By Edward Zelinsky

On a personal level, I enjoyed the news reports that Mitt Romney holds assets worth tens of millions of dollars in his individual retirement account (IRA). These reports confirm a central thesis of The Origins of the Ownership Society, namely, the extent to which defined contribution accounts, such as IRAs and 401(k) accounts, have become central features of American life.

I was also gratified as colleagues, friends and neighbors who are often skeptical of what I do for a living (“You actually teach about pensions?”) sought my opinion about Mitt Romney’s IRA. Since we don’t have all of the details, my answers entailed a certain amount of conjecture. For those too sheepish to ask, here are the questions most frequently posed to me and my answers:

Mitt Romney. Photo by Gage Skidmore. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Because he was a better investor than you. It appears that Mitt Romney’s IRA largely consists of investments he made while a partner at Bain Capital and of the proceeds from such Bain investments. Those investments were apparently made in Mitt Romney’s 401(k) account when the investments had relatively little value. When he left Bain, these investments were rolled over, i.e., transferred tax-free, to Mitt Romney’s IRA. While these investments were modest when initially made, they are now quite valuable. That is what successful private equity investors do.

When must Mitt Romney pay taxes on the assets in his IRA?

April 1, 2018. He could start paying taxes before then but what the Code calls his “required beginning date” is April 1, 2018. This date is set by a statutory formula which is quizzical even by the standards of the Internal Revenue Code: Mitt Romney was born on March 12, 1947. He will be 70 years old on March 12, 2017. Six months after this birthday is September 12, 2017. Therefore, Mitt Romney must start to draw down and pay tax on his IRA as of April 1, 2018.

How much tax will Mitt Romney have to pay then?

It will depend on the size of the IRA at that time and the tax rates then in effect. Because Mrs. Romney is only two years younger than her husband, the first distribution from Mitt Romney’s account on or before April 1, 2018 must be at least 3.65% of the account as it then exists. This percentage is based on the Romneys’ joint life expectancies as determined by Treasury actuarial tables. Thus, for example, if Mitt Romney’s IRA is worth $100,000,000 on December 31, 2017, his first distribution from this account on or before April 1, 2018 must be $3,650,000. Assuming that Mitt Romney made only tax deductible contributions to the account, all of this distribution will be taxed as ordinary income, at whatever tax rate then prevails.

What about subsequent years?

Each year, as the IRA holder ages, the required distribution (and thus taxable income) increases as a percentage of the current account balance. For example, when Mitt Romney is 75, his required IRA distribution will be 4.37% of the account as it then exists. When Mitt Romney is 80 years old, he will be required to receive and pay ordinary income taxes on 5.35% of the IRA balance as it then exists.

Wouldn’t Mitt Romney have been better off from a tax perspective keeping these investments as capital assets outside his IRA?

We don’t know. Had these investments been held directly by Mitt Romney as capital assets, they would have been more lightly taxed as capital gains. In contrast, Mitt Romney will pay tax at higher ordinary income rates when these investments are eventually distributed to him from his IRA. However, there are two potentially offsetting factors which Mitt Romney likely considered as part of his tax planning. First, some, perhaps many, of these investments may yield ongoing ordinary income. As to this annual income, it is typically considered desirable to engage in the kind of tax-deferral Mitt Romney has obtained by holding assets in his IRA.

Second, if assets are sold inside the IRA, those sales are tax-deferred. In contrast, if Mitt Romney had kept these assets in his own name and sold them, tax would have been due upfront on each sale. It appears that Mitt Romney concluded that these latter two considerations made it tax efficient to put these investments into his 401(k) account and, from there, into his IRA.

What is a “foreign blocker”?

The term “blocker” is today used to describe a corporation interposed between an investor and an investment. A foreign blocker is a blocker incorporated outside of the United States, typically in a low tax jurisdiction like the Cayman Islands.

Why did Mitt Romney use a foreign blocker for his IRA?

Probably to avoid the Internal Revenue Code’s unrelated business income tax (UBIT).

What is the UBIT?

Otherwise tax-exempt institutions, like pension trusts, university endowments and Mitt Romney’s IRA, trigger federal tax if, instead of investing to obtain dividends, interest and similar forms of passive investment income, they receive active earnings from business operations. The UBIT is the provision of the Code which levies this tax on the active business income received by tax-exempt entities. It is likely that many Bain assets are active businesses and thus would generate UBIT if owned directly by Mitt Romney’s IRA.

So how does the foreign blocker work?

Instead of the exempt institution itself holding active business assets, those assets are held by a foreign corporation which pays little or no corporate tax to its home jurisdiction. This foreign corporation then pays dividends to the exempt institution. These dividends are then tax-deferred to the exempt entity such as Mitt Romney’s IRA.

Without more detail, we don’t know if the foreign blocker corporation actually reduced Mitt Romney’s effective tax obligation. If the foreign blocker corporation owns U.S. business assets, the blocker will pay U.S. tax on its U.S. business income. This typically results in no net tax savings since the U.S. tax obligation is merely shifted from the tax-exempt institution to the blocker corporation.

If, however, the foreign blocker holds foreign business assets, it is possible for the blocker to spare the U.S. exempt institution from U.S. tax while paying little or no foreign tax. In that case, the foreign blocker is a real tax winner.

To evaluate this further, we need to know more about the portfolio of Mitt Romney’s IRA. It is, however, unlikely that a Bain Capital partner would have used a foreign blocker unless some tax savings resulted.

Is this unusual?

Hardly. The use of foreign blockers is quite common. You (here my previously indignant questioner typically becomes quite sheepish) may be covered by a pension plan which uses foreign blockers to defer UBIT on what otherwise would be currently taxed business income. You may also benefit from or contribute to a university endowment which uses foreign blockers.

Can I invest my IRA funds like Mitt Romney?

In theory, yes. In practice, no. There are mutual funds which invest in private equity deals of the sort Mitt Romney holds in his IRA. However, under the best of circumstances, these funds need to be scrutinized carefully as to their management fees and whether they really obtain the kinds of investment opportunities available to a Bain Capital partner. I’m skeptical.

Edward A. Zelinsky is the Morris and Annie Trachman Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. He is the author of The Origins of the Ownership Society: How The Defined Contribution Paradigm Changed America. His monthly column appears here.

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Charles Dickens loved birthdays and always celebrated his own in style. So, in the face of those who are complaining about being Dickensed-out already, my view is that we can’t party enough.

One of the earliest letters we have in Dickens’s hand is an invitation to his friend and fellow journalist Thomas Beard to his twentieth birthday party – a “chosen few” friends and family are summoned to “join in a friendly quadrille.” I wish I’d been there, or at one of the outings he would devise later in life: his thirty-second birthday, say, when “unless it should rain cats, dogs, pitchforks, and Cochin China poultry,” he is rounding up half a dozen of his friends to go walking with him in Kent (his old childhood beat). They ended up with dinner at Wates Hotel in Gravesend; Dickens wrote ahead to order iced champagne and a good fire ready to greet them.

Family birthdays also got the Dickens treatment, with all stops being pulled out for his eldest son Charley, who had helpfully arrived on Twelfth Night (6^th January). Charley’s sixth birthday was a real show-stopper. Not content with merely laying on the Magic Lantern show currently fashionable at parties for privileged under-tens, Dickens jacked up the excitement to fever pitch by buying up the stock of Hamley’s toy shop and coming out as a conjuror.  He had practised for hours on his own and was a great hit, with his tricks of flying money and burning handkerchiefs, although I imagine the patter must have been the best part of the show. As late as 1857 he was devising a birthday treat for his wife Catherine: the occasion of their first stay at Gad’s Hill, the country house he had bought in Kent. A year later, almost to the day, he was ejecting her from the family home.

Dickens felt birthdays intensely. He feels for his childhood self who works at the blacking factory and celebrates his birthday by screwing up his courage to go into a pub in Parliament Street and enquire, “‘What is your very best – the VERY best – ale, a glass?’”  In Bleak House we see him feeling for those who do not know when their birthdays are, like illiterate Jo the crossing sweeper, or who have unbirthdays, like illegitimate Esther Summerson. “‘Far better, little Esther,’” her godmother tells her, “‘that you had had no birthday; that you had never been born!’”

So it’s good to see the world stepping into its global glitter gear for him this year, with a myriad of festivities, including a dinner at the Mansion House in the City of London, and a reception at Buckingham Palace. Plenty of exhibitions too, radio and TV shows galore, theatrical performances and shelf-fulls of pleasant kitsch. I warm to tributes with an accent on the collective. On publication day, Dickens’s novels arrived into a sphere of sociable merchandizing. While you were reading the novel in its nineteen monthly parts you could also be dancing along – to even the darkest novels, with the Little Dorrit Polka and the Little Dorrit Schottische (think polka but slower). So I’m enjoying the Dickens board game which my son gave me for Christmas. And I like the sound of the British Council’s “Sketching the City” initiative, a world-wide invitation to us all to document our own city, as Dickens did London with his Sketches by Boz. The BBC TV’s Arena programme “Dickens on Film” took us on a journey which had both communal and individual resonance. We could sit beside our childhood selves drinking in those formative earlier film and TV adaptations, that very particular Sunday teatime moment for those of a certain age.

Sunday teatimes aside, it’s urban and night-time Dickens which is coming out strongest in the festivities. Less of the plum pudding and jokes; more darkness, grit, and mystery. The Dickens and London exhibition at the Museum of London ends with a brilliant film essay by William Raban, entitled “The Houseless Shadow”. Inspired by Dickens’s 1860 essay “Night Walks”, Raban filmed night-time London over five months, blending into his surroundings with his equipment in a supermarket bag, his tripod strapped to a luggage trolley. Catch it if you can; the exhibition is on until June 10^th .

Jenny Hartley is Professor of English Literature at Roehampton University. Her most recent book, The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, published this month. She is also the author of Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women, two books on British women’s writing from the Second World War, and The Reading Groups Book, a pioneering survey of reading groups. For the last ten years she has been a leading member of the Prison Reading Groups project.

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The article in this week’s Times with the commentary written by Chris Watson illustrates the significant changes that have happened in transplantation over the last two years. In 2008, the Organ Donor Taskforce (ODTF) came up with 14 recommendations to address the problem of donor shortage, and then UK Transplant (which then changed to Blood Transplant) acted upon these.

In addition to these changes, organ donation surgery became restricted to six zones whereas before the ODTF recommendations, all 26 transplant units in the country contributed to cadaveric organ donation. Also, the national sharing of organs (which had been voluntary, in so far as we aimed to serve our own community primarily and additional organs were shared only in certain cases) became enforced. This essentially was because there was a postcode imbalance, and some kidney failure patients waited six years for their transplant whereas in the northeast, patients generally waited only for 18 months.

The reasons for this imbalance were complex and were partly influenced by certain ethnic minority populations who didn’t support cadaveric donation while simultaneously making up a significant percentage of the number of patients who needed a transplant.

Additionally, different transplant unit structures had varying degrees of enthusiasm for donation. The work force obviously recognized these problems and tried to unify the approach and also ensure equality of access.

On a personal level, I was reluctant to throw my lot in with these national developments because our transplant population had a good deal! Indeed, with the national sharing mechanism, our local transplant rates initially fell, resulting in an increased waiting time.

The ODTF 14 point plan was, to me, an experiment which should be abandoned if it didn’t work. However, its effect was to promote donation by embedding Transplant Coordinators in most hospitals, thereby insuring that potential organ donors are not overlooked. In addition, numbers of Non-Heart-beating donors (aka donor after cardiac death), thanks to our pioneering work, have really taken off, accounting for 37% of cadaveric kidney transplants nationally. So although from a local level the national sharing scheme was a bad idea at the time, because of the promotion of donors through the enactment of the ODTF plan, the transplant numbers have now increased nationally, so my concerns for the future have proved wrong.

For example, I was on call for the week between Christmas and New Year and we did six kidneys and two liver transplants. Last week, I was again on call, and we did a liver, a kidney/pancreas, three live donor kidneys, two double kidney transplants, and an islet transplant! On the background of this our unit did 135 cadaveric donors last year.

Our next pressing problem is surgical exhaustion!

David Talbot is a Consultant Transplant Surgeon at Newcastle Hospitals NHS Trust and co-author of Organ Donation and Transplantation After Cardiac Death.

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On this day in 1922, James Joyce’s Ulysses was first published in its entirety, although the publication history of the book is nearly as complex as the novel itself. Initially serialised in The Little Review from 1918, publication of Nausicaä episode led to a prosecution for obscenity and no English-speaking country dared to publish more, and risk further prosecution. However, shortly after arriving in Paris in July 1920, Joyce met Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop and friend to modern writers. On hearing of the collapse of Joyce’s hopes of US or English publication, Sylvia Beach offered to publish the book under the auspices of Shakespeare and Company, to have it printed in Dijon by Maurice Darantiere, and to finance it by advance subscription. Joyce agreed at once. Here, we’ve picked one of our favourite extracts from the Oxford World’s Classics edition (pp.226-227).

Mr Bloom turned over idly pages of The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, then of Aristotle’s Masterpiece. Crooked botched print. Plates : infants cuddled in a ball in bloodred wombs like livers of slaughtered cows. Lots of them like that at this moment all over the world. All butting with their skulls to get out of it. Child born every minute somewhere.  Mrs Purefoy.

He laid both books aside and glanced at the third : Tales of the Ghetto by Leopold von Sacher Masoch.

–  That I had, he said, pushing it by.

The shopman let two volumes fall on the counter.

–  Them are two good ones, he said.

Onions of his breath came across the counter out of his ruined mouth. He bent to make a bundle of other books, hugged them against his unbuttoned waistcoat and bore them off behind the dingy curtain.

On O’Connell bridge many persons observed the grave deportment and gay apparel of Mr Denis J. Maginni, professor of dancing &c.

Mr Bloom, alone, looked at the titles. Fair Tyrants by James Lovebirch. Know the kind that is. Had it? Yes.

He opened it. Thought so.

A woman’s voice behind the dingy curtain. Listen : The man.

No: she wouldn’t like that much. Got her it once.

He read the other title : Sweets of Sin. More in her line. Let us see.

He read where his finger opened.

— All the dollarbills her husband gave her were spent in the stores on wondrous gowns and costliest fillies. For him ! For Raoul !

Yes. This. Here. Try.

–  Her mouth glued on his in a voluptuous kiss while his hands felt for the opulent curves inside her deshabillé.

Yes. Take this. The end.

—  You are late, he spoke hoarsely, eying her with a suspicious glare.

The beautiful woman threw off her sabletrimmed wrap, displaying her queenly shoulders and heaving embonpoint. An imperceptible smile played round her perfect lips as she turned to him calmly.

Mr Bloom read again : The beautiful woman.

Warmth showered gently over him, cowing his flesh. Flesh yielded amid rumpled clothes. Whites of eyes swooning up. His nostrils arched themselves for prey. Melting breast ointments (for him ! For Raoul !) Armpits’ oniony sweat. Fishgluey slime (her heaving embonpoint !). Feel ! Press ! Crished ! Sulphur dung of lions !

Young ! Young !

An elderly female, no more young, left the building of the courts of chancery, king’s bench, exchequer and common pleas having heard in the lord chancellor’s court the case in lunacy of Potterton, in the admiralty division the summons, exparte motion, of the owners of the Lady Cairns versus the owners of the barque Mona, in the court of appeal reservation of judgment in the case of Harvey versus the Ocean Accident and Guarantee Corporation.

Phlegmy coughs shook the air of the bookshop, bulging out the dingy curtains. The shopman’s uncombed grey head came out and his unshaven reddened face, coughing. He raked his throat rudely, spat phlegm on the floor. He put his boot on what he had spat, wiping his sole along it and bent, showing a rawskinned crown, scantily haired.

Mr Bloom beheld it.

Mastering his troubled breath, he said :

–  I’ll take this one.

The shopman lifted eyes bleared with old rheum.

—  Sweets of Sin, he said, tapping on it. That’s a good one.

This excerpt is taken from Ulysses: The 1922 text by James Joyce. It is edited with an introduction by Jeri Johnson, Senior Tutor at Exeter College, Oxford and appears in the Oxford World’s Classics series.

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A grown-up neighbor in the English village of my childhood told stories about angels that sat upon our shoulders and fairies that lived in her snapdragons. Like the other kids, I searched her flowers for a glimpse of the sprites, but agnosticism imbibed from my parents quickly overruled this innocent play. Yet there was magic in my neighbor’s garden and I had seen real angels on her lawn: little stalked bells that poked from the dew-drenched grass on autumn mornings; evanescent beauties whose delicately balanced caps quivered to the touch. By afternoon they were gone, shriveled into the greenery. Does any living thing seem more supernatural to a child than a mushroom? Their prevalence in fairy tale illustrations and fantasy movies suggests not. Like no other species, the strangeness of fungi survives the loss of innocence about the limits of nature. They trump the supernatural, their magic intensifying as we learn more about them.

Once upon a time, I spent 30 years studying mushrooms and other fungi. Now, as my scientific interests broaden with my waistline, I would like to share three things that I have learned about the meaning of life from thinking about these extraordinary sex organs and the microbes that produce them. This mycological inquiry has revealed the following: (i) life on land would collapse without the activities of mushrooms; (ii) we owe our existence to mushrooms; and (iii) there is (probably) no God. The logic is spotless.

Mushrooms are masterpieces of natural engineering. The overnight appearance of the fruit body is a pneumatic process, with the inflation of millions of preformed cells extending the stem, pushing earth aside, and unfolding the cap. Once exposed, the gills of a meadow mushroom shed an astonishing 30,000 spores per second, delivering billions of allergenic particles into the air every day. A minority of spores alights and germinates on fertile ground and some species are capable of spawning the largest and longest-lived organisms on the planet. Mushroom colonies burrow through soil and rotting wood. Some hook into the roots of forest trees and engage in mutually supportive symbioses; others are pathogens that decorate their food sources with hardened hooves and fleshy shelves. Mushrooms work with insects too, fed by and feeding leaf-cutter ants in the New World and termites in the Old World. Among the staggering diversity of mushroom-forming fungi we also find strange apparitions including gigantic puffballs, phallic eruptions with revolting aromas, and tiny “bird’s nests” whose spore-filled eggs are splashed out by raindrops.

Mushrooms have been around for tens of millions of years and their activities are indispensable for the operation of the biosphere. Through their relationships with plants and animals, mushrooms are essential for forest and grassland ecology, climate control and atmospheric chemistry, water purification, and the maintenance of biodiversity. This first point, about the ecological significance of mushrooms, is obvious, yet the 16,000 described species of mushroom-forming fungi are members of the most poorly understood kingdom of life. The second point requires a dash of lateral thinking. Because humans evolved in ecosystems dependent upon mushrooms there would be no us without mushrooms. And no matter how superior we feel, humans remain dependent upon the continual activity of these fungi. The relationship isn’t reciprocal: without us there would definitely be mushrooms. Judged against the rest of life (and, so often, we do place ourselves against the rest of nature) humans can be considered as a recent and damaging afterthought.

Some people may find my third point more controversial. Mushrooms demonstrate, quite convincingly, that gods are figments of the hominid imagination. Carefully designed experiments with psilocybin, the hallucinogenic alkaloid from species of Psilocybe mushroom, show that spiritual feelings of kinship with something greater than oneself, mystical experiences, and other nebulous phenomena can be induced by this single chemical. Participants treated with psilocybin in a recent study at Johns Hopkins University described feeling closer to God. After ingestion, psilocybin is converted into psilocin. Psilocin is remarkably similar in chemical structure to serotonin and when it reaches the brain it docks with serotonin receptors, upsets the normal functioning of the neocortex, and can conjure deities from thin air. Belief in God has no more substance than a mushroom dream.

To sum up: life on earth depends on mushrooms, humans wouldn’t have evolved without mushrooms, and mushrooms afford formidable support for the nonexistence of God. That we are manufactured from stardust, rescued from disorder by the big reactor in the sky, and destined to diffusion, is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And while mushrooms are everywhere and will outlive us by an eternity, what marvelous and unlikely fortune to be alive at this moment!

Nicholas Money is Professor of Botany and Western Program Director at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is the author of more than 70 peer-reviewed papers on fungal biology and has authored four books, including, Mr. Bloomfield’s Orchard. The Mysterious World of Mushrooms, Molds, and Mycologists (2002), and Mushroom which published in January 2012. As Director of Miami’s interdisciplinary Western Program, Dr. Money has broadened his professional interests and is examining the power of the scientific process to shape our comprehension of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything else.

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The question about the origin of gay “homosexual” has been asked and answered many times (and always correctly), so that we needn’t expect sensational discoveries in this area. The adjective gay, first attested in Middle English, is of French descent; in the fourteenth century it meant both “joyous” and “bright; showy.” The OED gives no attestations of gay “immoral” before 1637. Yet it is not improbable that this sense is much older but that it remained part of low slang, unfamiliar to the majority of English speakers, even such as were sensitive to street usage. Dickens began writing Dombey and Son in 1846 and gave the family name Gay to Walter, the future husband of Florence, the sweet and suffering character (one can even say the protagonist) of his novel. The combination Mrs. Walter Gay (or Florence Gay) did not shock or amuse his contemporaries, though gay woman “prostitute” had already made it even into printed books (the earliest citation in the OED goes back to 1825). Gay “homosexual” dates to the 1930’s, but it could hardly have been the product of slow semantic development from “depraved” and “perverse.” While “unnatural attraction,” to use the euphemism of the past epoch, was looked upon as a deviation and a vice, gay “male prostitute,” along with “whore,” would suggested itself to many. In the sixties of the twentieth century, homosexual men accepted gay as a neutral term, and that is the end of the story. A slight touch of novelty in my summary is that I don’t believe in “merry, joyous” acquiring negative connotations gradually and suspect that they have been present since the middle period but were suppressed or even tabooed; see also below. The sense “male prostitute,” perhaps especially with reference to a passive homosexual, may be old too. Thus, if I am right, the history of gay did not run parallel to that of faggot: in fag ~ faggot, reference to homosexuals indeed appeared only in the twentieth century.

The main mystery is the origin of the French word, the etymon of Engl. gay. The first edition of the OED offered no solution; the OED online expanded considerably the etymological part of the entry but refrained from taking sides and only listed a few proposals. This is natural: the history of gay is obscure and will, most likely, remain a matter of controversy in the future. Before I say what little I can on this subject, a short introduction is needed. It is well-known that words like warranty and guarantee, warden and guardian, William and Guillaume, among many others, are etymological doublets pairwise. The French for war is guerre, that is, the doublet of guerre serves also as its English gloss. We have here Old Germanic words with initial w-. When Central Old French borrowed them, w-, a sound alien to Romance, was replaced with gu- (first only before the vowel a); with time, w after g was lost. Later such words often migrated to English, where the spelling gu- bears witness to their stay “abroad.” But in Northern and Anglo- French, the dialects of greater importance to the history of English than the French of Paris, initial w- survived. Consequently, both warden and guardian are ultimately of Germanic origin, but guardian was taken over from Central French, whereas warden is a guest from Northern French, so that w- makes the word look as though it had never left it Germanic home.

The main old hypotheses concerning gay were based on the idea that it had come to French from some Germanic language: central (Franconian) or southern (Gothic). Therefore, scholars looked for appropriate adjectives beginning with g or w. The main candidates were Old High German gahi “quick, precipitous, daring” and wahi “shining, beautiful” (both with long a). Those adjectives have been recorded with several more senses, but we do not need full lists. Romance etymological dictionaries (at gai and so forth) usually defend wahi or more rarely gahi (look up jäh, the reflex of gahi, in German dictionaries if you are interested in more information). Both etymologies encounter considerable difficulties, because the path from either “precipitous” or “shining” to “merry” is hard to reconstruct. The second variant is preferable on account of Engl. gay “showy,” but, in English, “showy” seems to be a figurative meaning, while in French gai this sense does not exist at all.

To be sure, the sought-for etymon did not have to be Germanic: it might as well be a Romance word, and here our story again branches off into two. Latin gaudium “joy” has been suggested as the source of the adjective (do many people still remember the “hymn”: “Gaudeamus igitur, juvenes dum sumus”? “Let us therefore rejoice while we are young”). The other guess connected gay and jay (the bird name). The interplay of initial g- and j- in French deserves a long essay, but we’ll let it be, because the idea that French gai meant “merry as a jay” (or that the jay got its name because it was “a merry bird”) has been refuted quite efficiently. The derivation from gaudium still has distinguished supporters. A stray publication once defended German geil “lecherous, randy, horny” as the etymon of gai. This idea lacks value. I am now coming to the climax of my etymological thriller.

The regular readers of this blog know that I am a great admirer of Frank Chance, whose piercing judgment and etymological acumen (when I am agitated, I begin to speak like Anthony Trollope or like Kipling’s bicolored python—sorry) was equal to Skeat’s and James A. H. Murray’s. Oxford University Press would do the world a great favor if it reprinted ALL his contributions in a cheap slim volume with an index. In 1861 he published in Notes and Queries a short article (“note”), which I’ll reproduce with numerous abridgments:

“Gaîne. –The etymology of this Fr. word signifying sheath seems to me instructive. It comes…from the Lat. vagina…. The g in gaîne, therefore, really corresponds to the v in vagina…. In a similar way, I think, our adj. gay might be readily deduced from the Lat. vagus, or perhaps rather from the corresponding Ital. vago, which means both wandering, roaming, and pleasant, agreeable, the connexion apparently being the freedom from restraint implied by both classes of words.”

Some time ago, I devoted a post to the origin of the word bigot. Its etymology was discovered in a short review that no one seems to have read. Before that I told a similar story about conundrum. Quite naturally, French, Spanish, and German scholars have never heard of Frank Chance, for he published his letters only in Notes and Queries and occasionally in The Academy. But Skeat and Murray read this periodical and regularly contributed to it, so that it is incomprehensible why they missed Chance’s conjecture.

A hundred and thirty years later the noted German historical linguist Harri Meier offered exactly the same etymology and even referred to vagina as a piece of corroborating evidence. He cited not only Latin vagus “wandering, rambling; inconstant” (compare Engl. vague, vagrant, vagabond, extravagant, vagary, and others with the same root) but also (and this is especially important) the senses current in the living Romance languages and such derivatives as Italian svagarsi “divert one’s mind “and “enjoy oneself,” svago “relaxation, diversion, amusement,” and a few French verbs of the same type. Incidentally, Old French gai already meant “high-spirited; frivolous, fickle; libertine,” while Latin poets called a flighty girl vaga puella and vaga juventa (quite possibly, such maidens were not just flighty). It appears that Latin vagus ~ vaga indeed continued into the Romance languages with the sense “free from restraint” and underwent what is called an amelioration of meaning (from “libertine; frivolous” to “merry, vivacious”). For brevity’s sake, I’ll skip the question of whether gai had anything to do with its partial synonym gaillard. Middle English gay must have inherited both senses, but one became “standard,” whereas the other (because of its negative connotations) led an undignified life as part of low slang, until it came to the surface and ousted the idea of merriment. A gay man can now be full of pep or depressed and sad. We no longer hear either the tautology or the oxymoron. Thus, gay ends up as a Romance word without Germanic ancestors.

I believe that Chance’s etymology, rediscovered by Meier, who was unaware of a talented predecessor, is the best we have, but I am not a Romance scholar and will let specialists resolve the dispute. Regardless of their reaction, one thing is clear. Etymologists constantly force open doors. They lack solid bibliographies and rediscover old solutions or wander in the dark. I said this in my posts on conundrum and bigot. I’ll say it again now.

This is a portrait of John Gay (1685-1732), the author of The Beggar’s Opera. Of those who have borne this name, he may be the most famous representative.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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It’s hard not to feel at least a little sorry for Iowa’s conservative Republicans. Although three-quarters of the votes in Tuesday night’s caucus went to conservatives of one stripe or another, the winner by a bare eight votes was Mitt Romney, the most moderate candidate running – and “moderate” is an obscenity for conservatives. They don’t like Romney, and the feeling seems to be mutual. But even the relatively moderate Iowa Republicans who voted for Romney don’t seem terribly excited by him. The word his supporters most commonly use to describe him is “electable,” which is faint praise on the order of calling a meal “edible.” Nonetheless, his Iowa victory makes it all but certain that the former Massachusetts moderate, despite being the least preferred candidate of a majority of Republicans, will be the party’s champion for the presidency in 2012. This is an unhappy marriage of convenience that even Madame Bovary might pity.

Why are the Republican front-runner and the party’s base so at odds with each other? The answer lies in the party’s history, and particularly in the tension between moderates and conservatives that has been a constant theme of the GOP since the first incarnation of the New Right coalesced around the red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s.

The conservative movement has flared up at regular intervals ever since, like cicadas or herpes. Barry Goldwater’s presidential candidacy in the early 1960s was followed by Ronald Reagan’s efforts in 1976 and 1980, the Newt Gingrich-led Congressional insurgency of 1994, and the Tea Party over the past several years. In all of these incarnations, the primal enemy for the conservative activist has been not so much the liberal Democrat as the moderate Republican.

In the conservative view, the Democrats are foes to be overcome, but moderates are traitors to be exterminated. Moderates strike conservatives as a haughty establishment, unresponsive to the people’s wishes and in thrall to the elite media and “informed opinion.” Were it not for the moderates’ unprincipled willingness to compromise with Democrats, so the conservative thinking goes, the welfare state would long since have been repealed, and few of the pernicious progressive developments of the twentieth century would have come to pass.

Business-minded moderate Republicans, naturally, have a different perspective. In their minds, they represent the party of prosperity, stability, pragmatism, and efficient government. They think of liberals as fiscally incontinent hacks, but conservatives are something even more dangerous: Southern and Western populists and crony capitalists who abandoned their natural home in the Democratic Party and took over the GOP.

Moderates see conservatives as radicals hellbent on destabilizing the international system, debauching the country’s finances by heedlessly cutting taxes even in the face of massive deficits, and threatening domestic order by rendering government dysfunctional and seeking to polarize the political parties along ideological lines. As one prominent moderate Republican warned Barry Goldwater in the early 1960s, “Dogmatic ideological parties tend to splinter the political and social fabric of a nation, lead to governmental crises and deadlocks, and stymie the compromises so often necessary to preserve freedom and achieve progress.”

That long-ago moderate Jeremiah, as it happens, was George Romney, father of Mitt. As the governor of Michigan during the 1960s, the elder Romney fought for good-government reforms, defended citizen interests against both big labor and big business, balanced the state budget by implementing an income tax, and increased spending on education, unemployment relief, and local governments. As a candidate for president during 1967-68, he battled conservatives to put the GOP on the side of minority civil rights and called for the U.S. to disengage from the bloody Vietnam war. George Romney was undoubtedly the person Mitt most looked up to, and as Massachusetts governor he was a moderate Republican in his father’s tradition.

For many conservatives, the Romney family history of moderation disqualifies Mitt as a true Republican standard-bearer. It doesn’t matter to them that he has disavowed positions he once clearly believed, on issues such as the environment, abortion, and health care. They would remain unconvinced even if he succeeded in conveying the enthusiasm of a real convert rather than the flexibility of a contortionist.

Romney’s real problem, though, may be that the conservative enmity to his candidacy isn’t matched by corresponding moderate enthusiasm. Obviously many moderates are put off by his opportunism, and Romney’s appeal to moderates and independents will wane further if he moves farther right in the Southern primaries. But he may not be more appealing when he tacks back toward the center, because Mitt’s moderation seems amorphous and lacking content, particularly in comparison with his father’s example.

Granted, it will always be hard to fire up voters with the moderate virtues of prudence, efficient government, and fiscal responsibility. But George Romney excited moderates with his enthusiastic support for civil rights and civil liberties, his embrace of bold new ideas, and his real concern for equal opportunity and the problems of the disadvantaged. He kicked off his presidential campaign with a nationwide tour of American poverty, from rural wastelands to Watts, and implored his fellow citizens to “listen to the voices from the ghetto.”

Can anyone see Mitt doing the same? If he’s really a moderate at heart, is there more to his moderation than technocracy and a yen to cut taxes and business regulation? These are questions Romney will have to wrestle with long after the memories of Iowa have faded.

Geoffrey Kabaservice has written for numerous national publications and has been an assistant professor of history at Yale University. He is the author of the National Book Award-nominated The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment and, most recently, Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party. He lives outside Washington, DC. Rule and Ruin was reviewed in this Sunday’s New York Times.

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The new year is a time for bold and often foolhardy predictions. Certainly, most of us will take the prophesy of impending doom on 21 December, 2012 with a large pinch of salt. This date may represent the end of a 5,125-year cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, but it doesn’t necessarily signal the end of all things (not even in Mayan history, contrary to popular belief). I think that when the time comes, we can plan for Christmas 2012 with a reasonably clear conscience.

But, despite the obvious pitfalls, I am prepared to stick my neck out and make a prediction. I predict that this will be the year that the Higgs boson is discovered.

This elusive particle was first ‘invented’ in 1964, by English theoretical physicist Peter Higgs. It is the characteristic particle of the hypothetical ‘Higgs field’ – an energy field thought to pervade the entire universe. The field was introduced into theories of particle physics around the same time by Higgs in Edinburgh, Belgian physicists Robert Brout and François Englert, and Americans Gerald Guralnik and Carl Hagen and British physicist Tom Kibble at Imperial College in London.

The Higgs field is hypothetical but we can be reasonably confident that something like it must exist. It is believed to be responsible for breaking the symmetry of the primordial electro-weak force, moments after the big bang, and forever dividing the weak nuclear force (responsible for beta-radioactivity) from electromagnetism (responsible for much of physics, chemistry and life). As a result of their interactions with the Higgs field, the massless carriers of the weak force – called W and Z particles – gain mass. In essence, the Higgs field retards the particles’ acceleration; it drags on them like molasses. We interpret this resistance to acceleration as mass.

In 1967, American theorist Steven Weinberg used the Higgs mechanism to predict the masses of the W and Z particles. In 1983, these particles were discovered at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva, with almost precisely the masses that had been predicted.

The Higgs field is now believed to be responsible for endowing all elementary particles with mass, and is a central plank of the so-called standard model of particle physics. This is a collection of quantum field theories that describe the strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism, and the elementary particles that make up all the visible matter in the universe. To a certain extent, we could say that we know the Higgs field must exist because particles have mass. However, having an instinct that the Higgs field must exist is not the same as proving its existence. And we prove the existence of the Higgs field by finding the Higgs boson, also known in the popular media as the ‘God particle’.

Although CERN physicists will argue that the search for the Higgs boson is not the only purpose of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), it is fair to say that – faster-than-light neutrinos aside – this is where most of the current interest resides. The LHC reached a peak proton-proton collision energy of 7 trillion electron volts in March 2010 and throughout 2011 engineers have tweaked the beam luminosity, a measure of the number of collisions the beam can produce, to ever higher values. The machine out-performed nearly everybody’s expectations.

The summer proved to be something of a roller-coaster ride. In July 2011, at the European Physical Society high-energy physics conference in Grenoble, glimpses of a candidate Higgs boson were reported with an energy around 135 GeV (giga electron-volts, or billion electron-volts) by both the detector collaborations, ATLAS and CMS. But by the time of the Fifteenth International Symposium on Lepton-Photon Interactions at High Energies, which began on 22 August at the Tata Institute in Mumbai, the physicists’ confidence had evaporated. It seemed that as more data had been gathered, the significance of the events hinting at a Higgs around 135 GeV had actually declined.

I met with Peter Higgs on a wet Thursday afternoon in Edinburgh, a few days before the Mumbai conference was due to commence. Higgs retired in 1996 but has remained in Edinburgh close to the University department where he first became a lecturer in mathematical physics in 1960. He is now a sprightly 82 years old. We sat in a coffee shop with his colleague and friend Alan Walker, and talked about his experiences and his hopes for the near future.

He had waited 47 years for some kind of vindication for the mechanism that bears his name. We talked about the prospects for the Mumbai conference, and the grounds we had for optimism that something momentous may be about to be reported. ‘It’s difficult for me now to connect with the person I was then [in 1964],’ he explained, ‘But I’m relieved it’s coming to an end. It will be nice after all this time to be proved right.’
Sadly, as events in Mumbai unfolded, Higgs discovered that he would have to wait a little longer.

By the end of 2011 the LHC had delivered data from about 350 trillion proton-proton collisions to both ATLAS and CMS. At a public conference organized at CERN on 13 December both detector collaborations reported excess events corresponding to a candidate Higgs boson with an energy around 124-126 GeV.

When the data from several different possible Higgs decay channels were combined, the ATLAS collaboration observed an excess of events corresponding to 3.6-sigma above the predicted background. This is a statistical measure reflecting the degree of confidence in the experimental data. Three-sigma significance implies a confidence level of 99.7% – in other words, a 0.3% chance that the data are in error. Although such confidence levels sound pretty convincing, to warrant declaration of a ‘discovery’, particle physicists actually demand five-sigma data, or confidence levels of 99.9999%.

Still, 3-6-sigma significance is quite compelling. CMS reported a combined excess of events with slightly lower statistical significance of 2.4-sigma.

In a blog entry posted the same day, Tommaso Dorigo, an Italian physicist working on CMS, declared this to be ‘firm evidence’ for a standard model Higgs boson with an energy around 125 GeV. There followed a short but intense war of words in the blogosphere as American theorist Matt Strassler adopted a more conservative view, arguing that Dorigo’s use of the word ‘firm’ was unwarranted: ‘If he had said “some preliminary evidence” he would have gotten away with it. As it is, it seems to me that he has crossed a line…’

Although the statistical significance of the ATLAS and CMS results are consistent with the use of the term ‘evidence’, the official line from CERN is that we must wait for more data to be certain. Perhaps their experiences at the Mumbai conference last August has taught the physicists to be cautious. CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer closed the 13 December conference with these observations: ‘[The data provide] intriguing hints in several channels in two experiments, but please be prudent. We have not found it yet. We have not excluded it yet. Stay tuned for next year.’

Higgs himself echoed the party line: ‘Ah well, I won’t be going home to open a bottle of whisky and drown my sorrows, but equally I am not going home to crack open a bottle of champagne either!’
The LHC is scheduled to re-start proton physics in April, so the focus of attention will be once again on the big summer conferences.

So, what grounds do I have for confidence in my prediction? After all, there is a very real possibility that the excess events reported in December may decline in significance as more data are collected. But I have been watching events unfold at CERN for nearly two years and my instinct tells me that this is it. I’m not by nature a gambler, but I’d be willing to gamble on this.

As my ATLAS contact recently put it: ‘We really do need data to be sure, but I would bet on this myself. [It] depends how much of a betting man you are.’

Jim Baggott was born in Southampton, England, in 1957. He graduated in chemistry from the University of Manchester in 1978. After completing his doctorate in physical chemistry at the University of Oxford, he worked as a postgraduate research fellow at Oxford and at Stanford University in California. He has been studying and writing about science, philosophy and science history for nearly 20 years, and has won awards for both scientific research and science writing. His published work includes The Quantum Story, Beyond Measure: Modern Physics, Philosophy, and the Meaning of Quantum Theory, and A Beginner’s Guide to Reality. Watch Jim Baggott explain the history of the Large Hadron Collider and CERN here. His previous post for OUPblog can be found here.

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Everybody knows that smoking is bad for you. Yet quitting smoking is a challenging endeavour – insurmountable for some. Even smokers who get the best help available still have a 50% chance of relapsing. Clearly, the more options we have to help with cessation, the better. Recent research suggests that meditation and mindfulness may be beneficial for smokers looking to extinguish the habit.

Mindfulness is a concept stemming from ancient Buddhist philosophy, comprising nonjudgmental attention to present-moment emotions and experiences. Mindfulness and meditation-based practices have shown remarkable benefit for a variety of ailments, from depression to chronic pain. This year, the first randomised, controlled trial of a mindfulness-based smoking cessation program found that it worked better than a standard behavioral paradigm in helping smokers quit and avoid relapse.

Mindfulness seems to be beneficial by helping smokers cope with craving. Cigarette craving can be a powerful motivator, and one of the major reasons for relapse. But mindfulness is effective at helping people cope with strong emotions, such as those experienced with depression, anxiety, and pain. A small handful of studies have examined the relationship between mindfulness, craving, and smoking, and have lent some support to this hypothesis. However, the findings from those studies are inconsistent, and not terribly conclusive.

Wanting to examine this link further, we conducted research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We trained smokers in mindful attention and had them deploy it while looking at smoking-related images, which are known to induce strong craving in smokers. While they did so, we scanned their brains to learn more about what mechanisms might underlie the effects of mindful attention on cigarette craving.

We wanted our training to be quick and easy, so it would mimic what a smoking counselor might really teach her clients. The training took about fifteen minutes, and was based around a simple principle: focus your attention on whatever feelings or sensations arise, and then accept those without judgment. Secondly, we had them rate their craving right after viewing a picture. We didn’t tell them that mindful attention was supposed to make them crave less, so they didn’t have any expectations about what would happen. For all they knew, their craving might increase. Finally, we also included a control condition, where we asked them just to ‘passively view’ pictures—in other words, to view them as they normally would.

Our findings had some interesting implications for mindfulness in general, and for its application to smoking cessation.

First, we found that mindfully attending to smoking images caused people’s self-reported craving to decrease. In other words, when people ‘passively viewed’ a smoking-related image, their craving increased, but if they practiced mindful attention, they craved less. Their cravings weren’t completely eliminated, but were significantly decreased.

Second, we found that mindful attention affected a specific part of the brain, the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC). SgACC is known to be important in regulation of emotions, and it is overactive in depression and other mood disorders. During passive viewing of smoking pictures, when participants were craving, they had increased activation in this region. However, mindful viewing decreased activation in this region back to levels seen for neutral pictures. In addition, we found a decrease in functional connectivity between various brain regions known to underlie the sensation of craving, including insula, premotor cortex, and ventral striatum. This suggests that during mindful attention, the network underlying cigarette craving may not be as strongly coupled.

In addition to the findings themselves, there was one surprising aspect. Prior research suggested that mindful attention was associated with prefrontal cortex—areas involved in cognitive control and skills like attention and working memory. However, we didn’t find activation in that region. This suggests that mindful attention works through a more ‘bottom-up’ mechanism, where instead of directly suppressing craving, you instead mentally disengage from it. This may seem like a fine point, but it suggests that mindful attention works differently from the kinds of cognitive skills we usually teach smokers, which involve things like re-thinking a craving, distracting yourself, or actively suppressing it. Therefore, mindful attention might be a new kind of skill, useful for different people or different situations in which cognitive strategies don’t work as well.

Overall, our work has some implications for how mindfulness relates to cigarette craving. Based on our work, we think mindful attention can be taught relatively quickly, and is effective at decreasing a cigarette craving in the moment—when it’s most important to a smoker. Therefore, we think this approach has clinical usefulness in the real world, and this is part of why it seems to help smokers quit. And finally, since it seems to work in a manner differently from the types of cognitive skills currently taught by counselors, it could represent a new kind of tool to add to the tool-kit. And of course the more tools we have to help people quit, the better.

So if you’re trying to quit, consider learning mindfulness techniques to help you cope when you’re craving. It might be just the tool you need!

Cecilia Westbrook is an MD/PhD student at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. Her interests include affective neuroscience, behavioral regulation, and mindfulness. Her paper has been made publicly available by the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN). You can read it in full and for free here.

It’s that time of year again, the season when It’s A Wonderful Life pops up on every single television channel. Viewers seem not to tire of watching the story of George Bailey, the man who never left home but still managed to find meaning and a measure of success among friends and family in Bedford Falls. For Americans, known for their restlessness, George Bailey seems an improbable hero, and It’s a Wonderful Life an unlikely hit. After all, we are among the world’s most mobile people; our national icons are more often rugged individualists—pioneers, cowboys, immigrants—men and women willing to cut ties and move on, to leave home, and the past behind. Not so George Bailey, who despite his dreams for a life elsewhere, just stays put.

While viewers identify with Bailey in the movie, for much of the 20^th century, and now in the 21^st, Americans generally have regarded the George Baileys of the world as failures. Indeed, Bailey sees himself that way, longing to wipe the dust of his “two bit town” off his feet and go on to greater things. That Bailey thought of himself as a failure and that modern viewers might see him that way too reflects ideals of personality and success that emerged only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Contemporary culture frequently portrays mobility as natural and easy, as a longstanding part of the cultural DNA of Americans, but the idea that one had to move away from home in order to be a success is of surprisingly recent vintage.

Until the start of the last century, there was no shame in staying home. Unlike today, those adults who remained close to the family hearth were not labeled as unambitious. And those who felt homesickness when they were far from home were not considered immature and backwards as they are in contemporary society. Instead, love of home marked one as a refined and moral being, and homesickness was a sign of a virtuous and sensitive nature.

Notwithstanding such views, Americans in earlier centuries left home quite frequently. During the first half of the nineteenth century, Americans moved in unprecedented numbers, with close to 50% of the population migrating across state lines. Yet despite these peripatetic patterns, and despite our mythology of forward-looking, optimistic and highly individualistic pioneers, in reality these Americans did not find migration easy or natural. Many believed that mobility carried with it myriad risks, not least of which was homesickness or nostalgia as it was then known.

Considered a disease, it could prove fatal. During the Civil War alone, the Surgeon General attributed 74 Union deaths to nostalgia, and diagnosed over 5000 other soldiers as suffering from severe cases of the malady, the symptoms of which ranged from heart palpitations to “hectic fever” to incontinence. Soldiers were not the only ones to feel the pain of nostalgia, and newspapers routinely carried news of the sorry victims of the condition.  “Victim of Nostalgia: Priest Dies Craving for a Sight of his Motherland,” reported San Francisco’s Evening Bulletin in 1887. “Died By His Own Hand: Pangs of Nostalgia Drove Lonely Native to Meet Awful End,” reported the San Jose Evening News in 1901.  To earlier generations, leaving home often carried a hefty emotional toll, a toll that was widely acknowledged.  Mobility was not an unambiguous sign of ambition and success; instead it was often recognized as a source of pain.

Americans began to change their perspectives on home and homesickness only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as new views of mobility emerged. Nostalgia disappeared as a medical diagnosis, and the word’s meaning slowly changed. Rather than signifying a longing for a distant place, it came to be identified as a yearning for an unrecoverable time. As the diagnosis disappeared so too did sympathy for the homesick. Social Darwinists suggested that those who suffered from homesickness showed an inability to adapt to new environments. Early psychologists like G. Stanley Hall characterized homebodies as “provincial, plodding, and timid,” and later behaviorist psychologists insisted that those who could not leave home painlessly showed an alarming “infantile dependence.” They certainly would have wagged a warning finger at George Bailey, and characterized his loyalty to his mother and his hometown as vaguely pathological.

By the early decades of the twentieth century then, the conventional psychological and sociological wisdom had coalesced around the idea that the ambitious and successful moved on; the inferior, the dependent, the sissies, the failures stayed put.  Part of proving one’s maturity, modernity, and fitness for the capitalist marketplace was demonstrating the ability to cut home ties. Children were sent to summer camps to learn how to conquer homesickness; adults were told to repress it if they continued to feel it.  Only by moving away from home and its emotional entanglements might one be truly mature and truly succeed.

Yet this lesson is something that George Bailey never quite mastered, despite himself. He kept trying to shake the dust of Bedford Falls off his feet, but obligations to family and community required him to stay. Just as Bailey was unsuccessful at internalizing the demands of modern capitalist society, so many Americans have likewise discovered that the psychological mold of the rugged individualist does not accommodate their local affections and communitarian sentiments. And perhaps that explains the movie’s continued appeal, for it reminds us that America has never been only a nation of  individualists, that our past provides us with other personality types worth celebrating, and that love of home, loyalty to community, and a deep investment in a particular place need not be a source of shame nor a sign of failure.

Susan J. Matt is Presidential Distinguished Professor of History at Weber State University, in Ogden, Utah. She is the author of Homesickness: An American History.

Frantz Fanon died of leukaemia on 6 December 1961 at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, USA where he had sought treatment for his cancer.  At Fanon’s request, his body was returned to Algeria and buried with full military honours by the Algerian National Army of Liberation, shortly after the publication of his most influential work, The Wretched of the Earth. As a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), which had been engaged in a war against French colonial rule in Algeria since November 1954, Fanon had made his mark as a journalist for the FLN newspaper El-Moudjahid.  Writing in an angry and confrontational style, Fanon justified FLN violence as mirror violence: a liberational act against the inherent violence of colonial rule.  This in turn became the core of his argument in The Wretched of the Earth.  Expanding outwards from Algeria to the rest of Africa and Asia, Fanon talked of violence in mystical terms – a necessary stage in the forward march of history that would purge Africans and Asians of any inferiority complex in regard to European colonial powers.

Born in 1925 in Fort-de-France on the French-ruled Caribbean island of Martinique, Frantz Fanon opposed the right-wing anti-Semitic Vichy Regime which was established in the wake of the Third Republic’s defeat by Nazi Germany in 1940.  Horrified by the widespread support for Vichy amongst the island’s colonial authorities, Fanon took flight in 1943 and made his way to French Algeria, which had passed into Free French hands after the USA and British landings in November 1942.  There he joined the Free French forces, fighting in Italy and then Germany where he was wounded in the back during the Alsace campaign.  Decorated for bravery, Fanon stayed on in France to study psychiatry and medicine at Lyon University.

Living in France confronted Fanon with the racial contradictions of French republican ideology.  It made him realise that for all the talk of liberty, equality, fraternity espoused by the Fourth Republic, a French Caribbean man like himself would never be seen as a true citizen.  The Republic might claim to be universal but in reality his presence was unnerving for a French society where whiteness was the norm and blackness was equated with evil.  It was a painful experience that led him to write his first book, Black Skins, White Masks, in 1952.  Published by Seuil, this was a pioneering study of racism as a psychological system where, Fanon argued, black people were forced to adopt white masks to survive in a white society.

In October 1953 Fanon began working as psychiatrist in a hospital in Blida just south of Algiers.  At this point French Algeria was fraught with racial tension.  Nine million Algerians co-existed uneasily with one million European settlers.  France had invaded Algeria in 1830 and annexed the country not as a colony but an integral part of France. On 8 May 1945, just as Nazi Germany was defeated, mass nationalist demonstrations across Algeria had called for the establishment of an independent Algerian state.  In the town of Sétif in the east of the country, these demonstrations produced violent clashes that led to the death of twenty-one Europeans and ignited an Algerian uprising. However, the French response was brutal and throughout May eastern Algerian was subjected to systematic repression. Yet, although French order was restored, fear and mistrust was everywhere. More than ever the settlers  were determined to thwart any concessions to the Algerian majority and the result was a blocked society. Frustrated at their lack of political rights, a small number of Algerians formed the FLN in October 1954 which, through a series of coordinated attacks across Algeria on 1 November, sought to overthrow colonialism through violence.

As Algeria slid into war, Fanon saw the psychological impact of French rule at first hand.  Struck by the number of Algerian patients suffering from mental-health problems, Fanon came to interpret these as symptoms of colonial domination.   If Algerians felt morbid and depressed, he concluded, this was because colonialism had made them so by continually denigrating them as racially inferior.  In this sense, Fanon concluded, colonialism was a subtle web of oppression that was economic, political and psychological.

During his tenure in Blida Fanon was also horrified by the stories of torture his patients — both French torturers and Algerian torture victims — told him.  This reinforced his view on the inherent violence of the colonial system, initiating a process of separation that led Fanon to formally resign his post in 1956.  In his resignation letter to Robert Lacoste, a French Socialist Party deputy and Minister-Resident for Algeria in the left of centre Republican Front government, Fanon vented his anger on the ethics of French medical practice.  Outlining his theory of the psychology of colonial domination, Fanon pronounced the colonial mission to be incompatible with proper psychiatric practice:

If psychiatry is the medical technique that aims to enable man no longer to be a stranger to his environment, I owe it to myself to affirm that the Arab, permanently an alien in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalization. . . . The events in Algeria are the logical consequence of an abortive attempt to decerebralize a people.

Thereafter Fanon escaped to join the FLN in Tunis where he became a journalist. Charting the contours of the FLN struggle, his 1959 book, L’An Cinq de la Révolution Algérienne (subsequently published in English as A Dying Colonialism), presented this as a revolutionary one. The FLN, Fanon claimed, was not trying to turn society backwards to a pre-1830 conservative ideal. The needs of the revolutionary struggle were creating the seeds of a different, forward thinking society. So, by carrying weapons and planting bombs, Algerian women were breaking away from the confines of tradition.  They were inventing new roles for themselves that would lead to a completely new female identity

His most militant and far-reaching work was The Wretched of the Earth, published like A Dying Colonialism by the French radical publisher François Maspero.  In it Fanon saw Algeria as the microcosm of a general Third World Revolutionary movement in Africa and Asia. Controversially, Fanon claimed that at the core of this movement was violence which was a purifying act: a necessary response to colonial power through which Africans and Asians would free themselves of racial humiliation.  Thus liberated, Fanon continued, Africa and Asia could now turn away from Europe and start a new type of revolutionary society.

The Wretched of the Earth contained a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre that embraced Fanon’s vision. Within it Sartre warned that Europeans that they would find the book disturbing.  Why? Because Fanon shows that, having thrown off colonialism, Asians and Africans no longer need Europe:

Europeans, you must open this book and enter into it. After a few steps in the darkness you will see strangers gathered around a fire; come close, and listen, for they are talking of the destiny they will mete out to your trading-centres and to the hired soldiers who defend them. They will see you, perhaps, but they will go on talking among themselves, without even lowering their voices. This indifference strikes home: their fathers, shadowy creatures, your creatures, were but dead souls… Their sons ignore you; a fire warms them and sheds light around them, and you have not lit it. Now, at a respectful distance, it is you who will feel furtive, nightbound and perished with cold. Turn and turn about; in these shadows from whence a new dawn will break, it is you who are the zombies.

This was why, Sartre underlined, Fanon was so significant. With The Wretched of the Earth he showed how the location of the revolutionary change had shifted in the mid-twentieth century.  It was no longer to be found in the industrial proletariat of Lille or Manchester, whose revolutionary impulses had been dulled by the booming economic miracle in Western Europe, but amongst the dispossessed peasantry of the Third World.

During the 1960s The Wretched of the Earth became an iconic text of the new 1960s radical movement.  It was the classic vindication of the Algerian cause and a permanent indictment of colonialism which had a global resonance. This influence was explicit in the other international icon to emerge from independent Algeria, the 1966 film The Battle of Algiers. Directed by the Italian Gillo Pontecorvo and winner of the prestigious Venice film prize, the film’s depiction of the role of Algerian women, either using the veil for hiding weapons, or discarding it to pass themselves off in a decoy fashion, drew heavily upon Fanon’s interpretations.  Moreover, the film’s unflinching portrayal of the FLN’s attacks on civilian targets distilled into celluloid form Fanon’s theory of revolutionary violence, namely that terrorism is justified and wins.

Fanon’s message had an enduring message throughout the 1960s and 1970s.  In France he inspired revolutionaries such as Georges Mattéi, Gérard Chaliand and François Maspero who founded the journal Partisans in November 1961.  Convinced that the European working class was now inherently reformist, all three looked to the dispossessed peasantry in Africa, Asia and Latin America. For this reason the February 1962 issue was dedicated to the recently deceased Fanon who had given;

A new direction to their thinking, their decisions, their political acts and their very lives.

In the USA Fanon became a starting point for the Black Panther Party, formed in 1966 in San Francisco by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, which espoused a revolutionary, far-left politics that underlined black self-determination and pride.  While from Cape Verde to through to Angola and Mozambique, Fanon inspired other Africans fighting colonialism, not least Nelson Mandela in South Africa who visited FLN training camps in Morocco in early 1962 and saw in the Algeria ‘the closest model to our own in that the rebels faced a large white settler community that ruled the indigenous majority’.

Yet, even if the Third World Revolutionary moment is now over, Fanon still exerts a crucial intellectual influence, not just in our understanding of racism but also as a key reference point in post-colonialism, one of the major theoretical debates of the last thirty years.  Thus both Edward Said and Homi Bhabha look back to Fanon.  For them Fanon’s legacy raises unresolved questions about power, race and cultural representation which continue to be pivotal as the post-colonial world grapples with the aftermath of Western colonialism.

Martin Evans is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Portsmouth and author of Algeria: France’s Undeclared War. You can read more by Professor Evans here.

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Oxford staffers Stephanie Porter, Tara Kennedy, and Lana Goldsmith are here to show you how to pair beer with cheer as we enter the holiday season.  Below is the first of our posts that will be featured every Thursday this month.

Now that the calendar has turned the page to December, holiday season is in full swing. Aside from the lights and decorations flooding streets and buildings everywhere, this is the season of holiday parties! We will be celebrating The Oxford Companion to Beer through the month of December, and to kick off the month, we are turning our attention to hosting a holiday beer tasting.

First, a brief overview of the season’s beer history about the special brews available this season from contributor Chris J. Marchbanks.

Christmas ales is a catch-all descriptive phrase given to special beers made for Christmas and New Year celebrations, often with a high alcohol content 5.5%–14% ABV and marked by the inclusion of dark flavored malts, spices, herbs, and fruits in the recipe. A medieval instance of a Christmas ale was called “lambswool”—made with roasted apples, nutmegs, ginger, and sugar (honey)—so-called because of the froth floating on the surface. Today’s versions tend to be based on old ale, strong ale, and barley wine recipes, using cinnamon, cumin, orange, lemon, coriander, honey, etc. to create a warming, dark, and luscious festive beer. See old ales and barley wine. This tradition is closely related with the “wassail”, a mulled wine, beer, or cider usually consumed while caroling or gathering for the Christmas season. Most country breweries produce a Christmas or seasonal ale, some with long histories—notably in Belgium, England, Scandinavia, and the United States—which are usually matured for many months. There is no fixed recipe for these special ales as it is an opportunity for the brewer to expand boundaries and explore new tasty ingredients for Christmas, as the brewer’s gift to yuletide. The category includes some of the strongest beers brewed in the world including Samiclaus, which is a rich, aged Doppelbock with 14% ABV, originally brewed by Hurlimann in Switzerland but now in Austria at the Eggenberg Brewery. In the United States, Christmas Ale at Anchor Brewing (also known as “Our Special Ale”) contains a different blend of spices every year and helped spawn an interest in Christmas ales in the early days of the craft beer movement.

Since beer can have a cornucopia of flavors in every glass, you and your guests talk about the subtleties of each different beer. I might play a matching game where everyone writes down what they taste, and then the host can read the flavors from the label; or steam the labels off and have each person guess which label goes with which beer based on design. Either way, you will want to know how to create the perfect pour, and luckily, we know just the man to show you.

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Now that you have the pour down, what can you serve your beer in? It turns out that beer glassware has a long history, and the glass you serve it in matters. Take a quick tour of some of the elaborate glasses beer used to be served in, and grab some ideas of what will best suit your chosen suds.

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You may not be an expert, but you are definitely ready to pepper your guests with a little beer wisdom. So have fun, be safe, and enjoy good company over a delicious drink. And should you run into the questions about your choice of beverage, you can always refer them to Garrett.

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On 15 May 1941, two Englishmen flew from London to Lisbon, at the start of a ten-day wartime journey to New York City. Though they wore civilian clothes they were, in fact, the Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey, and his personal assistant, Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming RNVR, the future author of the James Bond novels. What followed was to change American intelligence forever.

Until December 1941, the United States of America was neutral in the Second World War. In two years of open blitzkrieg, the Nazis had conquered much of Europe; Britain stood alone and broke, summoning aid from its overseas dominions and colonies. The British Prime Minister Winston Churchill remembered well that industrial America’s entry into the Great War in 1917 had assured victory. He needed a repeat, but the US President F.D. Roosevelt proceeded cautiously.

The first American aid to the Allied cause was spun as protecting an isolationist nation. In return for 50 old American destroyers for the Royal Navy, the USA obtained from the British Empire 99-year leases on a chain of strategic Atlantic bases: in Newfoundland, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Antigua, St Lucia, Jamaica, Trinidad and British Guiana. Between January and March 1941, there were also secret military and naval staff talks codenamed ABC – the American-British Conversations. Following these, the Chiefs of Staff and the Joint Intelligence Committee in London sent the two men to Washington DC to help ‘set up a combined intelligence organisation on a 100 per cent co-operative basis’.

The relationship of Admiral John Godfrey to Ian Fleming was like that of ‘M’ and James Bond, but also father/son. Fifty-three-year-old Godfrey had three daughters but no son; thirty-three- year- old Fleming had three brothers but no father. (Major Valentine Fleming DSO had been killed in the Great War just before Ian’s ninth birthday.) Admiral Godfrey had a brilliant mind but a volcanic temper; Ian Fleming was imaginative and imperturbable. He was a good fixer and drafted swift, crisp memos.

The two men flew KLM to Lisbon and then took the Pan Am Boeing 314 seaplane via the Azores to the British colony of Bermuda, 600 miles east of North Carolina, where the first American garrisons were building a base to help protect what President Roosevelt called ‘the Western Hemisphere’. Hamilton, Bermuda was where the British had set up the Imperial Censorship and Contraband Control Office to read the world’s mail, taken off transatlantic ships and planes. Fifteen hundred British ‘examiners’, also known as ‘censorettes’ because most were women, worked in the waterfront Princess Hotel, processing 100 bags of mail a day – around 200,000 letters – and testing 15,000 for microdots and secret ink messages, before sending on the bags on the next plane or ship. At first the USA objected to this infringement of liberty, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) soon realised how useful the system was when it began to reveal foreign enemy agents on US soil.

Godfrey and Fleming arrived in New York City on 25 May 1941. They stayed at the St Regis Hotel on 55^th Street and 5^th Avenue in Manhattan and soon went to meet ‘Little Bill’, the Canadian businessman William Stephenson, and his American friend and ally ‘Wild Bill’, Colonel William J. Donovan.

The bullish Bill Donovan (a WW1 Medal of Honor winner and New York lawyer) had twice travelled to the war-zone on unofficial inquiry missions for the US president. All doors had been opened for him: Winston Churchill was eager for American help. Donovan had got on well with Admiral Godfrey in London in July 1940 and had met Fleming in Gibraltar in February 1941.

The other Bill, ‘the quiet Canadian’ Bill Stephenson, had been sent to the USA in June 1940 by the British Secret Service with the mission of improving relations with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. President Roosevelt recommended ‘the closest possible marriage between British Intelligence and the FBI’, and Hoover saw that by working with the British he could expand his counterespionage empire through the Caribbean, Central and South America. The US State Department, however, insisted on the status quo of the Neutrality Acts.

William Stephenson’s job as the SIS representative in America was investigating enemy activities in the western hemisphere, protecting British supplies against sabotage, countering German propaganda and encouraging the USA to intervene in the war on Britain’s side. Already, in the summer of 1940, William Stephenson had set up the offices for what would become British Security Co-Ordination at 630, Fifth Avenue, New York City. Because many American patriots were opposed to US involvement in foreign wars, most of BSC’s work was covert.

Nicholas Rankin spent twenty years broadcasting for BBC World Service where he was Chief Producer, Arts and won two UN awards. He is the acclaimed author of A Genius for Deception: How Cunning Helped the British Win Two World Wars and Ian Fleming’s Commandos: The Story of the Legendary 30 Assault Unit. Want to read more? Here are part 2 and part 3.

James Murdoch will today be hauled over the coals once more, by a House of Commons select committee determined to find out exactly what lay at the bottom of the phone-hacking affair. It has all the best ingredients of a modern political story – a too close relationship of politicians and press; a secret world of networking and influence now dragged, kicking and screaming, into the light; secret payments, cover-ups, and public outrage; and a strong whiff, not to say stench, of corruption in the air. The story of the ex-policeman, now a private investigator, detailed to pursue the lawyers of Milly Dowler in the hope of unearthing something discreditable or scandalous, is only the latest twist in what seems a peculiarly modern spiral of press misbehaviour and political greed.

The Murdoch affair seems the most contemporary of stories, chock-full of hacked mobile phones, high-tech surveillance equipment and secret video-recordings. But although the technology might have changed, it is a world that would have been only too familiar to nineteenth-century author Anthony Trollope. He was as fascinated as we are by what lies behind the public face of politics: the personal passions, rivalries and love affairs, the ins and outs of office, the spectacular rises and equally rapid falls.

It’s been a strange and revealing business, editing and living with Anthony Trollope’s 1873 Palliser novel, Phineas Redux, over the past couple of years. In one way, the Palliser novels seem to come from a world immeasurably distant from our own – aristocrat-run, high-imperial Britain before universal suffrage, motor cars and telephones, let alone the 24-hour news cycle that today’s politicians have learned to live with. But then again, the Palliser world very often seems strangely familiar, and not simply because the parliamentary rituals and furniture seem to have changed so little over the past century and a half. Almost daily throughout the editing process I would turn from thinking about Phineas’s complex love life, or Mr Daubeny’s machinations to stay in office, to the day’s news stories with a wry smile of recognition.

Trollope is sometimes wrongly thought to be a rather soothing or comforting writer, an old pair of slippers or the kind of Trollope a male politician could admit to cuddling up with in perfect safety. If that’s your view, Phineas Redux will make you think again. Not long before, Trollope, who had always wanted a parliamentary career, had stood as a Liberal candidate for Beverley in East Yorkshire. He came bottom in the poll and the corruption and inanity of electioneering disgusted him. The insight and disillusionment that followed fuels the novel, a story about a young politician in the making, who finds himself entangled in a nasty political quarrel that turns even nastier when his hated rival, with whom he has just very publicly quarrelled, is found dead, stabbed in a back alley. It’s not the first bit of violence in the book; a little earlier Phineas himself has been shot at by the enraged and half-mad husband of his intimate (but not too intimate) friend Lady Laura Kennedy (the bullet missed, or the book would have had to end there). By the time we get our hero safely to the end of the book and into the loving arms of the mysterious heiress Madame Max, he and we have also survived a corrupt election, accusations of bribery and electoral malpractice, alleged adultery and a secret investigation into bigamy in Poland. These adventures climax in a legal and political battle fought out over the publication of a private letter in the press, which claims to reveal the truth of Phineas’s adultery. Only through some very fast legal footwork and a last-minute injunction can Phineas prevent its publication, and his own and Lady Laura’s ruin.

It is at times like this that Trollope seems the most contemporary and prescient of novelists. He is a brilliantly perceptive observer of the power of newspaper reporting, and what we now call ‘the media’, in the making and breaking of political careers, and of the complex and often dirty tangles that politicians, editors and journalist find themselves in. The epicentre of these intrigues in the novel is Quintus Slide, the ‘indefatigable, unscrupulous’ editor of The People’s Banner. Formerly a radical, Slide now supports the Conservatives ‘with great zeal and with an assumption of consistency and infallibility’. Trollope gives us plenty to hate in Slide, whose populist Toryism is a mix of high-minded moralising and vitriolic personal attacks. A press quick to condemn others but utterly immoral in its own behaviour: seems a familiar mix?

Political hatreds, sexual scandals, unscrupulous editors, and last-minute injunctions: it is no wonder that Trollope has remained such a favourite, and so perennially topical, for so long. For his are the most clear-sighted and capacious of all novels about what we call, genteelly enough, the modern political process. But it is far from genteel in Trollope. Perhaps the Victorian equivalent of Silvio Berlusconi’s bunga-bunga parties might not have found a home in his work – the Victorian public would hardly have tolerated it – but the politician, his wife, his mistress, and the kidnapped cat almost certainly would have done.

John Bowen is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at University of York. Most recently he has edited the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Phineas Redux, and is also the author of Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit (2000).

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My first meeting with a Sudanese national was with Dr. John Garang, then commander of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), founded to fight against the Sudanese state—located in the country’s north, with its capital in Khartoum—and to advance the rights of the southern part of the country.  It was June 1989. By this point, Garang and the SPLA had been in open war against the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum, then led by Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi, for six years. This was during the second of two major North-South conflicts, the first of which occurred from 1955 to 1972, and the second of which started in 1983 and lasted for twenty-two years—until the South achieved its independence from the North in a referendum in January 2011.  Demographers estimate that during the first and second civil wars combined four million southerners died.   Sadek Sadiq al-Mahdi, or Sadek, as he is known in Sudan, is the great-grandson of the Mahdi, or “Chosen One,” an Islamic mystic and political leader whose troops overcame the Egyptian forces under the command of British general Charles Gordon during the siege of Khartoum in 1873, when the Mahdi drove the Egyptian and British colonizers out of Sudan. Gordon was beheaded.

Garang, an African and a Christian, asked to meet with me in Washington, D.C.  I had just joined the administration of President George H.W. Bush as director of the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA), part of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which leads U.S. government humanitarian relief efforts in crises around the world. And southern Sudan was in crisis: a famine had already killed 250,000 people. My predecessor as director of OFDA, Julia Taft, had mobilized a massive humanitarian aid effort, working with international and private aid agencies. “Dr. John”—as Garang was known—wanted to explain the South’s perspective and to remind me how crucial humanitarian assistance was to his people, who for many years had been victims of starvation, atrocities, mass population displacement, and epidemics caused by Northern tactics during the war.  I learned a great deal that day. Garang was a very gifted and dedicated teacher, and I will always be indebted to him.

Garang negotiated a peace agreement with the government in Khartoum of Omar al-Bashir, President of Sudan, which led to Sudan’s division into two separate sovereign states, which officially took effect on of July 9, 2011.  But he died in a helicopter crash six months after he signed the peace agreement in Jaunary 2005.  I had the sad duty to lead the U.S. government delegation to his funeral in the Southern capital of Juba.

Sudan, South Sudan and Darfur: What Everyone Needs to Know is a history of the country with particular emphasis on the last 30 years.  The book describes the two Civil Wars between the North and the South, the three rebellions over the past twenty five years in Darfur, including the most recent one which has attracted extraordinary international concern because of the terrible atrocities which were committed by the Sudanese government and its allies in Darfur.  This third rebellion is ongoing and President Bashir has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Darfur during this third rebellion.

Malakal, Sudan - Slogans and posters line the streets of cities throughout Southern Sudan. Here is a poster of the Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir. (Source: Lucian Perkins/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Three months after my meeting with Garang, I took the first of dozens of trips to Sudan and began a long engagement with the country and its people. For five years in the mid-1990’s I was vice president of World Vision, a faith-based international non-governmental organization which had large programs in South Sudan, and visited the country many times and had long conversations with Garang about his views, his strategy in the war, and his vision for the country.  From 2001 to 2006 I served as administrator of USAID and oversaw the U.S. government’s reconstruction efforts in southern Sudan and the American government’s humanitarian aid efforts during the rebellion in Darfur, a region in western Sudan, and consisting of three states—West Darfur, North Darfur, and South Darfur—in which nearly 300,000 people lost their lives. In October 2006, President George W. Bush appointed me as his special envoy to Sudan to lead diplomatic efforts to end the bloodshed in Darfur and to support the implementation of a North-South peace agreement.

I made several other Sudanese friends in my early years of involvement with the country, but they will remain anonymous because they are Northern Arabs and devout Muslims who would be at risk of reprisals from the Bashir government if I mentioned their names. They are well-educated, sophisticated members of the Khartoum elite who believe in democracy and human rights and oppose much of what the Bashir government is doing, and have educated me over the years on the dynamics of Northern Sudanese society and politics. I am indebted to them as well.

Sudan is situated in eastern Africa, nestled in a vast and intricate network of rivers—including the White and Blue Nile—and their tributaries, as well as along the fault line between Black Africa and Arab North Africa. Indeed, the greatest unresolved issue in the region’s politics has involved Islam. With the exception of the Communist Party and the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM; the political arm of Garang’s army), most major Northern Sudanese political parties claim their roots in and legitimacy from the Quran and Islamic teaching. They cover a broad range of opinion on public policy issues, from the more moderate Republican Brothers to the Umma Party, led by Sadiq al-Mahdi, who is at heart a modernist, and who during the Cold War was pro-Western and anti-Communist.  He remains very much in the Islamic democratic tradition (though his government—he has twice served as prime minister—committed atrocities against the southern people on a scale comparable to what happened in the 1990s under the Bashir government).

On the other extreme was the National Islamic Front, an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood, lead by Hassan al Turabi, the greatest of the Islamist figures in Sudanese politics since independence from Britain in 1956.  It was Turabi who invited his friend and ally Osama bin Laden to Sudan live and work in Sudan after Omar al-Bashir took power in a coup which unseated the Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi in 1989, a coup that Turabi was the mastermind of.  It was Turabi who negotiated a military, intelligence, and strategic alliance with the Iranian government, Sudan’s closest ally.

A second unresolved issue has been the relationship of the periphery of Sudan to the Arab Triangle, which is located at the center of the country, demarcated by Port Sudan on the Red Sea, Dongala on the Nile River to the north, and Sennar to the south. Khartoum, North Khartoum, and Omdurman lie at the center of the Arab Triangle; known as the three cities, they form one large metropolis. Three tribes of the Northern Nile River Valley in the Arab Triangle—the Ja’aliyiin, the Shaiqiyya, and the Danagla—have dominated Sudan since colonization by Egypt in 1821. Their dominance has led to the virtual exclusion of other tribes and regions from political, economic, and military power. This does not mean that all of the members of the three tribes are oppressors, or that they all agree with one other on all issues. Many from the Sudanese Nile River elite have devoted their lives to human rights and good governance, and risked their lives fighting the abuses of power by successive Sudanese governments. But the concentration of power in these three tribes and their sometimes ruthless efforts to keep that power has nonetheless led to constant strife and human rights abuses on a grand scale.

This is all coming to a climax as I write this article as a new civil war has started in Northern Sudan between Bashir’s government in Khartoum and Blue Nile, South Kordofan, and the Darfur regions.  These three regions—which are on the periphery of the country—have formed an alliance with the publically stated purpose of deposing Omar al-Bashir and his government.  The Sudanese air force is now conducting massive bombing raids on civilian targets in these areas in an attempt to destroy the base of operations of this alliance before their forces can surround Khartoum and remove Bashir and his party from power.

Andrew S. Natsios served as Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development from 2001 to 2005, where he was appointed as Special Humanitarian Coordinator for Sudan. He also served as Special Envoy to Sudan from October 2006 to December 2007. He is author of the forthcoming volume Sudan, South Sudan, and Darfur: What Everyone Needs to Know.

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Egypt’s new leaders “need to develop a coherent and compelling, emotionally satisfying vision of Egyptian society, and answer the question what Egypt stands for and what its place in the world is,” argues Cook. “If they don’t answer those questions in a way that makes sense to most Egyptians,” Cook cautions, “they too will be forced to rely on coercion and fear to maintain their rule. This, like Mubarak before them, will be their undoing and the struggle for Egypt will continue.”

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There are three major problems associated with the challenge of reaching out to the general public with chemistry. One is its collective disagreeable memory of how in many cases it was taught. Another is the association of the subject with harmful effects on humanity and the environment. The third is what is perceived as the intrinsically abstract nature of its explanations.

If chemistry, and all its marvellous contributions to the joy of being alive, is to be appreciated by the general public in this International Year of Chemistry (and beyond), it is essential that a way be found to explain what is going on when chemists stir their mixtures, boil their liquids, distil, reflux, and shake. Showing pictures of transiently awe-inspiring colour changes and exciting bangs might attract attention, but there is no hint of the intellectual infrastructure of our subject, no sharing of the insights of which we should be so proud or, at least, show how they represent our contribution to scientific understanding.

That being so, I decided that I needed to reveal the private life of atoms, what goes on at an atomic level, what chemists hold in their mind’s eyes when they carry out a chemical reaction. Visual imagery is the key.  Computer graphics have opened up a whole new world for the communication of chemistry, with the ability to display representations of molecules, to take a viewer through the intricate maze of atoms that constitute a protein molecule, to penetrate, like speleologists, into the cavernous interiors of zeolites, and to display the intricate architecture of minerals and solids in general.

I was left with a challenge: how to present the process of chemical reaction by using only static images, how to prepare those images, and how to lead readers through them. The first part of that was easy to solve, in principle, at least: just draw them myself. There are, of course, numerous molecular graphics packages available, and I used a variety of them. However, there were certain types of illustration where I wanted a different visual effect, and for these I used CAD software. That can be a time-consuming pain, as the coordinates of every atom have to be entered, but there is the advantage of being able to choose different textured for the surfaces of atoms and to generate photorealistic (if that is a term appropriate to molecules) ray-traced images. I then imported the images into Photoshop, and messed around with them for the effect I had in mind.

The interplay of image and narrative was another challenge. First, there was the choice of author’s voice. I needed a relaxed, inviting, not an academic textbook tone. It is hard for me to judge whether I have achieved what I wanted as readers respond to styles in unpredictable ways.  But at least I tried.

The other challenge in this respect was to achieve a sense of looking in to the underworld of atoms and inhabiting that world visually. I played with various solutions. An absurd one was to resent a series of full-page images that would speak for themselves. That would be too overwhelming and my editor dissuaded me from it. Then I thought of a page of illustration accompanied on the opposing page by a description of what was going on. The trouble with that is that it would impose a rigid structure that might not work everywhere. Moreover, I sensed that it would introduce too much separation between the account and the image. In the end I came up with an original prototype design concept in which the illustrations flowed in from the corners of the pages and underlay slightly the text. That would blend the words and images and also give a sense that we were peeking at just a tiny section of the vast numbers of molecules that were going about their business.

The design decision brought in its train another problem. Before I could draw an image, I needed to know at which corner of a page it would ultimately lie, because that determined the direction of flow of its component parts. The only solution was to set the pages myself, which I did with considerable help from my publishers and using page-setting software.

That, then, is the genesis of the book. When I look at the pages I can see that what I saw in my mind’s eye might not be immediately apparent to a naïve viewer. It would help, I think, to have an external commentary on the web to which a really interested reader could turn. There are other enticing possibilities that swim across my imagination. For instance, the images could be stereoscopic: that would be easier in an electronic version that on paper, but not out of the question even on paper. The ultimate molecule visualizations are all three-dimensional anyway, so the composites could be similarly contrived. Then, of course, the images could be animated (yes; perhaps in 3D) to bring out the dynamic nature of chemical reactions that the static images struggle to convey.

However: there is my effort, and I hope it gives my readers some insight into how we chemists think, how we unravel the workings of the world, and how we contribute to understanding.

Peter Atkins is the author of almost 60 books, including Galileo’s Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science, Four Laws that Drive the Universe, the world-renowned textbook Physical Chemistry, On Being, and Reactions: The Private Life of Atoms.

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To readers of Neutrino, rest assured: there is no need yet for a rewrite based on news that neutrinos might travel faster than light. I have already advertised my caution in The Observer, and a month later nothing has changed. If anything, concerns about the result have increased.

The response to my article created some waves. There were a couple of cogent remarks on The Observer’s comments section. Firstly, it was questioned that if neutrinos could indeed travel faster than light, the neutrinos from the supernova in 1987 (which had travelled 187,000 light years across space) should have arrived 4 days before the supernova was seen by eye, contrary to what was observed. One person also pointed out that if neutrinos could really go faster than light, then they could have gone at any speed, up to infinite. So the fact that the experiment “only” found them travelling at 1.00005 times light speed suggested that there was some underestimated error somewhere, and that the true answer would turn out to be 1. I agree; finding out what is the challenge.

I already mentioned some of the problems with the experiment – how it measures the time and the distance involved at huge accuracy, and then takes the ratio to get a speed. I read the paper on how they determine the distance, and the methods involved details of geodesy, which are outside my expertise. I admitted in the article that this was a “mystery to me”. One commenter, under the cloak of anonymity, took this to mean that I had not read the paper, and insisted on repeating this. Comments are subject to the laws of libel no less than printed media; the offending item was removed by the moderator.

This aspect of my personal mystery typifies the problems that the actual experimenters have. The team is primarily a group of high-energy physicists, and computer experts; however, the experiment requires expertise in many other areas. This is what inspired the team to go public in the first place: to advertise their concerns in the hope that other experts might come up with ideas. And there have been several.

A neutrino is detected in Italy, 500 miles from CERN, and the time is recorded. Surprisingly the precise time that that particular neutrino left CERN is harder to know than some first thought. CERN does not provide a beam of neutrinos. Instead it makes pions, which decay, producing neutrinos. The pions decay on the average in a hundred-millionth of a second, but some live longer and others die sooner. Precisely when this happens on a case-by-case basis is a statistical result, which is taken into account in the experiment. And the pions themselves are not primary particles, but are themselves produced by collisions between beams of high energy protons and a target. The protons that start all this emerge from the CERN accelerator in bunches – pulses spread over a short period of time. Precisely when in this time interval a proton does its work, leading to the pions and subsequent neutrinos is a big worry in some people’s opinion. The resulting beam of neutrinos then spreads out, over a mile wide by the time they arrive at the target 500 miles away in Italy, and one has to try and match an arriving neutrino with an initial proton back at CERN. This is all done statistically. If you saw the BBC2 television programme Faster than the speed of light on 19 October in the UK, check out Jon Butterworth’s comments about how tricky some of this experimental analysis is, and his questions about whether everything has yet been fully looked into.

More theoretical perhaps, but from a Nobel Laureate, Sheldon Glashow, comes evidence of an inconsistency in the evidence for super-luminal neutrinos. If neutrinos travelled faster than light, they would radiate electrons and positrons, and lose energy – and speed. Nothing like this has been seen. Of course, one can say that if neutrinos could travel beyond the speed at which current theory allows, all bets are off: the implications that they radiate electrons and positrons could also fail. But one has a sense of Occam’s Razor: inventing one excuse on top of another as one is squeezed into ever smaller corners.

Ultimately though, as I said in The Observer article, it is experiment that decides and it doesn’t matter how many theorists say nay. The truth will out. Science is built upon reproducibility. If and when this result is confirmed by independent experiments, and systematic errors ruled out, then I will be excited; but that time is not yet.

Frank Close is a particle physicist, author and speaker. He is Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford.
Close was formerly vice president of the British Association for Advancement of Science, Head of the Theoretical Physics Division at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and Head of Communications and Public Education at CERN. He is the author of several books, including Neutrino, Nothing: A Very Short Introduction, Particle Physics: A Very Short Introduction, and Antimatter. His latest book, The Infinity Puzzle, publishes this week.

Abina and the Important Men is an interpretation of the testimony of a young, enslaved woman who won her way to freedom in late nineteenth century West Africa and then prosecuted her former master for illegally enslaving her.  October 21 marks the 155^th anniversary of the date that she forced a British magistrate and a jury of eleven affluent and powerful men to hear the charges she was making against an influential male land-owner.

Having encountered Abina’s testimony in the National Archives of Ghana more than a decade ago, I felt driven to turn it into an annotated graphic history both from a sense of obligation to Abina and because of an inkling that her story could speak to a cluster of political and intellectual tensions in our society and within myself.  These tensions come in the form of what I call the “liberal dilemma”.  This dilemma seems to recur in a great deal of the literature, media, and art that makes up the intellectual matrix of our society. It begins with the desire deep within liberals like me to make a better world by helping everyone claim the universal birthrights of liberty, fraternity, and equality.  Yet the liberal worldview is also intertwined with a history colonial privilege, bourgeois society and its attitudes towards the lower classes, and male patriarchy and paternalism.  Thus the acts of “doing good” that characterize liberalism include the “civilizing mission” that hid the horrors of modern empire, the state-building justifications of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the sidelining of women and people of color.

Personally, I have grappled with my “liberalness” for much of my adult life.  The child of white South Africans who opposed apartheid, I have always wanted to lead the fight against evil, yet I have had to question my assumption that I had the right to lead that kind of war.  In the classroom, I have hoped to promote a cosmopolitan knowledge of the world in my students, and an appreciation of the need to study others.  Yet I have come to wonder how we can do so without making those others the objects of our gaze when they are seemingly powerless to study us back!  Intellectually, I have had to contend with the notion that the past is another country which we can never know.  I feel deep within me the pull to search for the methodologies by which we might strive to understand the worldviews and perspectives of those who lived in earlier times, especially the people whose voices we hear the least – the seemingly powerless and the apparent victims.  Yet I have come to accept that they are often rendered voiceless, not so much by their own lived experiences as by the ways that history and historians have silenced them and rendered them objects of our gaze.

Now let me explain why this book is a way for me, and I hope others, to grapple with this liberal dilemma.  It’s not because this is somehow a “rescue” of Abina’s voice.  Over the past few years, I have come to understand that Abina did not ever need rescuing for her own sake.  She was tough, she was expressive, she found for herself ways of fighting the powers that impeded her.  Rather, the book represents my realization that Abina’s voice needed to be brought out and interpreted for our sakes, because she has so much to teach us about a better way of being in the world.

This is why much of this book is actually about us.  In interpreting Abina’s story in graphic form, I and my accomplices – Liz Clarke, the artist, and Charles Cavaliere, my beloved editor at Oxford – chose to reveal everything and try to hide nothing.  Rather than pretending that we are the objective, all-knowers, we lay out clearly the limitations of our work, the ethical issues that bedevil us, the problematic relationship we have with Abina.  We also carefully place our interpretation next to the original document that bears Abina’s words.  We are, in effect, asking students and colleagues and readers to question our work, and to develop their own understandings.

As a way of grappling with the liberal dilemma this book both accepts the idea that it is good to study others and the need to question why and what we are doing when we interpret their words for ourselves.  It especially asks this question in light of the power and wealth differential between Abina and ourselves.

I will not pretend that I don’t love the Abina I have constructed in my mind, even though she is only an unreal representation of the real thing.  Maybe the real-life Abina was not the strong, individualistic, empowered survivor that we have made her out to be.  Maybe she did not see her testimony the way I see it – as a fight for the right to have a voice and be heard.   Undoubtedly, she was far more complex that we can understand from this real document.  I cry, that I cannot know the real her.  If I feel richer just from the little bit I do know, and from the yearning to know more, then I hope you will excuse me.

I do not know if Abina and I would have been friends if we were to have met.  I find myself to be a little in awe of her energy and I can accept that her experiences and mine have been very different.  But I think she and my daughter could have found happiness hanging out with each other, and I hope this book can be a way for Kaela, and many others like her, to begin asking the questions that will lead them to appreciate how the world looks through other people’s eyes, including those of Abina Mansah.  I believe striving to do so does, in fact, have the potential of making the world a somewhat better place.

Trevor R. Getz is Professor of History at San Francisco State University. He is the author of Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History with artist Liz Clarke.

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As thousands continue their march on Wall Street for a fifth straight week, an ancient story has much to tell us about the demands of justice.

The occupation of Wall Street is about a colossal failure of justice.  When justice fails, anger grows into rage.  And rage can tear a community into shreds.  When a few people reap huge rewards they do not deserve, while others get nothing but insults — even though they have worked hard and been loyal to their workplace –- justice has failed.  Bankers carry away huge bonuses, while more and more of the workers who do the heavy lifting are laid off.

Upper-level managers in many industries are allowed to plunder their businesses while loyal employees get the shaft:

Employees were particularly outraged that even as the company fell into bankruptcy, top managers awarded themselves $57.3 million in court-approved bonuses while 4,200 people lost their jobs and the workers who remained went without raises.

An ancient Greek myth captures our moment:  The Greek warrior Ajax has fought hard for nine years for his friends in the Greek army outside Troy.  He was by far the most effective fighter, and he saved many of his friends’ lives in combat.  Now comes the time for a major reward, and who gets it?  Not Ajax.  The reward goes to someone who is cunning and does his fighting with words—a man we know as Ulysses.

Ulysses is the idea man in the army, gifted at argument and strategy.  But Ajax has always done the heavy lifting, the day-to-day work that keeps the wheels turning.  The leaders have been taking advantage of Ajax for years.  Ajax sees at last that management has been playing him for a fool.  He explodes in anger and rage. In the ancient myth he sets out to kill the commanders, but he is foiled by a goddess and later takes his own life.

In our times, a modern Ajax can be just as angry.  He may work slow or sabotage his company in some other way.  If he is really angry, he may do serious damage to his team or to himself.  Management should know how to give the heavy lifters their rewards.  Failure to do so leads to the sort of anger and chaos we are now seeing in the streets.  Justice is the best cure for anger.

Ajax is right to explode when taken for granted and abused.  Management does not have to treat an Ajax so badly. It is true that they must also keep the cunning Ulysses on their side.  If Ulysses is not rewarded, he may go over and work for the Bank of Troy, where his Trojan Horse Investment Vehicle could produce gigantic profits for the other side.

Management can keep the team together, however, if they pay attention to justice.  That calls for leadership.  Leaders show wisdom, and compassion.  Leaders know how to recognize the value of each member of a team and communicate that to all.   Most important, leaders work for the benefit of the team, not to win big rewards for themselves.

Are you an Ajax or a Ulysses?  Are you loyal, hardworking — and shafted by the system?  Or are you cunning, selfish — and making out like a bandit as the economy collapses?  Or are you an Agamemnon, who commands the whole army but looks only to his own rewards?

In our time, too, there is a better way.  We are right to be enraged.  Those in charge — Wall Street, and our elected government leaders — had better show some leadership and pay attention to the demands of justice.  It’s not easy to do that, especially after so much as gone wrong.  But it is never too late to start.

Paul Woodruff teaches philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has held positions for over twenty years as department chair, honors director, and dean. He served in the United States Army as a junior officer, 1969-71. His many books include Reverence, First Democracy, The Necessity of Theater, and The Ajax Dilemma: Justice, Fairness, and Rewards.

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By Edward Zelinsky

In presidential elections, Nebraska and Maine today allocate one elector to the candidate who prevails in each congressional district in the state and award the remaining two electors (corresponding to the states’ U.S. Senators) to the statewide popular vote winner. All other states bestow their electoral votes as a bloc on a winner-take-all basis. In Pennsylvania, the Republican governor, senate majority leader, and speaker of the state house of representatives propose that, starting in 2012, the Keystone State emulate Nebraska and Maine and apportion one electoral vote to each of the state’s congressional districts and thus to the presidential candidate receiving the most votes in that district.

Had this method been used in 2008, Barack Obama, instead of receiving all 21 of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes under the winner-take-all rule, would have received only 11. The proposal to shift Pennsylvania to the district-by-district allocation followed in Nebraska and Maine has brought sharp criticism from Democrats. The New York Times, for example, while acknowledging that the Pennsylvania proposal is “entirely legal,” proclaims, with the Times’ customary humility, that the proposal is “entirely wrong.”

A similar controversy, with the parties reversed, occurred in 2004. Had it been approved by the Colorado electorate, Amendment 36 would, for 2004 and for future presidential elections, have awarded Colorado’s electoral votes on a proportionate basis, rather than pursuant to the winner-take-all rule.

Presaging the rhetoric of today’s opponents of the Pennsylvania proposal, George Will labeled Amendment 36  “pernicious.” Similarly, Steve Forbes argued that it may be necessary for Congress “to invalidate Colorado-like amendments” and thereby compel the states to allocate their respective electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis. In fact, the Colorado electorate rejected Amendment 36 and thus kept the Centennial State on the prevailing, winner-take-all system for awarding electoral votes.

I suggest that everyone calm down. There is nothing sacrosanct about the winner-take-all system which now prevails in forty-eight states. The Constitution neither requires that system nor, for that matter, requires popular elections of presidential electors. If the Pennsylvania legislature wants to designate the Steelers’ offensive line as the state’s presidential electors, it has the constitutional right to do so.

Obviously, the proponents of Amendment 36 sought partisan advantage, just as the backers of the current proposal in Pennsylvania seek such advantage today. It is, however, difficult to predict in advance which party will benefit from any proposition like Amendment 36 or the proposal to allocate Pennsylvania’s electoral votes by congressional districts. It was the Democratic Party which advanced Amendment 36 in 2004. However, had Colorado’s electoral votes been allotted proportionately in 2008, the beneficiaries would have been Senator McCain and Governor Palin who lost the overall popular vote of the Centennial State but would have received electoral votes under the proportional system. Similarly, if the Republican presidential ticket carries the overall popular vote in the Keystone State in 2012, switching to the Nebraska-Maine method of allocating electoral votes by congressional district will serve the interests of the Democratic Party, rather than of the Republicans sponsoring that switch.

Two values argue for letting the states experiment with either the proportionate allocation of electoral votes as was proposed in Colorado or allocation by congressional districts: federalism and the desirability of a strong two-party system.

The Constitution, reflecting the Framers’ commitment to federalism, gives each state the right to determine the method of selecting its presidential electors. Today, all states conduct a popular vote for president. However, early in the history of the Republic, the state legislatures elected the members of the Electoral College. Subsequently, some states experimented with popular voting and, eventually, all the rest followed.

Critical to the federalist ethic is belief in the desirability of letting states experiment. Sometimes such experiments work; sometimes they do not. So it would have been with Amendment 36. Maybe proportionate allocation of electoral votes would have proved a good idea; maybe not. Why not let Colorado experiment, just as, in an earlier age, some states began to experiment with popular voting for presidential electors in lieu of legislative selection?

Nebraska’s and Maine’s experimentation has not harmed American democracy. Colorado’s experiment, had it been implemented, would not have been a harbinger of doom. By the same token, Pennsylvania will not decimate American democracy by allocating its electoral votes among its congressional districts.

Moreover, the proportionate allocation embodied in Colorado’s Amendment 36 and broader use of the Nebraska and Maine systems might help combat one of the most troubling aspects of American politics today: the absence of competitive, two-party elections for Congress and the state legislatures. Either approach to awarding electoral votes might strengthen the two-party system by encouraging the weaker party in each state to campaign in that state or at least in parts of the state. In the process, the presidential campaigns would bolster each party for the future.

In the contemporary U.S. House of Representatives, a relative handful of seats are truly competitive between Republican and Democratic contenders. Similarly, comparatively few Americans today vote in serious, inter-party contests for state legislative seats. In many states, unopposed legislative candidates are fast becoming the norm.

There are many reasons for this dismal state of affairs including the enhanced sophistication with which incumbents can gerrymander to protect themselves and the possibility that like-minded voters increasingly segregate themselves geographically, making for more one-party districts.

But another important reason we lack competitive, inter-party elections for Congress and the state legislatures is that every four years, presidential campaigns, instead of energizing the two major parties throughout the nation, ignore most of the country to concentrate on a relative handful of closely-divided states. Under the winner-take-all method of allocating electoral votes, it made no sense for the McCain campaign to devote resources to New York or for the Obama campaign to spend resources in Texas. As a result, the weaker party in each of these states atrophies further, rather than receiving a boost from an active presidential campaign.

Under a proportionate allocation of electors or the allocation of electors by congressional district, it would pay for the less dominant party in each state to campaign in that state or in its more closely-divided congressional districts in order to increase its share of the state’s electoral votes. Such presidential campaigning would strengthen for current and future elections the Republican party in predominantly Democratic states and vice versa, making the political system more competitive for the long run.

Commentators such as Wagner College’s Joshua Spivak make the counter argument that Pennsylvania’s allocation of electoral votes by congressional districts will impact negatively on the American political system. However, without letting Pennsylvania’s experiment proceed, there is no way of knowing whether Mr. Spivak’s pessimistic prediction is correct or whether my more benign projections will prove more accurate.

Had Colorado’s voters approved Amendment 36, the constitutional order would not have fallen. Similarly, switching Pennsylvania to the system used in Maine and Nebraska will not be the death knell of American democracy. In a federal system, experimentation is a good thing. In this case, it might even strengthen the competitiveness of the two-party system.

Edward A. Zelinsky is the Morris and Annie Trachman Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. He is the author of The Origins of the Ownership Society: How The Defined Contribution Paradigm Changed America. His monthly column appears here.

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In the three videos below, Martin Kemp discusses three of those iconic images: the Mona Lisa, the Coca-Cola bottle, and the swastika.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Martin Kemp FBA is Emeritus Professor in the History of Art at Trinity College, Oxford. He has written, broadcast, and curated exhibitions on imagery in art and science from the Renaissance to the present day, and his books include The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Bruneslleschi to Seurat (1992), Leonardo (2004, new edition publishing October 2011), and the prize-winning Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man (1989 and 2006). His newest book is Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes Icon.

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Entomologists estimate there to be around a quintillion individual insects on the planet–and that’s just insects. Bugs are everywhere, but how much do we really know about them? Jeff Lockwood to the rescue! Professor Lockwood is answering all your bug questions–one at a time, that is. Send your question to him care of blog@oup.com and he’ll do his best to find you the answer.

Q: Cave Crickets! What the bejeebers are they, and how can I get them to move out of the basement?

Well, to start they’re crickets—sort of.  The cave crickets belong to the Family Rhaphidophoridae (they were a subfamily of the Gryllacrididae or wingless long-horned grasshoppers when I was in graduate school, but somewhere along the line they got a promotion to being their own family).  Technically they’re not “true” crickets (like house and field crickets), but they’re close enough.  In fact, they’re truer crickets than beasts like the Mormon cricket (which are presumably not Mormon and assuredly not crickets, being more closely related to katydids).

As for their scientific name, I dug through various sources and it seems that “rhaphid” means a spine or needle.  And “phorid” might mean humped (at least that’s my guess, given that the humpbacked flies are the Phoridae).  So I’d infer (with the caveat that I’m no Latin scholar and would be delighted if one corrected me) that Rhaphidophoridae describes something like a “spiny hump.”  This seems plausible given that the insect does have long, spindly legs and a hunched profile.

Cave crickets also called “camel crickets” (I presume because they have a hump-backed appearance and the coloration of a camel—most probably the former) and lots of other things such as “Oh my God, what the hell is that?!”  They’re actually quite elegant creatures, being spindly and delicate.  And it’s not like they’ll keep you awake with incessant chirping or eat your wooden joists or anything like that.  They are primarily detritivores, meaning they eat the yucky organic stuff around your baseboards that you wouldn’t consider eating yourself.

So, my first suggestion is to enjoy your insect visitors.  They are quite fascinating little beings and they’re not doing anything reprehensible.  But if you’re dead-set on expunging your basement fauna, you could catch them—they don’t bite or stink or anything like that—and move them to a nice outdoor home (like under some leaves).  They’d probably just as soon be outside, anyway.  I’m guessing you might not be keen on handling these insects, so let’s consider Plan B.

The next best approach is the one you use with other house guests that have overstayed a visit.  You should cut-off their kitchen privileges and make their living conditions inhospitable.  As for the former, that means doing a really good cleaning job in the basement (I’m not suggesting that you’re a less-than-fastidious housekeeper but a good scrubbing wouldn’t hurt—and seal-up any cracks and crevices while you’re at it).  As for the latter, do what you can to keep the basement dry and, well, less cave-like.  After all, they are cave crickets.  I’d guess that your basement is probably on the dark and damp side.

So that you don’t think I’m picking on you or your basement, I had cave crickets in my house a few years ago.  My wife was rather unaccommodating of my little pals, so I had to take action.  In this case, it was a matter of doing a really good job of drying out the flooring around the hot tub (a great habitat for cave crickets—the pump housing was warm, dark, and moist).  This worked quite well, but then I live in Wyoming where keeping things dry isn’t a great challenge.

The bottom-line: If you can’t enjoy them, then do what you’d do for your least favorite relative.  That is, change the locks (i.e., seal the cracks and crevices), empty the fridge (clean up any bits of leaves or other gunk), and lower the thermostat and turn off the humidifier (nobody likes a cold, dry house).

Jeffrey Lockwood was hired as an insect ecologist at the University of Wyoming in 1986.  But over the course of 20 years he metamorphosed into a Professor of Natural Sciences & Humanities, with a joint appointment between the Department of Philosophy and in the MFA program in Creative Writing.  He teaches courses in natural resource ethics, environmental justice and the philosophy of ecology, along with creative non-fiction writing workshops. He is the author of Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War.

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In the New York Times Magazine, Jonathan Chait roiled the waters of progressive opinion by claiming that the left is a little delusional in its criticism of Obama for failing to do more to improve the economy. Accusing liberals and leftists of “magical thinking,” Chait wrote that the left overlooks a major obstacle Obama would have faced had he pursued a larger stimulus plan in early 2009: “everyone who mattered” said the stimulus should be smaller, not bigger. I had my suspicions that it was Chait who was being a little magical here, conjuring a past that wasn’t quite as he presented it, but it wasn’t till I heard from my old friend from grad school Jonathan Stein that I realized what a talent Chait truly is. So I asked Jonathan, who’s now an editor at Project Syndicate, to write something up; here’s his response.     -Corey Robin

By Jonathan Stein

Barely a week after Barack Obama’s inauguration, with the US financial system on government life support, credit markets frozen, and asset prices seeking a bottom, roughly 200 economists—led by six Nobel laureates, including Kenneth Arrow, Paul Samuelson, and Robert Solow—signed an open “Letter to Congress” backing swift enactment of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. “To stop the hemorrhaging of jobs and pull the economy back from the edge,” they warned, “policymakers must act quickly and decisively…to boost employment and economic growth.”

Of course, many economists, preferring Hayek to Keynes, were duly mobilized against ARRA. Their recipe for recovery, standard fare in financial crises before the New Deal, would weaken aggregate demand further by forcing everyone—households, firms, and government—to start saving at the same time. The Keynesians, by contrast, worried that ARRA’s $787 billion fiscal stimulus would prove too little to offset the collapse in private consumption and investment. They were unequivocal in their support for the bill, but were plainly unconvinced that it would suffice: “This legislation may not be enough to solve all the economy’s problems, but it is urgently needed and an important step in the right direction.”

The point of rehearsing this history is not that the Keynesians were right, or that further stimulus is urgently needed. They were, and it is. But, now that the nebulizing myth of a “jobless recovery” has crystallized into a recession-in-waiting, those seeking to keep progressives on Obama’s bandwagon are finding it necessary to argue that the appropriate scale and scope of fiscal stimulus was—and remains—a foregone conclusion.

If you’re Jonathan Chait, for example, the stimulus debate never happened, or, if it did happen, the social stratum known as “everybody who mattered” (yes, “them”) stayed out of it. Or, if people who mattered took part, people who mattered more—like that “reliable barometer of elite opinion” Colin Powell—prudently dismissed the entire exercise.

Indeed, Chait allows Powell, of all people, to render the verdict on Obama’s domestic agenda—a verdict that progressives, too, presumably must accept: “[W]e can’t pay for it all.” Anyone who claims otherwise—namely, leftists now blaming Obama for having been dealt a weak economy and a recalcitrant Congress—has succumbed, as Chait unreflectively puts it, to “magical thinking.”

In fact, those who initially argued for a much bigger stimulus were quite realistic—and not only in economic terms. Economists like Brad DeLong, Paul Krugman, Jeffrey Sachs, and Joseph Stiglitz advocated a “go large” approach precisely because they foresaw—well before the emergence of the Tea Party—the difficulty of enacting a second stimulus bill. And, in contrast to Chait’s portrayal of the “liberal” position at the time, not only did they favor a larger stimulus; they also saw no tradeoff between short-term economic-recovery efforts and longer-term reforms. Universal health insurance, for example, would save money as well as lives.

Perhaps Chait really believes that these arguments, and their purveyors, didn’t matter in early 2009. And, given the left’s electoral weakness, perhaps he is right. Indeed, Obama’s political problem today is that pro-stimulus arguments aren’t particularly progressive anymore—or, to put it another way, reality, in the form of depressed private demand, has caught up to the left since ARRA’s impact began waning in the middle of last year. As Everett Ehrlich, a former undersecretary of commerce and chief economist at Unisys Corporation, put it in July 2010:

The economy is primed for growth. Banks hold over a trillion in nonborrowed reserves. Corporations have accumulated $1.8 trillion in cash. But a spark is needed to turn this kindling into a fire. Only government can do this—stimulus will never be more appropriate nor prospectively productive than it is now.

More than a year later, with headline unemployment pinned above 9% and the federal government’s borrowing costs at record lows (which is how bond markets tell the authorities to buy bridges and high-speed rail projects), Chait somehow still cannot find fault with Obama for failing to keep his matches dry. Back in 2009, Obama chose a smaller stimulus package (and allowed his opponents to lard it with non-stimulative tax cuts) in order to avoid alienating “moderate Republicans,” whose support he supposedly needed to advance the rest of his domestic agenda. This, according to Chait, is what progressives (those who mattered, at any rate) wanted at the time. And moderate Republicans, as we know, obliged en masse: all three of them voted for ARRA. One (Arlen Specter) went on to a distinguished year-long career as a Democrat before losing his Senate seat in 2010; the other two, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, have not supported Obama on any major legislation since.

Chait believes that the Republicans’ credible filibuster threat before the 2010 election, and their subsequent takeover of the House, redeems Obama’s domestic record—if not fully, then enough that progressives should stop whining and stay onside. Indeed, Obama, in Chait’s view, has been as progressive as institutional constraints have allowed him to be. Why, he wants to know, did Robert Reich call Obama’s decision to extend the Bush administration’s tax cuts for the wealthiest income earners “an abomination”? Didn’t Obama wring from the Republicans payroll-tax cuts and an extension of federal unemployment benefits (as Reich had been advocating)? And, most alarmingly, if Obama had refused that deal, wouldn’t he “have to accept the likelihood that nearly a million fewer jobs would have been created and that we would have been at risk of a double-dip recession back then”?

Well, in that case, Obama would have been worrying about the wrong problem—or, rather, not worrying enough about the right one. As August’s employment data show, a recession deferred is not a recession denied. Even if we accept Chait’s jobs figure, net employment grew by just 360,000 from August 2010-August 2011, with the total increase (and then some) attributable to those whom the Bureau of Labor Statistics describes as “working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.” And, to them—and to millions of other underemployed, casualized, non-organized, and de-unionized workers, and their families—the risk of a double-dip recession probably doesn’t seem quite so troubling as it does to Chait; after all, American wage earners, on average, have yet to recover from the first dip—in 1981.

That is why, for Reich, the payroll-tax cuts and extension of unemployment benefits that Obama received amounted to “peanuts.” When weighed against the size of the income-tax cuts that he extended—and against the unprecedented economic inequality fueled by the massive transfer of wealth from labor to capital over the past 30 years—that seems a fair assessment. Chait, however, rejects Reich’s claim that recent unemployment data would have left the GOP with no choice but to extend benefits. On the contrary, those peanuts were “forms of stimulus that Republicans would never have allowed without an extension of upper-bracket tax cuts in return.”

Fair enough. But, honey-glazed or not, peanuts are peanuts, not porterhouse. The issue is not that Obama—now supposedly focused squarely on short-term economic recovery—might have lost some stimulus had he insisted on letting the tax cuts expire; it’s that he failed to demand much more in exchange for reneging on a key campaign pledge. A public jobs program that provides workers with a living wage and secure benefits (and that establishes benchmarks for private-sector employers) is also a form of stimulus—and one that, unlike what Obama got, might have averted, rather than postponed, the risk of a double-dip recession.

At the very least, such a demand would have made some rich people more careful about what they wish for. See, that’s the thing about institutional constraints: acknowledging their existence should never mean turning them into a stalking horse for policy outcomes that run counter to your voters’ interests. Republicans understand that very well. For the GOP, bipartisanship is a tactic, not a program. As Chait points out, Bush enacted his income-tax cuts by relying on the congressional budget-reconciliation procedure, thereby avoiding the threat of a Democratic filibuster. So, why didn’t Obama use budget reconciliation prior to the 2010 mid-term election to restore the upper-bracket rates?

Chait has no answer to such questions, because Obama’s constraints have been largely ideological, not institutional. Indeed, Chait suggests time and again that Obama should have chosen differently—on the size of ARRA and the extension of the Bush-era tax cuts, no less. The arguments for choosing differently were made. They turned out to be right. Unfortunately, Obama still doesn’t think they matter. What he and Chait don’t understand is that, if institutional constraints are to be changed, these arguments matter much more than what can be won by ignoring them.

Jonathan Stein is an editor at Project Syndicate. The views expressed here are his own.

Corey Robin teaches political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. His forthcoming book is The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin.

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For many years terrorist groups pursuing their political, religious and ideological beliefs have attacked our free and democratic way of life.  Yet the largest loss of British citizens during a single terrorist attack did not occur in Britain but in the United States on 11 September 2001.  Amongst the 2,973 people murdered that day, 67 were British.  Although terrorism has been endemic to human history for centuries, there was something particularly horrific about the suddenness and sheer magnitude of the events of what became known across the world by its eponymous date: 9/11. For Americans, no act of terrorism compares to the attacks and from that moment the history of the United States has been divided into ‘Before 9/11’ and ‘After 9/11’.  In lower Manhattan, on a field in Pennsylvania, and along the banks of the Potomac, the United States suffered its largest loss of life from an enemy attack on its own soil.  Within just 102 minutes, four commercial jets would be simultaneously hijacked and used as weapons of mass destruction to kill ordinary citizens as part of a coordinated attack that would shape the first decade of a new century.

A new era

It would be a grave error to regard 9/11 as merely another episode in the long history of terrorism.    The nature of the tactics used and the devastation caused during the attacks literally and metaphorically, marked the dawning of a new era.  As news channels beamed live images around the world of aircraft crashing into the World Trade Centre’s ‘twin towers’, viewers could hardly comprehend the events that they were witnessing.  Part of the stunning horror of the attacks in New York was the very spectacle of immense physical structures, invested with the spirit of the age suddenly not being there.  In some ways the twin towers’ absence from the famous Manhattan skyline has become an eerie and enduring anti-monument to terrorism. It is rare that we in the post-World War II West have had to confront so starkly the extent of mass destruction but all who witnessed the unfolding events of that day saw the pernicious impact of terrorism striking at the very heart of the world’s one true super power.

Condemned as crimes against humanity by world leaders, governments called for action as they soon realised that if the contemporary international terrorist could attack the homeland of the United States, they could strike anywhere and at anytime. Amplifying the sense of global vulnerability felt that day was the lack of a visible and identifiable enemy.  These attacks were not state sponsored, nor were they part  of a conventional or recognisable war. The global intelligence community, stunned by the attacks themselves, had to come to terms with the emerging fact that it had been wrong-footed by a small band of terrorists dispatched by Al-Qaeda, an organisation based in one of the poorest, most remote and least industrialised countries on Earth.

Beyond the thousands of people that were murdered during the 9/11 attacks many more were seriously injured, both physically and psychologically.  Members of  Manhattan’s many communities joined forces with the emergency services and other professional organisations calling upon all their natural instincts, training, professionalism and resourcefulness to save the lives of others and mitigate the consequences of attacks in a way more reminiscent of wartime Europe than prosperous, powerful and impregnable North America. The series of coordinated suicide bombings created a new genre of conflict and people caught up in the horror of its consequences had to face a reality known only by war-ravaged ‘lesser’ nations for the very first time.

Changing landscape

In the United States and throughout the Western world national security used to be considered by studying foreign frontiers, weighing opposing groups or states and by measuring industrial and military might.  To be considered a significant risk there had to be an ‘enemy’ and that enemy had to muster and finance large armies.  Threats emerged slowly, often visibly, as weapons were forged, armies conscripted and units trained and moved into place.  Because larger states were more powerful, they also had more to lose. They could be deterred.  Following 9/11 it appeared that threats could emerge quickly and from organisations like Al-Qaeda who headquartered in a country thousands of miles away, in an area so poor that electricity and telephones were scarce, but who could, nonetheless, wield weapons of mass destruction in the largest cities of the best defended countries.

For this reason alone the methodology practiced by Al-Qaeda was both new and shocking; 9/11 represented such a change in the threat and risk to many countries. It also appeared that this new relationship knew no boundaries and one of the first real challenges for the United States Administration was to try and understand this phenomenon.  Learning the lessons of 9/11 means understanding the nature and rhetoric of global terrorism; who the terrorists are and what motivates them.  These were all issues discussed in offices and bars, on commuter trains and coffee queues; TV and radio shows in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.  Ten years, on the discussions are continuing.

Contemporary terrorism

The 9/11 suicide pilots and hijackers provided a profile of the post-modern terrorist.   They were mobile, being supported by a network of operatives who were able to move from country to country to disseminate propaganda and recruit personnel to their cause.  They showed how they could seek sanctuary and safe haven, yet could raise and transfer funds as well as procure weapons and other equipment.  In addition, they displayed an ability to communicate and conduct meetings while in the process of identifying targets, mounting hostile reconnaissance and finalising attack planning.  They have access to the world’s media and their announcements made in the name of Bin Laden can attract as much air time as those issued from the White House.

Much of the infrastructure of modern terrorism is increasing non-physical; the internet, new global communications and advancements in technology being harnessed by terrorists provide a new layer of sophistication to the contemporary terrorist that the 9/11 cell embodied.  State sponsorship of terrorism operations is also becoming increasingly difficult to identify and prove, while the boundaries with serious organised crime are evaporating.

The Al-Qaeda transnational terrorist network has demonstrated with chilling effect its  expertise at recruiting in one location, training in a second, attack planning in a third and delivering mass murder in a fourth. The uncomfortable truth seems to be that a single nation at the turn of the century could not , in reality, comprehend the size and scale of the threat, nor could they meet the challenges of multiple determined terrorists bent on killing themselves and others.  Yet during the planning and preparation of the Planes Operation there were numerous opportunities for the United States to identify the plot against them, and it would require the formation of a new commission to expose deficiencies in their homeland security structures.  The many initial questions thrown up by the Planes Operation where passed to a special board of inquiry, the 9/11 Commission, whose conclusions are vital to understanding the challenges and subsequent changes made to the UK counter-terrorism and security apparatus.

The Commission

During November 2002 the United States Congress and President Bush established the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.  Known as the 9/11 Commission, this independent, bipartisan panel was directed to examine the facts and circumstances surrounding the 11 September attacks. Its aim was to identify lessons learned and provide recommendations to safeguard against future acts of terrorism.  In pursuing their mandate the 9/11 Commission reviewed more than 2.5 million pages of documents, interviewed more than 1,200 individuals in ten countries and conducted hearings over 19 days taking public testimony from 160 witnesses.  The 9/11 Commission report was critical of the United States Government in a number of key areas.  It questioned how 19 suicide terrorists could be imported into America without examination. How were they able to live undetected within local communities for several months whilst seeking English language classes and flight instruction?  Why were they not identified by United States agencies working overseas in the first instance?  Most importantly however, the 9/11 Commission focused upon how the United States, having learned from its experiences, could develop their response to tackle this new threat and protect its citizens in the future.

Failures

The 9/11 Commission believed that the attacks revealed four kinds of failures: imagination, policy, capabilities and management.  It revealed that terrorists exploited deep institutional failings within the United States government.   The principal question was whether extra vigilance might have turned up an opportunity to disrupt the plot so the 9/11 Commission explored the United States aviation sector as a key component in the success of the terrorists attack plan lay in their ability to overpower and take control of aircraft. This had provided an opportunity for the suicide pilots to fly towards identified targets. Some of the flying skills had been acquired in flight training establishments within the United States general aviation sector.  The United States has the largest flight training industry in the world.  Students are attracted by the countries climate, its location but fundamentally the competitive rates charged by their flight instructors.  As a result, large numbers of prospective flying students arrive in the United States from all corners of the world.  Seeking flight training was therefore not unusual and the 9/11 suicide pilots blended into the large diverse and transient flight training population.  They were well placed to conduct their activities beneath the radar of the United States intelligence community

Commission conclusions

It is difficult to comprehend the United States authority’s failure to recognise the signs that a major terrorist plot was taking place within their communities. The sheer size and scale of the United States security machine did not correctly analyse, assess and prioritise intelligence on a national level.  A large number of agencies that held critical data did not share its information. These organisations were working in isolation each with there own ‘need to know’ principles and limited ‘need to share’ protocols.  A full national picture of the emerging threat was not put together.  Like a giant jigsaw puzzle many of the smaller pieces were missing that would have provided United States authorities with a greater opportunity to identify and disrupt the plot. Despite collating intelligence to develop a picture of unfolding events the United States authorities were behind the activities of the terrorist cell and as the Al-Qaeda ‘Planes Operation’ drew into its final phases in September 2001, time simply ran out. The 9/11 Commission concluded that the United States.

‘domestic agencies were not mobilised in response to the threat.  They did not have direction, and they did not have a plan to institute.  The borders were not hardened.  Transportation systems were not fortified.  Electronic surveillance was not targeted against a domestic threat.  State and local law enforcement were not marshalled to augment the Federal Bureau of Investigations efforts.  The public was not warned.’

Learning the lessons

In the 10 years that followed the 9/11 attacks we would come to learn a great deal about them and the people who perpetrated them.  We would also learn a great deal about the ideology and methodology behind the 102 minutes of terror that would frame the threat and shape the response to terrorism across the world. The impact of 9/11 on counter-terrorism cannot be understated, taking every  opportunity to pause and take stock of the lessons we must learn from this event and to consider what they taught us – and how much we have yet to learn, is vital for the future success of counter-terrorism practice. More recently we have seen Al-Qaeda activity in the attempted airline suicide bomb attack over Detroit, a failed bombing in Times Square in New York, and closer to home, commando style armed assaults in European cities and the mailing of Improvised Explosive Devices  (IEDs) hidden in print cartridges remotely despatched on commercial and cargo flights.  Whatever the answers to the indiscriminate and  unpredictable nature of Al-Qaeda inspired terrorism,  9/11 introduced a new form of relationship between national governments and those who threaten them, a relationship that would evoke a new type of counter-terrorism response and a new era of collaboration that continues to this day.

Andrew Staniforth is from the North East Counter-Terrorism Unit, West Yorkshire Police. He is an experienced counter-terrorism investigator who is responsible for designing and delivering training to counter-terrorism officers at one of the four specialist Counter-Terrorism Units in the UK. He has been commended for his work on counter-terrorism training by West Yorkshire Police and has also been involved in developing national exercises to examine the preparedness of both covert and overt police counter-terrorism assets. He is one of the authors of Blackstone’s Counter-Terrorism Handbook.

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