Christopher Caldwell believes in what the great man called “prejudices,” which is to say the unspoken authority of tradition, habit, family and shared cultural predilections. In that sense, he believes the clash of civilizations already has been lost in Europe. He also believes that its native peoples must now choose between what Powell called “the tragedy” of American-style cultural pluralism or a kind of quasi-Ottoman order in which religious communities essentially are self-governing within national borders. History, though, has a way of confounding both Western historical determinism and its not-so-distant intellectual cousin, the resignation of Islamic fatalism. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Grit, the overcoming of serious obstacles through determined effort, is most impressively on public display on the battlefield, in athletics, in every sort of comeback in the larger game of life, with its all-too-frequent peripeteias. To watch someone showing grit, winning through against impressive odds, is always a grand, exhilarating experience. However, it was H.L. Mencken who said that a writer who found the work too arduous ought to take a week off for labor on an assembly line – where he’ll discover what work really is.<<<To read full article, click here.>>>
After 26 years and 70,000 casualties, Sri Lanka’s civil war has ended—for now. The key to easing the fears of the country’s historically beleaguered Buddhist majority while protecting its Hindu minority? Rediscovering the blend of faiths that laid the foundation for the ancient kingdom of Kandy. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
A legal conflict between the daughters of former Egyptian presidents is a sad commentary on the condition of the Arab world. For what is on display here is only an exaggerated form of the conspiracy theories that are reaching unprecedented levels in Egypt and the Arab world. The leading Palestinian politician Farouk Qaddumi has accused the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas of killing Abbas’s own predecessor Yasser Arafat. It is surely time to ask: can the “natural” death of any Arab leader be taken as a fact? Is it possible for an Arab leader to die without being murdered? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
It sounds like a communist utopia, but a basic income program pioneered by German aid workers has helped alleviate poverty in a Nambian village. The idea is simple: The payment of a basic monthly income, funded with tax revenues, of 100 Namibia dollars, or about €9 ($13), for each citizen. There are no conditions, and nothing is expected in return. The money comes from various organizations, including AIDS foundations, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and Protestant churches in Germany’s Rhineland and Westphalia regions. The simple plan is working since instituted. Crime is down and children can finally attend school. Only the local white farmers are unhappy. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The young couple flew into Wichita bearing, in the lovely swell of the wife’s belly, a burden of grief. They came from a religious tradition where large families are celebrated, and they wanted this baby, and it was very late in her pregnancy. But the doctors recommended abortion. They said that with her complications, there were only two men skilled enough to pull it off. One was George Tiller, a Wichita doctor who specialized in late abortions. But when they got to their room, the phone was ringing. Her father was on the line. “There was some doctor who was shot who does abortions,” he said. They turned on CNN. Dr. Tiller had just been killed, shot in the head as he passed out church leaflets. In their shock, they mixed up the clinic and the church: We were supposed to be there. What if it had happened while we were there? What if he couldn’t complete the procedure? Now there is only one doctor left. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
How should America’s university presidents respond to the savagery in Iran today? The incarcerated student protesters forced to lick toilet bowls. The imprisoned dissidents beaten to death in holding pens, some with their fingernails torn out. The many murdered protesters, including Neda Agha-Soltan, the now-iconic young philosophy student shot in cold blood. The banning of foreign and domestic journalists from honest coverage or even access to news events. The arrest of professors and shuttering of academic institutions. Here are a few hints from another era. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In June 2007, Wendell Potter was head of corporate communications at Cigna, one of the largest health insurance companies in America, when he attended the U.S. premier of Michael Moore’s Sicko. Potter was part of the team charged with discrediting Moore’s film, which advance word said was highly critical of the health insurance industry. Potter “sat quietly in the back and took notes,” but soon realized he had a problem. “When I saw the movie, I’ll be honest: I thought it was a real good documentary. I knew from my own studies of other healthcare systems that it was an accurate portrayal of those systems and how they are able to provide universal coverage.” Yet he was being paid by Cigna to tell people the opposite, that the film was full of lies. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Standing in the well of a jail on New York’s Rikers Island as profanities rain down on you from the cells above, you realize the absurdity of academia’s most celebrated book on incarceration. Discipline and Punish, by the late French historian Michel Foucault, criticized jails and prisons for subjecting inmates to constant, spirit-crushing surveillance. The truth is that surveillance goes both ways in correctional facilities. Inmates watch their keepers as intensely as they are watched—and usually much more malignly. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Human nutrition research and practice is plagued by pseudoscience and unsupported opinions. In recent years, nutrition research and practice have lagged behind many other biological and medical fields.In part, this lag is due to many pseudoscientific beliefs and practices mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific methods. This allows for nutritional research and advice given to the public today to be science’s laughingstock. Reynold Spector explains why. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
“You are so hot,” Rielle Hunter said to John Edwards 10 years after he and his wife buried their first boy, and after they had started a new family, and after they had given their all to a presidential campaign—with the personal losses and long separations that come with it—and after Elizabeth had been diagnosed with cancer and undergone a disfiguring surgery and chemotherapy and lost her hair and been handed a recalculated set of odds about her life expectancy with two very small children who needed their mother. “You are so hot,” Rielle Hunter said, because she turned out to be another woman with a cavalier attitude toward wives. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
This fall, evolutionary biologist and bestselling author Richard Dawkins — most recently famous for his public exhortation to atheism, “The God Delusion” — returns to writing about science. Dawkins’ new book, “The Greatest Show on Earth,” will inform and regale us with the stunning “evidence for evolution,” as the subtitle says. It will surely be an impressive display, as Dawkins excels at making the case for evolution. But it’s also fair to ask: Who in the United States will read Dawkins’ new book (or ones like it) and have any sort of epiphany, or change his or her mind? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The Brits call it the “silly season.” In Germany the media call it the Sommerloch, literally “the summer hole.” What they are referring to is the fact that when politicians and businesspeople close up shop and go away for the major European summer holidays, the number of serious news stories tends to diminish — meaning desperate hacks need to find something else to fill the hole. That could be concocted scandals, minor celebrity gossip or spurious health scares. But the average German journalist’s best friend during the Sommerloch is undoubtedly the offbeat animal story. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Does the end justify the means? This question, difficult to answer in the abstract with a categorical negative or affirmative, occurred to me when I read that Alberto Fujimori, former president of Peru, had been sentenced to seven and a half years’ imprisonment for corruption, to run concurrently with the twenty-five years he is already serving for abuse of human rights. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. We possess the books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language, but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves. This is what Conroy was hinting at in his account of adolescence, the way books enlarge us by giving direct access to experiences not our own. In order for this to work, however, we need a certain type of silence, an ability to filter out the noise. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Ever since the first Europeans came to North America, only to discover the puzzling fact that other people were already living here, the question of how to understand the Native American past has been both difficult and politically charged. For many years, American Indian life was viewed through a scrim of interconnected bigotry and romance, which simultaneously served to idealize the pre-contact societies of the Americas and to justify their destruction. Pre-Columbian life might be understood as savage and brutal darkness or an eco-conscious Eden where man lived in perfect harmony with nature. But it seemed to exist outside history, as if the native people of this continent were for some reason exempt from greed, cruelty, warfare and other near-universal characteristics of human society. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Route 154 seems like a road out of a Beckett landscape, a long, hot, flat, dusty strip that runs through a featureless pine forest. It comes from nowhere, it goes nowhere—connecting, on a more-or-less straight shot, Mt. Lebanon and Sailes, in Bienville Parish in Louisiana’s northwestern corner. Not much has changed in 75 years. Someone has asphalted what was once raw earth and now, of course, you may Google up a certain point and view it through the satellite’s eye, sliding through the magnifications from the comfort of your own home. What you see, no matter the height, is a ribbon of road running through a green nothingness. But in that desolate place at 9:10 a.m. on May 23, 1934, something memorable happened. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Optimists called the first world war “the war to end all wars”. Philosopher George Santayana demurred. In its aftermath he declared: “Only the dead have seen the end of war”. History has proved him right, of course. What’s more, today virtually nobody believes that humankind will ever transcend the violence and bloodshed of warfare. I know this because for years I have conducted numerous surveys asking people if they think war is inevitable. Whether male or female, liberal or conservative, old or young, most people believe it is. For example, when I asked students at my university “Will humans ever stop fighting wars?” more than 90 per cent answered “No”. Many justified their assertion by adding that war is “part of human nature” or “in our genes”. But is it really? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In these challenging times, libertarian or economic conservatives and traditionalist or social conservatives confront opposing temptations. More commonly, they feel the allure of purity. Impatient or disgusted with compromise and conciliation, many members of both of conservatism’s leading camps are keen to rally around their own favored principle or highest priority and disregard or denounce the principles and priorities of their longtime coalition members. Meanwhile, a few, typically social conservatives, are drawn to the prospect of achieving a more perfect unity among conservative factions. They argue that if only economic conservatives and social conservatives would think through their deepest commitments, they would grasp that the differences between them are in reality superficial, and that when they understand their principles properly and examine policy alternatives rigorously, they will see that their opinions on major matters converge nicely. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
This week, I take a look at which countries have best weathered the global recession and credit crunch. All economies have been affected by the crisis, but a combination of policy responses and strong fundamentals has given some countries, especially some emerging market economies, a relative edge. These same strengths could lead the countries I highlight below to perform better as the global recovery begins, even if their growth rates remain well below 2003-07 trends. What do these countries have in common? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In the past decade, positive-psychology research has drawn hundreds of millions of dollars in grants. But the success of positive psychology has a flip side. The research has advanced alongside the mushrooming of a hungry popular market for guidance on what “happiness” really is and the tools—called “happiness interventions” in the lingo—that help people achieve it. But do people really need “happiness interventions”? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Jaroslaw Anders’s Between Fire and Sleep, a collection of essays that first appeared in American periodicals, especially The New Republic, when Eastern Europe was digging out from under the wreckage of Communism, is the best book of its kind available in English and, quite likely, any other language. Granted, the field of nonscholarly books that synopsize modern Polish literature is admittedly narrow, so such praise may sound slight, a little like Spinal Tap exclaiming that they’re huge in Japan. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Three years ago, Matthew Stewart published a provocative article in The Atlantic magazine blasting modern management theory and education. His advice to anyone considering an MBA was “don’t go to business school, study philosophy.”The secrets of business, he said, were to be found in history, literature and the classic ruminations on life and existence, not in the half-baked ramblings of business academics, consultants and “gurus.” In “The Management Myth,” he expands the Atlantic article into a devastating bombardment of managerial thinking and the profession of management consulting. As a former management consultant, Mr. Stewart lived long enough in the belly of the beast to know its nature. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
General knowledge, from capital cities to key dates, has long been a marker of an educated mind. But what happens when facts can be Googled? Brian Cathcart confers with educationalists, quiz-show winners and Bamber Gascoigne . <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Popular culture seems to have two general depictions of small towns. The first is a naive, sleepy, hamlet where nothing ever happens, populated with lovable eccentrics and warm-hearted folk (always folk, never people). Generally this setup sees the return of the prodigal son or arrival of an outsider, almost always from the “big city,” of which the townies speak with disdain. The protagonist will eventually fall in love with a more wholesome type of woman and realize what he’s needed all along is a simpler kind of life. See television shows like Northern Exposure and Ed, for example. The other stereotype involves a placid calm that masks a swirling tempest of murder (Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt), violence, racism (Pudd’nhead Wilson), small mindedness, and cowfucking (that would be Faulkner). The most accurate depiction of life in a small town I have ever seen, the TV show Friday Night Lights, is constantly in danger of being canceled. No one wants to watch it. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In America William Faulkner and Scott Fitzgerald were the Paris and Britney of their day, caught in the funhouse mirror of fame, their careers a vivid tabloid mash-up of hospitalisations and electroshock therapies. “When I read Faulkner I can tell when he gets tired and does it on corn just as I used to be able to tell when Scott would hit it beginning with ‘Tender is the Night’,” said Hemingway, playing the Amy Winehouse role of denier-in-chief. He kept gloating track of his friends’ decline, all the while nervously checking out books on liver damage from the library; by the end, said George Plimpton, Hemingway’s liver protruded from his belly “like a long fat leech”. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The economist Robert Heilbroner wrote in 1989: “Less than 75 years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won.” This outcome reflected a startling reversal because as recently as the decade before, socialism—considering all its diverse forms lumped together—seemed at the apex of its global sweep, apparently confirming Marx’s prophecy that it was not merely desirable but destiny. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
It was sometime in the 1980s, I think, that a basic transformation of the aims of literary criticism was complete. Not the spread of political themes and identity preoccupations, which struck outsiders and off-campus critics like William Bennett, a former secretary of education turned radio host, as the obvious change, but a deeper adjustment in the basic conception of what criticism does. It was, namely, the shift from criticism-as-explanation to criticism-as-performance. Instead of thinking of scholarship as the explication of the object—what a poem means or a painting represents—humanists cast criticism as an interpretative act, an analytical eye in process. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
For the female half of the population, it may bring a satisfied smile. Scientists have found that evolution is driving women to become ever more beautiful, while men remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors. Over generations, the scientists argue, this has led to women becoming steadily more aesthetically pleasing, a “beauty race” that is still on. The findings have emerged from a series of studies of physical attractiveness and its links to reproductive success in humans. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Failed states are not only a source of domestic calamities; they are also potentially a source of great power competition that in the past has often led to confrontation, crisis and war. The failure of a state creates a vacuum that, especially in strategically important regions, draws in competitive great-power intervention. This more traditional view of state failure is less prevalent these days, for only recently has the prospect of great power competition over failed “vacuum” states returned. But, clearly, recent events in Georgia—as well as possible future scenarios in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as southeastern Europe, Asia and parts of Africa—suggest that it might be a good time to adjust, really to expand, the way we think about “failed states” and the kinds of problems they can cause. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
There’s an awful lot of money to be made from compulsive shopping, judging by the career of Madeleine Wickham. Her Shopaholic series, written under the pen name Sophie Kinsella, is required reading for chick-lit enthusiasts, and the romantic comedy Confessions of a Shopaholic, the first of several planned big-screen adaptations, grossed more than $100 million worldwide. While the film, starring Isla Fisher, isn’t terribly funny, it does make the valid point that to enjoy shopping for elegant clothes isn’t a pathology. It’s a style.The American Psychiatric Association risks losing sight of that distinction by grimly—and rather inexpertly—debating whether avid shopping should be considered a sign of mental illness. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
