Explaining world politics: Death, courage, and human survival

By Louis René Beres

Here on earth, tragedy and disappointment seemingly afflict every life that is consecrated to serious thought. This is especially true in matters of world politics where every self-styled blogger is now an “expert” and where any careful search for deeper meanings is bound to fall upon deaf ears. Nonetheless, if we wish to better understand war, terror and genocide, we must finally be willing to search beyond the endlessly clichéd babble of politicians, professors and pundits.

Flummadiddle, skimble-skamble, and other arkymalarky

Tweet By Mark Peters I love bullshit. Perhaps I should clarify. It’s not pure, unadulterated bullshit I enjoy (or even the hard-to-find alternative, adulterated bullshit). I agree with the great George Carlin, who said, “It’s all bullshit, and it’s bad for ya.” Hard to argue with that. What I love is the enormous lexicon of […]

The Beatles and “My Bonnie”: 23 June 1961

By Gordon Thompson
To many adolescents fifty years ago, the future seemed bleak: the “King” had become preoccupied with refurbished Italian schmaltz while the world drew closer to Armageddon. But hope buzzed in the heart of an ungrounded amplifier in a West German high school.

Goodwill had floundered between the recently elected American president, John F. Kennedy and the Soviet Union’s premier, Nikita Khrushchev over the Soviet blockade of Berlin and America’s support of the failed

‘Pretty’ is as pretty does

By Anatoly Liberman

The adjective pretty had such a tempestuous history that it deserves an essay, even though no new facts are likely to shed light on the obscurities of its development. We will move from Old English tricks to Jack Sprat (surely, you remember: “Jack Sprat could eat no fat, / His wife could eat no lean; / and so betwixt them both, you see, / They licked the plate clean”), from Welsh praith “act, deed” to Russian bred “delirium” and end up pretty much where we were at the beginning.

Privacy law: a 10 minute tutorial

By Mark Warby
My mum told me the other day that she found all this publicity about privacy, super-injunctions, and Twitter most confusing. So do I, because the way it is reported seems to bear little resemblance to the world I thought I worked in and knew.

Forbidden images

By Justyna Zajac and Michelle Rafferty

The world recoiled when the gay community started receiving credit for its influence in fashion and culture, but at least, according to Christopher Reed, they were being acknowledged. In his new book Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas, Reed argues that for some time, the professional art world plain ignored the gay presence.

We had the chance to speak with Reed a few weeks back at his Williams Club talk, where he laid out the tumultuous relationship between art and activism. Below we present a few of the controversial things we learned.

The politics of pessimism

By Elvin Lim

The election of 2012 will turn on the economy and jobs. But jobs or the lack thereof are only a component of a more pervasive sentiment in American politics today. That sentiment is pessimism, because Horatio Alger has become Joe the Plumber.

The pessimism in American politics is concentrated in one part of the electorate — the white working class, also the group which has pulled most sharply from Obama’s support. Understanding the disaffection of the

Israel – Episode 17 – The Oxford Comment

Are Israel and the United States still a dynamic duo? According to Daniel Byman the debate isn’t about whether or not the United States should support Israel, but how we can encourage them with “tough support.”

Librarians in the United States from 1880-2009

By Andrew A. Beveridge, Susan Weber, and Sydney Beveridge

The U.S. Census first collected data on librarians in 1880, a year after the launch of the American Library Association. They only counted 636 librarians nationwide. Indeed, one respondent stated that he was the ‘Librarian of Congress.’ The number of librarians grew over the next 100 years however.

Linked Up: Epic photos, koalas, Richard Dreyfuss

I was writing a short introduction about how summer has finally come to New York, and how lovely it’s been, but I went to a meeting and by the time I came back to this post, it was raining. At least I have my links:

The indictment of John Edwards: What is a campaign contribution?

By Peter J. Henning
The felony indictment of former Senator and presidential candidate John Edwards on six counts of conspiracy, false statement, and campaign finance violations contains many tawdry details of his affair with Rielle Hunter and subsequent payments and benefits of over $900,000 she received as part of an effort to hide her from the media while she bore his child. The key question is not whether the affair

The battle for “progress”

By Gregory A. Daddis
David Ignatius of The Washington Post recently highlighted several “positive signs in Afghanistan,” citing progress on the diplomatic front, in relations between India and Pakistan, and on the battlefield itself. Of note, Ignatius stressed how U.S.-led coalition forces had cleared several Taliban strongholds in Kandahar and Helmand provinces. The enemy, according to the opinion piece, was “feeling the pressure.”

In search of hot jazz

By Kevin Whitehead
Music journalist Bill Wyman wrote an article for Slate recently that has resonated with me, pondering an age when vast quantities of music have become instantly available to anyone with an internet connection.  Every year my wish list of elusive rarities gets shorter and shorter. Research is getting a lot easier, for the historically-minded; so has just poking around, for curious listeners.

An archaeologists’s reflections on the Hay Festival

By David Wengrow
I have never spoken at anything like the Hay Festival before, but I had visited as a spectator, and remembered the buzz. So when the invitation to speak arrived I was delighted, and nervous. It is not your ordinary academic line up. On arrival I was ushered to the Green Room, where the likes of Simon Schama, Bob Geldof, Melvyn Bragg, and Rosie Boycott glide in and out.

Happy Bloomsday

It’s a holiday for James Joyce fans, a holiday known as Bloomsday. Joyce’s seminal 1922 novel Ulysses spans only a single day in Dublin (1904), and now we know every 16th of June as Bloomsday, so named after the novel’s protagonist Leopold Bloom. Typical Bloomsday activities involve including Ulysses-themed pub crawls, dramatizations, and readings. Some committed fans even hold marathon readings of the entire book.

The pro-business court and class action security

By Andrew Trask
The U.S. Supreme Court has handed down another class-action decision, Erica John Fund v. Halliburton. On one side was Halliburton, the multi-national energy company, that has assumed the status of a pop-culture villain for many. On the other was the class action trial bar, for whom securities class actions are a billion-dollar business.