought amateurs into the process of policymaking in important ways. First, it has greatly expanded the range of creators and consumers who have a direct stake in copyright law. Amateur video artists who uploaded their movies to YouTube, college students who receive “settlement letters” from movie studios, and early adopters of new video technology feel the impact of copyright law every day. And many of them now regularly follow copyright policymaking as well. The web has also allowed these creators and consumers to form grassroots activist communities, and a copyright reform movement has grown up in conjunction with larger media and political reform movements. Blogs, social networks, open government initiatives, and a series of organizations have kept different constituencies informed and vocal about copyright policy. And amateurs have begun to tip the balance in the copyright wars….
Our weekly roundup of recent blog posts and features from other academic presses (this week with a political focus):
As is fitting in a week where there were many excellent blog posts focusing on politics and the upcoming 2012 American elections, we’ll get things started this week with the latest entry in Princeton University Press’s Election 101 blog post series. This week, historian Christopher Loss takes on a topic that hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves: how education will affect the election in 2012.
At Duke University Press’s blog, guest blogger Priyamvada Gopal delves into the difficult issue of higher education in Britain with an excerpt from an article entitled “How Universities Die.”
The University of Illinois press examined the state of a particular political group in an interview with historian Jonathan Bell on American liberalism. Bell offers an account of liberal politics in the 21st century and gives Barack Obama some advice in his reelection bid.
At Beacon Broadside, Cynthia Cooper looks back at the last decade in American politics. She writes that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney need to “take the stand on war lies.”
Responding to a number of stories of industrial hazards that have come out over the last few months, Temple University Press features an article by Christopher Sellers explaining what these types of industrial dangers are, why they exist, and how people are trying to fix these hazards.
The OUPblog takes on a controversial and complex issue with a guest post by Mary Coleman asking, “is there an epidemic of autism?” Coleman, the Medical Director of the Foundation for Autism Research Inc., lays out the science behind autism and a plan for moving forward towards a medical therapy that reverses autism.
At the UNC Press Blog, Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian tell the stories behind their groundbreaking studies of life on Death Row. They make the case that capital punishment in the US is capricious, determined more by local politics, money, location, and the composition of appellate courts at the time of the trial rather than by the crime or the criminal.
Responding to the article by columnist John Derbyshire that led to his dismissal from the National Review, historian Andrew Kahrl takes a detailed look at integrated public leisure spaces over the last century in the Harvard University Press blog.
On a slightly less politically controversial note, Claire Rasmussen looks at the largest sporting event in New England: the Boston Marathon. She wonders why the event is so popular, and seeks the answer in the history of the marathon as an event.
Finally, at the Yale University Press Log, Sarah Underwood takes a look at food and nature in Katherine Larson’s poetry, from the mystery of hard-boiled eggs and the “synthesis” of bouillabaisse to the disturbing environmentalism behind the picture of a rotting sea lion carcass.
April is National Poetry Month, and for the rest of April we will be posting poems from our poetry titles and from those of our distributed presses. Our selection today is taken from Chinese University Press’s outstanding collection of poems from around the world, Words and the World: International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong. “Lacquer” is a poem written by Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun, and is translated from Slovenian by Christopher Merrill and the author. To Read: To Love, an individual chapbook of Šalamun’s poetry, is also available separately from Words and the World.
April 22 was Earth Day, and in honor of the occasion, we will be running a series of posts over the course of this week by authors of our environmental studies titles. These articles will cover a wide range of topics relevant to the study of the earth and the environment, from global climate change to the effects of economic development on the environment in China.
The first post in our Earth Day 2012 blog series is part one of a two-part Q&A with climatologist Michael E. Mann, author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. Mann is the scientist responsible for the famous “Hockey Stick Graph” that shows how recent global temperature rises have coincided with increased industrial development. Read part two of the interview here.
Q: What is the Hockey Stick?
Michael E. Mann: The “Hockey Stick” is a graph that my colleagues and I published in the late 1990s depicting estimated changes in the average temperature of the Northern Hemisphere over the past thousand years. The graph shows a long-term decline from relatively warm conditions during Medieval time into the colder conditions of the Little Ice Age (the “handle”), followed by the abrupt warming of the past century (the “blade”). The Hockey Stick was featured in the 2001 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report Summary for Policy Makers, which helped to establish it as an icon in the debate over human-caused climate change. The graph told a simple story: that a sharp and highly unusual rise in atmospheric warming was occurring on Earth. Furthermore, that rise seemed to coincide with human-caused increases in greenhouse gas levels due to the burning of fossil fuels. Read the rest of this entry »
April 22 was Earth Day, and in honor of the occasion, we will be running a series of posts over the course of this week by authors of our environmental studies titles. These articles will cover a wide range of topics relevant to the study of the earth and the environment, from global climate change to the effects of economic development on the environment in China.
Q: Why is it important to prevent the politicization of science?
Michael E. Mann: History is replete with all too many examples of the dangers that arise when science becomes politicized, like Lysenkoism and its detrimental impact on Soviet agriculture during the Stalin regime. Science is almost unique among endeavors in terms of the self-correcting machinery that govern its progress. Those findings, theories, and predictions that have merit ultimately prevail because of their explanatory success, while those which do not fall to the wayside. But the success of the process relies on the open, objective, and unfettered give-and-take between scientists. When those with an agenda attempt to game the system, they threaten the integrity of the scientific process. Read the rest of this entry »
April 22 was Earth Day, and in honor of the occasion, we will be running a series of posts over the course of this week by authors of our environmental studies titles. These articles will cover a wide range of topics relevant to the study of the earth and the environment, from global climate change to the effects of economic development on the environment in China.
China’s Path to Sustainable Development
Bryan Tilt
“Sustainability” is both an interesting analytical concept and a current buzzword whose precise meaning is difficult to pin down. Without getting too bogged down in the particulars of defining sustainability, it seems clear that the concept hinges on balancing economic and social growth with the limits of the biophysical environment. Nowhere is the need for sustainable thinking and action more acute than in contemporary China, where a population of more than 1.3 billion grapples with rapid industrial growth, urbanization, species extirpation, serious pollution, and a growing middle class of energy-hungry consumers. Read the rest of this entry »
This week our featured book is Sex and World Peace, by Valerie M. Hudson, Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli, and Chad F. Emmett.
Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of Sex and World Peace and we are also offering a FREE copy of the book to one winner.
To enter our book giveaway, simply e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu with your name and address (U.S. and Canadian mailing addresses only, unfortunately). We will randomly select one winner on Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck and spread the word!
“An eye-opening contribution to our understanding of the powerful misogynist forces that still contribute to violence and war. This volume should be required reading for all students of international relations and those who make policy.” — Ann Crittenden, author of The Price of Motherhood
April 22 was Earth Day, and in honor of the occasion, we will be running a series of posts over the course of this week by authors of our environmental studies titles. These articles will cover a wide range of topics relevant to the study of the earth and the environment, from global climate change to the effects of economic development on the environment in China.
Professor James Lawrence Powell, author of The Inquisition of Climate Science, is the executive director of the National Physical Science Consortium, a partnership among government agencies and laboratories, industry, and higher education dedicated to increasing the number of American citizens with graduate degrees in the physical sciences and related engineering fields.
Are Humans Causing Global Warming? Ask Floyd Landis.
James Lawrence Powell
The earth is warming. But can we be sure that humans are the cause? Yes. The same way cycling officials were sure that biker Floyd Landis doped with synthetic testosterone while winning the 2006 Tour de France.
With Lance Armstrong retired and most of the other top riders expelled for illegal drug use, Landis had become one of the favorites. He was leading when in stage 16 he fell to eleventh place. Then, just as his chances of winning seemed dashed, Landis won the next stage going away and went on to ride the Champs-Élysées in the winner’s yellow jersey. Read the rest of this entry »
April 22 was Earth Day, and in honor of the occasion, we will be running a series of posts over the course of this week by authors of our environmental studies titles. These articles will cover a wide range of topics relevant to the study of the earth and the environment, from global climate change to the effects of economic development on the environment in China.
Professor James Rodger Fleming, author of Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control and a professor of science, technology, and society at Colby College, is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), elected “for pioneering studies on the history of meteorology and climate change and for the advancement of historical work within meteorological societies,” and a fellow at the American Meteorological Society.
Geoengineering’s Checkered Past
James Rodger Fleming
Geoengineering, loosely defined as the intentional large-scale manipulation of the global environment, exists only in the fevered brains of those who propose it. It is “geo-scientific speculation” practiced by the Rube Goldbergs and Doctor Strangeloves who reside in a fantasy world of back-of-the-envelope calculations, simplistic computer models, and PowerPoint slides outlining outrageous proposals: build artificial volcanoes, open fire on the stratosphere with sulfate cannons, launch massive arrays of space mirrors to dim the sun, genetically engineer crops with more reflective leaves, or splash huge buckets of white paint on the cities of the world. The roots of geoengineering lie deep in the mythical quest to control nature, and its advocates exude a strange mix of overconfidence and hubris. Read the rest of this entry »
April is National Poetry Month and in honor of the occasion, we have been posting poems from our poetry collections and those of our distributed presses throughout April. Today, as April draws to a close, we are posting three poems from Korean poet Kim Sowol’s classic collection, Azaleas, translated by David R. McCann. Kim Sowol is one the most beloved Korean poets, despite the fact that he died when he was only 32. Azaleas, Kim Sowol’s only collection, was published when he was 23, and tells the story of a young man’s travels after leaving home. While the entire collection contains 127 poems, we’ve chosen (with great difficulty) three to post here today. Read the rest of this entry »
April 22 was Earth Day, and in honor of the occasion, we will be running a series of posts over the course of this week by authors of our environmental studies titles. These articles will cover a wide range of topics relevant to the study of the earth and the environment, from global climate change to the effects of economic development on the environment in China.
The advent of the Anthropocene era, when the activities of humankind determine how the environment develops and behaves, has had a very significant effect on our relationship with, and attitude towards, the Earth. Increasingly, the Earth is viewed primarily as a resource to be exploited; an exploitation sanctioned by our commitment to economic growth and material progress. Modernity, the socio-economic system we have developed in the West over the last few centuries, demands that we keep finding ways of improving the Gross National Product year on year. So we are encouraged by politicians, fixated as they invariably are on the necessity for growth, to regard ourselves as essentially machines for the generation of profit, and it has been depressing in recent years to see how the profit motive has been introduced into more and more areas of our lives. In my current book Addicted to Profit: Reclaiming Our Lives from the Free Market, I describe Western society as a ‘profitocracy’ since that seems to sum up how we have allowed the profit motive to become the dominant factor in our existence. No part of the public sector now seems immune from the requirement to turn a profit, and this is having a profound, and I would argue largely negative, impact on our lifestyles. Read the rest of this entry »
April 22 was Earth Day, and in honor of the occasion, we have posted a series of articles over the course of this week by authors of our environmental studies titles. These articles cover a wide range of topics relevant to the study of the earth and the environment, from global climate change to the effects of economic development on the environment in China.
Today marks the end of our Earth Day 2012 blog series, and we are concluding with an article by Carl Hobbs, a professor of marine science at Virginia Institute of Marine Science at the College of William & Mary. Professor Hobbs is the author of The Beach Book: Science of the Shore.
Earth Day and Mother’s Day
Carl Hobbs
Earth Day and Mothers’ Day share at least one important characteristic: each is a one-day celebration of something we should honor throughout the year. We should not have to be reminded to acknowledge the Earth or our mothers (or our fathers); we should always be aware of what they do for us and we should thank them frequently. This is easy for me because as a geologist, I work with the Earth every day and think about what it is and why and how it changes. As a marine geologist with a career in the area of coastal geology and coastal geomorphology, I have the luxury of working where the land, the sea, and the atmosphere intersect. This has provided by with a wonderful view of the earth and with many opportunities to think about what I see. For me, every day is Earth Day.
Beaches, barrier islands, and salt marshes are beautiful and complex places. One of my goals is to get others to observe, to take really good looks at, their environments. Carefully looking at a beach and thinking about what is seen – Why does it have the shape it does? How and why has it changed since the last visit? Why is one side of a sand dune steeper than another? – teaches the observer a lot. I wrote The Beach Book to help people interpret the shore.
I have had the good fortune to work along the mid-Atlantic coast and Chesapeake Bay for over 40 years. There have been a lot of changes. At a rough estimate, sea level has risen 8 or 9 inches during that time; that is enough to see. Low areas that used to be inundated only once every few years now are submerged at least yearly. Acquaintances who live in the low areas near the water have lost their wells to salt-water intrusion or have lost septic systems the rise of the saturated zone. Just as the changing environment impacts society, society interacts with and changes the environment. Urban areas have expanded and rural areas have become suburban. Lowly beach cottages have been replaced by large and fancy dwellings. I’ve seen the economic benefit of commercial seaports and I’ve seen the number of working watermen and their catch fall.
Earth Day should be more than simply celebrating the Earth. We should think about our individual and societal interactions with our planet. It is impossible for us not to change it but we must work to eliminate as many detrimental changes as possible because we can’t back up and we have had almost no success in correcting mistakes. We cannot “restore” an estuary but we might be able to rehabilitate it.
Every day is Earth Day just as every day should be Mothers’ Day. April 22nd is a good day to share our thoughts and actions for the benefit of our Earth.
April is National Poetry Month and in honor of the occasion, we have been posting poems from our poetry collections and those of our distributed presses throughout April. Today, in our final National Poetry Month post (this year, at least), we are coming back home with two great New York poems from our collection of poetry about NYC, I Speak of the City: Poems of New York, edited by Stephen Wolf. The first of our poems is Maya Angelou’s “Awakening in New York”, and our second is Frank O’Hara’s “Steps.” We hope you’ve enjoyed reading our poems as much as we have enjoyed posting them!
Awakening in New York
Maya Angelou
Curtains forcing their will
against the wind,
children asleep,
exchanging dreams with
seraphim. The city
drags itself awake on
subway straps; and
I, an alarm, awake as a
rumor of war,
lay stretching into dawn
unasked and unheeded. Read the rest of this entry »
“Efforts to establish greater peace and security throughout the world might be made more effective by also addressing the violence and exploitation that occur in personal relationships between the two halves of humanity, men and women.”—authors of Sex and World Peace
In this excerpt from the opening chapter toSex and World Peace, by Valerie M. Hudson, Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli, and Chad F. Emmett explain the ambition of their book to examine the importance of gender equality in national and international security:
Sex and World Peace offers three major contributions: two of them analytical and one normative. First, we hold that gender inequality, in all of its many manifestations, is a form of violence—no matter how invisible or normalized that violence may be. This gender-based violence not only destroys homes but, we argue, also significantly affects politics and security at both the national and the international levels. This linkage—empirical as well as theoretical—between gender inequality and national and international security is a new approach that has seldom if ever been considered within the discipline of international relations (and other disciplines as well). In a major shift from the conventional understanding, we suggest that efforts to establish greater peace and security throughout the world might be made more effective by also addressing the violence and exploitation that occur in personal relationships between the two halves of humanity, men and women.
the very best predictor of a state’s peacefulness is not its level of wealth, its level of democracy, or its ethno-religious identity; the best predictor of a state’s peacefulness is how well its women are treated. What’s more, democracies with higher levels of violence against women are as insecure and unstable as nondemocracies.
Valerie Hudson offers a litany of statistics pointing to the difficult situation that women throughout the world continue to face in regards to treatment under the law, lack of representation in government, rape, and violence. She argues that the impact of violence against women and the rise of sex-selective abortions, will have an impact on the future security of many societies.
The evidence of violence against women is clear. So what does it mean for world peace? Consider the effects of sex-selective abortion and polygyny: Both help create an underclass of young adult men with no stake in society because they will never become heads of households, the marker for manhood in their cultures. It’s unsurprising that we see a rise in violent crime, theft, and smuggling, whereby these young men seek to become contenders in the marriage market. But the prevalence of these volatile young males may also contribute to greater success in terrorist recruiting, or even state interest in wars of attrition that will attenuate the ranks of these men.
In conjunction with her recent article in Foreign Policy, Valerie Hudson, author of Sex and World Peace, posted maps that dramatically depict the difficult conditions suffered by women in certain parts of the world.
The maps focus on discrepancy in education, inequality in family law/practice, governmental participation by women, child marriage for girls, maternal mortality, women’s physical security, polygyny, son preference and sex ratio, and trafficking in females. Much of the data and research that informed these maps come from the Women Stats Project, which includes more data to understanding the linkage between the situation of women and the security of nation-states.
Our weekly roundup of recent blog posts and features from other academic presses:
We’ll start things off this week with Harvard University Press’s tribute to Levon Helm. Helm was, of course, the drummer and one of the vocalists of The Band, and Harvard’s post reflects on “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” the most famous song featuring Helm’s voice.
April 23 was Shakespeare’s 448th birthday, and Cambridge University Press celebrated in style on their blog with this excellently titled post: “I Thumb My Nose at Thee! A Modern Appreciation of Shakespearean Jabs.” They even highlighted my favorite Shakespearean insult: “Thou art like a toad; ugly and venomous,” from As You Like It.
We continue to be fascinated by Yale Press Log’s ongoing posts on the art of translation. This week they featured an interview with poet and translator Fady Joudah on his recent translation of Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan’s Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me.
The University of Minnesota Press Blog tackled a very tricky issue this week in a guest post by Roland Bleiker: what exactly should be done about North Korea? Bleiker believes that the best approach we can take in encouraging political, economic, or cultural change in North Korea is “information diplomacy.”
At the LSU Press blog, guest blogger John M. Sacher looks back at Louisiana’s secession from the United States in 1861. Louisiana has (and had in 1860) a very unique cultural identity, different from other Southern states like Mississippi or Alabama. Sacher tries to reconcile this cultural difference with Louisiana’s quick secession.
April 23 was World Book Night! Beacon Broadside and the UNC Press Blog both ran excellent posts describing their efforts and experiences giving books out (in one case, via surfboard!). Really great stuff (and really fun blog post reads)!
UNC Press also featured a guest post from Steven I. Levine and Michael H. Hunt on civilian casualties through history and in today’s military conflicts, comparing US reactions to civilian deaths caused by organized military action and by unsanctioned acts of individual soldiers.
Our Manhattan neighbors, NYU Press, ran a controversial article by Ronald Weitzer that originally appeared on CNN. In the wake of the Secret Service scandal in Colombia (not Columbia), Weitzer argues that prostitution should be legal, as it is in many countries around the world.
As one can see from a quick look at our philosophy booklist, we here at CUP love cogent explanations of the complicated issues raised by Continental Philosophy. This week, the OUPblog provided a great explanation of Jacques Derrida‘s feelings about the idea of “Europe” and his hope transcend the simplistic categories of Eurocentrism or anti-Eurocentrism.
Continuing the European theme, Princeton University Press has a guest post by Richard Kuisel comparing the elections in France and America. The post is a continuation of their Election 101 series, which we (again) cannot recommend highly enough.
Finally, we’ll end this week’s Roundup with a fascinating and hopeful post from the MITPressLog: “Can Robotic Dogs Help Socialize Children with Autism?” Apparently, there is evidence that robotic toys can help children with autism communicate more effectively with adults. Peter Kahn suggests that the lack of repetition in the way these toys behave might be behind this effect.
As always, if you particularly like something or think we left something important off our list, let us know in the comments!
Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of American Showman: Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel and the Birth of the Entertainment Industry, 1908-1935 and we are also offering a FREE copy of the book to one winner.
To enter our book giveaway, simply e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu with your name and address (U.S. and Canadian mailing addresses only, unfortunately). We will randomly select one winner on Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck and spread the word!
“An engaging writer, insightful critic, and rigorous scholar, Melnick has vividly recaptured the magic and moxie of this pioneer of the American entertainment industry, a marquee name in vaudeville, radio, and motion pictures. Melnick’s illuminating cultural biography is not just the engrossing story of the beloved and larger-than-life Roxy but a fascinating journey into American culture in the first passionate years of a lifelong affair with its own mass media.” — Thomas Doherty
“Is it morally permissible to submit to total instrumentalization living beings that, though they do not have a central nervous system, are capable of basic learning and communication? Should [plants'] swift response to stress leave us coldly indifferent, while animal suffering provokes intense feelings of pity and compassion?”
–Michael Marder
On Sunday, the New York Times published an editorial by Professor Michael Marder on the ethical problems raised by new plant science: “If Peas Can Talk, Should We Eat Them?“. Marder is the Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country in northern Spain, and is the author of the forthcoming CUP book Plant Thinking: Toward a Philosophy of Vegetative Life, in which he addresses many of the same issues he raises in his article.
In his editorial, Marder introduces and discusses new research that shows that “a pea plant subjected to drought conditions communicated its stress to other such plants.” Moreover, this research indicates that plants are able to create “memories” of stressful conditions and of the best ways to react to these conditions. Marder thinks that the discovery that plants have the ability to not only react to environmental pressures and stresses but to remember the most successful reactions and to communicate these reactions to plants around them raises potentially thorny ethical questions about the way we treat plants, just as discoveries about the complex mental states of animals raise questions about the way we treat animals.
Evidently, empathy might not be the most appropriate ground for an ethics of vegetal life. But the novel indications concerning the responsiveness of plants, their interactions with the environment and with one another, are sufficient to undermine all simple, axiomatic solutions to eating in good conscience. When it comes to a plant, it turns out to be not only a what but also a who — an agent in its milieu, with its own intrinsic value or version of the good. Inquiring into justifications for consuming vegetal beings thus reconceived, we reach one of the final frontiers of dietary ethics.
Marder claims that it is too early to make any definite claims about the ethical implications of discoveries about the ways that plants “think.” We are still in the early stages of the necessary research. However, he also believes that it is not too early to begin thinking about the potential moral ramifications of our inquiries into plant “thinking.”
Ethical concerns are never problems to be resolved once and for all; they make us uncomfortable and sometimes, when the sting of conscience is too strong, prevent us from sleeping. Being disconcerted by a single pea to the point of unrest is analogous to the ethical obsession, untranslatable into the language of moral axioms and principles of righteousness. Such ethics do not dictate how to treat the specimen of Pisumsativum, or any other plant, but they do urge us to respond, each time anew, to the question of how, in thinking and eating, to say “yes” to plants.
Edit: Professor Marder responds to criticism of his piece here.
Film historiography has often focused on production, stardom, and/or the intricate operations of the studio system—much of it to the exclusion of motion picture distribution and exhibition. American Showman analyzes the career of a single film exhibitor and radio broadcaster, Samuel Lionel “Roxy” Rothafel (1882–1936), between the years 1908 and 1935, in order to illuminate the work of a silent era “showman,” the complex operations of an urban movie palace, and the multiple and interrelated venues created for film, music, and live performance on stage, on screen, and over the air. Whereas the film industry could debate which star or mogul held more sway during this period, for a quarter of a century no motion picture exhibitor had more industrial and cultural power or influence than Roxy. On radio, Roxy was also amongst the medium’s most popular and innovative voices in the 1920s and 1930s, helping to determine early radio genres, formats, and broadcasting styles. His career not only illuminates the multifarious tasks of an urban movie palace exhibitor but Roxy’s additional roles as a broadcaster, filmmaker, music director, stage producer, propagandist, newspaper columnist, and author demonstrate that exhibitors like Roxy were not bureaucratic functionaries but influential figures that can and should be analyzed for their own thematic and stylistic predilections and industrial, social, and cultural influence. This analysis also demonstrates the motion picture exhibitor’s influence on spectatorship (both in film and live performances), narrative, and previously unexplored issues of authorship. Silent era exhibitors, in small and large venues, had tremendous agency over the texts they presented. In some cases, their preceding, intervening, and concluding music and live performances, and their editing of films, dramatically altered the narratives of the motion pictures they exhibited.
As the opening of Radio City Music Hall and the RKO Roxy Theatre neared, pressure mounted inside the two art deco theaters. In addition to his own need to top every theater he had ever opened in New York, Roxy was also under immense public scrutiny. Critic Gilbert Seldes noted that with Roxy’s decision to make Radio City Music Hall a venue for variety only, “What is done there will either energize or stultify entertainment in America for a generation.” Others, including Roxy, saw Radio City as a ray of hope in an otherwise dismal economic and social climate. He noted in August 1932:
Many people have remarked that the activity and bustle about Radio City in Rockefeller Center is a definite inspiration in the center of a big metropolis—a sort of example to all the world to forge ahead and get busy. In this same sense it strikes us that Radio City, when completed, will be a beacon light to the entire industry. Even as one astounding picture from any producer serves to help the entire fraternity, so Radio City will act as a stimulus to the entire nation and will help lift [it] out of the doldrums of depression. It will automatically broadcast a sincerity of purpose—a message of faith and optimism. Radio City will be a challenge and an inspiration, not only to our industry, but to all industries, to move forward and onward.
… Nearly every one of Roxy’s elaborate openings, from the Alhambra in Milwaukee in 1911 to the Roxy Theatre in 1927, had been met with glowing approval. He and the entertainment world expected nothing less than perfection. Roxy’s medical condition, though, had worsened and, he would later argue, limited his ability to produce effectively. “With that show, sick as I was,” Roxy told the New York Herald Tribune, “there wasn’t a chance to really get it whipped into shape, but I stuck with it night and day, with doctors and nurses in constant attendance; I wouldn’t let my associates down. Illness may have played a part, but it also seemed to provide a tidy excuse.
Unfortunately for Roxy, RKO, the Rockefellers, and every other party involved, Radio City’s opening night on December 27, 1932, was a critical disaster. After rain and traffic delayed the start of the show by more than an hour, a restless crowd sat through one colossal bomb after another. Brooks Atkinson noted, “The opening performance lasted from 8:30 until 2:30 the next morning, and neither Roxy nor vaudeville ever recovered from that brutal avalanche of fun.” The Toronto Daily Star was equally merciless, dubbing Radio City a “gigantic” failure and noting that “Nothing quite so blasting to the show business in any country equals the supreme flop of the new Radio City enterprise.” The Literary Digest remarked that the show was “in many ways, a program of the National Broadcasting Company,” but “unlike the wireless, you can’t turn it off when you are bored.” Roxy, the New Republic wrote, assembled “a job lot of vaudeville turns which . . . do not add up into a vaudeville program, and they bored the first few audiences stiff. The net effect was of a series of movie ‘prologues,’ one after the other.” Unlike his shows at the Roxy and the Capitol, these attractions did not frame some large capstone entertainment nor provide any cohesive thematic flavor. They simply added scale and volume to the show. It was big, massive, gaudy—and completely wrong for the time….
In forty-eight hours, everything Roxy had worked for since 1930 was ripped apart by the press and slashed by RKO. The RKO Roxy Theatre would, for the moment, remain relatively unchanged, but Radio City Music Hall, as Roxy had conceived it, would only last another week. The much anticipated resurrection of vaudeville did not come to pass; if anything, the disastrous failure of Radio City Music Hall was variety’s gurgling death rattle. Motion Picture Herald would comment two years later that after Radio City’s disastrous debut “there remained nothing to do about vaudeville but write the obituary.” It was also, though few realized it at the time, the figurative death of Roxy’s career and stature.
During Fox’s period of theatrical expansion, Roxy reveled in the relative lack of corporate oversight at the Roxy Theatre. He continued to spend lavishly; upwards of $45,000 per week was spent on stage productions and roughly $25,000 per week on scenery and costumes. In March 1928, Roxy announced that the sixteen Rockets would stay at the Roxy indefinitely, and he renamed them the “Roxyettes,” expanding the troupe to thirty-two precision dancers. Although rarely mentioned by historians, there were actually six different theaters in New York presenting troupes of Russell Markert-produced Rockets by the end of 1928.
Roxy continued to premiere new music as well, giving Irving Berlin’s “Sunshine” its first public presentation. The composer had telephoned the words and music to his new song, inspired by his current stay in Palm Springs, California, so that it could be given “immediate presentation to the public” in February 1928.Months later, Roxy would invite George Gershwin to write original music for the theater and conduct the Roxy orchestra’s performance.
Some film producers and critics remained concerned about the subsumed position of motion pictures within an environment that seemed to overwhelm short and feature films. With so much attention to stage performances, orchestral and choral performances, and guest band leaders and other composers and conductors featured at venues like the Roxy and the nearby Paramount, future documentarian John Grierson had commented in 1926 that deluxe motion picture theaters often overshadowed the artistry of the films they were meant to project.
Today we have a guest post from Aaron Belkin, author of Bring Me Men: Military Masculinity and the Benign Façade of American Empire, 1898-2001. Belkin is associate professor of political science at San Francisco State University and director of the Palm Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. In Bring Me Men, Belkin delves into the contradictions inherent in America’s conception of military masculinity.
Recently, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta invoked a familiar theme in responding to photographs of U.S. service members posing alongside body parts of Afghan militants when he asserted that, “This is not who we are.” In March, when an American soldier was accused of slaughtering 16 Afghan civilians, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said exactly the same thing. And, more than a century ago, in 1902, Secretary of War Elihu Root reacted to accusations of torture among U.S. troops in the Philippines in a similar manner.
American officials often use the same formula to dismiss accounts of military atrocities, attributing misconduct to rogue service members – “rotten apples” – rather than anything fundamental about the troops or the armed forces. While the military does not avowedly embrace cruelty, and while most service members follow the rules most of the time, a more plausible, if radioactive, explanation for the consistency of stories about misconduct is that U.S. troops sometimes engage in brutal, sadistic behavior because of how they are trained. Official disclaimers notwithstanding, cruelty is a part of “who we are.” Read the rest of this entry »
This past Sunday, Michael Marder, the Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country and author of a forthcoming Columbia University Press book, published an op-ed in the New York Times examining ethical questions that might arise from new research into plant “thinking.” In this article, titled “If Peas Can Talk, Should We Eat Them?“, Marder asked readers to consider whether it is “morally permissible to submit to total instrumentalization living beings that, though they do not have a central nervous system, are capable of basic learning and communication? Should [plants'] swift response to stress leave us coldly indifferent, while animal suffering provokes intense feelings of pity and compassion?”
Many readers made it clear, both in the Times and in other forums, that they believed that Marder was attacking or marginalizing the moral reasoning behind vegetarianism, veganism, and various animal rights movements. In an upcoming article for the New York Times, Marder responds to these critics, claiming that it was not his intent to in any way minimize animal suffering in discussing new research about plants. We have a brief excerpt from this article, in which Marder clarifies his stance on dietary ethics.
Dietary ethics attuned to vegetal life does not imply that we should start eating more animal flesh, or, for those who are neither vegans nor vegetarians, continue consuming it in good conscience. Plant stress certainly does not reach the same degree and does not express itself the same way as animal suffering—a fact that must be reflected in our practical ethics. Nevertheless, the commendable desire to ameliorate the condition of animals, currently treated as though they were meat-generating machines, does not justify strategic argumentation in favor of the indiscriminate consumption of plants. Ultimately, the same logic submits to total instrumentalization the bodies of plants, animals, and humans by setting them over and against an abstract and rational mind. And this means that the struggles for the emancipation of all instrumentalized living beings should be fought on a common front.
For the full article, keep an eye on the New York Times’ philosophy op-ed section, The Stone.
Pick is, in part, responding to Calling All Carnivores, a contest from The Ethicist, a feature in the New York Times Magazine. The judges for the contest—Peter Singer, Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, Jonathan Safran Foer and Andrew Light—will select the best essay on why it is ethical to eat meat.
At the end of the day, eating meat, or not eating it, are both moral choices we are required to make. The difference is that eating meat, the default position, has until recently in the West been largely morally invisible. Meat eaters fall into three categories: the “defaulters” who take what is and what ought to be as one and the same; the “new moralists,” Michael Pollan among them, who portray the consumption of animal flesh as an enlightened and conscientious choice, sensitive to both the lives of animals and to the higher value of human culinary discernment; and “bravado eaters” who insist on meat eating as an expression of manly superiority. The last two categories are defensive; the first is ostensibly neutral and relies on what the novelist J. M. Coetzee calls “willful ignorance.” None of the three can claim the moral high ground, though one—the middle one—has tried and, to some extent, succeeded to occupy the ethical discourse around food. The proof? The New York Times’s much talked about Calling All Carnivores: Tell Us Why It’s Ethical to Eat Meat . For what is the competition itself if not the product of the new moralist discourse promoted by foodies and gourmands?
Time for our weekly look at the best articles from the academic press blogosphere:
We’ll open up this week with a thoughtful take from Kyla Tompkins at From the Square, the NYU Press blog, on an extremely bizarre story from Sweden concerning the Minister of Culture, blackface, and a cake shaped like a human. I dislike the “defies description” cliche, but this situation really does defy description.
On Tuesday, May 1, the Occupy movement held a worldwide General Strike. The University of Minnesota Press has an excellent guest post from Eugene W. Holland discussing the strike and the Occupy movement more generally.
Do you feel strongly about any of the following: Dan Brown, Twilight, Neil Gaiman, or the films of Guillermo del Toro? If you are part of the 99% of the world that loves or hates “the new supernatural,” this post on the Harvard University Press blog is for you! Complete with recommendations, interviews, and discussion of how “the new supernatural” is the forefront of a reinvention of American Christianity, Harvard’s discussion of the work of Victoria Nelson is truly fascinating.
The OUPblog has run a couple of excellent articles over the past week on different aspects of bullying. In the first post, Maureen Duffy details seven ways that schools and parents can mishandle reports of bullying. And today, Faye Mishna discusses how to tell the difference between regular conflict and bullying within friendship.
Meanwhile, not to be outdone, the Cambridge University Press blog offers an interview with Robert Crosnoe and Peter K. Smith, in which the most pressing questions about the sociology and psychology of bullies and the bullied are answered.
Elsewhere on the Cambridge blog, Tim Burns continues Cambridge’s Dickens 2012 series, a celebration of the great author’s 200th birthday. In his post, Burns looks at Dickens’ place in the 21st-century school classroom.
The UNC Press Blog is a reliable source of fascinating posts about the Civil War, and this week they featured a guest post from Christian McWhirter on Civil War music in popular film. Happily, some of the best-known Civil War films and television shows gain high grades on the historical accuracy of their soundtracks.
At Beacon Broadside, Chris Steadman invites Sam Harris on a joint trip to a mosque. In the rest of his post, Steadman, a self-avowed “queer atheist” looks at atheist Islamophobia and offers a passionate attack on the Islamophobic misinformation machine.
Finally, this week Yale University Press ran an excellent article by Cathy L. Jrade on Uruguayan poet Delmira Agustini. Jrade claims that Agustini is known for “her daring eroticism, her inventive appropriation of vampirism, her morbid embrace of death and pain, and her startling use of dualities and opposites,” but is overlooked in her obsession with writing itself.
Question: Who is Roxy and why is it important to know his work?
Ross Melnick: Samuel Lionel Rothafel (1882-1936), better known as “Roxy” to millions of moviegoers and radio listeners, was the most influential and famous film exhibitor between 1913 and 1934 and one of radio’s most prolific radio stars between 1922 and 1935. He opened (and/or managed) most of New York’s most important movie palaces during this period including the Strand, Rialto, Rivoli, Capitol, and Roxy theaters before opening both Radio City Music Hall and the RKO Roxy Theatre in December 1932. A decade earlier, he became one of the first national radio stars through his emceed broadcasts from the Capitol Theatre that transmitted the Capitol’s stage shows and his coterie of musicians, dancers, and other performers. His troupe became known as “Roxy and His Gang” and were one of the top radio broadcasts between 1922 and 1935 on NBC and later CBS. He was not only, in Rick Altman’s words, “the most powerful man in the film industry,” but also an equally influential figure in radio, music, and American culture. Even today, “Roxy” theaters around the world continue to exploit his name and brand.
Q: A key concept you discuss is the “unitary text” of silent (and early sound) film exhibition that incorporated dance, opera, music, and other media and live performance. What is the unitary text and its significance to understanding the movie palace experience?
RM: Scholars such as Richard Koszarski have long noted that silent film exhibition during this period was part of “an evening’s entertainment” and a “balanced program.” Namely, film was accompanied not only by orchestras of up to 110 members at the Roxy Theatre, but also by elaborate stage shows, newsreels, travelogues, cartoons, and other live and recorded entertainment. The unitary text attempts to account for how these other elements of the show interrupted, enhanced, complicated, and sometimes subsumed the feature films presented. The feature film—typically the focus of much film historiography—is inherently complicated by the complexities of silent film exhibition in which the feature film was just one part of the larger show. In Roxy’s case, he often edited the films he exhibited for time and/or narrative alterations, asserting his right to final cut. In American Showman, I articulate how in each theater silent films were presented differently from theaters across town and across the country.
Pick is, in part, responding to Calling All Carnivores, a contest from The Ethicist, a feature in the New York Times Magazine. The judges for the contest—Peter Singer, Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, Jonathan Safran Foer and Andrew Light—will select the best essay on why it is ethical to eat meat.
As Timothy Pachirat recently argued in Every Twelve Seconds, it is not quite the case that if slaughterhouses had glass walls everyone would be vegetarian. The “new moralists,” those who portray the consumption of animal flesh as an enlightened and conscientious choice, sensitive to both the lives of animals and to the higher value of human culinary discernment—namely Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, and their American counterparts—have put slaughter on primetime television, proving that killing itself can be made to disappear in the act. This is one of our dubious powers: to remain blind in full view of reality. Blindness ensues from the new moralists’ refusal to question the morality of killing, the fact that animal life is subjected again and again to human whims. Somehow, somewhere along the way, the moral conversation turned into something else, bracketing off the fundamentals and magnifying incidental details—the hows and wheres of killing—turning the obvious commonplace that it is preferable for sentient animals to die without having suffered unimaginably before into the entire moral debate. Read the rest of this entry »
This week our featured book is Picturing Algeria, by Pierre Bourdieu.
Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of Picturing Algeria by Pierre Bourdieu and we are also offering a FREE copy of the book to one winner.
To enter our book giveaway, simply e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu with your name and address (U.S. and Canadian mailing addresses only, unfortunately). We will randomly select one winner on Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck and spread the word!
As a soldier in the French army, Pierre Bourdieu took thousands of photographs documenting the abject conditions and suffering (as well as the resourcefulness, determination, grace, and dignity) of the Algerian people as they fought in the Algerian War (1954–1962). Sympathizing with those he was told to regard as “enemies,” Bourdieu became deeply and permanently invested in their struggle to overthrow French rule and the debilitations of poverty.
Upon realizing the inability of his education to make sense of this wartime reality, Bourdieu immediately undertook the creation of a new ethnographic-sociological science based on his experiences—one that became synonymous with his work over the next few decades and was capable of explaining the mechanics of French colonial aggression and the impressive, if curious, ability of the Algerians to resist it.
This volume pairs 130 of Bourdieu’s photographs with key excerpts from his related writings, very few of which have been translated into English.
This coming Sunday, May 13, is Mothers’ Day. In honor of the occasion, we have two articles this week discussing popular conceptions of motherhood. Today, we are featuring an article by Kelly Oliver, the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University and author of a number of books including the forthcoming Knock Me Up, Knock Me Down: Images of Pregnancy in Hollywood Films and Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex, and the Media.
Twilight: Breaking Dawn continues a long line of horror films featuring women giving birth to otherworldly creatures. Bella, the teenage heroine of the Twilight series, is a modern day Rosemary’s Baby, whose pregnancy with a “demon” leaves her wasting away. While Rosemary drinks vile potions prepared by witches, Bella drinks blood out of kiddie Styrofoam cups complete with straw. She is further infantilized cuddled up on the couch under her childhood quilt, another nod to the childlike Rosemary. Whereas Rosemary’s Baby ends with a close-up of the demon baby’s glowing red eyes, Breaking Dawn ends with a close-up of Bella’s glowing red eyes, signaling her transformation into a vampire.
Another homage to Rosemary’s Baby is Bella’s nightmarish birth scene, shown through flashing images of a screaming Bella being drugged so vampires can remove the baby. Talk about extreme home birth! Edward delivers the baby by chewing through the amniotic sac. Not a very sterile operation, but it does the trick. Still, don’t try this at home! Never fear, the baby looks adorable after Edward’s “sister” cleans her…perhaps by licking off all that blood? Read the rest of this entry »
“Algeria is what allowed me to accept myself.”—Pierre Bourdieu
We continue our week-long focus onPicturing Algeriawith an excerpt from an interview with Pierre Bourdieu included in the book. In the interview with Franz Schultheis, Pierre Bourdieu discusses his time in Algeria and his interest in photography. You can read the full interview with Pierre Bourdieu with photographshere.
Pierre Bourdieu: It is perfectly natural to link the content of my research and my photos. One of the things that interested me most in Algeria, for example, is what I called the “economy of poverty” or the “economy of slums.” Normally, the slums were perceived (not only by racist, but also by naive observers) as something dirty, ugly, disorderly, thrown together, etc., whereas, in truth, it is a place for a very complex life, for a real economy with an inherent logic, where you see a great deal of resourcefulness, an economy that at least offers a lot of people a minimum with which to survive and, above all, for social survival—i.e., to escape the shame for a self-respecting man of doing nothing and contributing nothing to his family’s livelihood. I took a lot of photos on this subject, photos of all the hawkers and street vendors, and I was really amazed at the resourcefulness and energy in these unusual buildings, that were reminiscent of shop windows or a shop; or this motley collection of displays on the ground (which also interested me from an aesthetic point of view, as it was a very baroque scene); the pharmacists I interviewed, who were selling almost all sources of traditional magic, whose names I wrote down, aphrodisiacs, etc.
There were also very picturesque butcher’s shops (those three big, triangular wooden stands with cuts of meat hanging on them)—a typical subject for a photographer in search of picturesque, exotic scenes. I myself always had hypotheses about the organization of space on my mind: There is a layout plan of the village with a certain structure, a structure of a house; and I also discovered that the distribution of graves in the cemetery corresponded roughly to the layout of the village based on clans. And I wondered, “Will I
find the same structure in the markets?” That reminds me of a photo I took in a cemetery: a Cassoulet tin filled with water on an anonymous grave. On the seventh day after someone has died, you have to bring water to their grave in order to capture the female soul; in this case it was a Cassoulet tin that had
previously contained a taboo product: pork….
We continue our week-long focus onPicturing Algeria, by Pierre Bourdieu with an excerpt from Craig Calhoun’s foreword. (You can also read an interview with Bourdieu about the book and his time in Algeria):
Bourdieu sailed to Algeria in the company of working-class and peasant soldiers with whom he identified as the son of a provincial postman. He tried, not entirely successfully, to persuade them of the problems with French occupation. As he realized, their very recognition that he had voluntarily (but perhaps only temporarily) renounced some of the privilege conferred by elite education only accented the class division between them. Assigned to national service as a clerk in the bureaucracy of the French army, he found himself working for a colonial administration he would come increasingly to hate as it repressed a growing insurrection. But Bourdieu’s hatred was not only for the violence of the French military, but for the larger colonial project and the ways it disrupted and damaged the lives of individuals and the collective life of communities. He entered a country torn apart not just by colonialism but also by the introduction of capitalist markets and consequent social transformation. It was in this context that Bourdieu developed the concept of “symbolic violence” to refer to the many ways in which people’s dignity and capacity to organize their own lives were wounded—from the forced unveiling of women to the disruptions a new cash economy brought to long-term relations of honor and debt to the categorization of the rural as backward and the denigration of Berber languages (by Arabophones as well as Francophones).
Bourdieu was initially posted to boring duty with an army air unit in the Chellif Valley, 150 kilometers west of Algiers. Before long, however, he was reassigned to Algiers. The move was a favor from a senior officer who was also from Béarn, the same rural province as Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s mother had interceded on his behalf.
Mothers don’t get enough credit in histories of social science, and Bourdieu’s made a second crucial contribution to his career, even more basic to this book. She bought him a Leica camera. This came a little later, though, as Bourdieu’s engagement with Algeria grew deeper and became a crucial, formative influence on his career and life.
Positively understood, the project of plant liberation would allow plants to be what they are and to realize their potentialities, often in the context of cross-kingdoms co-evolution.
–Michael Marder
Yesterday, the New York Times published a second editorial by Professor Michael Marder on the ethical problems raised by new plant science: “Is Plant Liberation on the Menu?“. Marder is the Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country in northern Spain, and is the author of the forthcoming CUP book Plant Thinking: Toward a Philosophy of Vegetative Life, in which he addresses many of the same issues he raises in his article.
In this new article, Marder addresses the questions, concerns, and criticisms raised in the comments section on his first article concerning the ethical issues raised by plant thinking, “If Peas Can Talk, Should We Eat Them?.” First of all, he explains in greater detail the research he discussed in his original article and makes clear what he means by “plant thinking”:
Contemporary research into plant intelligence, spearheaded by Anthony Trewavas (University of Edinburgh), Stefano Mancuso (University of Florence) and Richard Karban (University of California, Davis), among others, complicates this tripartite division. For example, studies have found evidence of “deliberate behavior” in plants: foraging (note that the botanists themselves use this word usually associated with animal behavior) for nutrients, the roots can drastically change their branching pattern when they detect a resource-rich patch of soil, or they can grow so as to avoid contact with roots of other members of the same species, in order to prevent detrimental competition. Of course, plants are not capable of deliberation or of making decisions in the human sense of the term. But they do engage with their environments and with one another in ways that are incredibly sophisticated, plastic and responsive — in a word, intelligent, though not perhaps conscious.
