Paul Davidson offers some ideas:

A very harsh review, in New Left Review:

Perlstein’s larger historical focus, however, is near glaucoma. His narrative chugs through the late 60s and early 70s, offering scenes that are drearily familiar from the scores of contemporary accounts cited in his many pages of footnotes. The result is prolix, bland and humdrum. The style is indescribable. Here is a sample, from his account of Nixon’s response to a newspaper column by Roscoe Drummond suggesting that he needed to de-escalate in Vietnam, otherwise ‘popular opinion will roll over him as it did lbj’:

At which Nixon thundered upon his printed news summary . . . ‘Tell him that rn is less affected by press criticism and opinion than any Pres in recent memory’. Because he was the president most affected by press criticism and opinion of any president in recent memory. Which if known would make him look weak. And any escalatory bluff would be impossible. Which would keep him from credibility as a de-escalator; which would block his credibility as an escalator; which would stymie his ability to de-escalate; and then he couldn’t ‘win’ in Vietnam—which in his heart he didn’t believe was possible anyway. Through the looking glass with Richard Nixon: this stuff was better than lsd.

From October 9, 2007 talk at the Heyman Center for the Humanities, a video.

Barnett Rubin and Ahmed Rashid in Project Syndicate:

Afghanistan has been at war for three decades, and that war is spreading to Pakistan and beyond. A time-out needs to be called so that the players, including President-elect Barack Obama, can negotiate a new bargain for the region.

Securing Afghanistan and its region will require an international presence for many years. Building up Afghanistan’s security forces is at most a stopgap measure, as the country cannot sustain forces of the size that it now needs. Only a regional and global agreement to place Afghanistan’s stability above other objectives can make long-term stability possible by enabling Afghanistan to survive with security forces that it can afford. Such agreement, however, will require political and diplomatic initiatives both inside and outside of the country.

In an effort to lighten up dark days humans invented gallows humor. Gallows humor is a variation of whistling past the graveyard. Whistling past the graveyard is itself a reaction to looking for silver linings and finding none —not under bank vaults, in the recesses of broom closets in the US Treasury, nor among wisps of pocket lint in the suit of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, nowhere. And looking for clouds with silver linings in the middle of a Class 5 typhoon is either a sign of rank desperation or a futile search for the last shred of the flag of hope straining horizontally in a fierce wind longing to be let loose and put out of its misery.

Anyway, people like to laugh about disaster. Keeping to this tradition, and in this spirit, I've discovered some poetic responses to financial collapse I thought might be appropriate as the U.S. Congress spars with the President in a game of chicken regarding the bailout of the U.S. auto industry. You'll find these below.

(To all poetry purists out there: take a vacation; don't waste your breath on comments about aesthetics or the absence of excellence, or complain that this is not Shakespeare …I know, I know.)

…..The Sound of Wall Street', by Mary Levai, the editor of Bill Fleckenstein's daily Market Rap:

Raindrops on Wall Street and whiskers on nitwits
Bright copper futures and false affidavits
Brown paper stock options tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things.

Opaque financials as layered as strudels
Dead fish as upright as overcooked noodles
Net-income forecasts with phony ka-chings
These are a few of my favorite things.

Funds' window dressing in evergreen sashes
Flaky financials from lax lads and lasses
Fed easing summers, fall, winter and springs
These are a few of my favorite things.

When the Dow bites
When the Sox stings
When I'm feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don't feel so bad.

Bailouts for bumblers, and bankruptcy rumors
C-E-O car chiefs stripped down to bloomers
Twenty-five billion to rank ding-a-lings
These are a few of my favorite things

When all graphs slump
As all banks cling
When I'm far from glad
I simply remember my favorite things
Then I go stark, raving mad.

Leverage is… (Part 1), from Cassandra, of Cassandra Does Tokyo:

leverage is
as leverage does
increasing the fizz
as well as the buzz

it has no emotion
keeping no friends
its not magic potion
just what a bank lends

treat it with caution
do treat it with care
else abusing its fractions
might cause you to swear

'course when in a bull
it will certainly yield
buckets more full
wiv wotever you've stealed

but…if in a bear
be you levered and long
the loss that you'll wear
makes you ev'r more wrong

Or how about some verse with a little graphic punch? Here's Broker Joe (very Suessian). Check it out.

And from past busts (so as not to feel singled out by fate), Thomas Love Peacock, 1825:

Read more »

From The Guardian:

New excerpts from Darwin's letters and diaries, along with contemporary cartoons and photographs, show how his revolutionary On the Origin of Species was received.

From Harvard Magazine:

Barack Obama’s election represents the fulfillment of a dream that once seemed unfathomable, writes Fletcher University Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of Harvard’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research:

Given all of the racism to which black people were subjected following Reconstruction and throughout the first half of the 20th century, no one could actually envision a Negro becoming president—“not in our lifetimes,” as our ancestors used to say. When James Earl Jones became America’s first black fictional president in the 1972 film, The Man, I remember thinking, “Imagine that!” His character, Douglass Dilman, the president pro tempore of the Senate, ascends to the presidency after the president and the Speaker of the House are killed in a building collapse, and after the vice president declines the office due to advanced age and ill health. A fantasy if ever there was one, we thought.

Writing on theroot.com, Gates notes how much things have changed in his own lifetime:

It is astounding to think that many of us today—myself included—can remember when it was a huge deal for a black man or woman to enter the White House through the front door, and not through the servants’ entrance.

For much of our country’s history, African-Americans visited the White House to make a political statement; Gates outlines that tradition, from sea captain Paul Cuffe, who visited James Madison in 1812, through Frederick Douglass’s three visits to Abraham Lincoln, to the Civil Rights movement. Black visitors remained an anomaly in much more recent times, he writes:

During Bill Clinton's presidency, I attended a White House reception with so many black political, academic, and community leaders that it occurred to me that there hadn’t been as many black people in the Executive Mansion perhaps since slavery. Everyone laughed at the joke, because they knew, painfully, that it was true.

And Gates gives readers this prescient passage from a 1958 Esquire magazine essay by Senator Jacob Javits, the moderate Republican from New York:

What manner of man will this be, this possible Negro Presidential candidate of 2000? Undoubtedly, he will be well-educated. He will be well-traveled and have a keen grasp of his country’s role in the world and its relationships. He will be a dedicated internationalist with working comprehension of the intricacies of foreign aid, technical assistance and reciprocal trade. … Assuredly, though, despite his other characteristics, he will have developed the fortitude to withstand the vicious smear attacks that came his way as he fought to the top in government and politics … those in the vanguard may expect to be the targets for scurrilous attacks, as the hate mongers, in the last ditch efforts, spew their verbal and written poison.

More here.

Earlier this year, a young novelist named Keith Gessen published his first book. Even more than most such debuts, All the Sad Young Literary Men was highly autobiographical: it had several narrators, but each were recognizable as versions of the writer, and the real-life originals of even minor characters could easily be identified. The novelist’s own ambition was the book’s major theme, and in a sense its writing was less important than its publication, which consummated the drive for recognition that was both its inspiration and its subject. Because of this self-reflexive quality, the book took on a kind of symbolic significance. It was an almost chemically pure example of the kind of literary ambition that has less to do with wanting to write well than with wanting to be known as a writer. The limitations of this kind of ambition could be seen in the book’s reception, not so much in the print reviews as on the Internet, where it became the target of extraordinarily virulent attacks. Attacks, not criticism, for in the discussion of All the Sad Young Literary Men on several blogs and one popular website, literary criticism in the ordinary sense played almost no role. Its detractors had little to say about its plot, characters, or prose style; more curiously, perhaps, neither did Gessen, when he took to the Internet to defend himself. Both writer and readers treated the book, properly, as an assertion of self, and the only question was whether that assertion ought to succeed—whether Gessen ought to become famous.

more from Poetry here.

On April 27, 1982, less than two months before his death from cancer, John Cheever appeared at Carnegie Hall to accept the National Medal for Literature. While his colleagues stood and cheered (“John had nothing but friends,” said Malcolm Cowley), Cheever hobbled across the stage with the help of his wife, Mary. Months of cancer treatment had left him bald and pitifully frail, shrunken, but his voice was firm as he spoke. In his journal he’d referred to this occasion as his “Exodus” and reminded himself that literature was “the salvation of the damned”—the lesson of his own life, surely, and the gist of what he said that day at Carnegie Hall. “A page of good prose,” he declared, “remains invincible.” Seven years before—his marriage on the rocks, most of his books out of print—Cheever had tried drinking himself to death. He was teaching at Boston University, beset by ghosts from his awful childhood in nearby Quincy: “There were whole areas of the city I couldn’t go into,” he said later. “I couldn’t, for example, go to Symphony Hall because my mother was there.” (His mother—resplendent in a coral-embroidered, homemade dress—used to attend concerts at Symphony Hall but refused to bring tickets: “Young man,” she’d say, “I am Mrs. F. Lincoln Cheever and my seats are number 14 and 15.”)

more from VQR here.

Who can ever tire of learning about the great discoveries in physics during the first forty years of the twentieth century, and about the men and women who were responsible? The benchmark texts are the surveys and biographies written by the late physicist and historian Abraham Pais, though all the essentials are gathered in a more condensed—and, to my taste, somewhat more digestible—form in the relevant chapters in William H. Cropper’s Great Physicists (2001). Now here is Gino Segrè with an original and worthwhile contribution to the field. Faust in Copenhagen is an exceptionally thorough account of the emergence of modern quantum mechanics over the years from 1925 to 1933, aimed at a general reader—which is to say, there are no equations. This is a difficult story to tell in any straightforward way. So many different and concurrent threads have to be woven together that a simply chronological narrative can’t be given. Some more subtle organizing principle is called for. Segrè has used the Copenhagen conference of April 1932 as his focus, returning repeatedly to it, and to its participants, as a way of keeping us oriented.

more from The New Atlantis here.

Elephants, like many of us, enjoy a good malted beverage when they can get it. At least twice in the past ten years, herds in India have stumbled upon barrels of rice beer, drained them with their trunks, and gone on drunken rampages. (The first time, they trampled four villagers; the second time they uprooted a pylon and electrocuted themselves.) Howler monkeys, too, have a taste for things fermented. In Panama, they’ve been seen consuming overripe palm fruit at the rate of ten stiff drinks in twenty minutes. Even flies have a nose for alcohol. They home in on its scent to lay their eggs in ripening fruit, insuring their larvae a pleasant buzz. Fruit-fly brains, much like ours, are wired for inebriation. The seductions of drink are wound deep within us. Which may explain why, two years ago, when John Gasparine was walking through a forest in southern Paraguay, his thoughts turned gradually to beer.

more from The New Yorker here.

///
Lacquer
Tomaz Salamun

Destiny rolls over me. Sometimes like an egg. Sometimes
with its paws, slamming me into the slope. I shout. I take
my stand. I pledge all my juices. I shouldn’t
do this. Destiny can snuff me out, I feel it now.

If destiny doesn’t blow on our souls, we freeze
instantly. I spent days and days afraid
the sun wouldn’t rise. That this was my last day.
I felt light sliding from my hands, and if I didn’t

have enough quarters in my pocket, and Metka’s voice
were not sweet enough and kind and
solid and real, my soul would escape from my body, as one day

it will. With death you have to be kind.
Home is where we’re from. Everything in a moist dumpling.
We live only for a flash. Until the lacquer dries.

From The Four Question of Melancholy (White Pine Press, 1997) 
///

From The Root:

For generations, The Mommy Wars have largely skipped black women. For most of us, staying at home to raise our children full-time was never a choice. Our families’ survival depended on our wages—often earned from nurturing and caring for white families. With the rise of a post-civil rights generation, a critical mass of high-powered black women like the Princeton and Harvard-trained first lady Michelle Obama, have more options than ever. After gaining the educational credentials our mothers and grandmothers could only have dreamed of, many of us have exulted and rejoiced in having the choice to stay at home and raise our own children—a decision celebrated by black stay-at-home mothers’ groups like “Mocha Moms.”

As Michelle prepares to move to the White House to become “mom in chief,” the always racially-charged Mommy Wars have reached new heights. In a joint effort with NPR’s daily talk show Tell Me More, The Root has brought together four accomplished mothers—Rebecca Walker, Jolene Ivey, Leslie Morgan Steiner and Anna Perez—to share their takes on Michelle’s choices. With viewpoints that are funny, brash and bracing, the four women bring controversial and conflicting perspectives that are sure to spark spirited and downright-heated discussions about Michelle’s—and all women’s—choices.

The End of Feminism As We Know It?

by Rebecca Walker, author Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence

When Michelle Obama prioritized her life over her career in a widely viewed television interview, I cheered. Feminism’s slippery promise of diversity has long been built around white centrism, its monopoly by women over 50, its de facto placement of the rest of us in the margins. Michelle’s rise challenges that centrism. She so embodies feminist goals that she surpasses them. How will white feminists deal with that?

More here.

From Scientific American:

The empty highway stretches straight out to the horizon, so I take a moment to peek at the electronic display down in the car’s center console. I read out the numbers on the screen swiftly and glance back to the windshield, when I see … nothing. A dense fog has swallowed the roadway, and I am driving blind. Before I can feel for the foot brake, an unmistakable warning—a brake-light red rectangle—flashes onto the windshield. Without another thought, I slam hard on the pedal, cursing loudly. My vehicle comes to a hasty halt as a disabled car emerges abruptly from the murk dead ahead. Before I can even exhale, bright lights burn all around, and laughter rings out incongruously through the passenger cabin. I remember suddenly that I’m sitting inside the VIRTTEX (VIRtual Test Track EXperiment) driving simulator lab at Ford’s Research and Innovation Center in Dearborn, Mich. The big, egg-shaped simulator dome enables specialists there to conduct driving tests under totally safe but highly convincing virtual-reality conditions. The disembodied mirth on the intercom is the control-room technicians having a chuckle over my brief discomfiture.

For the past quarter of an hour they have thrown various tasks at me—each one designed to demonstrate the dangers of driving while distracted. One of my jobs—the last one, in fact—had been to look down at the central display when asked and call out the numbers that appeared there without losing control of the vehicle. Glances away from the road that are longer than two seconds double the odds of a crash or near crash. During the follow-up debriefing, Mike Blommer, technical leader at the VIRTTEX lab, tells me that the windshield alarm that popped up during the final task is a visual alert generated by a forward-collision warning unit on Volvos. The system acts like an electronic guardian angel, monitoring traffic up front with radars and cameras and signaling the driver when it senses danger. The warning’s marked resemblance to a standard red brake light is no accident, he notes: “The engineers chose that particular signal because its meaning is intuitively clear to every experienced driver. Even though you’d never seen it before, you knew exactly what it meant and took corrective action.”

More here.

Michael Bond in Nature:

The Dalai Lama is keen for Buddhists and scientists to interact.

In the troubled relationship between science and religion, Buddhism represents something of a singularity, in which the usual rules do not apply. Sharing quests for the big truths about the Universe and the human condition, science and Buddhism seem strangely compatible. At a fundamental level they are not quite aligned, as both these books make clear. But they can talk to each other without the whiff of intellectual or spiritual insult that haunts scientific engagement with other faiths.

The disciplines are compatible for two reasons. First, to a large degree, Buddhism is a study in human development. Unencumbered by a creator deity, it embraces empirical investigation rather than blind faith. Thus it sings from the same hymn-sheet as science. Second, it has in one of its figureheads an energetic champion of science. The current Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of Tibetans, has met regularly with many prominent researchers during the past three decades. He has even written his own book on the interaction between science and Buddhism (The Universe in a Single Atom; Little, Brown; 2006). His motivation is clear from the prologue of that book, which Donald Lopez cites in his latest work Buddhism and Science: for the alleviation of human suffering, we need both science and spirituality.

More here.

Justin Peters in Slate:

Question No. 13 on Barack Obama’s extensive questionnaire for potential members of his administration: “If you have ever sent an electronic communication, including but not limited to an e–mail, text message or instant message, that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect if it were made public, please describe.”

From: Justin Peters
Date: 05/22/1996
Subject: Whoops!

hey all … my first week on e-mail and I’m already screwing it up. yesterday afternoon, I accidentally hit “reply all” and sent everyone in my address book an e-mail that I only meant to send to brad. although this was meant to be humorous, i understand that many of you found it incredibly hurtful. for the record, i don’t really think that all the sophomore girls are “aspiring whores,” and i certainly don’t think that beth jervey is a fat and stupid hooker who never takes a shower. i also was kidding when i said those things about mrs. wenzel, beth jervey’s father, and people of irish heritage. finally, i did not mean to attach that photograph of my balls. please delete that photograph asap.

More here:

Alex Cooley in the Wall Street Journal:

By upholding the sanctity of Georgia’s territorial integrity, the European Union and the United States signal to Abkhazia’s de facto government that Moscow remains its only reliable partner and security guarantor. Conversely, Moscow’s recognition of the two breakaway regions — which Russia insists must fully participate in the negotiations — sets an unacceptable legal precedent and intends to reward Russian military actions in Georgia.

Yet there is an intermediary sovereign formula that could bridge the two absolutist positions. While neither restoring Georgia’s territorial integrity nor recognizing Abkhazia’s independence is acceptable to all sides at the moment, Abkhazia could be placed under an international system of trusteeship or supervised administration. Similar to the processes in Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor, the United Nations would authorize international organizations to work with Abkhaz authorities to improve the territory’s economic and governing capacity and democratic institutions. By placing Abkhazia under international administration for an initial period of, say, 10 years, the status issue could be deferred until the parties may be better prepared to resume peaceful talks.

Obama’s politics is governed by an anti-political fantasy. It is the call to find common ground, the put aside our differences and achieve union. Obama’s politics is governed by a longing for unity, for community, for communion and the common good. The remedy to the widespread disillusion with Bush’s partisan politics is a reaffirmation of the founding act of the United States, the hope of the more perfect union expressed in the opening sentence of the US Constitution. It is a powerful moral strategy whose appeal to the common good attempts to draw a veil over the agonism and power relations constitutive of political life. The great lie of moralism in politics is that it attempts to deny the fact of power by concealing it under an anti-political veneer. At the same time, moralism engages in the most brutal and bruising political activity. But the reality of this activity is always disavowed along with any and all forms of partisanship. Moralistic politics is essentially hypocritical.

Yet, what is most hypocritical, of course, is the talk of change. What are the elements of Obama’s strategy? Let me identify three. Firstly, we have a depoliticized moral discourse of the common good, backed up by a soft and inoffensive version of historically black Christianity. Obama inhabits the rhetorical space of prophetic, black Christianity, while adopting none of its critical radicalism, none of the audacity that one can find in the sermons of Pastor Jeremiah Wright.

more from AdBusters here.

In January of 2009—on New Year’s Day, to be precise—it will have been half a century since the brave and bearded ones entered Havana and chased Fulgencio Batista and his cronies (carrying much of the Cuban treasury with them) off the island. Now the chief of the bearded ones is a doddering and trembling figure, who one assumes can only be hanging on in order to be physically present for the 50th birthday of his “revolution.” It’s of some interest to notice that one of the ways in which he whiles away the time is the self-indulgence of religion, most especially the improbable religion of Russian Orthodoxy.

Ever since the upheaval in his own intestines that eventually forced him to cede power to his not-much-younger brother, Raúl, Fidel Castro has been seeking (and easily enough finding) an audience for his views in the Cuban press. Indeed, now that he can no longer mount the podium and deliver an off-the-cuff and uninterruptable six-hour speech, there are two state-run newspapers that don’t have to compete for the right to carry his regular column. Pick up a copy of the Communist Party’s daily Granma (once described by radical Argentine journalist Jacobo Timerman as “a degradation of the act of reading”) or of the Communist youth paper Juventud Rebelde (Rebel Youth), and in either organ you can read the moribund musings of the maximum leader.

more from Slate here.