With family in Britian, David Kynaston has finished the second volume of his multipart chronicle of the British people from 1945 to 1979, called Tales of a New Jerusalem. I’ve already reviewed the first volume, Austerity Britain, so I’ll just say: Kynaston has again written a masterpiece. More vividly and profoundly than any other historical work I’ve read, Tales of a New Jerusalem captures the rhythms and texture of everyday life and the collective experience of a nation. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Many of today’s most-respected thinkers, from Stephen Hawking to David Attenborough, argue that our efforts to fight climate change and other environmental perils will all fail unless we “do something” about population growth. In the Universe in a Nutshell, Hawking declares that, “in the last 200 years, population growth has become exponential… The world population doubles every forty years. But this is nonsense. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In November 9, 2001, George W. Bush created a new public holiday—World Freedom Day. The United States, he explained, would lead the global fight for “liberty, freedom and the universal struggle for human rights”; it would try to help the “more than two billion people” still living under repressive regimes. The idea that America could, or should, do this had informed a certain kind of Washington mind-set throughout the Cold War. But after the Berlin Wall came down, freedom’s crusaders increasingly set their eyes not so much on Communism as on violators of human rights in general. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The Arab world today is ruled by contradiction. Turmoil and stagnation prevail, as colossal wealth and hypermodern cities collide with mass illiteracy and rage-filled imams. In this new diversity may lie disaster, or the makings of a better Arab future. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Facebook and Indians have a magnetic connection. Everyone in my family in India except my father—who, at 77, is entitled to his suspicions of the medium—is a Facebook user. Every single friend of mine in India—except for an eccentric Bengali writer who idolizes a 19th-century British viceroy, Lord Curzon, for which reason he cannot be said to have come to terms with the modern world—is a Facebook user. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The last few years in American mental health have been marked by a brutal public flogging. Revelations in 2008 and 2009 that drug research at Harvard and the University of Texas was tainted by millions of dollars in drug company undisclosed payments to the researchers (which were subsequently condemned on the floor of Congress by Senator Chuck Grassley) was followed by high profile media coverage of problems with the practice of psychotherapy. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In 1992 I was chairman of the History Department at New York University—where I was also the only unmarried straight male under sixty. A combustible blend: prominently displayed on the board outside my office was the location and phone number of the university’s Sexual Harassment Center. History was a fast-feminizing profession, with a graduate community primed for signs of discrimination—or worse. Physical contact constituted a presumption of malevolent intention; a closed door was proof positive. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
If you work at a large company, and especially if you manage other people, chances are you’ve gone through diversity training. The vast majority of the Fortune 500 and, by some estimates, the majority of American employers offer diversity training programs for their employees. Many make such training mandatory. The amount of money spent on it in the United States runs into the billions. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
I was shocked by General John Sheehan’s remarks about “open homosexuality” in the Dutch Army being to blame for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. (He was testifying in the Senate against President Obama’s plans to end the ban on allowing gays to serve openly in the US military.) Not shocked by his bigotry, but by his ignorance of his own profession. Isn’t the General aware that some of the finest soldiers in the history of warfare have been “openly homosexual”? As Churchill himself said, the three time-honored traditions of the Royal Navy are rum, buggery and the lash. <<<To read more, click here.>>>
A science museum is a kind of experiment. It demands the most elaborate equipment: Imax theaters, NASA space vehicles, collections of living creatures, digital planetarium projectors, fossilized bones. Into this mix are thrust tens of thousands of living human beings: children on holiday, weary or eager parents, devoted teachers, passionate aficionados and casual passers-by. And the experimenters watch, test, change, hoping…. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Downtown Tehran, winter: impossible traffic, the energy of 9 million Iranians making their way through congested streets, the white peaks of the Alborz Mountains disappearing shade by shade in the ever-increasing smog. The government’s declared another pollution emergency, and the center city is closed to license plates ending in odd numbers. The students at the university, where I am teaching a seminar on American Studies, are complaining openly about the failures of their elected officials. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Buy my food at Walmart? No thanks. Until recently, I had been to exactly one Walmart in my life, at the insistence of a friend I was visiting in Natchez, Mississippi, about 10 years ago. It was one of the sights, she said. Up and down the aisles we went, properly impressed by the endless rows and endless abundance. Not the produce section. I saw rows of prepackaged, plastic-trapped fruits and vegetables. I would never think of shopping there. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The Ten Commandments were set in stone, but it may be time for a re-chisel. With all due humility, the author takes on the job, pruning the ethically dubious, challenging the impossible, and rectifying some serious omissions. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Congress members accuse Timothy Geithner of coddling Wall Street. Wall Street accuses him of abetting socialism. Yet when the history books are written, Geithner will be recognized as Barack Obama’s key lieutenant in the struggle to right the economy and fix the finance system. Economically, Geithner’s plan has worked better and more cheaply than anyone could have imagined a year ago. Politically, it threatens to undermine Obama’s presidency. Is Geithner a courageous public servant doing the right thing? Or have his years as a player in global finance made him loath to change an industry that needs fundamental reform? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Last year was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The anniversary was marked by conferences the world over. I will not tell you how many I attended; ecologically sensitive readers of The Chronicle might start whining about carbon footprints and that sort of thing. Let me just say that I found myself going no fewer than three times through the Quad City International Airport, in Moline, Ill. Moline! <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Last summer in Seattle, Starbucks opened 15th Avenue and Tea, an unbranded café featuring “small batch coffees sourced from individually owned farms” and a variety of fussy brewing methods designed to appeal to those connoisseurs who believe a cup of $4 coffee ought to be at least as complicated to make as a Big Mac. Starbucks is 39 years old now, and like a lot of 39-year-olds, especially those who’ve experienced great success in their salad years but are beginning to wonder if they’ve lost their touch, it’s having a bit of an identity crisis. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
From pole-dancing lessons to baking cupcakes, modern woman thinks she can do it all. Germaine Greer’s free-thinking female eunuch has been replaced by the desperately self-inventing ‘Madonna’, argues Charlotte Raven, who looks back in shame at the moment in the 1990s when her generation turned its back on feminism. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The euro is under attack like never before, as the promises on which it was based turn out to be lies. Hedge funds are speculating against Greek debt, while euro-zone politicians work behind the scenes to cobble together rescue packages. But fundamental flaws in the monetary union need to be fixed if Europe’s common currency is to survive. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
On February 5, 1895, the Jupiter of American banking, J. P. Morgan, took the train from New York to Washington to see the president. He had no appointment but came to discuss matters of grave national interest. The crash of 1893 had thrown the country into deep depression, exposed a schizophrenic monetary policy, and now the nation’s gold standard stood on the brink of collapse. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
I had come for an adventure’, says freelance foreign correspondent Rob Crilly of his time in Sudan. ‘Changing the world or saving Darfur were not part of my agenda.’ This characteristically frank and unpretentious comment captures the core strength of his book Saving Darfur: Everyone’s Favourite African War: its honesty. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
For most of Winter 2007, I was in Canada’s Northwest Territory, in a series of small towns about two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. After twelve years of freelance writing, I have either traveled for work or traveled while between jobs, and I’ve been a few places around the world — Argentina, New Zealand, Australia, Thailand, most of Europe. But the Arctic is nothing like the world that I’ve seen. It’s more like pictures of the moon. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The West’s confusion arose because it wasn’t prepared for such a fundamental unsettling of postwar geopolitics. During four decades of ideological confrontation, theoreticians and journalists had argued about how a society should move from capitalism to socialism. There was no research on the opposite question—that is, on the transition from socialism to capitalism—apart from a few inconclusive studies, most notably in Poland, concerning the possibility of introducing some elements of the free market into a Communist society. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
‘Who do you think made the first stone spear?” asks Temple Grandin. “That wasn’t the yakkity yaks sitting around the campfire. It was some Asperger sitting in the back of a cave figuring out how to chip rocks into spearheads. Without some autistic traits you wouldn’t even have a recording device to record this conversation on.” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
After the Berlin wall fell and the remaining occupation force departed in the early 1990s, a motley crew of house squatters and hippies moved into the former French barracks. But within a few years, the local city council converted the space into a gleaming town for the middle class called Vauban. When you visit this eco-town, it quickly becomes apparent that Vauban resembles nothing so much as a tarted-up socialist paradise. It leaves you with the feeling of having seen a small replica of East Germany—except that it actually works. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
It is economic inequality, not overall wealth or cultural differences, that fosters societal breakdown, they argue, by boosting insecurity and anxiety, which leads to divisive prejudice between the classes, rampant consumerism, and all manner of mental and physical suffering. Though Sweden and Japan have low levels of economic inequality for different reasons – the former redistributes wealth, while in the latter case, the playing field is more level from the start, with a smaller range of incomes – both have relatively low crime rates and happier, healthier citizens. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The crash of Air France flight 447 from Rio to Paris last year is one of the most mysterious accidents in the history of aviation. After months of investigation, a clear picture has emerged of what went wrong. The reconstruction of the horrific final four minutes reveal continuing safety problems in civil aviation. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Traffic had slowed to a crawl in Baghdad’s Azamiyah district as drivers stopped to ogle the president. It was April 2003, and Saddam Hussein cheerily greeted his subjects as a few bodyguards tried to keep the crowd at bay. Someone handed Saddam a bewildered baby, which he hoisted up in the air a few times and handed back. When he reached a white sedan, Saddam climbed onto the hood to survey the sea of loyalists. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In the popular imagination, Tibet is a land of snow-capped mountains and sweeping vistas, fluttering prayer flags, crystal blue skies, saffron-robed monks spinning prayer wheels, and, perhaps most of all, timelessness. And likewise, the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet and its chief emissary to the West, is a man of abiding wisdom and compassion, an inspiration and moral compass, a beacon of calm in a frenetic modern world. Set aside the fraught politics of this contested region. If one word sums up what Tibet means to the West it is this: purity. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The high-profile military campaign by International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) forces against Taliban militias in Afghansitan’s southern province of Helmand involves the deployment of some 15,000 heavily armed troops, who are supported by strike-aircraft, helicopter-gunships, artillery and armed drones – all ranged against perhaps 1,000 lightly armed insurgents. Despite this imbalance of power, Operation Moshtarak is already facing unanticipated difficulties. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
A friend and I are wandering through the lush gardens of a grand country home. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to live somewhere like this?” I ask, stopping to admire the view of the house over its lake. “Summer days on the lawn, grand parties, cocktails.” My friend mutters something about having a social conscience, but I’m not listening. “Lazing about,” I continue. “Wonderfully bored.” My friend’s face swivels towards me like the ventriloquist’s dummy in Magic. “Bored? How could you be bored if you had all that?” he exclaims. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Without trying, it was an intense, proud community, in which no one locked their doors. Calthorpe looked for the element of design magic that made it work, and concluded it was the dock itself and the density. Everyone who lived in the houseboats on South 40 Dock passed each other on foot daily, trundling to and from the parking lot on shore. All the residents knew each other’s faces and voices and cats. It was a community, Calthorpe decided, because it was walkable. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
