Hard on the heels of Christopher Buckley’s recent memoir of the deaths of his parents (“Losing Mum and Pup”), Richard Brookhiser has published his own account of life with William F. Buckley Jr., the founder and longtime editor of National Review, who died in February 2008. Brookhiser is a talented and prolific writer, best known in recent years for a series of books on the founding fathers. But through much of his adult life, the center of his world was National Review. This slight but engaging memoir is the story of a young man drawn early into Buckley’s orbit who struggled over many years to bask in, and at times to escape, the aura of his famous mentor. Brookhiser grew up in a conservative but not particularly political middle-class family in a suburb of Rochester, N.Y. When nationwide protests against the Vietnam War broke out in 1969, extending into his own small community, Brook­hiser was a high school freshman. He was contemptuous of his fellow students who joined the protests. “I thought they were wrong,” he recalls. “I also thought there was something phony about the exercise, simultaneously preening and copycat.” He wrote a long letter to his brother (a student at Yale) describing his reactions, and at his father’s suggestion, he sent a copy to National Review — a magazine his family knew largely because they sometimes watched Buckley’s television program, “Firing Line.” A few months later, his precocious article appeared as the magazine’s cover story — the day after his 15th birthday.

more from Alan Brinkley at the NYT here.

Michael Spence in Project Syndicate:

What can we expect as the world’s economy emerges from its most serious downturn in almost a century? The short answer is a “new normal,” with slower growth, a de-risked and more stable core financial system, and a set of additional challenges (energy, climate, and demographic imbalances, to name a few) with varying time horizons that will test our collective capacity to improve management and oversight of the global economy.

Lower growth is the best guess for the medium term. It seems most likely, but no one really knows. The financial crisis, morphing quickly into a global economic downturn, resulted not just from a failure to react to growing instability, risk, and imbalance, but also from a widespread pre-crisis inability to ”see” the rising systemic risk.

These defining characteristics will condition the responses and the results in coming years. There are countervailing forces. The high-growth countries (China and India) are large and getting larger relative to the rest. That alone will tend to elevate global growth compared to the world where industrial countries, and the US in particular, were in the growth driving seat.

The current crisis has come to be called a “balance-sheet recession” of global scope and tremendous depth and destructive power because of its origins in the balance sheets of the financial and household sectors. Extreme balance-sheet destruction is what made it distinctive. In the future, central banks and regulators will not be able to afford a narrow focus on (goods and services) inflation, growth, and employment (the real economy) while letting the balance-sheet side fend for itself.

Over at e! Science News:

Do friends wear the same style of shoe or see the same movies because they have similar tastes, which is why they became friends in the first place? Or once a friendship is established, do individuals influence each other to adopt like behaviors? Social scientists don’t know for sure. They’re still trying to understand the role social influence plays in the spreading of trends because the real world doesn’t keep track of how people acquire new items or preferences.

But the virtual world Second Life does. Researchers from the University of Michigan have taken advantage of this unique information to study how “gestures” make their way through this online community. Gestures are code snippets that Second Life avatars must acquire in order to make motions such as dancing, waving or chanting.

Roughly half of the gestures the researchers studied made their way through the virtual world friend by friend.

“We could have found that most everyone goes to the store to buy gestures, but it turns out about 50 percent of gesture transfers are between people who have declared themselves friends. The social networks played a major role in the distribution of these assets,” said Lada Adamic, an assistant professor in the School of Information and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Daniel Gross in The New York Times:

The financial meltdown has sent the literary-minded scurrying back to the classics for insight and succor. The dastardly exploits of the Ponzi artist Bernie Madoff call to mind “The Great Gatsby” or “The Way We Live Now.” At a time when hard-core free-marketeers like Richard Posner are questioning the efficacy of capitalism, the works of Karl Marx are being fished out of the dustbin of history. Most classic critiques of capitalism are much-mentioned but little-read, the sort of books people routinely cite without really knowing what’s in them. In the interest of understanding our suddenly imperiled passion for private jets and $5,000 handbags, I recently dusted off — literally — one of those classics, Thorstein Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class,” published in 1899.

In the book, Veblen — whom C. Wright Mills called “the best critic of America that America has ever produced” — dissected the habits and mores of a privileged group that was exempt from industrial toil and distinguished by lavish expenditures. His famous phrase “conspicuous consumption” referred to spending that satisfies no need other than to build prestige, a cultural signifier intended to intimidate and impress. In this age of repossessed yachts, half-finished McMansions and broken-down leveraged buyouts, Veblen proves that a 110-year-old sociological vivisection of the financial overclass can still be au courant. Yet while Veblen frequently reads as still 100 percent right on the foibles of the rich, when it comes to an actual theory of the contemporary leisure class, he now comes off as about 90 percent wrong.

More here.

From The Guardian:

This is an eloquent and interesting book, although you do not quite get what it says on the tin. Karen Armstrong takes the reader through a history of religious practice in many different cultures, arguing that in the good old days and purest forms they all come to much the same thing. They use devices of ritual, mystery, drama, dance and meditation in order to enable us better to cope with the vale of tears in which we find ourselves. Religion is therefore properly a matter of a practice, and may be compared with art or music. These are similarly difficult to create, and even to appreciate. But nobody who has managed either would doubt that something valuable has happened in the process. We come out of the art gallery or concert hall enriched and braced, elevated and tranquil, and may even fancy ourselves better people, though the change may or may not be noticed by those around us.

This is religion as it should be, and, according to Armstrong, as it once was in all the world's best traditions. However, there is a serpent in this paradise, as in others. Or rather, several serpents, but the worst is the folly of intellectualising the practice. This makes it into a matter of belief, argument, and ultimately dogma. It debases religion into a matter of belief in a certain number of propositions, so that if you can recite those sincerely you are an adept, and if you can't you fail. This is Armstrong's principal target. With the scientific triumphs of the 17th century, religion stopped being a practice and started to become a theory – in particular the theory of the divine architect. This is a perversion of anything valuable in religious practice, Armstrong writes, and it is only this perverted view that arouses the scorn of modern “militant” atheists. So Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris have chosen a straw man as a target. Real religion is serenely immune to their discovery that it is silly to talk of a divine architect.

More here.

From The City Journal:

Herbert George Wells was already a renowned writer of fiction when in 1901 he published the nonfiction work Anticipations of the Reactions of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought. The book’s scientific prescriptions to cure social diseases turned the novelist into a seer, both in England and in America, where Anticipations had already been serialized in the North American Review. More than any other intellectual of the time, Wells spoke to two enormous nineteenth-century shifts: the growth of giant industries, which undercut the old assumptions about the sovereignty of the individual; and Darwinism’s concussive reassignment of humanity from the spiritual to the natural world, which begged for prophets of a naturalized humanity.

Numerous fin de siècle writers had looked backward at a century of material and mechanical progress, both to praise its achievements and to condemn its running sore, the seemingly permanent misery of the urban working class. But Wells looked ahead, asserting that the future as well as the past had a pattern. He argued inductively about the nature of what was likely to come, based on the way the telephone, telegraph, and railroad had shrunk the world, and he populated his predictions with a dramatic cast of collective characters. Some he loathed: the idle, parasitic rich; the “vicious helpless pauper masses,” the “People of the Abyss”; and the yapping politicians and yellow journalists whom he considered instruments of patriotism and war.

More here.

Roger Burback in CounterPunch:

The coup against Manuel Zelaya of Honduras represents a last ditch effort by Honduras’ entrenched economic and political interests to stave off the advance of the new left governments that have taken hold in Latin America over the past decade. As Zelaya proclaimed after being forcibly dumped in Costa Rica: “This is a vicious plot planned by elites. The elites only want to keep the country isolated and in extreme poverty.”

Zelaya should know, since his roots are in the country’s large, land-owning class, having devoted most of his life to agriculture and forestry enterprises that he inherited. He ran for president as the head of the center-right Liberal Party on a fairly conservative platform, promising to be tough on crime and to cut the budget. Inaugurated in January, 2006, he supported the US-backed Central American Free Trade Agreement, which been signed two years earlier, and continued the economic policies of neo-liberalism, privatizing state held enterprises.

But about half way into his four year term, the winds of change blowing from the south caught his imagination, particularly those coming from Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, the largest regional power fronting on the Caribbean. With no petroleum resources, Honduras signed a generous oil subsidy deal with Venezuela, and then last year joined the emergent regional trade bloc, ALBA, the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas. Inspired by Venezuela it now has Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Dominica and Ecuador as members. Simultaneously, Zelaya implemented domestic reform policies, significantly increasing the minimum wage of workers and teachers’ salaries, while stepping up spending in health care and education.

More here. [Thanks to Isabel Toledo.]

Andy Coghlan in New Scientist:

Shootings and killings in deprived areas of Chicago and Baltimore have plummeted by between 41 and 73 per cent thanks to a programme that treats violence as if it is an infectious disease.

Pioneers of the programme, called CeaseFire, say it relies on simultaneously changing attitudes and behaviour and will work anywhere.

The key is to change social norms so that violence is seen as “uncool” both by potential perpetrators and their communities, instead of being the automatic way to settle a dispute.

On 30 June, pioneers of the programme publicised their high success rate so far to attract interest at a time in the year when violence peaks, triggered by the heat.

“Violence gets transmitted the same way as other communicable diseases, so we train 'violence interruptors' to prevent escalation,” says Gary Slutkin, founder and executive director of CeaseFire.

“They change the norm from 'violence is what's expected of me' to 'violence will make me look stupid',” says Slutkin.

More here.

Sean Wilentz in The New Republic:

The past three generations of historians have agreed that Abraham Lincoln was probably the best president in American history and that Franklin Pierce was one of the worst. Pierce, a New Hampshire Democrat, gave political cover to fractious slaveholders and their violent supporters in the 1850s. His softness on the slavery issue encouraged the southern truculence that later led to secession and the formation of the Confederacy. Apart from their closeness in age–the bicentennial of Pierce's birth passed virtually unnoticed four and a half years ago–about the only things that he and Lincoln had in common were their preoccupation with politics and their success in reaching the White House.

When Pierce ran for president in 1852, Lincoln, naturally, campaigned against him. But the cause of the Whig party was extremely feeble in Illinois that year. (The Whigs, originally formed in opposition to Andrew Jackson, were a national coalition of pro-business conservatives, reformers who supported economic development, and moderate southern planters. Lincoln remained a staunch Whig loyalist until the party crumbled in 1854.) And so Lincoln limited himself to a long speech in Springfield–it took him two days to deliver it!–which he abridged and repeated in Peoria. The speech did nothing to affect the outcome of the election, in Illinois or in the country at large. But it deserves to be remembered in these days of Lincoln idolatry, because it can be disturbing reading to anyone inclined to worship Father Abraham.

More here.

The early part of the century saw an explosion of literature with the hotel at its heart, reflecting a period of enormous social change on both sides of the Atlantic. At the same time that the work that Matthias explores was being written—Kafka, Stefan Zweig Franz Werfel, Joseph Roth, Thomas Mann—American writers such as Edith Wharton, Henry James and Sinclair Lewis too wrote about hotels. And British writers like Rosamond Lehmann, Jean Rhys, Evelyn Waugh and Elizabeth Bowen all made use of the literary hotel in their fiction, at a time when travelogues (JB Priestly, George Orwell) also abounded. The hotel as an institution is a product of the transnational industrialisation and development that took place at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, and thus an important vantage point from which to observe that change. The emergence of a bourgeois leisure class and the shift from a sedentary to a travelling society was reflected in literature with a focus on newly created modern spaces. These began to prise apart the strict boundaries between public and private that had hitherto been so important in the consolidation of a bourgeois identity. Ironically, one of the novels that best captures this moment was published in 1997. Steven Millhauser’s Pulitzer prize-winning Martin Dressler is a fairytale-like invocation of fin-de-siècle New York. Dressler, a flâneur who spends his life in semi-public spaces, watching and speculating, neither at home nor dislocated from home, neither alone nor part of a group, rises from humble beginnings to own a chain of hotels.

more from Monica Ali at Prospect here.

Some time after James Baldwin arrived in Istanbul he settled in Gumussuyu, a neighbourhood that hangs on the side of one of the city’s many hills, above the Golden Horn, the shores of Asia, and even the Sea of Marmara. Baldwin was a drinker, and one of his favourite neighbourhood spots was the Park Hotel. These days that glamorous meeting place is a terrible hulking carcass of a stunted building project, all grey, barren floors and trash heaps, stray dogs barking at nothing all hours of the day. Both vistas – the fabled view, the hovering skeleton – loom outside the living room windows of the great Turkish actor Engin Cezzar, who was largely responsible for Baldwin’s little-known sojourn in Turkey, where he lived on and off throughout the 1960s. When I went to visit Cezzar last winter, a collection of letters between Baldwin and Cezzar had just been showcased in an Istanbul bookstore along with Baldwin’s translated works, and I told Cezzar I’d bought them. He scowled: “Don’t read Jimmy Baldwin in Turkish, for Christ’s sake.” Cezzar seemed proud of his book, and his special friendship with “Jimmy,” but he had priorities. He prized Baldwin as one thing above all else: a writer.

more from Suzy Hansen at The National here.

In 1945, Pablo Picasso was invited to illustrate the elegiac Le Chant des morts, a book of poems by Pierre Reverdy that contemplates mortality after World War I. Yet when the publisher sent him a sample written in the poet’s handwriting, Picasso thought it “almost a drawing in itself.” Inspired by the shape of Reverdy’s script, Picasso crafted bright red, fanciful calligraphic images for the book, offsetting the poems’ melancholy and calling attention to the material presence of the page itself—what art historian Irene Small refers to as “a registration of painting pulled into the physical space of writing.” Picasso had long been fascinated with the correspondence between image and text; in his “papiers collés,” 1912–14, he famously collaged fragments of newspaper, inviting the viewer to read into the surface of the canvas; later, he treated newspaper pages as grids on which he composed figural drawings and paintings. Picasso also tried his hand at writing. In 1935, suffering from a bout of artist’s block, he stopped painting and, for one year, zealously wrote poems instead. (His friend and patron Gertrude Stein was not a fan.) In reconciling his personal obstacles as an artist, Picasso declared, “i will no longer paint the arrow / we see in the drop of water / trembling in the morning.” Here, he rejects not only representation (pointing where to look and how) but also signification (painting as a visual trick that portends something it is not). But without these foundations, how would he paint?

more from Stefanie Sobelle at Bookforum here.

From History Today:

It is 40 years since Neil Armstrong took his ‘giant leap for mankind’ on the early summer morning of July 20th, 1969. It was the high point of a vast and expensive space programme initiated by President John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s which ended when Apollo 17’s lunar module lifted off from the Moon on December 14th, 1972. In just under three and a half years, 12 US astronauts walked on the Moon, drove around in their Moon buggy and thrilled television viewers around the world with their barely believable pantomime on a celestial body 236,000 miles from Earth.

The end came suddenly and space has not captured the public’s attention in the same way since, except, in a very different way, in response to the tragedies of the space shuttles Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. The Apollo programme had to compete for attention with other major events: the large-scale unrest in the US over civil rights and against the Vietnam war; then, less than a year after the last Apollo mission, the Watergate scandal which brought down President Nixon. Throughout these upheavals, astronauts walked on the Moon, flew the American flag and displayed the might of US technology and resources to massive global audiences in what remains, arguably, the greatest technical achievement of mankind.

More here.

Driving Lesson
Renay

I learned to drive on this road flattened between
cornfield and pasture. my stick legs folded onto daddy's lap
the sun white off the Plymouth hood, ribboned
down a windshield crack. careful. so careful, I
curved the wheel between a shallow grade to the corn
and a runoff ditch where tadpoles swam together
like bee swarms then exploded apart, comma bodies
shooting from the huddle at a stone drop in the water

daddy whistled The Year that Clayton Delaney Died
to the back of my neck while I crisscrossed the car over dust ruts.
sixteen blocks in the city. out here it was
twenty rows of irrigation pipe, two mailboxes, Fred's pig shed.
I never saw Fred's pigs but my cousin Janell did.

I swayed through every slouch in the road, passed the truck cab
splotched rust and green hunkering in a blackberry tangle.
every year those berries plumped out fat and sweet,
then wrinkled to dry nubs while we watched from the fence line
where a bull waited to stick little girls on his yellow horns.

we snuck a bath towel out once, Clorox white with fat red roses
spilled across it. we shook it at him but he stood bull still
watching us run to the fence, shake the towel, then scramble away.
he stood bull still while those red red bullfighter roses flashed at him
so we proclaimed him colorblind.

I watched from the toolshed while he stood still again when they
shot him then rolled his stomach, red and white like the towel,
onto the pasture. I wasn't afraid of him humped over on the grass.
that sticky mat of blood made me want to charge at them, gore them
through the fence with my imaginary horns

on the day they butchered, I touched him for the first time. his
horns as thick as my forearm, round on the end
not ice pick sharp. all summer we ate beef for supper. beef
and unguarded blackberries that stained our faces purple.

I learned to steer on this road.

from: Agnieszka’s Dowry

My old friend Jyri, who, along with Marko Ahtisaari, got me started blogging:

India moves closer to civil rights for all its citizens, in the Hindustan Times:

It observed that the inclusiveness that the Indian society traditionally displayed in every aspect of life manifested in recognising a role in society for everyone.

“Those perceived by the majority as ‘deviants’ or ‘different’ are not on that score excluded or ostracised,” the Chief Justice writing the judgement for the Bench, said.

Where society can display inclusiveness and understanding, such persons can be assured of a life of dignity and non-discrimination, it said.

“This was the spirit behind the resolution of which Jawaharlal Nehru spoke so passionately,” the Bench said referring to the Objective Resolution moved by him on December 13, 1946 at the Constituent Assembly debate.

Quoting Nehru, Justice Shah said “words are magic things often enough, even the magic of words sometimes cannot convey magic of human spirit and of a nation’s passion …(this resolution seeks very feebly to tell the world of what we have thought or dreamt of so long, and what we now hope to achieve in near future)”.

He said Nehru was of the view that the House should consider the resolution not in a spirit of narrow legal wording, but rather look at the spirit behind that resolution.

The Bench was critical of the provision of section 377 of IPC holding that “a provision of law branding one section of people as criminal based wholly on states’ moral disapproval of that class goes counter to equality guaranteed in the Constitution.”

“The provision of section 377 runs counter to the Constitutional values and the notion of human dignity which is considered to be cornerstone of our constitution.

Cass Sunstein in The Spectator:

Some years ago, a number of citizens of France were assembled into small groups to exchange views about their president and about the intentions of the United States with respect to foreign aid. Before they started to talk, the participants tended to like their president and to distrust the intentions of the United States. After they talked, some strange things happened. Those who began by liking their president ended up liking their president significantly more. And those who expressed mild distrust toward the United States moved in the direction of far greater distrust. The small groups of French citizens became more extreme. As a result of their discussions, they were more enthusiastic about their leader, and far more sceptical of the United States, than similar people in France who had not been brought together to speak with one another.

This tale reveals a general fact of social life: much of the time groups of people end up thinking and doing things that group members would never think or do on their own. This is true for groups of teenagers, who are willing to run risks that individuals would avoid. It is certainly true for those prone to violence, including terrorists and those who commit genocide. It is true for investors and corporate executives. It is true for government officials, neighbourhood groups, social reformers, political protestors, police officers, student organisations, labour unions and juries. Some of the best and worst developments in social life are a product of group dynamics, in which members of organisations, both small and large, move one another in new directions.

Lincoln Mitchell in The Huffington Post:

Throughout his presidential campaign, but more notably, during his presidency, President Obama has shown himself to have an impressive ability to accumulate political capital. During his tenure in the White House, Obama has done this by reaching out to a range of constituencies, moderating some of his programs, pursuing middle of the road approaches on key foreign policy questions and, not insignificantly, working to ensure that his approval rating remains quite high.

Political capital is not, however, like money, it cannot be saved up interminably while its owner waits for the right moment to spend it. Political capital has a shelf life, and often not a very long one. If it is not used relatively quickly, it dissipates and becomes useless to its owner. This is the moment in which Obama, who has spent the first few months of his presidency diligently accumulating political capital, now finds himself. The next few months will be a key time for Obama. If Obama does not spend this political capital during the next months, it will likely be gone by the New Year anyway.

Katha Pollitt in The Nation:

I thought President Obama’s Cairo speech was basically fine: begin anew, extend the hand, reject “crude stereotypes” all around, turn the page on the Christian triumphalism of the Bush years. But there’s no denying that the section on women’s rights was rather minimal, just three paragraphs, compared with his long discourse on Israel and Palestine; and to my American ears its priorities were a bit odd. You would think the biggest issue for Muslim women is that someone is preventing them from wearing a headscarf: “The US government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab and to punish those who would deny it,” he said. “I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal.” Fair enough, but that woman is choosing. What about Saudi or Iranian women, who are forced by law to cover? Obama noted that countries where women are well educated tend to be more prosperous and promised American aid for women’s literacy and microloans. These are both good things, especially in desperately poor and underdeveloped countries like Afghanistan; but face it, to become full participants in modern societies women need more than a grade school education and a sewing machine. They need their rights. In fact, some Muslim countries, like Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, already have large numbers of highly educated women–in Iran, as in America, more young women go to college than men. But those women are prevented from working to their capacity, or even at all, by religiously motivated sex discrimination. In Saudi Arabia, women can’t even work in lingerie stores. By a quirk of the gender-apartheid regulations, only men can sell ladies’ underwear. So much for “modesty”: when there’s money to be made from women, you can be sure the theocrats will figure out a reason that God wants it to go into men’s pockets.