An Atmosphere of Concern: My Summer at the Climate Change Group
During the course of my ten-week internship last year, Asia gained nearly one million new urban residents. Many of these urbanites moved into freshly constructed, high-energy consuming buildings that help make up a building sector accountable for one-third of the world’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Over the next twenty years, China alone will add as many as 350 million urban residents to its population—more people than live in the United States—and will build the equivalent of ten New York Cities’ worth of skyscrapers... More
Is Capitalism on Trial?
“I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death,” Frank Luntz, an influential GOP pollster and strategist, warned the Republican Governors Association at a meeting in Florida last month, referring to the Occupy movement. “They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”
Perhaps Luntz had already discovered this startling finding, buried in a recent Pe... More
Evil and Ignorance: The Case of Darfur
What is the role of ignorance in allowing evil to thrive? Can ignorance be a form of acquiescence? When does ignorance of evil become culpable in itself? These are large questions, but ones worth asking of public intellectuals who presume to speak about the nature of evil, and on this basis particular instances of evil.
In his much-reviewed new book Political Evil, political scientist Alan Wolfe attempts to diagnose various forms of political naïveté among those attempting to respond to politica... More
In Darkness: Surviving the Holocaust
Agnieszka Holland is a half-Jewish director, born in Warsaw several years after the Second World War, who has had a varied and illustrious film career. She was assistant director on her mentor Andrzej Wajda’s Danton (1983), and directed films of her own in Poland, like the grim, political A Lonely Woman (1981). After 1981 most of her films, such as Olivier, Olivier (1992) and Washington Square (1997), were made elsewhere in Europe and in the United States. In recent years, she has directed epi... More
The Roberts Court and the Separation of Church and State
Separation of Church and State was one of the fundamental principles undergirding the new nation envisioned by the framers of the U.S. Constitution. Neither “God” nor any synonym for it appears anywhere in the Constitution. Article VI forbids any religious test “as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” And even before granting the freedoms of speech, the press, assembly, and petition, the First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Taken together, the “Establishm... More
The Iron Lady: Thatcher Devoid of Thatcherism
Biopics are rarely the best way of getting a handle on the social or political world. They are too focused on the career or character of their central figure. Everything else, including other people, is only superficially sketched, subsumed by the actions, thoughts, and feelings of the film’s protagonist. Phyllida Lloyd’s The Iron Lady, one of the better recent works in the genre, is a perfect example of the biopic’s limits and strengths.
It opens with a frail old woman on the cusp of dementia, Baroness Margar... More
Europe’s Civic Cultures and the Euro Crisis
Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World
by Michael Lewis
W.W. Norton & Co., 2011, 224 pp.
Michael Douglas is a movie star who won an Oscar for his role as a corporate raider in Wall Street. Michael Lewis was a real-life bond trader who became a celebrity by leveraging three years at Salomon Brothers into a lifelong career as a writer of entertaining books on business, starting with the best-seller Liar’s Poker. The messages they preached, on screen and in print, were coincidentally both so beguiling that they confused their audi... More
Ten Days in Tahrir
On November 18, as it careened toward democracy, Egypt got a partial glimpse of its future on the midsized patch of concrete and dirt in downtown Cairo known as Tahrir Square.
It was a hazy and warm Friday, the day of prayer and the typical day of protest. Activists across the political spectrum had called for a unity rally ten days before the country’s first round of parliamentary elections since the winter revolution. But if there was any unity, it was mostly among the Islamists, who had come out for one of th... More
Hungarian Media Independence Under Attack: An Interview with Balázs Nagy-Navarro
In April 2010 the Hungarian right-wing party Fidesz won a sweeping victory, aided by the immense unpopularity of their Socialist opponents and one of the worst unemployment rates in the European Union. The party’s control of 68 percent of the seats in parliament allowed it to govern without ideologically diverse coalition partners. Upon gaining power, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán did not hesitate to take full advantage of that fact,
Straight Out of Wukan: A Quick Q&A with Journalist Rachel Beitare
Earlier this year, a Beijing-based Israeli journalist named Rachel Beitare contacted me out of the blue to set up an interview about the impact the Arab Spring events might have in China. I ended up impressed by the caliber of the questions put to me, so I started keeping an eye out for her byline, in case she published things in English (much of her work is in Hebrew.) I wasn’t disappointed: before long Foreign Policy ran a smart commentary, “Guilty By Association,” in which Beitare
The Early History of Sudan’s Third Civil War
When the history of Sudan’s third civil war is written, most will judge that the precipitating event occurred on May 21, when the Khartoum regime seized the contested border area of Abyei. It is a terminus a quo in some ways similar to ... More
Psychological Conflict: A Dangerous Method
The trademarks of David Cronenberg’s films have been stunningly imagined violence (Eastern Promises) and intense psychological horror, especially of the fetishistic, bodily, and carnal varieties (Crash, The Fly, Dead Ringers). In Spider (2002) he explored the schizophrenic mind through the eyes of a man given a room in a house for emotionally disturbed people after being released from a mental institution.
Though Cronenberg’s latest film, A Dangerous Method, does depic... More
Has the Islamist Winter Killed the Arab Spring?
We have learned to be skeptical of sweeping ideological revolutions, but “non-ideological” democratic revolutions come with a paradox: as soon as the polls open, the vanguard that has fought and sacrificed to earn the ballot is unceremoniously swept into the political margins. Results from the first round of parliamentary elections in Egypt have been trickling in, starting with a reported turnout of 52 percent (a higher number was previously reported and c... More
The GOP’s Attacks on Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood
Margaret Sanger, the pioneering advocate for birth control and women’s rights, is back in the news, forty-five years after her death in 1966. The renewed interest in Sanger is due to the escalation of attacks on Planned Parenthood by Republicans and anti-abortion activists. In her time, Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a controversial figure, even among feminists, and she often ran afoul of the law in her quest to promote women’s health and birth control. But the recent attacks are filled with lies and mis... More
Woody Guthrie: Spokesperson for the Lost
The latest drama by playwright and actor Michael Patrick Flanagan Smith opens with a dying man lying supine in bed, ravaged by the effects of Huntington’s disease. But this is no ordinary man. He’s an iconoclast, one of the original artist-activists, a major influence on the 1960s civil rights movement, a man who could reduce counterculture demigods like Bob Dylan and John Lennon to mere idolaters. This man is Woody Guthrie, and in Woody Guthrie Dreams, which ran at the Theater for the New City in Manhattan’s East Vill... More
After the Scream: Occupy Wall Street Reforms Itself
The Murry Bergtraum High School For Business Careers, a massive, modernist citadel that stands directly opposite One Police Plaza, the NYPD’s Lower Manhattan headquarters, was, protesters agreed, an odd place for Occupy Wall Street to hold a meeting. But the evening’s work needed privacy, quiet, and a good chunk of unbroken physical space; the school’s second-story cafeteria, cleared of students and lunch tables, offered all three. So, on November 7, hundreds of occupiers—many of whom were only months ago strolling the halls of... More
Afghanistan Diaries: Teachers and Doctors
Combat Outpost Rankel, Safar, Garmsir District, Helmand Province, Afghanistan
November 2010
During my first week with the unit I helped the ANA company commander, Captain Abdullah, come up with a list of things he felt were essential to his mission of disrupting the Taliban in the Safar area. The idea was to provide a manageable request list to the ANA battalion logistics soldiers, who, like most ANA logisticians, struggle to keep up with demand and meet the needs of a growing force, all while learning their trade. Here is the list Captain Abdullah dictated by radio to ... More
Is Italy’s Opposition out of Options?
Late on Tuesday night, Silvio Berlusconi announced his intention to resign as prime minister of Italy. After losing his majority in parliament in a key vote on economic policy, even the normally bullish and intransigent Berlusconi realized that his departure was inevitable. Despite weathering a storm of scandals over the past two years—including the notorious “Rubygate” affair—and surviving a dizzying number of confidence motions, his number was finally up.
... More
Dissent on Occupy Wall Street
Dissent’s coverage and analysis of the Occupy mobilizations:
Occupying Student Debt – Jeffrey Williams, Jan. 30
Is Capitalism on Trial? – Peter Dreier, Jan. 27
In Chicago, Throwing Down the Gauntlet – Todd Gitlin, Jan. 26
A New Quarter Begins at UC Davis – Drew Halfmann & Sarah Augusto, Jan. 19
MoreAfghanistan Diaries: Letters of Recommendation
Combat Outpost Rankel, Safar, Garmsir District, Helmand Province, Afghanistan
September 2010
On the way from my old job with the Afghan brigade to my new Afghan infantry company in Safar, I stopped for a few days at Delhi, the headquarters of our Afghan battalion (the middle level between brigade and company). The Marine logistics mentor there was building a medical aid station for the ANA. A local Afghan contractor had dropped off some wood cabinets and tables and was erecting the tent. “How did you find a contractor for this job?” I asked. “Oh, it’s really easy. I wal... More
