Tag: history

A Room For Books

Posted on by Herbert Harris

by Herbert Harris

The greatest privilege of my childhood was growing up in a house where books had their own room.

My father’s library occupied the second floor, the only room without a window air-conditioning unit. On summer afternoons in Washington, DC, when the heat and humidity pressed down like a weight, the rest of the house hummed and rattled with machines straining to keep up. The air in the library stayed stubbornly still. It was the early 1970s, and I was on summer break after tenth grade, retreating there to find the peculiar solitude this room alone offered. Each book I opened sent up a cloud of dust that glittered in the angled sunlight. Shutting the door turned the room into a sauna, but in that quiet stillness, I didn’t mind. It felt like the price of admission to a different world.

The previous summer had unfolded differently. I had just finished ninth grade, where we surveyed the classics of English literature and retraced the decisive moments of Western civilization, reliving the deeds of its great men and women. I spent long afternoons in the library, sinking into those books as the heat pooled around me. I melted into a reclining chair and wandered through the past. That immersion had felt complete, even sufficient. But this summer, I arrived with a different appetite. I was growing skeptical of the Eurocentric narratives threaded through everything I was learning. I sensed there were other stories and vantage points, and I came looking for them.

I picked up the book I had been reading a few days earlier and turned to the page marked with an index card. I searched for the sentence I remembered, but at first the words slipped past me. James Baldwin was writing about a Swiss village, about children shouting “Neger” as he walked through the snow. Seeing the word on the page registered instantly, not as surprise but as recognition. I had learned early what it meant to be called that name in its American form. That knowledge had settled into my body long before I could articulate it. Read more »

Sunday, November 9, 2025

Canali, Aristocrats, Ant-Men: David Baron on Mars

Posted on by David Kordahl

by David Kordahl

This article is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation with David Baron about his new book, The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America. A video of this conversation is embedded below.

Intro and Percival Lowell Background (0:00)
Origins of the Canal Craze (6:39)
Gathering Evidence for the Canals (10:41)
Scientific Debate with Astronomers (14:02)
Thinking about “Outsider Scientists” (23:35)
Influence of Canals on Culture (27:45)
Reflections on Mars and the Future (32:33)

Intro and Percival Lowell Background

Today I’m speaking with David Baron, a seasoned science writer who has contributed to many major American journalism outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. He was a longtime science correspondent for NPR, and his TED Talk on the experience of solar eclipses has been viewed millions of times. His last book, American Eclipse, won the American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award in 2018. Today we’ll be discussing his new book, The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America.

The “alien craze” in the subtitle of your book is the story of how, for about a decade at the beginning of the twentieth century, many people came to believe that the planet Mars held not only life, but a complex civilization. The person most responsible for popularizing this view as an established scientific fact was Percival Lowell. Lowell functions as a main character in your book.

I want to thank you for joining me today. At what point in your reporting for this book did it become clear that Lowell would function as a central figure in your story?

Oh, pretty much I knew that from the start. I first learned about the so-called “canals on Mars” from Carl Sagan, when I was in high school and watched the Cosmos series on PBS. On an episode about Mars, Sagan talked about this astronomer, Percival Lowell, who at the turn of the last century saw these weird lines on Mars that he believed were irrigation canals. It’s remembered as one of the great blunders in science, because it was an idea that really took off.

What actually surprised me was not that Lowell was my main character, but just how many other people got swept up in this craze—some of them quite prominent, famous scientists and inventors who totally believed that in fact there was the civilization on Mars. It was not just Percival Lowell. It was quite a collection of interesting characters. Read more »

Thursday, November 6, 2025

Four Meditations On Roads And Pathways

Posted on by Mark DeLong

by Mark R. DeLong

A still from the Disney animate movie Cars should a line-up of Cars characters (all automobiles of varying makes and models, including a firetruck). They are lined up under a large banner straddling "Radiator Springs" main street. The sign reads "WELCOME INTERSTATE TRAVELERS." But the trouble is that no interstate travelers have arrived. The cars look somewhat anxious and dismayed.
Still from Cars (2006)

1.

Regular snowmobile trails bored us kids in the closing years of the 1960s. They wound through the woods, dipping here and there just enough to stall my uncle’s boxy old Evinrude machine with its odd orange and too smooth track. My cousins and I wanted slopes—frozen white waves—to test our snow jets as if we had exchanged whining two-cycle engines for surfboards and were scaling waves on Hawaii’s North Shore. The slopes we chose in winter were man-made and, now that I look at them, rather tame. Before winter idled roadbuilding, earthmovers had cut paths for a new “Interstate” outside of town, pushing the hills into the valleys and leaving steeper cut-off grades to bound highway lanes; the earthmovers leveled the roadway through the landscape. For a winter in the 1960s, the highway’s deer fence still lacked, so we could sneak through and leap our snowmobiles over the edge of the snowy wave. We carved track parabolas up to its crest.

That was the story of I-35 near Moose Lake, Minnesota, where I was a child—at least before the wide interstate pavement opened to cars. I’m certain Moose Lake’s town council didn’t have as much fun with the interstate as I did with my cousins that winter. They knew what would happen to town traffic and businesses once the highway opened. It would dwindle and the town with it. The same story played out wherever a “superhighway” cut through the landscape.

They tried to avoid having their town turn into another small place where a gas station or two near the highway ramps would become the only retail businesses, and they had a plan. One could say they hijacked highway traffic to run through the town’s center on two-lane US Highway 61. You couldn’t exit and re-enter the new highway at the same interchange; whoever would get off I-35 would have to run through town to re-enter the interstate on an on-ramp at the opposite end.

It was a cunning plan. It didn’t work. Read more »

Wednesday, October 1, 2025

Protesting With Dignity: From Hiroshima to Silicon Valley:

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Four winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics (left to right): Niels Bohr, James Franck , Albert Einstein, and Isidor Rabi attend a ceremony held at the Princeton Inn in Princeton, New Jersey, where the Technion Institute of Technology awarded honorary degrees to Einstein and Franck (Image: Institute for Advanced Study).

In every generation, young people find causes to champion. Today’s students rally against wars in foreign lands, the environmental record of large companies, the entanglement of Silicon Valley with the Pentagon and China, or the human rights policies of nations like China. These are important causes. In a free country like the United States, protest is not only permitted but celebrated as part of our civic DNA. In fact in a democracy it’s essential: one only has to think of how many petitions and protests were undertaken by women suffragists, by the temperance and the labor movements and by abolitionists to bring about change.

The question is never whether one has the right to protest. The question is how to protest well.

In recent years, I have watched demonstrations take forms that seem more interested in confrontation than persuasion: blocking officials and and other civilians from entering buildings, occupying offices, shouting down speakers, harassing bystanders on their way to work, even destroying property. These actions may satisfy the passions of the moment, but they rarely strengthen the cause. More often they alienate potential allies, harden the opposition, and give critics an excuse to dismiss the substance of the protest altogether. The tragedy is that the cause itself may be just, but the manner of advocacy makes it harder, not easier, for others to listen.

A historical parallel makes the case well. Read more »

Through a Glass, Darkly: America’s Long Misreading of China

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia. By James Bradley

By the time Henry Luce’s LIFE magazine was churning out colorized visions of a democratic, Christian China under the steady hand of Chiang Kai-shek, the die had already been cast. Not in Beijing or Nanjing but in Washington and New Haven, where a potent combination of missionary fantasy, elite delusion, and diplomatic theater spun the most expensive fiction in American foreign policy. It might well turn out to be the most expensive misunderstanding in American history. James Bradley’s fascinating The China Mirage tells that story in a way few books have. It’s less a cautionary tale and more a generational hallucination, one whose ghosts are still rattling around the White House Situation Room today.

This is not a subtle book, and that’s its strength. Bradley writes with the fervor and sardonic tone of a man watching a slow-motion car crash that everyone else mistook for a victory parade. The narrative he unspools is less about China itself and more about the American invention of China, an invention powered by an astonishingly small handful of men: Henry Stimson, Henry Morgenthau, and above all Henry Luce, whose boyhood in China as a missionary’s son formed a kind of mythic cradle for the 20th-century China Lobby. Their China was a Christian China, a Westernized China, a China that never really existed.

This is the mirage of the book’s title, and Bradley makes clear that it has cost America dearly.

At the heart of The China Mirage is a claim that would sound like conspiracy if it weren’t so well-sourced: that Chiang Kai-shek, Madame Chiang, and her brother T. V. Soong orchestrated the most successful foreign public relations campaign in American history. Under the pretext of fighting Japan, they extracted huge sums of money and military hardware from FDR, which either went into their own pockets or flowed toward Chiang’s guerilla war with Mao. With the Soongs’ impeccable English, Wellesley diplomas, and Methodist polish, they seduced a generation of American policymakers into believing that Chiang’s faltering, corrupt regime spoke for China. Luce, with his vast media empire, did the rest, featuring Chiang and Madame Chiang on LIFE’s cover more often than most American celebrities, opening women’s clubs and Manhattan drawing rooms to China donations, and making millions of Americans believe they were elevating the noble Chinese peasant.

The result: billions in aid, doctored diplomatic cables, falsified briefings to the president, and a country misled into war. Read more »

Sunday, July 27, 2025

God Is Dead And No One Cares

Posted on by Kevin Lively

by Kevin Lively

The fragmented Holy Roman Empire (HRE) around 1000 AD in many senses formed the kernel of all subsequent geopolitics in Central Europe. Lotharingia originally comprised the territories stretching from the Netherlands in the north to Burgundy in modern south-eastern France. Lorraine, whose name derives from this region, was in perennial dispute between French and German elites from the treaty of Verdun (843 AD) until WWII. The Eastern Slavic-Hungarian Marches, or border regions, run from the Northern March encompassing modern Berlin, south to the Balkans. These Eastern Marches roughly formed the Western edge of the Soviet satellite states throughout the cold war.

Nietzsche saw it coming early. The Europeans drowned God in the gore of Lotharingia during WWI. They dismembered the body on the Marca Geronis in WWII. They immolated the corpse with a funeral pyre made from human beings during the Holocaust. Purging these residual “ethnic impurities” sealed the millennia of ritualistic slaughter which constituted the history of nation-state formation in Europe from Charlemagne until the modern system of international relations.

With the latest brazen attack by the United States on a sovereign nation in utter disregard for the legal formalism of international diplomacy, the current framework of diplomacy between states is likewise prostrate upon the altar, with another pyre in the making.

The Fading of Past International Orders

The organs of International Law which were instituted after the conclusion of WWII were intended to be the framework in which nation-states non-violently adjudicate disagreements between themselves. Due to centuries of expanding and re-expanding the Marches, by 1945 the empires of Western Europe, the USA and the Soviet Union were in direct control of, or possessed a preponderance of influence over, the bulk of the world’s labor capacity and resources. However, by squinting somewhat, one can see an analogy of limited usefulness between the United Nations and some aspects of the various roles the Catholic Church played for the centuries from about 920 AD until about the Protestant reformation circa the 1520s.

That is to say, the church was a long-lived institutional and cultural supra-structure which transcended the loss of power by any one individual or group of individuals. The Church claimed some universalistic authority over moral approval of conflicts between the various medieval warlords and regional hegemons. Similarly, the UN of course is theoretically invested with the capacity to collectively approve of inter-state war or sanctions under some semi-transparent legalistic process. Read more »

Thursday, July 24, 2025

The Empty Throne: Emergent Conspiracies And Causal Cherries

Posted on by Jochen Szangolies

by Jochen Szangolies

Angelus Novus, by Paul Klee. In the interpretation of Walter Benjamin, this is the angel of history, blown inexorably into the future by the storm of progress, while its gaze remains fixed on the past. Image credit: public domain

Stephen King’s Dark Tower-series takes place in a world that has ‘moved on’, and appears to be deteriorating. The story’s main protagonist, Roland Deschain, last of an ancient, knight-like order of gunslingers, is seeking the titular Dark Tower, which forms a sort of nexus of all realities, to perhaps halt or even reverse the decay. His greatest fear is that once he reaches the top of the tower, he finds it empty: God or whatever force is supposed to preside over the multiverse dead, or absent, or perhaps never having existed in the first place.

There is substantive debate on what forces shape history: the actions of great leaders, the will of the people, material conditions, conflict, or perhaps other forces entirely. For our purposes, however, we can group these into two categories: the microcausal view, where history is nothing but the sum total of millions upon millions of individual actions, and the macrocausal view, where there exists some form of overarching driver of history, be it fate, a Hegelian world spirit, or some form of laws of history that dictate its unfolding. This second option is perhaps most simply explained by there being an occupant to the room at the top of the Dark Tower: some entity that, by whatever means or design, holds the reins and shapes the course of the world.

In today’s world, this is a less widely held opinion than might have once been the case. But does this mean that history is just comprised of actions at the individual level, and it is thus this level that we should best appeal to for explanatory force? Is there, as Margaret Thatcher claimed, ‘no such thing as society’?

My aim in this column is to investigate the possibility that there is a middle being excluded here. Just as the theory of evolution has shown us that there can be design without a designer, I propose that, at least in certain respects, there can be a sort of ‘plan’ without a planner to history—that, in other words, it can make sense to analyze its course as if it were following a design not reducible to the actions of individuals. Read more »

Sunday, July 6, 2025

The Novel Endures: A Conversation with Ross Barkan

Posted on by Philip Graham

by Philip Graham 

Ross Barkan is certainly having a moment. His third and most ambitious novel, Glass Century, set in New York and encompassing over fifty years of the city’s history, has recently been published and is enjoying a raucously enthusiastic critical reception.

I wasn’t surprised by the praise for Glass Century. Having been a New York City cabdriver in the ’70s, a volunteer near Ground Zero in 2001, and the father of a daughter who refused to abandon her West Village apartment and beloved city during the Covid crisis, I found myself utterly convinced on every page by Barkan’s long game of interweaving intimate family secrets with the public unfolding of the city’s historic crises. And he can write a mean tennis match, too.

Meanwhile, this week Barkan’s long-time friend and political comrade-in-arms, Zohran Mamdani, has triumphed in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor. One might say that Ross Barkan, a 35-year-old novelist, journalist, essayist and political commentator, is feeling the warm embrace of the zeitgeist.

Philip Graham: Your novel Glass Century begins with the two main characters, Mona Glass and Saul Plotz, as they prepare the final arrangements of a false marriage. That their wedding will be staged is a secret built on another secret: Saul is already married and has two children. Mona believes this fictional wedding with her lover will fool her parents, who are relentless in their insistence that their fiercely independent daughter settle down and start a family.

Somehow, they manage to pull off the deception, not only for the wedding but for the many years of their actual committed relationship. A lot of people in this novel have to maintain the secret, and at least an equal number need to ignore or adopt a complicit silence about their suspicions—Mona’s parents and Saul’s wife and children, in particular. And somehow you manage as author to maintain this tightrope trick throughout the novel. It certainly rang true for me. Every family, I believe, cloaks some truth or truths that must remain silent.

Ross Barkan: Secrets are everything: shameful, powerful, ennobling, destructive. There isn’t a family without secrets. It’s only a matter of how large they are. Secrets were on my mind as I wrote Glass Century. How do we keep them? Whom do they hurt? Who benefits? A secret, sometimes, offers something of a counter-life. You slip in and live in a way you might not have otherwise. Already married Saul, in this instance, finds Mona to be something like his counter-life. And Mona, in turn, has the image of marriage, which was so important to her traditional parents in the 1970s. Of course, what makes this all interesting, as you point out, is that there are others aware of the ruse. There’s complicity. It’s plausible, certainly, to be skeptical of all of this—how is it possible? In a fictional world, there can be a just-so quality to events but I wanted to write in a manner where it didn’t seem so fantastical for secrets like these to be held. Men and women do have affairs, lives are carved out within lives, and families, in a way not so dissimilar from organisms, must adapt gradually to all of it. As I wrote the novel, I considered image versus reality, and how, from the outside, we know so very little about people. That’s the beauty of the novel form, and why I love it so: there’s the ability to excavate that interiority, that consciousness. I loved living in the pages with Mona and Saul. Read more »

Friday, June 20, 2025

Tea Montage

Posted on by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

 1. Teacup from Russia

The first teacup I use as a child is not for tea but milk which is boiled and mixed with sugar. I blow on it to watch the steam disperse and the cream float. The teacup is Russian. This is just before the Soviet war begins in Afghanistan and America lionizes the Mujahideen, the future fathers of the would-be war orphans otherwise known as the Taliban.

By the time I begin college in America, the Soviet Union fades and the Mujahideen are already darlings of the past, but I hear the story of Stalin that will forever stay with me:

Stalin at the dinner table pets a live chicken whose feathers he plucks feather by feather, demonstrating how, as the chicken becomes colder and weaker, it hovers more desperately around his hand, the only source of warmth. Bloodied and in pain, it follows the trail of the few grains of feed tossed its way.

An image to relive in a time when I see nothing but a pile of feathers and humanity desperate for survival. It is June of 2025. The trail of blood will be obvious to the reader; it follows the trail of fuel, weapons, data, and global capitalism. Read more »

Tuesday, May 27, 2025

Who is a migrant? The Shortest History of Migration by Ian Goldin

Posted on by Dick Edelstein

by Dick Edelstein

According to today’s newspaper, Spain is expected to lose some 30% of its population over the next 75 years, based on current birth rate projections, a loss of over eight million inhabitants—too great to cover through the influx of migration (La Vanguardia, 17 May). And what about other European countries? The study cited above predicts a still greater per capita drop in Italy’s population. So why aren’t people more worried about who will supply the labor power that we will need to secure future social benefits, rather than heeding absurd declarations by right wing populists like Meloni and Trump on the supposed dangers of migration?

At a time when it is essential to be able to separate the facts and realities of migration from the myths and lies, author Ian Goldin offers us timely assistance in a brief book entitled The Shortest History of Migration, an indispensable guide when the facts of migration are obscured by a baseless hysteria whose effects span the political spectrum, influencing the attitudes of groups and individuals on the left as well as the right. This is an opportune moment to take a good look at those facts. The author, with a gift for synthesizing detailed material, has produced a concise book, with an apt cover blurb that says: “Read in a day. Remember for a lifetime.” Goldin takes a very long view, explaining to readers how migration has always been an intrinsic part of the evolution and development of the human race as he traces the phenomenon throughout all of the eras of human history.

As a migrant myself, and someone whose recent ancestors migrated from Europe to the New World for some of the reasons succinctly described in this book, for me this is a personal as well as a social question, although most people have some personal interest in migration as well as their own viewpoint. Read more »

Thursday, April 10, 2025

With Apologies to Canada

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners, and necessity has made us allies. Those whom God has so joined together, let no man put asunder.  —John F. Kennedy addressing the Canadian Parliament, 1961

If you had to design the perfect neighbor to the United States, it would be hard to do better than Canada. Canadians speak the same language, subscribe to the ideals of democracy and human rights, have been good trading partners, and almost always support us on the international stage. Watching our foolish president try to destroy that relationship has been embarrassing and maddening. In case you’ve entirely tuned out the news—and I wouldn’t blame you if you have—Trump has threatened to make Canada the 51st state and took to calling Prime Minister Trudeau, Governor Trudeau.

I’ve always loved Canada. My first visit there was as an eleven-year old when my mother sent me up to Vancouver to live with a friend’s family for the summer. Vancouver is such a jewel of a city and Canadians are such nice people that even at that age I was appreciative of our northern neighbor.

Getting your arms around the Canadian character is not easy. There are a few stereotypes, one of them being that Canadians are polite. Guess what: in general, they are polite. But I have a sense that Canadians have two very different sides to their character, one being the pleasant law-abiding citizen, and the other represented by their raging hockey fans or their certifiably crazy world cup ski racers, once called The Crazy Canucks. To their credit, Canadians keep these two parts of their personalities in separate vaults and usually don’t mix the two. But have no doubt: behind the good manners and friendly dispositions, Canadians have a fierce side and iron will not to be trifled with. Read more »

Wednesday, April 2, 2025

Mari, A Free-Range Mexican Nanny in Hong Kong—And Other Comparable Characters—The Memoir Continues

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin

by Barbara Fischkin

An impressionistic watercolor by Marta Camarena: Barbara Fischkin and her first-born son in the plaza in front of of her young family’s rented home in the Plaza de los Arcangeles, in San Angel, Mexico City

Part One: Before Mari Saved Us

This is the back story: Maria Angeles Garcia, known to us as “Mari,” was a godsend to our family. In part two, which I plan to publish in May, readers will find out more about how this young, single mother from a small village in northern Mexico moved with us to, of all places, Hong Kong.

That move was in 1989. A few years earlier Mari had left her children with relatives with plans to earn money as a domestic worker in la capital, Mexico City—and then return home to give her family a better life. Eventually she came to work for us. Within a year, my husband was notified he would be transferred to Hong Kong. We asked Mari if she would come with us for a short while. We never expected her to say yes. But she did.

Mari grew up hearing both Spanish and an indigenous language. In Hong Kong, most people speak English and Cantonese. Regardless of geography, the underlying job wouldn’t change. When I was working as a journalist, from a home office or out doing interviews, I needed a nanny to take my first-born toddler son on small excursions. I didn’t want him locked behind the walls of our palatial home. I wanted him out and about, playing with neighborhood kids and savoring the bright colored flowers. I wanted him to suck oranges Mari picked right off the tree and to enjoy the aroma of elote— corn—roasting on sidewalk barbeques.

 Mari knew that in Hong Kong, things would change. She mustered the courage, the fortitude and a free-range sensibility to spend a few months with us in Asia. She could have easily found another position in Mexico City. But she was intent on doing her job and frankly wanted to make sure our family, especially the child, transitioned safely.

After watching Mari in action, I knew so much more about assessing and hiring good household help. Typically, I did a good job. This chapter, though, is about the ones who came before Mari. Some had their moments of glory. Most get lost in her shadow. Read more »

Sunday, March 9, 2025

Barcelona’s Revolutionary Requiem Asserts Enlightenment Values

Posted on by Dick Edelstein

by Dick Edelstein

Photo: David Ruano

Following the opening night performance of Mozart’s Requiem in Barcelona last month, I left the Gran Teatre del Liceu harboring the thought that this revolutionary setting was a slick riposte to the existential challenge of malevolent Trumpian ideology, a notion that could have motivated theatre director Romeo Castellucci’s approach to staging Mozart’s much beloved and final work in his Liceu debut. Castellucci is already well known to Barcelona theatre audiences, and he is planning to return to the Liceu in the near future with his own opera project.

This staged production of the Requiem premiered at the Aix-en-Provence Festival. Although it is a mass for the dead, the Requiem, like much of Mozart’s music, expresses an irrepressible joie de vivre and is more about celebrating the cycle of life than mourning a death. Here we enter into the labyrinth of ambiguities and controversies that surround this work. Mozart’s views on the Church, society, Masonic beliefs, and enlightenment values molded his attitude towards life and death. This tension of ideas is manifest in the interplay between the text, music, and dramatic symbolism in Castellucci’s highly kinetic, fully-staged setting that includes folk dancing, gestural movement, choreography, set decoration, and multimedia support.

The opening scene evokes a tragic mood as an elderly woman sits in a bare bedroom placidly staring at a small mid-century tv set until the scene changes to depict her death and burial. Throughout the work, the chorus performs movements, gestures and folk dances in scenes that represent community activity and folk rituals. Although the Requiem usually takes an hour to perform, the inclusion of five additional short devotional pieces by Mozart has resulted in a 90-minute running time that works well for musical theatre. Castellucci has previously staged innovative performances of devotional music, always managing to surprise his audience, and he seems to prefer these works to Italian melodrama. In this case, the Requiem provides a sound foundation for a theatrical setting, and the narrative that emerges is only partly rooted in 18th century customs and beliefs since it resonates with our own times as well.

The program notes make the extraordinary claim that Mozart’s immensely popular work “is not just the culmination of a late stage of Mozart’s oeuvre, but the pinnacle of musical history…”  That’s a pretty bold claim, but let’s have a look at a snippet of this work that shows some of the qualities of the piece as a whole. Read more »

Thursday, February 6, 2025

Why Summer Camp Matters, Even In Winter, Part Two—The Memoir Continues

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin

by Barbara Fischkin

The place where I learned the most about diversity, equity and inclusion was not at my liberal summer camp in New York’s Catskills mountains—but at a pig farm in northern Kansas. To be fair, if it wasn’t for camp, I never would have pitched a tent under the big sky of the Jensby farm.

A dining hall at a Web-Met Camp
A dining hall at a Wel-Met Camp.

I was there because, as my last chapter noted, Wel-Met, my summer sleep away camp, had a free-range philosophy. Campers planned their own activities, hiked into the woods for sleepovers and—when older—lived in tents rather than bunks. This was a preparation for the next step: Cross-country camping trips. Wel-Met ran six of these each summer and in the 1960s they all stopped at the farm of Clarence and Florence Jensby. The Jensbys welcomed all with open arms—campers and returning counselors alike. (I arrived three times). On the surface, we could not have been more different. Or in today’s lingo, more diverse. Most of us were Jewish New Yorkers. The Jensbys were Christian midwesterners.

It did not matter. With great panache, the Jensbys introduced us to their operation and their pigs who, well, smelled like pigs. This came as a surprise to the city slickers. Mrs. Jensby demonstrated, with schoolteacher-like skills, how to prepare a live chicken for dinner. Trip after trip, year after year, she showed city kids how she would break the chicken’s neck, pluck the feathers, yank out the guts and prepare it for cooking. Some campers were horrified. I saw her humanity. I saw her as a farmer who worked quickly to minimize suffering. Today, when I view pictures of chickens raised in crowded coops, not free-range—or hormone or antibiotic free—I think of how Mrs. Jensby did it better.

I also have a memory of Mrs. Jensby dressed up, wearing her good shoes and leaving the farm—perhaps for church. I wondered how she did this without stepping on any animal droppings. I wondered how she had transformed herself so quickly from farm wife in a blood-stained apron to a “proper” lady. A lifelong lesson: there is more to a person than you see at first. Read more »

Tuesday, November 26, 2024

To fight Trumpism, liberals should embrace the Founding Fathers

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Washington resigning his commission. Even George III thought this act made him one of the greatest of all men.

The Founding Fathers aren’t much in fashion among liberals these days. A good friend of mine has been trying to get a novel about Thomas Jefferson published for three years. He has approached more publishers than he can care to name, publishers of all sizes, reputations and political persuasions. He tells me that while most mainstream, as well as niche publishers, have turned his manuscript down, a small number of right-wing houses that typically publish conservative polemic are deeply interested.

My friend’s problems with publishing Jefferson mirror the liberals’ problem with the Founding Fathers in general. At best they are dismissed as outdated dead white men, and at worst as evil slaveholders. But as an immigrant who came to this country inspired by the vision these men laid down, I don’t feel that way. Neither does my 4-year-old who proudly dressed up as George Washington, of her own accord, for Halloween last year. She stood proudly in her little tricorne hat and blue colonial coat, her face full of determination, as if she too was leading an army (she was particularly inspired by the stories I told her of Valley Forge and Washington’s crossing of the Delaware). Both she and I believe that while these men’s flaws were pronounced, and vastly so in some cases, the good they did far outlives the bad, and they were great men whose ideals should keep guiding us. More importantly, I believe that a liberal resurrection of the Founding Fathers is in order today if we want to fight the kind of faux patriotism foisted on us by the Party of Trump (“POT”. We can no longer call his party the Republican Party — that party of Dwight Eisenhower, of Ronald Reagan, of respect for intelligence, fiscal responsibility, international stewardship and opposition to real and not perceived evil, is gone, kaput, pushing up the daisies, as the memorable sketch would say: it is an ex-party).

First, let’s acknowledge the bad. There’s no denying why some liberals feel hesitant about embracing the Founding Fathers. These men who laid out ideals of equality and justice also owned human beings, a glaring contradiction that’s impossible to ignore. They were patronizing toward women and scoffed at their intellect. They would almost certainly have thought that people who looked like me or my daughter could not be equal citizens of the Republic. Washington and Jefferson, in particular, were deeply enmeshed in this brutal institution – Jefferson far more so than Washington, who freed his slaves in his will – and it’s fair to question how they could write about liberty while denying it to others. As early as 1775, Samuel Johnson was asking, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”; the hypocrisy was obvious on both sides of the Atlantic. For those of us who call themselves liberals and believe in human rights, this hypocrisy is hard to reconcile.

But we must remember the times in which they lived if we want to free ourselves of the disease of presentism. As wealthy Virginia planters, it would be virtually impossible to imagine Washington or Jefferson not owning slaves. Their acceptance of slavery was, however evil and anachronistic it seems to us, common among people of their era. However, their ideas about free speech, religious tolerance, separation of powers, and individual rights were not. In other words, as Gibbon said about Belisarius, “His imperfections flowed from the contagion of the times; his virtues were his own.” In addition, it is important to not bin “The Founders” in one homogenous, catch-all bin. Washington freed his slaves and was a relatively beneficent and enlightened master for his times, loathe to participating in the wrenching practice of separating families, for instance; Adams and twenty-two of the signers of the Declaration of Independence did not own any at all; Franklin later became an abolitionist; Jefferson was probably the biggest culprit – not so much because he owned many slaves but because the gap between his soaring rhetoric and the reality at Monticello, not to mention his relationship with Sally Hemings, is glaring. To recognize these differences between the Founding Fathers is to not excuse their practices; it is to recognize the possibility of human improvement and the fact that in every age there is a spectrum of men and morality.

Read more »

Wednesday, October 30, 2024

Frozen Thought

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Christopher Horner

In daily life we get along okay without what we call thinking. Indeed, most of the time we do our daily round without anything coming to our conscious mind – muscle memory and routines get us through the morning rituals of washing and making coffee. And when we do need to bring something to mind, to think about it, it’s often not felt to cause a lot of friction: where did I put my glasses? When does the train leave? and so on.

So, we get on well in the world of medium sized dry goods, where things can be dropped on your foot and the train leaves at 7.00 AM.  Common sense carries us a long way here. For common sense is what we know already, what we can assume and the things we know how to do because we know what they are.

There are limits, though. We begin to run into difficulties when we apply the categories of the understanding – the normal way we think of things – into areas which look as if they are same kind of thing, but are not. I’m thinking of anything to do with long term change, of the way in which structures underlie what we see, of the complex interactions of the economy and politics. The kind of thinking that we might call common sense is the ‘spontaneous ideology of everyday life’, and it has problems with the larger and longer-range things that both run through our lives and have a history that we should try to grasp.

If we fail to make that effort, we typically find ourselves falling back on the notion that these are just things that we can assume to be the case. This can lead to quite problematic positions.  So, a friend of mine – intelligent, well educated – announced to me, apropos of Trump et al ‘half of America is just sick’. Perhaps on reflection he’d think that a bit inadequate, but it does represent the baffled contempt many have for the people who support a party and a politician who they see, rightly, as a threat to whatever democracy remains in the USA. Read more »

Monday, October 28, 2024

What Would An AI Treaty Between Countries Look Like?

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

A stamp commemorating the Atoms for Peace program inaugurated by President Dwight Eisenhower. An AI For Peace program awaits (Image credit: International Peace Institute)

The visionary physicist and statesman Niels Bohr once succinctly distilled the essence of science as “the gradual removal of prejudices”. Among these prejudices, few are more prominent than the belief that nation-states can strengthen their security by keeping critical, futuristic technology secret. This belief was dispelled quickly in the Cold War, as nine nuclear states with competent scientists and engineers and adequate resources acquired nuclear weapons, leading to the nuclear proliferation that Bohr, Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard and other far-seeing scientists had warned political leaders would ensue if the United States and other countries insisted on security through secrecy. Secrecy, instead of keeping destructive nuclear technology confined, had instead led to mutual distrust and an arms race that, octopus-like, had enveloped the globe in a suicide belt of bombs which at its peak numbered almost sixty thousand.

But if not secrecy, then how would countries achieve the security they craved? The answer, as it counterintuitively turned out, was by making the world a more open place, by allowing inspections and crafting treaties that reduced the threat of nuclear war. Through hard-won wisdom and sustained action, politicians, military personnel and ordinary citizens and activists realized that the way to safety and security was through mutual conversation and cooperation. That international cooperation, most notably between the United States and the Soviet Union, achieved the extraordinary reduction of the global nuclear stockpile from tens of thousands to about twelve thousand, with the United States and Russia still accounting for more than ninety percent.

A similar potential future of promise on one hand and destruction on the other awaits us through the recent development of another groundbreaking technology: artificial intelligence. Since 2022, AI has shown striking progress, especially through the development of large language models (LLMs) which have demonstrated the ability to distill large volumes of knowledge and reasoning and interact in natural language. Accompanied by their reliance on mountains of computing power, these and other AI models are posing serious questions about the possibility of disrupting entire industries, from scientific research to the creative arts. More troubling is the breathless interest from governments across the world in harnessing AI for military applications, from smarter drone targeting to improved surveillance to better military hardware supply chain optimization. 

Commentators fear that massive interest in AI from the Chinese and American governments in particular, shored up by unprecedented defense budgets and geopolitical gamesmanship, could lead to a new AI arms race akin to the nuclear arms race. Like the nuclear arms race, the AI arms race would involve the steady escalation of each country’s AI capabilities for offense and defense until the world reaches an unstable quasi-equilibrium that would enable each country to erode or take out critical parts of their adversary’s infrastructure and risk their own. Read more »

Tuesday, August 13, 2024

How The American Way Traveled By Car

Posted on by Mark DeLong

by Mark R. DeLong

The photograph shows the corner of a room where an unmade bed stands, the headboard occupying most of the left half of the image. One the bed are newspapers and pillows. From the center of the photo, a number of images of cars and trucks, cutout from magazines and newspapers, emanate in roughly a triangular shape. The wall is unpainted insulation board.
Rothstein, Arthur. Room in which migratory agricultural workers sleep. Camden County, New Jersey. October 1938. Photograph. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. Click source URL for enlargement: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/518bdec0-b97b-0138-ebbc-059ac310b610. See footnote [1] below for information about the title of the photograph.
Gullies had deepened, though puddles—some pond-like—had seeped into the ways, so that the challenge of driving was a matter of keeping axels clear of the swell of ground between tire tracks. Never really good, the roads still showed wounds from September’s hurricane, now known as The Great New England Hurricane of 1938. It had blown by New Jersey, a bit out to sea, but still whipped the coast with hundred-mile-an-hour winds. The state’s tomato crops were ruined, and angry winds and downpours had bitten a chunk out of the apple harvest. Potatoes, at least, nestled snugly under clotted soil, protected from the winds.

In October 1938, 23-year-old Arthur Rothstein drove the roads on assignment to document the lives of the nation as part of his job in the Farm Security Administration (FSA). This time, his assignment was New Jersey, and in Monmouth County he was interested in where potato-picking migrants slept, usually in shacks near the fields they worked. He took lots of pictures of ramshackle buildings—ones you would easily assess as barely habitable: a leaning frame taped together with tar paper, a “silo shed” that sheltered fourteen migrant workers, a “barracks” with hinged wooden flaps to cover windows—in fact merely unscreened openings, one dangling laundry to dry. Rothstein, like his colleagues at the FSA during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, documented the need for the government programs. Squalid housing matched the dirt and brutal labor of migrants, many of them cast into their situations by the disaster of the Great Depression.

Amidst such architectural photographs, one sticks out. Actually it is one of a pair of photographs, both taken indoors of sleeping quarters—no one would comfortably call them “bedrooms.” One shows a narrow unmade bed near a window shabbily curtained with a frayed and loosely hung blanket. In the other one, more tightly framed, the image draws close enough to reveal a carved headboard, a rumpled newspaper open to a full-page ad for Coca-Cola (“Take the high road to refreshment“) and other papers pushed to the corner of the bed. Neatly cut pictures of luxury cars from newspaper advertisements decorate the flimsy particle board wall that served as meagre insulation.[1]

When I saw the picture with the cars, I noticed a change in visual tone. The image felt hopeful. Read more »

Monday, June 24, 2024

Cousin Bernie, Free-Range Professor, Part One: The Memoir Continues

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin

by Barbara Fischkin

Professor B.B. Morris, dressed up as a newspaperman of yore, after educating his students about journalism.

I remember the day I realized that my cousin Bernard Moskowitz—my father’s nephew—was nothing like my other relatives.

The realization came in a flash as I spotted a newly arrived letter on the dining room table at our home at 4722 Avenue I in the Midwood section of Brooklyn. Two pages. Typewritten. It remains in my mind’s eye. I recognized the scratchy signature: It was my “Cousin Bernie.” I went back to the first page because that seemed like it was from somebody else  It was embossed with these words:

Moorhead State College

Moorhead, Minnesota.

Professor B.B. Morris.

My mother, her eagle eyes in play, gazed through the opening from the kitchen and walked up behind me.

“Is this…,” I said

“Yes,” she replied, smiling. “Cousin Bernie got a good job. Daddy is so proud.”  She paused. A worried look took over her face. “He changed his name. Maybe they don’t like Jews there.” Another pause. More worry. “It must be very cold.”

I imagined my mother sending Cousin Bernie a sweater. Or two. Or ten.

What else? A Star of David tie clip? A Hebrew prayer book? The possibilities were endless. Read more »

Monday, May 13, 2024

Israel, Gaza, and Robert McNamara’s Lessons for War and Peace

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Once again the world faces death and destruction, and once again it asks questions. The horrific assaults by Hamas on October 7 last year and the widespread bombing by the Israeli government in Gaza raise old questions of morality, law, history and national identity. We have been here before, and if history is any sad reminder, we will undoubtedly be here again. That is all the more reason to grapple with these questions.

For me, a particularly instructive guide to doing this is Errol Morris’s brilliant 2003 film, “The Fog of War”, that focuses on former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s “eleven lessons” drawn from failures of the United States in the Vietnam War. Probably my favorite documentary of all time, I find both the film and the man fascinating and the lessons timeless. McNamara at 85 is sharp as a tack and appears haunted with the weight of history and his central role in sending 58,000 American soldiers to their deaths in a small, impoverished country far away which was being bombed back into the stone age. Throughout the film he fixes the viewer with an unblinking stare, eyes often tearing up and conviction coming across. McNamara happens to be the only senior government official from any major U.S. war who has taken responsibility for his actions and – what is much more important than offering a simple mea culpa and moving on – gone into great details into the mistakes he and his colleagues made and what future generations can learn from them (in stark contrast, Morris’s similar film about Donald Rumsfeld is infuriating because unlike McNamara, Rumsfeld appears completely self-deluded and totally incapable of introspection).

For me McNamara’s lessons which are drawn from both World War 2 and Vietnam are uncannily applicable to the Israel-Palestine conflict, not so much for any answers they provide but for the soul-searching questions which must be asked. Here are the eleven lessons, and while all are important I will focus on a select few because I believe they are particularly relevant to the present war. Read more »