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.

Until the early morning of November 15, a few hundred Occupy Wall Street protesters spent the chilly nights of a glorious autumn camping out in Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. Despite Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s disapproval with their politics and under the New York City Police Department’s anxious eye, the occupiers captured public attention in a remarkably peaceful way. Regrouping for the winter, they will take stock of what they have achieved so far and the work that remains.

Though the occupation was initially ignored by mainstream media after it began in September, the protest movement attracted favorable attention both nationwide and internationally. Arrests flared in other U.S. cities, notably Oakland, California, where protesters tried to recall a famous general strike of 1946 by marching to the port. But unlike in Oakland, and Portland, Oregon, the encampment at Wall Street survived the constant threat of being rousted by police action on the one hand and cold weather on the other without death, disaster or dishonor.

An official order to clear Zuccotti Park was squelched in October by the intervention of local city council members and other politicians—some of whom, not coincidentally, plan to run for office in the 2012 elections. Many local labor unions support the movement, suggesting that alliances may be possible across “police and firefighter” lines. This kind of alliance recently won a referendum in Ohio overturning a state law that would have limited public unions’ collective bargaining rights.

In Zuccotti Park protesters formed a tiny city within the city. Food, clothing and books were donated and handed out. Electric generators that were confiscated by the fire department were returned after volunteer attorneys complained on the protesters’ behalf. For public safety the occupiers relied on volunteer security guards who used nonviolent techniques to confront, isolate and occasionally expel troublemakers. Women and transgender protesters could, if they wished, sleep in separate tents. Before November 15, few people were arrested by the police for allegedly committing sexual or physical assault.

New Yorkers quickly became accustomed to this remarkably peaceful microcosm of urban life. On sunny weekend afternoons tourists thronged Zuccotti Park and its celebrated neighbors, the World Trade Center site on one side and the financial district on the other. I have never seen Lower Manhattan look more vibrant.

But Occupy Wall Street was only one of Manhattan’s tourist attractions. To put support for the movement’s proposed reforms in a realistic perspective it is suggestive to look at other sites in the city and the desires that they apparently fulfill.

Nearly 50 million men and women are visiting New York City this year. Nearly 50,000 of them ran in the recent New York City Marathon sponsored by ING Bank .

While protesters occupied Zuccotti Park in tents, the average price of a hotel room in New York City is $250 and the hotel occupancy rate is over 80 percent.

The average rent for a two-bedroom Manhattan apartment is $3,000 to $5,000 a month and the vacancy rate is practically nil . Close to Zuccotti Park you can rent a small studio apartment in Tribeca Tower for $3,395 .

Uptown, on the shopping mile of Fifth Avenue, young people line up in front of the Apple Store to buy an Iphone 4S. After registering online they arrive at the store, pick up a number and wait to be called into the store by an Apple employee. A few blocks down the street, other people line up to enter the Abercrombie & Fitch store though the young man working as a door guard tells me no special event or sale is going on. In front of Hollister, another chain clothing store, more people are waiting to enter the store which is now, a young employee says, is at its maximum capacity.

We can’t ignore that while most people are preoccupied with paying for a home and an education, they are also shopping for fun. Occupy Wall Street has won many supporters, but to win the hearts and minds of most Americans the movement must go on at least metaphorically to occupy Fifth Avenue as well.

Sharon Zukin is Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Loft Living, Landscapes of Power (winner of the C. Wright Mills Award), The Cultures of Cities, Point of Purchase, and most recently Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. You can read her previous posts here.

View more about this book on the

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

View more about this book on the

Yesterday, we announced that South Sudan is the 2011 Place of the Year. How much do you know about Sudan, South Sudan, and Darfur? Test your knowledge with this quiz by Andrew S. Natsios.

1. What four factors have caused Sudan to be so unstable since independence in 1956?

(1) Its enormous size (it is the largest country in Africa geographically), (2) its very weak transportation infrastructure to tie its economy together, (3) its extraordinary diversity of languages, cultures, and tribes, and (4) the failure of its leaders since independence to find a broadly accepted formula to share wealth and power, and its attempt to impose through coercion and repression Islam and Arab culture on the South which is African, and practice Christian and traditional religions, and Arab culture on Northern tribes which speak African languages.

2. What proportion of the population of historic Sudan (Sudan before the South became independent in 2011) is racially Arab and what proportion is African?

Most Sudanese Arabs are descendants of the African tribes in the Northern Nile River valley and Sahara desert which adopted Arab culture and language after they converted to Islam. There are few Arabs in Sudan.

3. What are the two largest tribes in historic Sudan (Sudan before the South became independent in 2011)?

Dinka and Fur.

Portrait of Dinka tribesmen and women at the local square in Rumbek, Southern Sudan. (Source: Lucian Perkins/United States Holocaust Museum)

4. What are the three dominate tribes in historic Sudan which controlled the government, the military and business enterprise since independence in 1956?

The Ja’aliyiin, the Shayqiyya and Danagla.

5. During the joint British Egyptian rule between 1902-1956 what ethnic groups dominated the economy of Sudan?

Greeks, Lebanese Christians, Armenians, and Iraqi Jews. They were brought in by General Gordon in the 1880’s to develop a commercial economy and continued to play a major role into the 1970’s.

6. How many internal wars have taken place in Darfur over the past thirty years and which tribes fought them?

Three. The Fur vs. Arab War between 1986-1989; The Masalit vs. Arab War between 1986-1988; The Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa vs. Arab War between 2002-present). During all three wars, the Arab tribes were proxies for the national government in Khartoum which provided weapons and funds for them to fight against the African tribes.

7. Where did the Darfuri African tribes in the third (and current) war get the weapons they fought with?

From the Libyan and Chadian governments and captured weapons from the Sudanese military after the rebels defeated them in battle between 2003-2004.

8. What political figure in Sudan is purportedly related by marriage to Osama bin Laden?

The Islamist leader Hassan al Turabi. He reportedly married Turabi’s niece while he lived in Sudan in the 1990’s at Turabi’s invitation.

9. Why did Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir agree in 2011 to a peaceful secession of South Sudan to form an independent state?

Bashir would have faced a high probability of military defeat in a new war with the South had he tried to stop Southern independence. The South Sudan military–called the SPLA–had more troops than the North, had purchased heavy weapons with oil revenues after the peace agreement of January 2005, and had arrayed their forces along the border with the North. Had the North invaded the South they would have faced a southern army which would have been defending their own homes and families, while the Northern army has suffered from increasingly poor morale.

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.

View more about this book on the

Each November, we announce a Place of the Year, somewhere that our experts deem will be important to keep an eye on in the coming months. The 2011 Place of the Year is South Sudan. Why, you ask? Read on.

By Andrew S. Natsios

For more than two centuries, Sudan has attracted an unusual level of attention beyond its own borders. This international interest converged in the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century as four independent forces met.

First, there is the rebellion in Darfur, which has generated greater international concern than any other recent humanitarian crisis. This long-neglected western region has been intermittently at war since the 1980s and claimed the lives of 300,000 Darfuris in its most recent phase. The rebellion beginning in 2002 led to an ongoing humanitarian emergency, costing Western governments about one billion dollars annually at the peak of the crisis to sustain the 1.8 million people driven into sixty-five IDP (internally displaced person) camps scattered across Darfur. The Sudanese government committed widespread atrocities in Darfur as part of its counter-insurgency strategy, which involved a massive ethnic cleansing campaign to displace the tribes that started the rebellion and has motivated an international advocacy campaign to compel Western governments and international organizations to address the violence. The crisis has led to the deployment of 26,000 United Nations/African Union (UN/AU) peacekeeping troops and police—the largest in UN history to a single conflict—to Darfur, which cost $2 billion to maintain in 2007 alone. (The African Union is a successor to the Organization for African Unity, and seeks to create a more integrated Africa on the model of the European Union, though they were a very long way from achieving that.)

The Darfur rebellion has recently obscured the far more lethal war between northern and southern Sudan, spanning twenty-two years in its most recent phase and which has cost the lives of more than two and a half million Southerners—eight times the number who died in Darfur. The war was brought to a tenuous end in 2005 by the North-South peace agreement—called the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) —which the Bush administration played a central role in fashioning, along with Great Britain, Norway, and neighboring African states.  In January 2011, Southern Sudan voted in a historic referendum—required by the CPA—to become an independent country and the Sudanese government led by Omar al-Bashir agreed to recognize their secession which formerly took place July 9, 2011.

9 Oct. 2010 - Juba, Sudan - On the 9th of each month rallies are held throughout Sudan to push for the referendum slated for January to be held on time at that date. Here soldiers patrol the streets during the rally. (Source: Lucian Perkins for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Secondly, there is oil and mineral wealth. Emerging Asian economic powers in particular have been drawn to Sudan by its vast natural resources. Over 75 percent of Sudan’s oil production (43 percent of which was, until Southern independence, jointly controlled by the Sudanese government and the Chinese; 39 percent by Malaysian; and 8 percent by Indian government-owned oil and gas companies) is located in the South and its reserves are believed by some oil experts to hold two to three billion barrels. Mining companies have been rushing to explore reportedly large deposits of gold, diamond, uranium, copper, and coltan (a mineral used in electronic products), also located in the South.

Sudan’s natural resources are not limited to oil and mineral wealth. Some argue that all of Africa and even the Arab world could be fed by farming from southern Sudan’s luxuriant soils, plentiful rain fall, and seemingly limitless river system with its great irrigation potential.

A comprehensive USAID wildlife study of the Sudd—the largest wetland in Africa and located in the southeast corner of the country—was conducted with National Geographic support by naturalist J. Michael Fay and Southern Sudan scholar Dr. Malik Marjan. Their study discovered a teeming population of between one and two million animals, including white-eared kob antelope (800,000), elephants (8,000), giraffes, hippopotamus, water buffalo (8,900), ostriches (2,800), reedbucks (13,000), tiang (160,000), Mongalla gazelles (250,000), Nile lechwe antelope (4,000), Beisa oryx, and lions—animal herds rivaled in size in Africa only by those of the Serengeti and Kalahari. These herds are matched by those of the South’s domesticated cattle, which are estimated at eight to ten million animals, the highest people-to-cattle ratio in Africa.

For Egypt, Sudan’s immediate northern neighbor, the country’s most precious resource may not be its oil, mineral wealth, or farm land, but its water; the head waters of the Nile River are located there. Egypt has traditionally sent some of its most seasoned and able diplomats to Sudan and Ethiopia because the Nile River waters (from the White Nile, which begins in Uganda, and the Blue Nile, which begins in Ethiopia; they merge in front of the Presidential Palace in Khartoum) profoundly affect the country. Without the Nile, Egypt would be unable to sustain its eighty million people. Egyptian government agencies predict Nile River water flows will be insufficient to meet the country’s agricultural, industrial, and human needs by 2017. Egyptian focus on events in Sudan grows more intense and more concerned every year.  Egypt’s economic and strategic interests are inextricably linked to Sudan, and thus, it has often played over two centuries an active and even aggressive role in Sudan’s internal affairs.

Thirdly, Sudan has been a religious battleground for generations, and any attempt to ignore or deny this yields an incomplete and distorted picture. In historic Sudan before Southern secession, approximately 70% of the people confessed Sunni Islam, 20% Christianity, and 10% traditional tribal religions. Since 1956, four governments whose ideology is based on various schools of Islamic teaching have taken power, two democratically — in 1964 and 1986; one through the gradual conversion of General Jaafar al-Numayri from Arab socialism to an Islamist political agenda in 1976; and one with the 1989 coup d’état that has brought the longest sitting Islamist government in Sudanese history, under the leadership of Omar al-Bashir.  All four governments undertook violent military campaigns against the southern Sudanese people, persecuting local Christian populations and expelling of missionaries. This persecution has had profound consequences for Southern Sudan because it has accelerated the growth of the indigenous Churches and led to one of the largest and fastest conversion of indigenous people to Christianity in modern history, a fact noted by Western church groups and NGOs which lobby on their behalf.

25 Sept. 2010 - Rumbek, Southern Sudan - A religious procession winds down the main road in Rumbek on Sunday. (Source: Lucian Perkins for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

The coup that brought Omar al-Bashir to power in 1989 was orchestrated by Islamist prophet Hassan al-Turabi, who used it to attempt to reshape Sudanese society and government. In 1964 Turabi became the Secretary General of the Islamic Charter Front, an off-shoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, was later renamed the National Islamic Front (NIF). Al-Turabi guided its ideology, and acted as its grand strategist for nearly a decade after the NIF seized power. His sermons, calling for a world Islamic uprising, were recorded and distributed by his acolytes and broadcast in mosques across North Africa. Turabi’s intention was to use Sudan as a base for the radical Islamization of Africa, alarming neighboring African states, such as Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda, all of which saw Turabi’s regime as a threat to their internal stability, since they all have considerable Muslim (who are Sufists) minority populations that  have generally lived in harmony with their Christian neighbors.

Thus, within only a few years, Sudan had attracted the attention of the outside world because of repeated humanitarian catastrophes and massive loss of human life; the discovery of vast economic riches—oil and minerals; Sudan invited a man to live in the country who was later to become the most wanted war criminal in the world, Osama bin Laden (his former home in Khartoum is a tourist site even today); and the fear by its neighbors of the plans of its leaders to mobilize a religious jihad to project the Sudanese Islamist revolution into the heart of Africa and overthrow moderate Arab governments in the region.  So the next time you are sitting at home, half-heartedly watching the evening news, be sure to perk up and pay attention if you hear the country Sudan mentioned.  It will be worth your time.

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.

View more about this book on the

October 13, 1884

Conference setting international time begins

Why does most every country in the world agree on how to determine what time it is? You can thank the International Prime Meridian Conference, which began on October 13, 1884, and lasted nearly ten days. The twenty-five countries that gathered in Washington , D.C., agreed to accept the line of longitude that passed through Britain’s Royal Observatory as the prime meridian—the line of 0° longitude (just as the Equator is 0° latitude). The nations also agreed that the time at Greenwich would be the standard time against which all other times would be compared—Greenwich Mean Time.

The conference was the brainchild of US President Chester Alan Arthur (in office 1881-1885), who recognized that the increases in international shipping and communication required the standardization of longitude measures and of time.  Before 1883, when telegraph lines began transmitting time signals to all major US cities, there had been more than 300 local times in the United States.

The choice of Greenwich was hardly a surprise. Britain had used Greenwich mean time (GMT) since 1848 as the standard across its far-flung world empire, and the United States had adopted the same time zone system in 1883.  The conference required unprecedented cooperation to overcome nationalist sentiments.  France, ever Britain’s rival, proposed that the prime meridian should pass through the royal observatory in Paris,   But in the end, Greenwich prevailed.  While only two dozen nations took part in the agreement, others later adopted what would quickly become the global standard. And that is why, no matter where you are in the world, you will know what time it is.

Time zones in Siamese. A Thai map, created right after the 1884 conference, that celebrates the new prime meridian. Source: Library of Congress.

“This Day in World History” is brought to you by USA Higher Education.
You can subscribe to these posts via RSS or receive them by email.

After fifteen years of fast growth and, by Greek standards, monumental achievements (from EMU accession in 2001 to winning the UEFA Championship in 2004), Greece has found itself at the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008/09 again at the epicentre of global attention. But this time the publicity is unintended and for all the wrong reasons. Following notoriously poor management of its public finances, that culminated in the revelation in the Fall of 2009 of chronic misreporting and under-stating of its fiscal figures, the country became subject to increasing market pressures that raised its government bond spreads to unmanageable levels and led it, in the space of only a few months, to ask for a rescue package (effectively, a bail-out) by its Eurozone partners. Indeed, in May 2010 Greece was signing a Memorandum of Understanding with the EU-IMF-ECB ‘troika’, setting the conditions for a €110bn loan that would help the country meet its financial obligations to 2012. The Memorandum imposed a series of conditions for fiscal and regulatory measures aiming at consolidating the public finances and introducing structural reforms to rationalise economic governance and raise competitiveness.

What happened next is by now well known. The Greek government was slow to realize the magnitude of the problem and (owing to the Eurozone’s own institutional and political constraints) pursued half-heartedly a set of austerity measures which eventually became all the more pervasive pushing the economy into an ever deepening recession. Uncertainty about the true intentions of the Eurozone kept fuelling market speculation making the Greek debt ever more unserviceable and requiring ever harsher budgetary measures. In this climate, and with the socio-political situation in turmoil, structural reforms have been slow, often mis-targeted and almost always poorly communicated; while in the space of two years Greek GDP fell cumulatively by over 10% and the Greek public debt rose by an astonishing 60% (and rising). What will be the ultimate implications of this for Greece is still unknown (although it seems increasingly obvious now that an exit from the Eurozone is becoming inevitable). But at least now the criticality of the situation for the national economy is well appreciated.

Much less appreciated, however, if at all, are the spatial implications of austerity. Greece is a country of vast geographical divisions. Its GDP data do not fully reflect this – but in many respects Greece’s economic geography has the characteristics of a developing country. Out of 11 million residents, around four million live in one single city (the capital, Athens) accounting for almost 50% of national GDP. Outside this, with the exception of two or three semi-urbanised regions, some 25% of the population is still involved in agricultural activities, producing just 5% of national GVA, while nationally manufacturing accounts for only 13% of GVA. Two in five working-age Greeks are inactive. Of the rest, one in ten is (was: now unemployment has climbed to 16%) unemployed and one in three is self-employed (typically small-shop owners in family businesses). More than a quarter is employed in the public sector (including state-owned utilities and enterprises), leaving salaried employment dismally at less than 30%. Industrial production is also heavily concentrated in or around the capital, which also accounts for 85% of all FDI in the country. The economic landscape is thus extremely skewed. Human, physical, financial and political capital are all concentrated in a single urban agglomeration and almost all other areas have singular and deep dependencies: the south Aegean islands on tourism, Western Macedonia on (state-owned) energy production, Eastern Macedonia on public transfers, the North Aegean and Western Greece on public sector employment, and most of the remaining areas on agriculture.

In this landscape, the austerity measures of 2010/11 have remarkably uneven spatial implications. In a paper published recently in the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, I have examined this unevenness generated by the vast compositional differences that exist across the Greek economic space. The collapse of public investment, which was originally to fall by 7% but has now more than halved (and became even more concentrated) affected much more dearly the north-western and north-eastern regions of Western Macedonia, Ipeiros and the North Aegean. The retraction of state benefits (transfers to households) has affected deeply the region of Eastern Macedonia and Thrace (in the north-east; and to a lesser extent Crete in the south). The pervasive cuts in public sector pay (already by 14% of average pay, with more cuts being currently implemented) and employment affect disproportionately those regions that are most dependent on the public sector: the northern (east and west) regions mentioned above, as well as two regions in the western periphery (Western Greece and the Ionian). Similarly, the vast increase in taxation (VAT rates rose to 23%, the non-taxable income threshold fell by 40% and a series of flat-rate levies were introduced) affects more strongly the regions with high concentrations of low household incomes: the same regions as above (including also the Peloponnese).

It is of course no accident that these effects concentrate in the least dynamic and more backward regions of the country. The measures have been applied horizontally and are largely counter-distributive. It follows that the more vulnerable regions and those that are more dependent on transfers from the centre are to be affected more dearly. But this is not the end of the story. The uneven geography of the effects of austerity creates cumulative pressures to the ailing regions that – if policy is not reversed – may also compromise the ability of these regions to recover. In a country with already weak equilibration mechanisms (migration, capital mobility, price adjustments) and in an environment of illiquidity and disinvestment, even if the recession is to lead to falling relative prices and costs in the backward regions, this will not generate sufficient capital flows to recover local demand. Instead, new investments (if present) will tend to concentrate in the least vulnerable areas (i.e., the capital), as ‘prudent’ investors will move away from risk diversification (investing in a portfolio of localities) towards concentration to areas where demand is still vibrant (in relative terms). A Harris-Todaro type urban migration movement may follow, where the new cohorts of unemployed in the periphery will be attracted by the higher employment opportunities accruing from urban density (in a Marshallian sense) thus reinforcing the collapse of local demand in the periphery. Relative concentration will then follow its cumulative causation path (of a Kaldorian type), with productivity growth remaining stronger in the centre thus attracting more capital and more skilled migration there. Diversified regions and regions with relatively more vibrant external demand (exports, tourism) will be in a better position to weather these effects. In the Greek context, these are the regions of the capital (Athens/Attica) and the South Aegean – exactly the ones that are least affected by the austerity measures.

Of course, this is a scenario rooted in a largely Keynesian theoretical understanding. In practice, equilibrium forces do find their ways – and reality is rarely as simple as theory. The pervasiveness of the austerity measures in Greece and the social tensions that they create are already pushing some away from the centre and towards the less urbanised periphery – where family ties and low housing costs create opportunities for survival that are not on offer in the centre. But as the path to austerity continues, even these survival tactics may prove ephemeral. In the absence of spatially designed policies, that will understand the nature of spatial imbalances and address them in a systematic way, it is almost perverse to expect that market forces alone will produce equilibria that will be economically optimal, let alone spatially balanced and socially desirable: market concentration will intensify the underutilisation of resources in the periphery and will lead to more dependence.

In this context, policies for balanced economic development are not some kind of luxury; they become a necessity. An exit from the crisis requires investing large and investing in economic diversity: not throwing money blindly into the economy, but investing to create the functional-spatial complementarities that can recover domestic demand and reconstitute productive capacities and profit opportunities for private investment. The negotiations between Greece and its Eurozone partners in July 2011 opened a path to this, by introducing the idea of a new “Marshall Plan” for Greece, involving some targeted ‘strategic investments’ from countries like Germany and the early release of funds allocated to Greece through the EU Structural Funds. Whereas fiscal consolidation and structural reforms still are – and must remain – very much at the centre of the policy agenda, what is needed now is the translation of these ideas into practice, with targeted investments that will have a clear strategy and spatial character. Investments that will allocate resources where capacities are underutilised and becoming thinner; investments that will increase the diversity of the Greek economy and raise its resilience. Without a well-thought spatial design, any new measures, even of a Keynesian character, will only have a limited effect as they will maintain the spatial and other imbalances that characterise the Greek economy and will make a recovery more difficult and less sustainable.

Vassilis Monastiriotis is Senior Lecturer in the Political Economy of Southeast Europe at the European Institute, London School of Economics. His research encompasses the areas of applied economics, political economy and economic geography and focuses on issues of economic policy, economic development and growth, regional disparities, local labour markets and labour market regulation. He is affiliated to the Hellenic Observatory and the Spatial Economics Research Centre (both at LSE) and has published in a variety of economics and regional science journals. You can read his paper ‘Making geographical sense of the Greek austerity measures: compositional effects and long-run implications’, published in the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, in full and for free here. You may also be interested in this OUPblog post by Julie MacLeavy.

With the new school year approaching, Social Explorer is taking a closer look at education data today and over the years. In this installment, we are looking at some of the earliest reported census data related to education.

The Census Bureau first reported literacy data on reading and writing in 1840. At the time, 91.5 percent of the adult white population (over the age of 20) was literate.

In 1850, the white literate population fell slightly to 89.8 percent. Meanwhile, the illiterate free colored* population (41.3 percent) was over four times as large as the illiterate white population. These literacy rates appear to be closely linked with school attendance rates. That same year, 56.1 percent of white children (aged 5 to 19) attended school while just 17.1 percent of the free colored population (aged 5 to 19) attended.

In both the black and white populations, women were less likely to be literate than men, but the gender gap in literacy rates was wider among whites (59.5 percent of illiterate white adults were female; 55.0 percent of illiterate black adults were male).

However, children were attending school at similar rates (53.3 percent of white female school age children compared to 52.7 percent of white male school age children; and 16 percent of free colored female school age children compared to 18.4 percent of free colored male school age children)—a trend which would contribute to improved literacy rates in the coming decades.

To see the regional trends in literacy rates, you can map the data using Social Explorer. For instance, take a look at these maps of the illiterate population (age 10 and up) from 1870 to 1930 to explore variations around the country and changes over time.

1870 Illiterate Population (age 10 and over)

1900 Illiterate Population (age 10 and over)

1930 Illiterate Population (age 10 and over)

For more information literacy rates for different groups, such as gender, race and foreign born, check out Social Explorer’s reports.  The census discontinued tracking literacy data in 1940, and focused more on educational attainment, which we will explore in our next feature.

We hope you enjoyed parts one and two of our back to school series.  Check back soon for part three.  We promise there won’t be a quiz, but data just might help you succeed in school.

*Early editions of the census used the terms “colored” and “free colored” population to describe African-Americans/blacks.  For another example of census terminology, see this post about Native Americans.

This report is also available on the Social Explorer blog.

Everyone knows by now that Tropical Storm Irene, which blew through the East Coast last weekend, flooded the beaches, suburbs and some inland towns but did little lasting damage in New York City.  I have seldom felt so lucky to live on a high floor with no river view and on a street with very few trees.

We all over-prepared for harm, of course.  New York City has more than five hundred miles of waterfront and the Bloomberg administration, with visions of Hurricane Katrina’s victims still imprinted on everyone’s mind, told thousands of residents of those areas to leave their homes for emergency shelters.  The governor of New York worked with the Obama administration to declare a state of emergency.

Since there was no need to evacuate my apartment I followed my Noah’s Ark reflex.  I baked two loaves of bread before the storm’s expected arrival, filled pots of water in case of a power outage or water main break and removed books and furniture that were in the room with the biggest windows—those most likely to shatter in hurricane winds.

As in the social storms of the Arab Spring and the recent British riots, social media channeled urgent communications.  The city government and local public radio station coordinated crowd sourcing of the hurricane’s effects through a special website:  http://nycsevereweather.crowdmap.com/main.  On Saturday night, the eve of the hurricane’s expected arrival, I got more emails from friends than on any other weekend I can remember.

When the city awakened to gray but mostly still skies on Sunday morning, those of us who had escaped the storm’s fury felt fortunate indeed.  Apart from the joy of seeing the skyscrapers and rooftop water towers in their right places and being able to flush the toilet and turn on the lights, I had a good chance to reorganize a major share of my family’s possessions.

Now I followed my Laura Ingalls Wilder instinct for domestic sufficiency.  Which books do I not need on the coffee table?  Does the telephone that never worked really belong close at hand?  Should that drawing in its old frame remain on the floor?  Or the pile of hand-drawn “books” that my daughter made in elementary school:  shouldn’t these be kept in a drawer?

The city as a whole faces more important decisions.  In the long run use of the waterfront must be made safe and secure.  Last year an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that showcased the innovative ideas of architects and urban designers for environmentally sustainable and even productive uses of the city’s shores.   So far none of these have been taken into account by the otherwise thoughtful PlaNYC, the Bloomberg administration’s statement of action principles that will guide the city’s environmental planning until the year 2030.

Neither has the city planning commission made an effort to curb rather than expand waterfront development.  The waterfront is a lucrative site for high-rise, luxury residential development and no one in the city government wants to frustrate developers’ interest in milking this cash cow.  In fact, financing the public parks on the waterfront that are planned to ring the city depends on selling development rights on and around them.

At this very moment the public-private conservancy that manages the beautiful new Brooklyn Bridge Park is soliciting developers’ proposals to build high-rise hotels and housing there to help pay for maintaining the land and building new public attractions.  Because expensive hotel rooms and apartments can generate the most income with the fewest units, thus making the smallest footprint in the park, this type of development is favored.

In the short run the joy of escaping Hurricane Irene confronts the irony of living in an epicenter of high-rise development.  When the storm blew over the city on Sunday morning an advertisement on the home page of the New York Times’ website was promoting  “New Waterfront Condos in Downtown NYC.”  Business as usual.

Sharon Zukin is Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Loft Living, Landscapes of Power (winner of the C. Wright Mills Award), The Cultures of Cities, Point of Purchase, and most recently Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. You can read her previous posts here.

View more about this book on the

Three years ago this month, Russia and Georgia fought a brief and brutal war over an obscure slice of mountainous land called South Ossetia that had declared its independence from Georgia. Flouting international law, Russia stepped in to defend South Ossetia and later formally recognized the secessionists as a legitimate government. Hundreds died and thousands of refugees fled the disputed region.

The 2008 war demonstrated the explosive potential created by the presence of phantom states: places that field military forces, hold elections, build local economies and educate children, yet inhabit the foggy netherworld between de facto existence and international legitimacy.

With about 70,000 people, South Ossetia is one of the smallest of these oddities of international politics. Its fellow breakaway republic, Abkhazia, has approximately 250,000 (these numbers are disputed). Nagorno-Karabakh and Transnistria are two others in the former Soviet Union. To the south are the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus; the Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza Strip; and the self-functioning territory of Somaliland. A half dozen other patches of land could be added to the mix; together, they are home to approximately 40 million people.

Phantom states stoke wars, foster crime, and make weak states even weaker. Nagorno-Karabakh is lauded by Armenia and loathed by Azerbaijan, leading all sides to stockpile arms in case of renewed violence. The unsettled status of Northern Cyprus weakens the economic prospects of all Cypriots and strains relations between the European Union and Turkey, Northern Cyprus’s chief supporter. And although Somaliland has been an island of effective governance in anarchic Somalia, its unrecognized status has discouraged aid and investment.

Phantom countries frequently emerge from wars, and are sustained by the threat of further fighting. In Gaza, Hamas has waged an off-and-on war with Israel even as it has cracked down on local crime and picked up the trash.

Leaders of phantom states champion the right to national self-determination while the countries from which they seek independence stress the need for stable borders. Stuck between these incompatible principles, phantom governments tend to point out uncomfortable precedents and double standards and latch on to foreign patrons. Indeed, most phantoms survive in part because of external support. Moscow is the power broker in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, while Armenia holds sway over Nagorno-Karabakh.

Taiwan shows one way out of this conundrum; despite existing in a state of legal uncertainty, it has thrived. From 1949 to 1971 the Nationalist government in Taiwan held China’s seat at the United Nations and was recognized by most world governments. Since the 1970s, however, no major power has formally recognized Taiwan and it remains a source of tension between the United States and China. Yet, in the past four decades, Taiwan has become an economic powerhouse, a model of democratic transition from authoritarian rule and a responsible member of the international community — all without a seat at the United Nations.

The key was engagement. Taiwan’s economic and strategic importance pushed the United States, China and other great powers to tiptoe around — and sometimes even embrace — its unsettled legal status. Legitimate but unrecognized, a real country but not independent, Taiwan has demonstrated the positive power of creative ambiguity.

A similar approach could work elsewhere. Phantom governments are often corrupt, run by warlords and plagued by drug trafficking and other illicit trade. But transparent government, free elections and a peaceful foreign policy are as vital for phantom states as they are for real ones. If phantom governments behave well, they should be offered a path toward legitimacy by the world’s major powers. Economic and political reforms can proceed parallel to, and even bolster, discussions over sovereignty.

By insisting on territorial integrity, the United States and other countries forgo the chance to turn phantom states into responsible players. So long as phantoms are denounced as separatists or outposts of illicit commerce, the international community has little opportunity to hold their leaders accountable. And treating them as mere eccentricities means that phantom states have little reason to care about the international order.

Even when a phantom state becomes a genuine state, the problems don’t necessarily end. Eritrea, which seceded from Ethiopia in 1993 after years of war, is a warning. It has since fallen into tyranny, fought a border war with Ethiopia in which many thousands died, and supported the brutal Shabab militia in Somalia. Although Eritrea is independent, it remains a source of instability.

To avoid another Eritrea, the international community should push phantoms to reform rather than focusing exclusively on seeking statehood. Otherwise, millions of the world’s citizens will linger in legal and political limbo — rebels with a cause and soldiers with a ready-made grievance — while their neighborhoods remain at risk of war.

Daniel Byman is a Senior Fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, an Professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University with Charles King. Byman served on the 9/11 Commission staff and is author of A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism.

A version of this article originally appeared in the New York Times.
View more about this book on the

E. B. White was correct when he wrote more than sixty years ago that New York is a city of neighborhoods, and he was even more correct that every neighborhood has its own “little main street.”   “No matter where you live,” he says, “you will find within a block or two a grocery store, a barbershop, a newsstand and shoeshine shack, an ice-coal-and-wood cellar.., a dry cleaner, a laundry, a delicatessen” and on to the “hardware store, a liquor store, a shoe-repair shop.”  Except for the coal merchant, a little main street like that has been the mainstay of my neighborhood in Greenwich Village and the existential linchpin of my life.

But when I recently returned from a six-month sojourn in Amsterdam, I was shocked by the changes.  Though the storefronts look pretty much the same as before I left, many shops I knew have vanished.  They weren’t just victims of the owner’s retirement or economic recession.

The branch of a local supermarket chain, “family owned since 1932,” had lost so many customers to a nearby Whole Foods Market that it closed.   The longtime photo shop, which had clung to life for the past few years by taking passport pictures and digital images for eBay sellers, is now a Middle Eastern humus restaurant.  While I was away a corner diner morphed into an “artisanal gelato” shop selling small five-dollar cones.  The futon store turned into an informal but upscale “pasta pizza bar.”


• Pasta Pizza Bar

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Pasta-Pizza-Bar.jpg

• Univ Pl Pop Burger

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Univ-Pl-Pop-Burger.jpg

• Univ Pl Rugby

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Univ-Pl-Rugby-1.jpg

• D'Agostino's closed

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/DAgostinos-closed.jpg

• Gelato Artigianale

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Gelato-Artigianale.jpg

• Grey Dog cafe

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Grey-Dog-cafe.jpg

You should understand that University Place is a short and fairly placid shopping street.  Though Greenwich Village has been reputed to be the capital of hip culture since before the first hipster was born, you might find a local shopping street like this in Boston, Philadelphia or Dallas.  When I moved there in the 1970s I found the usual bread-and-butter stores that White describes.  I could buy a loaf of rye bread, shop for fresh fish for dinner, and have my prescriptions filled and my pants dry cleaned.  I could buy flowers for my husband’s birthday, browse a well-stocked bookshop or hardware store and tell the butcher which cut of beef I wanted.  I could get a burger at any of three diners or eat Italian or Japanese.

This wasn’t Nobu territory.  None of the stores boasted gourmet quality products.  But in those days there was no Yelp to rate the local bagel store and in most of the small shops you could talk with the owner.  This made the street feel like home, as Jane Jacobs famously pointed out for the street where she lived on the other side of the Village.

For a long time University Place shared the area’s rakish reputation as a breeding ground for artists, writers and political radicals.  The Hotel Albert, built in the 1880s, had hosted Mark Twain, Walt Whitman and Hart Crane.  In the 1950s the owner commissioned Salvador Dali to design an open-air bus called a Loconik, named for both the railroads’ means of transportation and the Village’s denizens, beatniks, to give free tours of the neighborhood.  Also in the postwar years the Abstract Expressionist artists and their literary friends drank and argued through the night at the Cedar Tavern, two blocks away.

By the end of the sixties, though, the street’s reputation for louche rebellion had run aground.  Some of the Albert’s last celebrated guests, rock bands, fell apart because of drink and drugs, and the hotel declined into seedy disrepair.  Like a dowager forced to pawn her last string of pearls, the Albert was sold and transformed into condos.

At the same time the blocks around University Place were also being transformed.  The brownstone houses were still as grand as they had been in Henry James’s lifetime, but the loft buildings where small factories, artisans’ workshops and artists’ studios had coexisted peaceably for years began to be converted to living lofts and offices for psychotherapists, architects, and small film companies.

While the creative class was setting up shop, the two nearby private universities, New York University and The New School, began to expand.  There were financial problems and hasty acquisitions but overall their student bodies and tuition revenues grew, which gave them motivation and capital to expand even more.

As a result, “studentification” is reshaping University Place in the universities’ image.  Though this has been a neighborhood where white-haired residents are not afraid to pick their way with their caretakers or walkers, the crowd of pedestrians grows younger and faster every year.  A good portion of the young women are so tall and skinny they look like fashion models.

I don’t mind the mix of ages and body types but the stores are changing to meet a young, affluent and mobile market.  My “little main street” is losing the local character praised by E. B. White and mimicking the food court in an upscale mall.

This is happening not only on my shopping street, but in neighborhoods throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn.  The stock market, recession and U.S. debt limit crisis haven’t stopped the upward trend of real estate prices here.  Young white families with children are still moving in, balancing the demographic trend toward lower-income nonwhites and single member households that began in the 1950s and 1960s.  Young families and older folks are the ballooning extremes of Manhattan’s demographic dumbbell.

Yet both groups face a crunch of public services, starting with overcrowded classrooms in public schools and the fiercest ever competition for private school enrollments, and a shutdown of senior citizen centers. Meanwhile the city and state governments have joined the nationwide uprising by public officials to curb the costs of the public labor force by all possible means.  Though it isn’t easy to fire teachers and other employees who are still protected by labor union contracts with local authorities, the retrenchment of the public sector makes life in the city harder.

During this torrid summer I am painfully aware of the city’s always needy infrastructure: the uneven surfaces, not to mention potholes of midtown streets, the hot and airless subway platforms, the aged water and sewage pipes that need to be replaced.  Money, as always, is tight.

I know that Amsterdam, like all European cities, faces similar problems.  Cutbacks to public services and their continued privatization provoked brief labor strikes and a lot of grumbling during my stay there.  Individual homeowners and the city government as well face the high costs of replacing old building and bridge foundations, for the beautiful 17th century canal houses of Amsterdam’s UNESCO World Heritage Site were built in the water.

Despite the unrelenting homogenization of city life though I have found one thing in New York unchanged.  New Yorkers still love this city because it is gritty and lively, and probably the most sensually diverse city in the world.  But their sense of feeling at home in their neighborhood depends on keeping their little main street truly local.

Sharon Zukin is Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Loft Living, Landscapes of Power (winner of the C. Wright Mills Award), The Cultures of Cities, Point of Purchase, and most recently Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. You can read her previous posts here.

View more about this book on the

By Purdy, Director of Publicity, OUP USA

As a proud potato-eater of Irish descent, I was often told by my grandmother Rafferty, “Eat all your potatoes if you want to grow tall and strong.”  It seems my grandmother was on to something. Between 1000 and 1900, world population grew from under 300 million to 1.6 billion, and the share of population living in urban areas more than quadrupled, increasing from two to over nine percent. The increase in population accelerated dramatically over time and occurred almost entirely towards the end of the period.  Many demographers, historians, and economists alike have speculated as to the reasons for such growth on a global scale.  The authors of an article published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian, argue that perhaps the potato holds the answer.

“Potatoes provide more calories, vitamins and nutrients per area of land sown than other staple crops.  Potatoes dramatically improved agricultural productivity, and provided more calories and nutrients relative to pre-existing Old World staples,” notes Nathan Nunn, Assistant Professor of Economics at Harvard University. “Old World regions that were suitable for potato cultivation experienced larger increases in population and urbanization after the introduction of potatoes.”

The estimates are robust to a number of sensitivity checks, which include controlling for a large number of alternative determinants of population and economic growth. These include legal origin, identity of the colonizer, the prevalence of disease (measured as distance from the equator and potential prevalence of malaria), distance from the coast, a history of Roman rule, the prevalence of Protestantism, being an Atlantic trader, and the historic volume of the slave exports.

“Baseline estimates suggest that the potato accounts for approximately 25-26% of the increase in total population and 27-34% of the increase in urbanization in the period studied,” said Nancy Qian, Assistant Professor of Economics at Yale University.  “Estimates suggest that for villages that were fully suitable for potato cultivation, the introduction of the potato increased average adult heights by approximately one-half inch.”

According to the article, findings contribute to the historical debate about the importance of nutritional improvements in explaining part of the rapid population increase over the past three centuries. Furthermore, since urbanization rates and adult heights provide reasonable proxies for economic development and overall standards of living, the results suggest that the availability of potatoes also played an important role in spurring economic growth in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The statistics and figures above have been provided courtesy of The Quarterly Journal of Economics. To read the full article for free online, click here.

By Michelle Rafferty

When my friend sent me a link with the subject line: Carmel in WSJ! I clicked with trepidation. The last time my hometown made national news it involved a sodomy hazing incident and the high school basketball team. Phew. This time, it was only about a local dispute over an expensive new piece of suburban architecture:

Photo by Melissa Rafferty

This is the Palladium, a $126 million concert hall, whose controversial price tag is heating up this spring’s mayoral election. My first thought was: why, when Indianapolis theater and concert venues reside a mere 20 minutes south, did Carmel do this?* I asked our resident city expert Sharon Zukin for her opinion on the matter and she wrote:

…so Carmel, Indiana, has entered the global sweepstakes of destination culture!…every city copies every bigger, more famous, more glamorous city to build cultural attractions in the hope of attracting tourists and (hope against hope) They hire starchitects (usually Frank Gehry but in this case…the long-dead Andrea Palladio!) to design flagship buildings that will get media attention (the Guggenheim Bilbao effect). They sign up for the Cow Parade (see the website) if they have a low budget and for “The Gates” (Christo in Central Park, 2008) if they have a big budget and for the Olympics if they have a huge budget. All of which puts them on a treadmill of cultural competition.

And the ironic thing  is that the more cities compete, trying to differentiate themselves with “cultural attractions,” the more alike they become. As Zukin also told me:

…so many cities do the same thing that they ALL wind up building the same kind of attraction, so the uniqueness of any of these attractions is submerged in the wave of same-old same-old spectacles; the resulting standardization is called, thanks to the geographer Donald McNeil, McGuggenization.

Think of the Guggenheims, Times Squares, MOMA’s, and MOCA’s across the world. That’s McGuggenization. And your city could be next!

*In the Palladium’s defense, I spoke with my mom and she happened to like the center (they offered a free concert for the grand opening).  And she didn’t have much sympathy for the outcry about a potential raise in taxes due to Palladium expenses. Turns out Carmel has one of the cheapest tax brackets in the area, meaning the residents have gotten a lot of bang for their buck over their years. Like a brand new Arts & Design District. Safer roads. And Waterslides.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve written a Linked Up, but with releasing a new episode of The Oxford Comment, working “frak” into my daily vocabulary, and trying to keep up on developments in Egypt, I’ve not found the time! Hopefully, today’s will make up for it. Have a wonderful weekend everyone!

P.S. I promised our Twitter followers that if they came up with at least 5 good questions about insects I would have an entomologist answer them, so send in yours!

Apparently Kobe Bryant told Pau Gasol he needed to be more “black swan” on the court. [NYMag]

I was shocked by this: “Vodafone Forced to Send Pro-Government Text Messages in Egypt” [RWW]

There is a wonderful new Paula-Deen-as-hipster meme [Clabwag]

I have a lot of colleagues in the UK, so this “everything you ever wanted to know about the UK/GB/England in five minutes” was very helpful. My favorite (favourite?) part: “BFFs 4EVA USA?” [CGPGrey]

And since we’re on the topic of geography, I might as well present this from XKDC:

Yes, it’s been around for a while, but I think it’s important to remind everyone that you can talk like a pirate on Facebook. [NextWeb]

You got a few minutes to make some fleeting art? Then try this.

If you didn’t see the update to our article “Why the Trenta?” I’m sure you’ll be delighted to learn that Starbucks’ newest size can hold an entire bottle of wine. [Cockeyed]

Oh Apple, you’re so sneaky. [Atlantic]

Protesters are awesome: Egyptian volunteers clean the streets [Good]

And now,  an enormous infographic:

By Michelle Rafferty

The Oxford Comment guest star Jon (featured on Episodes 1 and 4.5) recently wrote in with this shocking, yet true story:

I was on the UWS on Saturday and noticed this bright orange/green/blue bird standing on the sidewalk chirping. It looked pretty out of place. I went to say hi to him and he flew up and landed on the shoulder of one of the people I was with (see photo). We figured he must have escaped from an apartment window or something. Poor guy was not equipped to handle the freezing cold, so I held onto him and ventured into Columbia’s campus for help. Everyone was very concerned. Then a student told us he was familiar with a good vet in town and offered to bring him in. He was a handsome little fella (the bird).*

Here’s hoping this little bird found his owners! And if you are looking for a quick ornithological fix, I recommend A Field Guide to the Birds of Brazil by Ber van Perlo.

*Upon closer inspection of said photo, Jon surmised the species of the little birdy to be Green-rumped Parrotlet. If you have better guesses, please let us know.

As the year draws to a close, we’ve been reflecting on all the wonderful books published in 2010, and in doing so, we’ve also realized there are some classics worth revisiting. The authors and friends of Oxford University Press are proud to present this series of essays, which will appear regularly until the New Year, drawing our attention to books both new and old. Below, Sharon Zukin (author of Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places) discusses the powerful last essays of Tony Judt, as collected in The Memory Chalet.

I have yet to hold the full collection in my hands, but like many North Americans I have read with fear and delight the essays from Tony Judt’s Memory Chalet, published in the New York Review of Books and the New York Times over the past two years. These are the most significant pieces of writing I read in 2010 and perhaps the most significant writing I am likely to read for the rest of my life.

Memory Chalet is Judt’s memoir, composed, dictated and published between his diagnosis with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 2010, and his death soon after in 2010.  It seems he did not write these essays for publication, but they speak to so many lives and concerns that this may be his most universal, most meaningful book.  Certainly the essays are a memory chest for Judt’s children, but they are also a reckoning with his complicated heritage: privileged by intellect, promoted by meritocracy, punished by an outsider’s clear vision of hypocrisy and dictatorship of every form.  Memory Chalet is Judt’s personal version of his masterwork Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005), a narrative of the past half-century in the West, when utopian plans flourished, grew stale and died of a thousand pinpricks from within the liberal capitalist dream.

The book bears witness to post-World War II economic growth and the rise to global dominance of Western industrial economies and the way of life – the consumer lifestyle – they built.  Judt himself experienced the higher standard of living, upward social mobility and “glittering prizes” made possible by a few Cold War decades.  But he also shows how it was possible then and is necessary now to forge a union between liberal democracy and socialist equality.

My favorite essays speak to me, and I guess they were published because they speak to so many other readers of left-wing intellectual media.  I love “Food,” in which Judt recalls his mother’s cooking and viscerally evokes memories of home, family and a secular Jewish identity that is consolidated by memories of relatives who were killed during the Nazi regime on the other side of Europe.   I also like “Meritocrats,” Judt’s account of his student years in the elite precincts of King’s College at Cambridge University, from his initial social trepidation as a scholarship student from a state school to his growing appreciation of politically conservative but tolerant intellectual mentors who showed unexpected patience and tact with a youthful, critical scholar. I find “Austerity” both strange and familiar.  For a Londoner like Judt, the austerity era recalls the World War II privations his parents endured just before he was born; for a Baby Boom American like me, it summons up the Great Depression underlying my parents’ thrift and care.  Other, much-commented on essays pose harsh questions about Israel and the romance of the collective life of the kibbutzim, the closest many Jews came to socialism before disillusionment with the state of Israel, and the role of their own governments in depriving Palestinians of nationhood.

I find Judt’s observations of New York City less original because so many urban writers have said the same things about the same cosmopolitan mix.  But Judt finds the critical edge by observing that he came to live in the world’s most famous cities – London, Paris, New York – at the very moments of their twilights, when their best years have passed and their current growth spurts look like weak efforts of revival.  Paris was the capital of the 19^th century, New York the capital of the 20^th, and their glittering lights – like the glittering prizes of postwar elite society – turn out to be Aladdin’s lamps in a dimly receding utopian cave.

Sharon Zukin is Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Loft Living, Landscapes of Power (winner of the C. Wright Mills Award), The Cultures of Cities, Point of Purchase, and most recently Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. Read her column here.

By Arnold H. Taylor

At the time of writing, the British Isles and much of Europe are experiencing their second cold winter with record low temperatures. Roads are blocked by snow, trains are disrupted and airports closed. Meanwhile, conditions over the other side of the Atlantic Ocean are unusually mild. The reason for this is that the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), a great swaying of the weather patterns over the region, is currently in a weak phase.

This climatic swaying is one of the long, slow dances into which the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are locked, and which catch up living populations in their wake. The largest of these, the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), distorts weather patterns all around the equatorial regions of the planet. In each case, atmospheric pressure rises (or falls) in one area at the same time as it falls (or rises) in distant region. The atmospheric seesaw is east-west between Australia and Tahiti in the ENSO phenomenon but north-south between Iceland and the Azores in the NAO.

Another important difference between the two is that the NAO is basically a winter phenomenon rather than occurring throughout the seasons. Strong values of the NAO correspond to intense westerly winds with mild winters over Europe but cold winters in eastern Canada and the USA. With weak NAO’s there are less pronounced westerlies and the temperatures are reversed.

But the ENSO and the NAO also have something in common: at the root of each is a melodic ballet of ocean and atmosphere. For the NAO this has been demonstrated by Mark Rodwell, Dan Rowell and Chris Folland at the UK meteorological Office who showed that the variations in the NAO over the last 50 years could be reproduced by a model of the atmospheric circulation, provided that the observed temperatures of the world’s oceans were included. They went on to infer that heat exchanges in and out of the North Atlantic Ocean were a critical process for this. However, when Martin Hoerling, Talyi Xuby and Jim Hurrell in Boulder, Colorado used another model to see which aspects of the oceans’ temperatures were most vital for reproducing the NAO changes, they found it was the progressive warming of the tropical regions.

Can these two alternative causes of the NAO, heat exchanges in the North Atlantic and tropical warming, be reconciled? One possible scenario is a resonator in the ocean and atmosphere of the North Atlantic that is driven by remote events in the tropics. A resonator is any object or system having a natural frequency. Perhaps the most familiar example is a playground swing. Pushing a child in time with its period will make the swing go higher and higher, but attempts to push it at a faster or slower tempo result in smaller movements. In the resonator model, the variations in the tropics constitute the external forcing and the conditions in the Atlantic the state of the resonator.

In 2005, I published a simple model of this kind in Geophysical Research Letters. This model used observations of global temperatures and of the ENSO cycle to make its predictions (see figure above). The paper included a forecast of the trend in the NAO up to 2025, a forecast that predicted the likelihood of weak NAOs around the present time. Last winter and the current one seem to be bearing out the forecast. Therefore, if the simple model is correct, the cold winters we in Europe are experiencing at the moment are a consequence of global warming.

Looking further ahead, the weak NAO phase is forecast to be increasingly replaced by a strong phase which would imply mild winters. These will continue well beyond 2025. If so, this current sequence of severe winters could be the last I shall live to see.

Arnold H. Taylor is Visiting Professor in Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Plymouth, and Fellow of the Plymouth Marine Laboratory. His book, The Dance of Air and Sea: How oceans, weather, and life link together will publish in the UK in February 2011. In it he explains how living populations across the globe are connected by great swayings of the world’s atmosphere and oceans, and how understanding and predicting these global interconnections is one of the great quests of climate change science.

By Alex McGinn, Publicity Intern

It’s no secret that East Coasters are skeptical of the West Coast. Southern California seems particularly peculiar to most inhabitants of the northeastern seaboard; perhaps its picturesque landscape, balmy weather, and laid back lifestyle seem out of touch with the realities of fast-paced East Coast cities. But what some of these West Coast cynics may not know is that SoCal’s most influential “boosters” were refugees of the northeast.

Thinking about this, I turned to The Frontier of Leisure: Southern California and the Shaping of Modern America by Lawrence Culver. Here are a few important Yankees who escaped their overworked and seemingly miserable East Coast fates to become the earliest developers of some of Southern California’s most iconic getaways.

Charles Lummis known as a booster of Los Angeles and Palm Springs was born in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1859. The son of a Methodist minister, Lummis attended Harvard, but devoted less time to his studies than to romantic pursuits. He enjoyed his summers hiking, mountain climbing, and writing poetry while employed at a relative’s resort hotel in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. After failing out of school, Lummis married Dorothea Rhodes, a medical student he had met while at Harvard. After fleeing New England for Ohio, the two’s marriage faltered as did Lummis’s career as a newspaper editor. To make matters worse, Lummis had contracted malaria. He decided that he needed a fresh start and found it in Los Angeles. Chronic overwork, too little sleep, too much alcohol, and continuing marital problems resulted in a stroke that paralyzed his left side at the age of 29. After his recovery in Iseleta Pueblo, New Mexico, Lummis published several books that glorified the Southwest. This glorification tremendously aided the city of Los Angeles and granted it its allure.

Charles Frederick Holder known as a founding booster of Catalina Island began his career as a scientist and author. Interestingly enough, Holder was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, the same birthplace of Charles Lummis, in 1851. He attended the prestigious United States Naval Academy, but left before graduating. He served for several years as the assistant curator of zoology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and authored a number of books. He came to Southern California to recuperate from a lung infection aggravated by overwork. Like Lummis, Holder published several books about Southern California focusing on Catalina Island, which he believed encapsulated the region’s healthfulness and distinctive flora and fauna. Holder’s accounts of swimming, hunting and other recreational activities attracted tourists to the Southern Californian getaway.

John C. Van Dyke known as the first booster of Coachella Valley was the art critic for Century Magazine and one of the best-known and widely read public intellectuals in the nation. While he frequented Charles Lummis’s salon at El Alisal, he remained firmly entrenched on the East Coast, where he was librarian at New Brunswick Theological Seminary and the first professor of art history at Rutgers University. However, the deserts of California, to his eyes, contained the most delicate palette of colors imaginable. Van Dyke narrated his book The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances (1901) as a solitary traveler, walking and riding through an uninhabited landscape. His refined aesthetic contemplation of the desert was presented as a rebuke to the excesses of urbanism, industry and capitalism of modern America. Ironically, Van Dyke’s book bore a dedication to “A.M.C.” who most readers didn’t realize was Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron who had done as much as anyone to ensure industry and urbanism. Regardless, The Desert was hailed by preservationists and literary critics for its environmental sensitivity. Charles Lummis raved about it in his magazine, calling it a ‘poem and prophecy all in one’ and bringing notoriety to the otherwise unknown Coachella Valley.

By Sharon Zukin

Taking a position on Las Vegas is like taking an option on a company’s stock: if you like the place, you’re betting that free markets, human power over nature and boundless shopping opportunities will continue to rule the world.  If you don’t like it, you’re a killjoy…or a sociologist.

I made my first trip to Las Vegas in early November when the mood in America was sour.  Political candidates’ billboards shouted “Not the Incumbent!” and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was locked in a nasty battle for re-election against a Tea Party candidate, Sharron Angle.  I was prepared to show East Coast tolerance toward libertarians and to be agnostic about the casinos’ glitz and raunch, but I wasn’t prepared for the gigantic scale of the hotels, the almost total absence of a place to stroll along the Strip and the sense that there was no city—no urban “there”–there.

I had expected to find dark romance.  What I found was mega-hotels with 3,000 to 4,000 rooms dominating the skyline, multi-story parking garages for hotel guests and staff taking up a large portion of the “backstage” land and a growing reliance on shopping and dining to compensate for declining gaming revenues.

It was all tawdrier than I had imagined.  I came looking for James Bond but found suburbia.

Locals told me that when the Forum Shops at the Caesars Palace Hotel and Casino opened in 1992, it was the first high-end shopping center on the Strip and attracted residents as well as tourists.  It offers the same luxury brands as any upscale shopping mall, from Gucci and Tumi to 7 for All Mankind and my own New York favorite Scoop (eek!).  Until now it hasn’t had much competition, but since the opening of City Center down the Strip in 2009 the Forum looks even less exclusive.

In contrast to the weird appropriations from imagined landscapes that other newish hotels feature—the imagined Venice of the Bellagio, underscaled Eiffel Tower of the Paris Las Vegas and cockeyed iconic structures of New York New York—City Center offers cutting-edge design by some of the best contemporary architects, from Daniel Libeskind and Rafael Viῆoly to Kohn Pedersen Fox.  Libeskind’s jagged edges are the “point man” for the project as a whole, fronting the Strip and startling anyone who approaches City Center from the kitsch on either side.

More than a work of public art, though, City Center is a private-sector New Deal for Nevadans.  Promoted as a “center of gravity” for a city that has none, this giant construction project contains two luxury hotels (one without a casino, how exclusive is that?), office towers and shopping mall; it cost about $12 billion to build.  When it ran over budget and risked being shut down, Senator Reid stepped in to defend it, saving, it is said, 22,000 jobs.  Typical for all such projects, City Center benefits from large tax abatements from the state.

Though the critic Paul Goldberger has praised the quality of most of City Center’s buildings and its grand interior spaces, domesticating Libeskind’s wild imagination in a shopping center emphasizes how Las Vegas tends to make everything into an accessory of capital accumulation.  More than New York or London or Paris, Vegas is a city shaped by and for economic speculation.  Gambling is its way of life: the joints along the Strip make up 70 per cent of southern Nevada’s economy, a state official told me.  Even if gambling and tourism count for less, the place depends heavily on transients spending money.

No wonder, then, that the unemployment and foreclosure capital of America is peering into the crystal ball to see how it might market itself in the present recession.  Luxury is out of style in Middle America and California—which sends the largest weekend crowd to the casinos—is hurting.

Dream worlds are a threatened species.  Before I visited Las Vegas, MGM Resorts (formerly known as MGM Mirage), the Strip’s biggest casino operator and the owner of City Center, was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.  After I returned home, the other MGM, the movie studio, which was connected with the casino when both were owned by the investor Kirk Kerkorian, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Though the hotel and gambling corporation has no relation with the movie studio, it’s hard not to draw a lesson.  Casino capitalism no longer offers an escape from making things and making jobs.

Sharon Zukin is Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Loft Living, Landscapes of Power (winner of the C. Wright Mills Award), The Cultures of Cities, Point of Purchase, and most recently Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places.

By Benjamin Ross

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill has been plugged, but the fire on another oil platform recently is a disturbing reminder of the unfinished business that it leaves behind. The root cause of the disaster – an absence of outside supervision that allows profit-driven managers to set their own priorities – has yet to be remedied. As long as the oil companies are left free to pursue short-term cost savings at the expense of safety, new catastrophes are all but inevitable.

The vast scale of this summer’s spill offers no guarantee that there will be real change. Its oil slicks are far from being the first to afflict our coasts – floating oil first became a national scandal nearly a century ago. The issue has been a political football ever since, with the oil industry exercising its political muscle again and again to fend off outside oversight.

Remarkably, it’s not just environmentalist outsiders who have criticized the petroleum producers’ resistance to regulation. Since oil spills first became an issue, the industry’s own experts have told their employers that to prevent spills, the discretion of company management must be limited.  Controls work only when they are imposed from the outside.

The controversy first arose in the years after World War I, when floating oil became a national scandal. Fouled beaches and dead birds shut down ocean resorts, whose owners organized to seek relief. They were joined – so severe was the problem – by fire insurance companies, burdened by claims for burning docks.

As in the Gulf this summer, the search for causes brought finger-pointing. Oil companies blamed steamships and their practice of filling drained fuel tanks with seawater. The unfiltered ballast was dumped into harbors when it was time to reload. Shipowners pointed back at wastes from refineries.

After a fierce lobbying battle, the Oil Pollution Act of 1924 exempted the refineries. But as the price of this victory, the newly formed American Petroleum Institute promised that the industry would police itself.  An API technical committee quickly came up with a program to control the oil discharges. It designed devices to separate oil from ballast water and wrote a long manual on refinery waste. The committee recommended that the trade association send out inspectors with the power to compel compliance with these practices. But this idea was shot down by objections from member companies, and self-regulation became purely voluntary.

The New Deal put water pollution control back on the national agenda. The oil industry, advised by the API to “play poker rather than throwing down its cards in advance,” adopted a strategy of undeviating opposition to federal oversight. This effort was crowned with success in 1940 when a bill to regulate new sources of pollution, passed by the House, died in conference committee.

Peacetime concerns, the environment among them, returned with the end of World War II, and oil companies received another expert warning. The chair of the API’s committee on refinery wastes admonished the readers of National Petroleum News in 1946 against “the futility of adhering further to the policy of objection and obstruction.”

This message too went unheard. The industry continued to resist outside control, and a Republican congress gave them a sympathetic ear. The toothless Water Pollution Control Act of 1948 limited the federal role to research, training, and grants to local governments.

Laws were at last passed to put polluters under federal supervision in the 1970s, following a well blowout off Santa Barbara and other well-publicized ecological disasters. Statutes governing oil spills were further tightened after the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989.

But laws by themselves provide no guarantee of effective supervision.  The people who write and enforce the rules must have the knowledge, the will, and the strength to make them work. Too often, government officials have surrendered to the political clout of big business. At worst – and worst is what we got from the Mineral Management Service – regulators simply rubber-stamp decisions made by officials of the corporations they are supposed to oversee.

Effective pollution control comes only when good laws are complemented with strong and consistent enforcement.  The managers who make decisions day-to-day must be made to face real consequences when they take undue risks.  The oil that poured into the Gulf this summer was only the latest proof of the limits of self-regulation, and of government’s essential role in protecting our endangered environment.

Benjamin Ross is President of the Washington consulting firm, Disposal Safety, Inc. He is both environmental scientist and commentator on current affairs, and has served on committees of the National Academy of Sciences and the USEPA Science Advisory Board. Ross is author with Steven Amter of of The Polluters: The Making of Our Chemically Altered Environment.

By Jan Zalasiewicz

Volcanoes can take one by surprise. That was the case with Mount St. Helens, that famously erupted sideways rather than upwards, and it was certainly so, two millennia back, when sleeping Vesuvius awoke to bury Pompeii and many of its citizens. Eyjafjallajokull may not have been quite so dramatic, but its effects, in tearing a large hole in our complex and delicate network of global airline communication, certainly rippled around the world.

To a geologist, the presence of a volcano on Iceland isn’t at all surprising. After all, Iceland is literally, and continuously, splitting apart, as this island sits exactly on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. That mighty planet-sized fracture is continuously oozing magma, as the Americas pull ever farther apart – by a couple of centimeters a year, maintained for over a hundred million years – from Africa and Europe.

What raised a few eyebrows, though (mine, for sure) was the sheer filthiness of the eruption, and the amount of ash that it hurled high into the atmosphere, to the alarm of airline companies just about everywhere. For volcanoes that sit astride mid-ocean ridges are by nature generally placid by nature. For sure, they produce what seem like spectacular firework displays for the TV cameras, and flowing lava can, here and there, play merry hell with real estate values.

This is nothing, though, compared to the paroxysmal eruptions – Krakatoa, Pinatubo and the like – that occur in those parts of the world where tectonic plates are colliding. The violence of such cataclysms can destroy a whole country (and even Krakatoa was small compared to the great eruptions of the deep geological past). So why was Eyjafjallajokull trying to behave like one of the bad boys?

One answer is ice. Lying far north, Iceland is a land not just of volcanoes but of glaciers too – one of which lies on top of Eyjafjallajokull. As the uprushing magma came into contact with this, the ice flashed into steam, the expansion of which added quite a bit of oomph to the eruption. The lava, in turn, rapidly chilled by the ice, solidified quickly as it emerged, the thermal stresses shattering it into countless tiny fragments. This produced lots of ash, to be carried high into the atmosphere in the steam-driven (turbo-charged, if you like) eruption plume. It’s a bit (only a bit, mind) like putting a lot of wet wood and leaves on to a bonfire. This was one smoky volcano, and it seriously annoyed the neighbours.

Volcanic ash, of course, is feared by airline pilots, and justifiably so. One of the scariest experiences in all of flight history took place in 1982 when a British Airways Boeing 747, carrying 263 people, flew into an ash cloud from an erupting Indonesian volcano, Mount Galunggung. Ash particles entered the jet engines, melted against the hot metal, and, in effect, clogged them with reconstituted magma. All four engines failed, and the airplane, now completely without power, began to plunge towards the Indian Ocean.

The pilots kept their nerve, and prepared to ditch into the sea, while at the same time trying to restart the engines. The attempts failed until, when just a few thousand meters above the sea, the engines – amazingly – coughed back into life. They were able to fly to Jakarta, and landed safely (though not without difficulty, as the windscreen was almost opaque through being sandblasted by the sharp ash particles).

They had been saved by the same phenomenon that made Eyjafjallajokull such a disruptive volcano: thermal shock. As the stricken airplane descended, the cold air rushing through the lifeless engines chilled the molten ash, freezing it into solid volcanic glass. The chilling was fast enough for thermal stresses to shatter this glass, causing enough of it to break off to allow the engines to re-start. It was a lucky squeak.

That was learning through experience, and it is not the kind of experience that anyone would like to repeat. Hence the caution over Eyjafjallajokull, and the determination to learn from the less dangerous form of experience that can be achieved by good, thoughtful science. Thus, can one specify just what levels of ash in the sky are dangerous? For that, of course, one needs to know as much as possible about the complex paths the ash particles take through the atmosphere, and how they are affected by the forces – turbulence, gravity, electrostatic effects – that act upon them.

One needs to understand the volcanoes better, too. Sitting next to Eyjafjallajokull is Katla. This is a bigger and potentially more threatening volcano that has, in the past, tended to erupt not long after its small and unpronounceable cousin. Will it do so again?

It’s a never-ending story, trying to understand this Earth of ours better, so that we can live more securely and happily upon it. What is certain, though, is that the surprises won’t stop. We’d better get used to that.

Jan Zalasiewicz is a Lecturer in Geology at the University of Leicester, having formerly been at the British Geological Survey. He is the author of The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks? and most recently, The Planet in a Pebble: A Journey into Earth’s Deep History.

Yemen is Oxford’s 2010 Place of the Year. As we’re sure you very well know, Yemen is on the front page of many newspapers now because of the increased influence of Al Qaeda and the recent bombing attempts that emerged from the small middle eastern country. However, the decision to choose Yemen as the POTY was made long before any of these developments reached our ears. Below, geographer Harm de Blij explains just why we found this country to be of particular interest not just in the year past, but as we look ahead. You can follow Yemen in the news here.

By Harm de Blij

International tensions have a way of thrusting small, faltering states into the global spotlight. When suicide bombers attacked, and very nearly sank, the American warship U.S.S. Cole in 2000 in Yemen’s south-coast port of Adan (Aden), this remote country on the southwest corner of the Arabian Peninsula drew the world’s attention for the least desirable of reasons. Once seen as a promising if fragile experiment in Muslim-Arab democracy and as a destination for adventure tourism, Yemen suddenly found itself at the center of concern about the threat of Islamic militancy and terrorism.

Yemen occupies a small, peripheral sector of the Arabian Peninsula, but its population very nearly matches (and by some estimates exceeds) that of its vast neighbor, Saudi Arabia. The country as it is seen on the map today, its boundaries with Saudi Arabia still contentious, is the product of a 1989 merger between two neighbors, the populous, tribal Yemen Arab Republic (North Yemen) in the northwest, bordering the Red Sea, and the communist-inspired People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (South Yemen), facing the Gulf of Adan, in the south and east. This agreement, which took effect in 1990 to create the Republic of Yemen with its capital at Sana’a in the northern interior, soon collapsed in a political crisis that precipitated a civil war in 1994. South Yemen announced its secession, North Yemen’s forces advanced into the South and captured Adan, culpable politicians were killed or exiled, and the state was restored.

The physical geography of Yemen displays rugged, deeply incised mountains in the North, where ephemeral streams flow westward to the Red Sea coast and disappear eastward into interior deserts, and lower relief in the South, where coastal topography is also rugged but interior desert plains are more extensive. Much of the craggy, arid countryside lies remote from Yemen’s meager road system and effectively beyond the reach of its government, creating refuges for rebels and bandits who ambush officials, kidnap tourists for ransom, and, more recently, set up terrorist bases. As in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, relief, remoteness, and cultural traditions combine to protect jihadists.

Yemen’s relative location creates additional challenges. Its territory (about the size of France) includes the sizable island of Socotra in the Gulf of Adan and more than 100 islands in the Red Sea, some of which have also been claimed by Eritrea, resulting in armed clashes. Only the Bab-al-Mandeb (Gate of Grief), one of the world’s narrowest maritime choke points, separates the southern tip of Yemen from the landmass of Africa. And across this hourglass-shaped waterway lie the malfunctioning state of Eritrea, the impoverished ministate of Djibouti, and the failed state of Somalia. In the seas that, by virtue of UNCLOS maritime boundary rules, consist largely of Yemeni territorial and Exclusive Economic Zone waters, piracy has become a way of life for thousands of African buccaneers. Few of the world’s neighborhoods present more daunting challenges.

In the more than two decades since its enforced restitution, Yemen has been torn by centrifugal forces powerful enough to marginalize the modern legal and political system that outsiders sought to sustain and locals tend to dismiss as impractical and irrelevant. The country has taken on, in Western perspective, the features of a failed state. In the south, a renewed independence movement is reviving notions of a new South Yemen with the currently moribund port of Adan as its capital. Although the South contains only about one-fifth of the country’s population of 25 million, it also has the bulk of what remains of Yemen’s oil reserves. Southerners complain that the North has effectively colonized their domain, installing its friends in powerful places, sidelining locals, and stifling initiatives of all kinds. And in the bulge that marks northwest Yemen’s border with Saudi Arabia, the Houthi clan has been waging its own war against the Sana’a government. The Houthis, Shia Muslims in a country that is nearly 60 percent Sunni, have received support (including smuggled weapons) from Iran; Yemen’s government alleges that Houthi rebels were trained in Eritrea by Lebanese members of Iran-supported Hizbullah. The Houthi, in turn, claim that Saudi Arabia has helped the Sana’a regime by allowing Yemen’s forces to cross the border and attack them from the north. Once again, as so often in Yemen’s history, outsiders are fueling local conflict. As a result of this latest war, more than 250,000 people, most of them Houthis, were internal refugees in mid-2010, and the North was a hotbed of anti-Sana’a sentiment.

But the key issue in the far North appears to have strong economic as well as religious and political dimensions. The Houthi domain is economically depressed even by this country’s standards, and the locals demand a better share of government assistance in the form of roads, wells, schools, and utilities. Whatever stokes the Houthi rebellion, it contributes to the further destabilization of an already weak state. The poorest country in the Arab world, Yemen is running out of its leading export commodity, oil; it is facing a crisis of water supply, suffers from severe electricity shortages, has a badly damaged infrastructure, and is buffeted by high unemployment and endemic corruption. Regional frictions and strong local loyalties, coupled with external pressures and involvements, erode the authority of the Yemeni government. In the modern world of terrorist cells and jihadist movements, Yemen’s weakness spells opportunity. As terrorists and their religious and logistical supporters become established and international concern rises over their presence in Yemen, Western efforts to shore up the country’s army and police carry growing risk. The new-found power of the government to intervene, through raids on terrorist bases and arrests of militants, is perceived by many citizens as proof of foreign interference and carries a cost in terms of loyalty and allegiance. Al Qaeda, already well-established in Yemen, is the beneficiary of such perceptions. An American-born Yemeni Muslim preacher, Anwar al-Awlaki, has become a prominent figure in Yemen’s militant circles. Awlaki has been accused of training jihadists in the arts of terrorism, including the attempt by a Nigerian passenger to blow up a civilian airliner approaching Detroit in December 2009. When the United States authorized his elimination, Awlaki’s stature soared even as his protection tightened.

Obscured by all the attention this country’s political geography now attracts, is a Yemen that might have been, given its illustrious past, a prosperous kingdom more than two thousand years ago, whose economy was based on irrigated frankincense and spices. Yemen experienced a golden age during the fourteenth-century Rasulid rule, when architecture, science, literature and agriculture flourished. Just 17 years ago it held the first free, multiparty election ever conducted on the Arabian Peninsula – also the first in which women participated and the first to result in the appointment of a woman at ministerial level in an Arab government. But always, Yemen’s corner of the world turns violent, sets progress back, and, from Egyptians to Ottomans to European colonizers to Marxist ideologues – and now, Muslim militants – imposes outside interests on local customs and traditions. Yemen’s cultural landscape bears the marks of both triumph and disaster.

Harm de Blij is the John A. Hannah Professor of Geography at Michigan State University. The author of 30 books, including The Power of Place and Why Geography Matters, he is an honorary life member of the National Geographic Society and was previously the Geography Editor on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

YEMEN

Why Yemen, you ask?

It’s a place that seems to be on the brink of collapse, and even as we prepared to make this announcement, Yemen again emerged as a home base for terrorist plots. The stakes are high and the future is unclear for Oxford’s 2010 Place of the Year.

According to geographer Harm de Blij, author of The Power of Place and Why Geography Matters, “In the modern world of terrorist cells and jihadist movements, Yemen’s weakness spells opportunity.” Regional conflicts like the Houthi rebellion in the north and revival of the southern secessionist movement diminish the power of the government. Terrorist bases now reside in the remote countryside, posing a familiar dilemma for the United States: Is shoring up the country’s army and police worth the risk of increasing Al Qaeda protection and loyalty? At the same time Yemen stands to be the poorest country in the Arab world, nearly depleted of its leading export, oil, while facing a water shortage experts say is heighten by the country’s addiction to qat, a mildly narcotic leaf.

Once a promising experiment in Muslim-Arab democracy, Western opinion now recognizes Yemen to have all the features of a failed state. Obscured by the attention of the political geography, is what de Blij calls “a Yemen that might have been.”

To hear more from de Blij on Place of the Year be sure to check in tomorrow!

Yemen at a glance:

Population: 22,858,000
Capital(s): Sana’
Government: Multiparty Republic
Ethnic Groups: Predominantly Arab
Languages: Arabic
Religions: Islam
Currency: Yemeni rial= 100 fils
Cash crops: coffee and cotton
President: Ali Abdullah Saleh

And now for the runners-up…

Greece
Haiti
Gulf Coast (of the United States)
the Eyjafjallajokull volcano
Mexico
Seaside Heights, NJ
California
Rio de Janeiro
Wall Street
The Gulf of Aden (“Pirate Alley”)

OUP Employee Votes:

“I’d go with Mexico. A fascinating failing state in which our stake couldn’t be greater, and compelling for all the reasons the other places mentioned might be interesting (or in crisis) individually–you have natural disaster (or the ongoing potential thereof), man-made disaster, social unrest, crime (and how), political chaos and corruption, etc. Whatever you do, don’t pick Seaside Heights, N.J., though I’ve nothing whatever against the place.” -Tim Bent, Executive Editor, Trade History

“Haiti—so we don’t forget the hundreds of thousands of people who lost their families and homes and way of life.” -Jessica Ryan, Copyediting Lead

“Eyjafjallajokull. It’s perfect in that it had a world-wide impact, or close to it; it was hard to pronounce; and it was the proverbial flash-in-the-pan issue.” -Niko Pfund, VP and Publisher

“You totally made up that volcano name.” -Mr.Mittens, Ceramic Monkey

“As a kid, my mother would wrap me up in several layers of clothing before taking me to Seaside Heights, as though more material meant increased protection against the loss of childlike innocence that happens there. It warms my heart that all of America (and other MTV-broadcasting countries) can now experience the Sleaze-side Surf Club and boardwalk and all the eye-opening things that happen there.” -Grace Labatt, Associate Editor

“The volcano. It’s way cooler than anything else on the list, including the Jersey Shore. Sorry, but Snooki has nothing on Eyjafjallajokull.” -Terry Yoshiuchi, Special Sales Representative

“I vote for Haiti. Haiti has been a little forgotten since it happened early in the year and the media darlings of BP and miners have taken over their media time. It will take years to rebuild this tiny island and the opportunity to highlight them so that perhaps they can receive the support they need would be awesome.” -Julie Marshall, Director of Sales

“I love Betty White, but I will resist the urge to nominate Facebook as “Place of the Year.” This is Oxford, not The New York Observer. Instead I vote for Haiti. Ten years from now, no one except Stanley McChrystal will really care that their flight was delayed by a volcanic ash cloud, but the earthquake reorganized the life stories of a generation of Haitians into Before and After. The Gulf Coast disaster wasn’t as much of a disaster as anticipated – that is, it did not produce enough oil-coated seabirds to sustain the 24-hr-a-day press coverage that a “Place of the Year” requires. Greece…is located in Europe. As long as the USA is #1 and we have the nukes, the “Place of the Year” should stay in our hemisphere, yesno? That’s better. Wall Street might have been the “Place of the Year” in 2008, and it always imagines that it’s the place of the year, the decade, infinity, the universe – why give those jerks more attention? Pirate Alley sounds like fun, but there are pirates in Mexico, too – didn’t one of them behead a tourist, like, last week? Or was it the chief of police who was beheaded, and the tourist just disappeared? And has anyone seen the mayor recently? He hasn’t come to work in three days. Mexico has farther to fall; let’s wait until it hits bottom before we start dishing out awards. California – what happened in California? Budget crisis? Join the club. Nothing else springs to mind. You lose, California! And stop taunting us with those “Find Yourself Here” ads in the middle of winter. A few Yemeni terrorists aren’t going to make Yemen itself more interesting, unless the past ten years failed to satisfy our hunger for complicated tribal alliances and sand. Seaside Heights should absolutely win the E! Entertainment News “Place of the Year” and I support its nomination wholeheartedly. Is that it? Anyone else? I see a hand. Rio? What do you want, Rio? “Brazil is not a serious country,” said* Charles de Gaulle, who nominated himself for “Place of the Year” in 1962. Unless someone sends me on an all-expense-paid vacation to the “Place of the Year,” Rio is out. -Anonymous

HAITI. Place of the Year. Now, what do they win?” -Anonymous Assistant Editor

“I think that the Eyjafjallajokull volcano would be a good choice because it reminded us that the movement of people and goods across the globe is not a given, that we’re still subject to the power of this planet’s natural processes, and that we have not, and cannot, fully conquer nature. Thanks for sending out the choices.” -Mally Anderson, Editorial assistant in Trade History

“I think Rio de Janeiro for many reasons (although I will only provide three). The first being that the country’s economic resiliency during the recent global meltdown was remarkable, especially when you consider how the three other ‘BRIC’ country’s faired during the same time period. The strength that their bond is currently trading at is an all-time high for the country (and it looks as though it will be staying there for quite some time). They will be hosting the World Cup and the Olympics in the same decade; a first for any country in the world. And last but certainly not least, they arguably have the most beloved president in the world in Lula. Rio is where the place of the year should be.” -Nick Mafi, Publicity Assistant

“Greece is broke and convulsing with socialist rioting. Yemen is a hotbed of al-Qaeda. Unless it’s a Snookie nod, I’m lost on the Seaside Heights, NJ meme completely! Help!” -Susan Fensten, Publicist

“Haiti – it was such an eye opener and I think it’s important to bring some light back on the country. Often after a disaster, a place is all over the news and then just slowly fades from our memories. This might bring some attention back to Haiti and prompt people to ask “how are they doing?” -Jamie Taratoot, Events Coordinator & Associate Publicist

“I’m gonna go with Haiti. Not only was the disaster immense, but it was the first time I made a “text” donation to the Red Cross. I think it was an event that, through the media, had a striking impact on the US (at least). I will be really interested in seeing how the recovery efforts go there.” -Anne Zaccardelli, Special Sales Representative

“It is odd to think a geological phenomenon could have a major impact on the world like the eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano, or the earthquake in Haiti, but 2010 reminded us that Mother Nature is not to be trifled with and for that reason I have to go with Haiti as my pick for 2010 Place of the Year. ” -Christian Purdy, Publicity Director

“I’ve never been to Greece, but I’m recently married with no honeymoon planned and we’ve got an ache for it. We’re keeping one glimpse in mind. Presided over by a little, wrought-iron porch, from a whitewashed third-floor window, there’s a narrow crescent of cobbled streets in the village of Kioni, Ithaca, that makes its way down to the water’s edge. The inlet is blue enough to stop you in your tracks, but in the shallows where the crabs rest, it’s clear, briney, and made to match the temperature of your skin. It knows you! – I’m sure of it. We’re wrapped in a steep, burnt coastline here, about 300 miles northwest of Santorini, and from that high window the view of the lane and olive branches and red rooflines below us zigzags down and converges to a point on the tiny beach, a uniquely Greek view, shaped like an upside-down fir tree. We can’t decide whether to stick with that sight, and its upper breeze carrying marjoram and fish, or join it, down by the shallows. Perhaps a murmur and an ouzo at the best cafe in the village will settle this. We will find that cafe or pass the bright day looking, until the sunset steals in, mutes the hillside colors and burnishes the sky, and my heart stops. We have not seen any of this! But our shared glimpse of the quietest islands in Greece is more real to us than places we’ve known our whole lives.”  -Anonymous Assistant Marketing Manager

By Sharon Zukin

The world’s biggest cities often spawn disaster scenarios—those end-of-the-world, escape-from-New-York exaggerations of urban dystopia.  Once limited to printed texts and paintings, visions of urban apocalypse have become ever more accessible in newspaper photographs, movies and video games.  They form a collective urban imaginary, shaping the dark side of local identity and civic pride.

New York is especially attractive as a site of imagined disaster.  Maybe it’s payback for the city’s hubris and chutzpah, or perhaps there’s something in the American character that yearns for and fears creative destruction.  If there is a general hunger for destruction stories, it is fed by the knowledge that the cities we build are vulnerable.  The terrorists’ attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001 brought this point home to Americans, renewing dormant anxiety about nuclear war and environmental disaster.

But what if the city’s built environment suffers from slow erosion rather than a single cataclysm like Hurricane Katrina?  Can we visualize the slow creep of problems as well as we imagine the sudden onset of disaster and summon the will to change course?

“Rising Currents,” a recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, pitted five teams of architects, engineers and urban designers against a gradual but dramatic rise in sea level resulting from global climate change.  The challenge: to retrofit the city’s waterfront to survive and prosper after a new Flood.

Cities have a troubled history with water.  From building walls around wells in ancient deserts to colonizing rivers for the expansion of trade, human settlements have worn down maritime nature with a steady ooze of cement.  Building dams in the West of the United States,  India and China, crowding cities near the Danube River in Eastern Europe, throwing landfill into Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor as well as into New York Bay: all of these have reduced water resources to serve human needs.

Global cities, those capitals of capital, are the biggest offenders.  As one of the architectural teams engaged in the MoMA exhibition points out, two piers built for oil depots on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River are each two miles long—as long as the Twin Towers of the old World Trade Center were high.

What’s most impressive about a rising water level is the sense that nature is taking back from the human world.  And what’s most impressive about the architectural projects in “Rising Currents” is the sensibility that human survival depends on adaptation rather than pacification.

There are good ideas here.  The keywords are conservation, production and conversion:  creating a transportation network of ferry boats rather than cars and buses, developing oyster beds off the Brooklyn shore, reshaping fuel depots to use less land.  But how can a city government—one whose modest plans for renovating parkland are constantly plagued by cost overruns and delays—undertake these projects?

Privatization is not the answer.  Only a state can coordinate long-term efforts to rebuild for urban survival.  The recent rescue of the Chilean miners from their underground prison suggests to some people that a non-governmental mobilization of global resources can be successful against great odds.  In that case, though, individuals, industries and governments united around one clear goal.  To rebuild the waterfront, many conflicts of interest would have to be overcome.

The wholesale revamping of the built environment demands more than the low-level voluntary efforts that have marked environmental work so far.  School children learn to recycle, but when the current economic recession cut back imports from China, it also reduced China’s need to buy recycled cardboard from the U.S.  Painting New York rooftops white to reduce heat retention in hot weather and save energy that would be used for air conditioning—one of the biggest drains of scarce natural resources—doesn’t go far enough.

A local environmental initiative in Kansas mobilizes people in several small cities by speaking to traditional values of thrift, patriotism and the desire to be good stewards of the earth.  Boy Scout troops, religious congregations and elementary schools have been enlisted in a campaign to save energy rather than use up fossil fuels and pay higher bills.  What message can big cities take from this?  Or will they continue to take comfort in the Godzilla scenario of inevitable disaster?

Sharon Zukin is Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Loft Living, Landscapes of Power (winner of the C. Wright Mills Award), The Cultures of Cities, Point of Purchase, and most recently Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places.

By Sharon Zukin

At some point during the past few years I realized that my friends and I are often the oldest diners in a restaurant, especially when we break bread in one of the trendy gastrodomes of downtown Manhattan.  Sure, we still wear black and think of ourselves as hip but the trendier the resto’s vibes the more our gray hairs stand out in the crowd.

My daughter, a college student, laughs at me when I complain that the talk or music is too loud.  I just try to avoid the places with high-decibel ratings alongside high ratings for food (and I wish the New York Times’ restaurant reviews would include ambient noise ratings as other towns’ papers do).

Imagine my shock, then, to discover that age rage is also common among the young—with younger diners complaining about people like me!  “Here’s the sad thing,” says a recent Yelp! review of a small French bistro in the West Village, “the ENTIRE place was seated with senior citizen couples, with the exception of two grandparents behind us with a mom and a loud little kid.  I’m talking people in their eighties.  Not exaggerating…It was all very strange.”

I’m not in my eighties but I’ll tell you what’s “very strange”:  the population of New York City is going to get a whole lot older very fast.  The city’s age spread is now about the same as that of the U.S. population.   Around 7% are children too young to go to school, almost 25% are under eighteen years of age and half as many (fewer than 12%) are over sixty-five.

But according to demographers’ projections, after 2010 New York will be a rapidly aging city.  Some reasons for this are natural (baby boomers aging), others are social (medicine and changes in cultural practices keeping us alive longer) while still others are a mix of both (fertility rates declining).  All in all, though, the city’s older population will increase dramatically in the next twenty years.

Daily life as we know it will be turned upside down.  Carrie Bradshaw and her friends will trade in their Manolo’s for walkers.  Whole Foods Market on Union Square will be empty by 3 p.m.  The doors on the L train to Williamsburg will stay open longer to allow for a collectively slower pace and a weaker ability to shove.  For Manhattan – where residents’ median age has long been the highest in the city – is also slated to age the most dramatically.   It may be hard to sustain the island’s reputation as “the fashion capital of the world” when the number of residents over sixty-five rises by 60%.

Let’s look at this another way, not as a competition for restaurant tables or fashion cred, but as a competition for publicly funded social services.  During the baby boom that followed World War II, there were twice as many school children as New Yorkers over 65.  By 2030, the two groups will have roughly equal numbers.  Does this suggest lowering the chronically underfunded schools budget and shifting money to the also chronically underfunded public hospitals and senior centers?

A couple of years ago the mayor’s office joined the New York Academy of Medicine to jump-start the creation of an “age-friendly city.”  While refusing to solve a major problem for many senior citizens—affordable housing—the mayor and other elected officials say they want to make the city more “walkable,” with more reliable public transportation and places to sit and rest in public spaces.  These improvements would help all New Yorkers and fit the mayor’s environmental agenda.

But other initiatives to help older people would require the state to use its considerable powers to raise revenue and make new rights.  Long awaited bike lanes signal the city government’s gradual efforts to encourage non-carbon-producing transportation but pedestrians, especially older ones, fear being struck by cyclists who commandeer the sidewalks or run red lights.  The rising homicide rate among young black men is connected to some degree with the large percentage of grandparents in Manhattan and the Bronx who are their primary caregivers and cannot keep track of what, or who, incites them to violence.  In the national economy, not just steel and auto workers but also computer engineers and human resources executives over the age of 50 face what they fear is permanent unemployment.

When the New York Times columnist Verlyn Klinkenborg mourns the disappearance of his longtime barbershop or I write about how the city has “lost its soul,” are we just getting old?  Or do we all face major problems in political and economic life that demand a re-centering on local jobs and housing?

Sharon Zukin is Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Loft Living, Landscapes of Power (winner of the C. Wright Mills Award), The Cultures of Cities, Point of Purchase, and most recently Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places.