bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Coccidioidomycosis
Authors: Ampel Neil M
Published: October 2023

Coccidioidomycosis is a disease of the Western hemisphere caused by the dimorphic soil-dwelling fungus that until recently was recognized as the single species Coccidioides immitis (see Taxonomy). First recognized as a clinical entity in Argentina in 1882, the first case associated with the San Joaquin Valley in California was reported soon after (Rixford and Gilchrist, 1896). Early cases presented with inflammatory lesions of the skin, bones, and joints that progressed to death despite attempts at treatment. By the turn of the century, the causative organism was identified as a mould despite its resemblance in tissue to a protozoan (Ophüls, 1905). For the first 40 years, coccidioidomycosis was thought to be a relatively rare but disfiguring and usually fatal disease. However, benign cases of pulmonary disease associated with erythema nodosum or erythema multiforme were increasingly observed (Dickson and Gifford, 1938). This form of illness, called Valley Fever, led to speculation that not all cases of coccidioidomycosis were fatal and that there was a wide spectrum of clinical manifestations of infection (Smith, 1940). These observations ushered in a watershed period in the understanding of coccidioidomycosis led by Charles E. Smith and his colleagues. Smith developed the coccidioidin skin test, defined the incidence and prevalence of infection within the San Joaquin Valley, and described the relationship of skin-test reactivity to clinical disease (Smith et al, 1948). He also developed the coccidioidal serum antibody tests (Smith et al, 1950), variations of which are still in use today. However, there was no treatment for coccidioidomycosis until 1957, when Fiese reported the first use of amphotericin B to manage a case of disseminated disease (Fiese, 1957). Further strides in the therapy of coccidioidomycosis using amphotericin B were pioneered and described by Winn (Winn, 1959).
Penicilliosis
Authors: Nelson Kenrad E , Sirisanthana Thira
Published: October 2023

More than 200 species of the Penicillium genus have been described. Penicillium organisms are abundant in nature and are common laboratory contaminants. However, Penicillium marneffei is the only dimorphic species. The organism is commonly responsible for disseminated invasive infections in humans with HIV infection or AIDS in the endemic areas of Southeast Asia and southern China. Penicillium marneffei has also been found to cause natural infections in several species of rodents in the endemic areas and rodents can be infected experimentally. Penicillium marneffei was originally isolated from the liver of a bamboo rat (Rhizomys sinensis) at the Pasteur Institute in Dalat, Viet Nam in 1956. Capponi and colleagues observed the death of bamboo rats due to disseminated infections with P. marneffei involving their reticuloendothelial system (Capponi et al, 1956). These investigators passed the newly discovered organism experimentally in mice, and it was sent to the Pasteur Institute in Paris for further study. At the Pasteur Institute, the fungus was characterized by Segretain and named Penicillium marneffei in honor of Dr. Hubert Marneffe, the Director of the Pasteur Institute of Indochina (Segretain, 1959a). Subsequently, Segretain became the first known human to be infected with the organism in 1959 when he accidentally stuck his finger with a needle he was using to inoculate a hamster. The clinical manifestations of his infection were a subcutaneous nodule at the site of the inoculation and lymphadenitis involving the draining auxiliary lymph nodes. The infection responded to treatment with high doses of oral nystatin. The first natural human infection with P. marneffei was reported in 1973 in a 61-year-old U.S. missionary who was suffering from Hodgkin’s disease. His infection was discovered when he underwent a staging splenectomy for Hodgkin’s disease (Di Salvo et al, 1973). The missionary had visited Southeast Asia after Hodgkin’s disease had been diagnosed 1 year prior to the splenectomy. At surgery the excised spleen contained a tan nodular mass, 9 cm in diameter with a necrotic center, which grew P. marneffei when cultured on Sabouraud dextrose agar at 25°C. The patient survived after being treated with amphotericin B. The second case of penicilliosis was reported in 1984 in a 59-year-old man who had traveled in Southeast Asia (Pautler et al, 1984). He had recurrent episodes of hemoptysis and P. marneffei organisms were isolated from his sputum. Also in 1984, five additional cases who had been seen at Ramathibodi Hospital in Bangkok, Thailand between 1974 and 1982 were reported (Jayanetra et al, 1984). Eight cases of P. marneffei infection were reported from Guangxi province in southern China that had occurred between 1964 and 1983 (Deng et al, 1985). Additional cases were recognized from 1985 to 1991 in southern China (Li et al, 1985; Wang et al, 1989; Li et al, 1991). These patients were not immunocompromised. All cases had occurred prior to the AIDS epidemic in Southeast Asia.
Superficial Cutaneous Fungal Infections
Authors: weeks Jeff , Moser stephen A , Elewski boni E
Published: October 2023

In this chapter, we review cutaneous diseases caused by a variety of fungal pathogens infecting the skin, hair, and nails. These diseases are divided into the following classification based on level of invasion, host inflammatory response, and pathogen: (1) superficial mycoses, (2) dermatophytoses, (3) cutaneous disease caused by nondermatophyte moulds, and (4) cutaneous candidiasis. Superficial mycoses are characterized by fungal invasion into the superficial stratum corneum with little to no inflammatory response. Dermatophytoses are caused by dermatophytes, which are a closely related group of fungi that invade the full thickness of the stratum corneum and result in a host-mediated immune response. Several nondermatophyte moulds produce infections that mimic dermatophytoses. Cutaneous candidiasis results from invasion of deep layers of the skin by members of the Candida genus. Superficial mycoses are fungal infections of the skin and hair that invade only the most superficial layers and cause little or no inflammatory response. These mycoses include the malassezioses, tinea nigra, blacpiedra, and white piedra. Superficial invasion of the nail plate, so-called white superficial onychomycosis, is discussed in the Dermatophytoses section.
Pneumocystosis
Authors: Decker Catherine F , Masur Henry
Published: October 2023

Although considered an organism of low virulence, Pneumocystis carinii is an important cause of pneumonia in immunocompromised hosts, especially those with hematologic malignancies, organ transplants, HIV, certain congenital immunodeficiencies, and those receiving high-dose corticosteroids. Unfortunately, this pneumonia has continued to occur despite the recognition in the 1970s that chemoprophylaxis could greatly reduce the incidence of this disease in the immunocompromised host. A dramatic increase in incidence of P. carinii pneumonia occurred as the AIDS epidemic grew as did our knowledge of the initial manifestations, diagnosis, treatment and prevention of P. carinii pneumonia. Soon, thereafter, with the implementation of chemoprophylaxis in the late 1980s for the HIV-infected population, and with the widespread use of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) in 1995, there has been a steady decline in cases (Kaplan, et al, 2000). However, P. carinii pneumonia will continue to occur in those who do not have access to medical care, those who are unaware they are infected, those who elect not to treat their HIV infection aggressively, or those who fail to respond to therapy. Pneumocystis was traditionally considered a protozoan since it was originally identified by Chagas in 1906. However, recent applications of molecular techniques demonstrated that the organism shares many characteristics with fungi, especially Saccharomyces (Edman et al, 1988; Stringer et al, 1989; Cailliez et al, 1996). However, P. carinii is unusual among fungi in that the organism lacks ergosterol in its plasma membranes and is insensitive to antifungal drugs that target ergosterol biosynthesis. Based on its morphology, which is similar to that of protozoa, the life cycle of P. carinii has been divided into three stages: the trophozoite, found outside the cyst and believed to be intermediate between the sporozoite and the cyst; the cyst, a spherical or crescent-shaped form; and the sporozoite or intracystic bodies, found within the cysts (Barton et al, 1969). Since human P. carinii is not cultivatable in vitro, the life-cycle has not been fully elucidated. It has been suggested that the mode of replication occurs through binary fission and excystment (Hughes et al, 1977).
Memory and Cognitive Functioning After Electroconvulsive Therapy
Authors: Abrams Richard
Published: October 2023

Several aspects of cerebral functioning can be affected for varying intervals by ECT, depending on the number, frequency, and duration of the induced seizures, the anatomical placement of the stimulating electrodes, and the stimulus wave-form, parameters, and charge. Depending on which particular combination of these variables they receive, patients during the immediate postictal period may experience confusion and neurological dysfunction that occasionally progresses to delirium. After the postictal confusion has cleared, two specific types of memory impairment can be demonstrated: retrograde amnesia for events preceding the seizure and anterograde amnesia (rapid forgetting) for events following it. Non-memory cognitive impairments may also be detectable in the interictal period using various modem neuropsychological procedures. Finally, patients may experience subjective memory dysfunction that may or may not be objectively confirmed. Studies of the various aspects of ECT-induced disruption of functioning naturally divide themselves into those conducted during the immediate postictal period before reorientation has occurred, those conducted after full alertness and orientation have been reestablished, and those conducted days, weeks, or months later.
Neurobiological Correlates and Mechanisms
Authors: Abrams Richard
Published: October 2023

In this chapter, the word “neurobiological” subsumes all of the following terms unless more particularly specified: neurochemical, neurohumoral, neurotransmitter, neuroendocrine, neurohormonal, neuropeptide, neurogenetic, neurophysiological, and neurometabolic.

The literature on neurobiological consequences of induced seizures contains a dearth of human ECT studies compared with electroconvulsive shock (ECS) trials in animals, yet normal animal data have not helped to explain how ECT works in mentally ill patients.
How to Help Yourself without Taking Medicine
Authors: Wallace Daniel J , Wallace Janice Brock
Published: October 2023

Although there is no cure for fibromyalgia, patients can initiate numerous changes and make adjustments that improve their sense of wellbeing. Simply stated, there are things patients can do without spending money or seeing a healthcare provider. Demonstrating a certain amount of control over the syndrome also improves self-esteem and instills a sense of self-worth.

Even though certain general dietary principles allow fibromyalgia patients to feel better, there is no “fibromyalgia diet.” No specific food regimens or supplements have ever been shown in any published, controlled study to be helpful for fibromyalgia despite the observation that “arthritis diet” books are a multimillion-dollar-a-year industry.

How can we explain this discrepancy? First, people feel better when they eat healthy foods. Most arthritis diet books urge patients to eat three well-balanced meals a day and caution against overeating. Many recommend having the main meal at midday; heavy, late-evening dinners don’t give the body enough time to burn off calories and are associated with bedtime esophageal spasm or heartburn. Similarly, consuming alcohol, nicotine, or caffeine (in the form of coffee, tea, or even chocolate) at a late dinner can make it harder to get a good night’s sleep. Alcohol, in particular, should not be used as a painkiller. In turn, poor sleep can increase musculoskeletal pain. An acceptable healthy balance of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats can also increase energy and fight fatigue.
Anti-Imperialist Wit in Horace Walpole’s Letters
Authors: Sabin Margery
Published: October 2023

A by-stander often sees more of the game than those that play. -Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto Horace Walpole’s letters to his friend Horace Mann from the late 1760s to the 178os follow the scandals of the British rise to power in India from the perspective of a bystander rather than a player.1 As the son of Robert Walpole, the most powerful political figure in parliamentary politics for a generation in the middle of the eighteenth century, Horace Walpole had an insider’s grasp of political machination, but without his father’s relish or skill for it.
Burke’s India Campaign: Goliath, Scourge, Redeemer
Authors: Sabin Margery
Published: October 2023

Although Walpole and Burke both represent the critical side of eighteenthcentury British debate about India, in other ways they stand at opposite ends of the spectrum of writing on the subject. Instead of Walpole’s cynical wit mixed with observations on other items of the daily news, Burke offers impassioned exhortations in speeches and writings through a parliamentary campaign of fifteen years, from 1781 to 1795; instead of the bits and pieces gleaned by Walpole from rumor and newspapers, Burke’s research and analytic mastery of what was already the massive British Indian archive constitute a feat of herculean energy and sustained concentration.
The Beast in Nirad Chaudhuri’s Garden
Authors: Sabin Margery
Published: October 2023

If your first order of business is to “decolonize “ the mind, there seems little to be said on behalf of Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s Autobiography of an Unknown Indian,1 with its fond childhood memories of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and the Encyclopedia Britannica in turn-of-the-century Bengal. Many anticolonial critics simply fix Chaudhuri as one of Macaulay’s freakish progeny: the Anglicized mind in brown skin created to serve imperial power in British India.
The Politics of Cultural Freedom: India in the I950s
Authors: Sabin Margery
Published: October 2023

Dissent in British writing about India during the colonial period is comparatively easy to recognize and define, even while it changes tone and shape in response to shifting historical contingencies over the long period of British rule. In India, after independence and the trauma of Partition, the nationalist consensus against imperial domination that had held the freedom movement together broke apart into complex and aggressive internal conflicts: regional, political, religious, and social.
Gene Insurance
Authors: Tabarrok Alexander
Published: October 2023

Not so long ago, the only way to get a glimpse of your future health was to take a trip to the local psychic for a tarot card reading. Now, thanks to advances in genetic research, medical practitioners are increasingly able to read your health future from a much more reliable source-your individual genetic code. The correlation between specific genes and some diseases is now well established, and further discoveries are announced almost weekly.
Time-Consistent Health Insurance
Authors: Cochrane John H
Published: October 2023

Currently available health insurance contracts do not fully insure many long-term illnesses, such as AIDS, cancer, senile dementia, heart disease, or organ failure. Many people who get such diseases face ruinous increases in premiums. Others lose their health insurance by losing their job or their spouse or by exceeding a lifetime cap on benefits. Some are bankrupted by health expenses; some are unable to get further medical care. Many other kinds of insurance do not cover long-term risks in the same way, for example, medical malpractice and product liability insurance.
Patent Buyouts: A Mechanism for Encouraging Innovation
Authors: Kremer Michael
Published: October 2023

Economic growth ultimately depends on the production of new ideas, but competitive markets do not provide appropriate incentives for the production of ideas. If consumers pay only the marginal cost of transmitting ideas, revenues will be insufficient to cover the cost of producing ideas. Historically, societies have used a wide variety of mechanisms to encourage production of ideas. Some, such as patents and copyrights, provide inventors with monopolies over goods produced using their ideas. Others, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the synthetic fuels program, directly subsidize research. The United States uses both types of mechanisms; for example, government and industry each spent about $13 billion on health research in 1992 (National Science Board 1993).
Curb Rights: Eliciting Competition and Entrepreneurship in Urban Transit
Authors: Klein Daniel B , Moore Adrian T , Reja Binyam
Published: October 2023

Urban transit in the United States has long been dominated by government ownership and regulation, and it has been declining steadily in ridership and productivity (APTA 1995). An economist-cum-policymaker would seek to inject competition and entrepreneurship into the sector by privatizing it. The two types of privatization often advocated are contracting out and “free competition” (Department of Transportation 1984; Lave 1985; Gomez-Ibanez and Meyer 1993). Experience has shown, however, that each approach has serious shortcomings.
Freedom and Legitimacy
Authors: Richardson Henry S
Published: October 2023

To examine the conditions of legitimate rule, we must consider the conditions of legitimate lawmaking. Presumably, lawmaking must be democratic; but I will need, over the course of the coming chapters, to articulate what conception of democracy follows from the basic normative demands we would make on politics. Only when we have firmly in view what is required of legitimate democratic government can we adequately address the challenge posed by the threat of bureaucratic domination. We should begin by asking why political rule must meet the burden of legitimacy. The fundamental reason is that government impinges on individual freedom. In the present chapter, I will look at this question two ways. First, I will consider the basic issue of impingement and the kind of burden of legitimation it imposes. Considering the question from this point of view will suggest a basic case for democracy. Next, I will look further at a specifically republican interpretation of freedom, which points up the general significance of the danger of domination. The Burden of Legitimation Government action comes under a burden of legitimation because it impinges on freedom. It does so in two ways. The liberal is rightly concerned about government action because it can undercut or violate fundamental rights. The republican is rightly concerned about government action because it can put us under new duties and may do so arbitrarily. Because of these threats to freedom, government decisions need to meet strong requirements of legitimation. When a local shop puts shirts on sale for half price, that does not enhance my freedom. When an airline cancels a cheap fare to Orlando, that does not diminish my freedom. We interact with other persons and institutions all the time, and they shift our incentive and opportunities, both on purpose
The Case for a Qualified Populism
Authors: Richardson Henry S
Published: October 2023

I have argued that a legitimate government must be democratic, republican, and liberal. It must be of the people-that is, democratic as opposed to aristocratic or monarchical, according equal consideration to each in its processes of decision. It must be republican, dispersing and checking power so as to prevent domination. And for its procedures really to achieve the republican aim of preventing domination, which exists where power may be arbitrarily exercised, it must be for the people, in the sense that its procedures must respect the fundamental rights and liberties of each and treat each as a free and equal citizen. This account of a liberal-republican democracy thus begins to exhibit some flesh on its bones. It at least gives a theoretical context for my question about bureaucratic domination. Yet there are important dimensions still missing. These characterizations of how the political process ought to treat citizens are, indeed, fine as far as they go. What needs to be added is not any further qualification of how it must treat us but rather a proper recognition, suitably free of mystification, exaggeration, or romanticization, that we are it: that democratic government is rule by the people.1 Hence, we need to broach the theme of populism, which will bring us, finally, to the value of autonomy. Whereas the combination of republican and liberal ideas that I have advocated has a long and flourishing history, both contemporary republican theorists and contemporary liberal theorists have sharply criticized the populist ideal of rule by the people. From the liberal direction, Riker’s book, Liberalism against Populism, portrays populism as a mask for coercion and majoritarian domination. Riker, as noted, took Arrovian social choice theory to cast doubt on the idea of the public good, which, according to populist ideas, is supposed to provide the focus or aim of the popular will. Believing that there is no proper object of the will of the people only endlessly varied ways to configure and constrain processes of majority decision, Riker emphasized the importance of ensuring that governments abide by
Democratic Rule Must Be Reasoned
Authors: Richardson Henry S
Published: October 2023

I have not yet integrated the idea of deliberative democracy into my account. This idea is currently popular and is taken by some simply to be obviously attractive. Others, reacting perhaps to the idea’s very popularity, deny its attractions. On both sides, there is vagueness and equivocation about what “deliberative democracy “ means. In part to avoid these confusions, I start instead with the term “reasoning.’’1 Those who engage in practical reasoning about what ought to be done are engaged in deliberation in a core or paradigm sense. I will argue that citizens in a democracy must rule by reasoning with one another. Collective self-rule thus must be reasoned. Hence, if you will, democracy must be strongly deliberative. The aims of this chapter will emerge more clearly if a limitation of the recent deliberative democracy movement is recognized, one that arises from aspects of that movement’s polemical context and from weaknesses in its philosophical development. Two features of the movement’s polemical context have tended to limit its vision. Some recent proponents of deliberative democracy have concentrated on opposing the sort of preference-aggregation approach shared, in various forms, by the public choice and social choice schools. Against these powerful intellectual constructs, advocates of deliberative democracy have insisted that a crucial function of democratic dialogue is to change preferences.2 Sometimes it is persuasive argument that does it, as in the case of Patrick Henry’s speech to the Virginia Assembly in 1775.3 Sometimes information is what does the trick; for instance, widespread publicity about endangered species has surely led people who otherwise would not even have heard about them to care about preserving them. Sometimes these two effects are mixed together: U.S. Senators who had not heard about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge before the 2000 presidential campaign probably soon afterwards formed some view about whether drilling for oil should be allowed there. This point about preference change is a powerful one; I will build on it in chapter 11.
Equality in a Deliberative Democracy
Authors: Richardson Henry S
Published: October 2023

The emphasis that a deliberative theory of democracy, such as democracy as democratic autonomy, lays on citizens’ reasoning with one another stands in some tension with the basic democratic ideal of equality. While each person can be given just one vote, people plainly differ in their reasoning and persuasive abilities. A theory of democratic reasoning must take account of this fact and must address the problem of political inequality that it raises. Thomas Christiano puts the point well: The quantitative equality secured by the principle of “one person, one vote “-whether in the electorate or the legislature-does not suffice; the process of democratic deliberation must also satisfy the requirements of “qualitative equality, “ which assure a fair or an equal chance of influencing debate, both within the legislature and the agencies and in the public domain more broadly.1 In this chapter I will give an account of the kind of qualitative equality that democratic procedures ought to afford. While the quantitative principle of “one person, one vote “ is just as important, it is less problematic. There are issues that arise about how to interpret that principle as well, and some of these come up in my discussion in chapter 14 of systems of election.2 Here, however, I will concentrate on qualitative equality. Threats to qualitative democratic equality can come from inequalities of power, of resources, or of persuasive ability. I will begin by concentrating on the first two sources of difficulty, reserving for later a discussion of persuasion and persuasive abilities. The first step will be to survey some of the difficulties facing any effort to spell out a principle of qualitative equality for democratic politics.
Candidate Approaches to Election Web Sites
Authors: Bimber Bruce , Davis Richard
Published: October 2023

Does the Internet gain us votes? What is the best way to use the new capacities that the Internet provides? These questions were central to the campaigns in 2000, even as they committed many hundreds of thousands of dollars to developing and extending their Internet operations throughout the general election season.

These questions reflect an uncertainty on the part of candidate campaigns about how effective this new medium would be in helping secure electoral victory. Using content analyses and interviews with the staff associated with candidate campaigns, this chapter will look at how the various organizations attempted to answer these questions in the 2000 campaign. (For a discussion of our methodology, see the appendix.) We will examine candidate strategies and goals and how these were reflected in the content and functions built into their Web sites.
The Audiences for Election Web Sites
Authors: Bimber Bruce , Davis Richard
Published: October 2023

Understanding the dynamics of campaigning online requires getting beyond the set of operating assumptions that had come into wide spread use by the late 1990s on the part of campaign professionals and candidates. As we saw in the last chapter, by 2000 campaigns were making quite sophisticated communication efforts based on the observation that supporters of the candidates compose the most important element of Web audiences. But the details of the audiences for political Web sites and how they react to their experiences with candidates’ online materials have remained almost a complete mystery both to researchers and political professionals themselves. In politics, like other endeavors, knowing how to target a message based on the specifics of an audience is very important. How many Americans actually saw George Bush’s site? What portion of Bush’s audience were women compared with Al Gore’s audience, and how favorably did men as opposed to women respond to these sites? What motivated people to visit Ralph Nader’s site compared with the sites of his major-party competitors? What kind of voters crossed over, so to speak, and voluntarily viewed the Web site of a candidate they did not support?
Introduction: The Age of the Oberpower
Authors: Hirsh Michael
Published: October 2023

In The Early Days after September 11, 2001, when the Pentagon and lower Manhattan lay smoking and it dawned on Americans that thousands of their compatriots had died because of something evil emanating from Afghanistan, the Department of Defense was in a state of confusion and fear. The heart of America’s economic and military power had been attacked. The terrible images from the twin towers, the caved-in facade across the way from Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s office, cried out for decisive retaliation. But the idea of launching a war in Afghanistan seriously worried a military brass still haunted by “Vietmalia” syndrome: a wariness of suffering U.S. casualties in out-of-the-way places like Vietnain and Somalia, where both the national interest and the exit strategy were unclear. Afghanistan was a nation fabled over the centuries for its ferocious resistance to invaders. With its treacherous mountain passes and jutting, knifelike ridges, the country was God’s gift to guerrilla warfare, the place where great powers sent their young men to die.
Navigating the Permanent Quagmire
Authors: Hirsh Michael
Published: October 2023

Invited To The Oval Office shortly after the war in Afghanistan began in October 2001, U.S. senator Joseph Biden had a hearHo-heart with the leader of the free world, the newly engaged George W. Bush. After a white-knuckled month of terror, the mood of the two men was buoyant. America was striking back at last: Taliban and al-Qaeda forces would soon flee from the major cities, signaling the end of the bizarre fundamentalist regime that had harbored Osama bin Laden. The topic of discussion now was postwar Afghanistan. Biden, a garrulous Delaware Democrat who was then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was delighted at what he was hearing from the president. America would do it right this time, Bush told him, not leave some hapless country in the lurch, sowing the seeds of future rage and discontent-and terror. Afghanistan would not be Somalia or Rwanda or even Afghanistan circa 1989, when America discarded the country like a used cartridge after years of supplying and encouraging the mujahideen, who were once our allies, in their successful war against the Soviets. Bush himself, two days later, would indirectly criticize his revered father, President George H. W. Bush, on that score.
What Is the “International Community”?
Authors: Hirsh Michael
Published: October 2023

The International community illusory? Yes, it’s fairly fashionable to say so. But the international community is real. We Americans helped create it. And if we do a good job of helping it to grow, it could well prevent our children and grandchildren from ever having to hear a shot fired in anger. But first things first. Let’s understand what we’re talking about. To do so, let’s remove ourselves from the realm of academic abstraction and head straight for the real world. Come witness with me the creation of a new member of the international community.
The Argument from Hard Power
Authors: Hirsh Michael
Published: October 2023

Lieutenant General Michael V. Hayden has the peculiar problem of running the world’s most secretive spy agency in the world’s most open society. Situated about midway along the busy industrial corridor between Washington and Baltimore, the National Security Agency is both visible and invisible. The “Crypto City” complex lies just a few miles off Interstate 95, one of the most traveled arteries in America. But thick, dark green-tinted windows guard its secrets, and at its gateway the NSA has prevented county officials from laying down a rubber traffic-counting hose to determine how many employees pass over the roadways.1 Hayden tries his best to bridge the parallel universes of secrecy and openness that he inhabits. Many of the NSA’s thirty-five thousand employees are forbidden from telling their spouses exactly what they do; yet the agency has its own website, with a “kid’s page” for aspiring young code breakers.
Rethinking Multilateralism
Authors: Hirsh Michael
Published: October 2023

Richard Holbrooke is known in diplomatic circles as “the bulldozer,” and he looks the part. Six foot one and broad-shouldered, with a square jaw and a plowlike nose, Holbrooke naturally dominates any room he walks into. He is smart and supremely self-confident, with an uninflected, insistent way of talking that is like a verbal handcuff, captivating listeners whether they’re inclined to agree with him or not. An A-lister on the dinner-party circuit in New York and Washington, the career diplomat and sometime investment banker is a shameless cultivator of the media. (How many assistant secretaries of state get a full-length profile in Vanity Fair, as Holbrooke once did, albeit a negative one?) Holbrooke is also, like Madeleine Albright and the Bush neoconservatives, a fervent believer in the essential goodness of American power. And he’s happy to apply it unilaterally, if push comes to shove.
Origins
Authors: Dowbiggin Ian
Published: October 2023

How do we save civilization? physician William Duncan McKim asked rhetorically in 1900. A “gentle, painless death” for America’s drunkards, criminals, and people with disabilities was his answer. The only thing that stood in the way, McKim explained, was the “unreasonable dogma that all human life is intrinsically sacred.” The march of science, he concluded, dictated that Americans give up this long-standing religious belief.

McKim’s secular and scientific rationales for euthanasia in the early twentieth century signaled a revolutionary challenge to literally hundreds of years of Judea-Christian teaching about the dignity of human life. For centuries, euthanasia had normally been understood to mean the process whereby the relief of pain for the dying was the best way to ensure an “easy death.” However, that changed in the late nineteenth century when euthanasia acquired its modern connotation. For the first time in history, people began defining it as actual mercy killing.
Stalemate, 1940–1960
Authors: Dowbiggin Ian
Published: October 2023

When the 1940s dawned, many in the euthanasia movement believed it was only a matter of time before euthanasia became legal in the United States. The 1930s had been marked by a flurry of encouraging events, from headline-grabbing mercy killings to the founding of the Euthanasia Society of America and England’s Voluntary Euthanasia Legislation Society.

But euthanasia advocates were in for a surprise. At the very time they were lobbying to get a voluntary euthanasia bill introduced into the New York State legislature, the ground beneath them began to shift seismically. World War II broke out, and as Hitler’s war machine marched eastward across Europe in late 1939, news of Nazi atrocities against mental patients and handicapped children filtered back to America. Euthanasia defenders in the United States discovered to their horror that many Americans associated their movement with these murders. For a group that prided itself on its liberalism, humanitarianism, and progressive views, the stigma of Nazism was particularly embarrassing.
Amassing State and Gathering Storm
Authors: Marx Anthony W .
Published: October 2023

Allegiance or obedience to political authority, which cannot practically be forced upon each individual, typically rests upon some constructed image of sameness. People are usually willing to sacrifice their money, lives, or liberty only to those with whom they feel a bond of similarity. Perhaps that bond is easier to imagine and forge in a small local community where similarities and mutuality of interest are more self-evident, although in such circumstances differences and distrust are also more immediately evident. But if the basis of cohesion and obedience is somewhat uncertain even in local settings, it becomes more so in larger contexts where supposed compatriots do not even know each other and where there is greater diversity. This is the quintessential political dilemma faced by every large-scale polity. Europe in the fifteenthh and early sixteenth centuries had not yet faced this dilemma. Strong states did not yet exist as larger scale, effective units requiring matching popular cohesion. Preindustrial economies were still largely based on localized agriculture. And power had long been held locally by nobles only loosely connected to monarchs, with central authority remaining weak. That authority was challenged by recurrent civil wars, pitting nobles against each other and against the crown, and by foreign powers. State bureaucracy was underdeveloped, with limited ability to draw taxes or to raise armies. Currency or legal systems had not yet fully developed.
A Backward Glance
Authors: Wharton Edith
Published: October 2023

Fate Had Planted me in New York, and my instinct as a story-teller counselled me to use the material nearest to hand, and most familiarly my own. Novelists of my generation must have noticed, in recent years, as one of the unforeseen results of “crowd-mentality” and standardizing, that the modern critic requires every novelist to treat the same kind of subject, and relegates to insignificance the author who declines to conform. At present the demand is that only the man with the dinner pail shall be deemed worthy of attention, and fiction is classed according to its degree of conformity to this rule. There could be no greater critical ineptitude than to judge a novel according to what it ought to have been about. The bigger the imagination, the more powerful the intellectual equipment, the more different subjects will come within the novelist’s reach; and Balzac spread his net over nearly every class and situation in the French social system.
Introduction to the 1936 Edition of The House of Mirth
Authors: Wharton Edith
Published: October 2023

It seems like going back to the Pharaohs to try to re-enter the New York world in which The House of Mirth originated. The book was written only thirty years ago, and the circle I described in it was that in which I had lived since my eleventh year, and which, in all essentials, had remained unchanged in the interval between my childhood and the writing of the book. It is given to some novelists, even though they continue to ply their craft beyond middle age, to retain to the end an audience familiar with the life their tales depict, and still to a great extent leading that life. Thackeray and Balzac, for instance, were spared the difficulty of having to readjust themselves to any marked modification in the point of view and the social habits of their readers: whereas in Trollope’s latest novels one feels the effort, remarkable if not always successful, of a painter of social life to adapt his vision and its expression to conditions so abruptly modified that the resplendent Duke of Omnium of Framley Parsonage would have seemed an almost legendary figure to the society described in The Way We Live Now, and The American Senator.
Debasing Exchange: Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth
Authors: Dimock Wai Chee
Published: October 2023

The Most Brutal moment in The House of Mirth dramatizes not so much the centrality of sex as the centrality of exchange. Sexual favors are what Gus Trenor wants, but his demands are steeped in—and legitimated by—the language of the marketplace, the language of traded benefits and reciprocal obligations. Odious as it may seem, Trenor’s speech merely asserts what everyone assumes. “Investments” and “returns,” “interests” and “payments”: these words animate and possess Wharton’s characters, even in their world of conspicuous leisure. The power of the marketplace, then, resides not in its presence, which is only marginal in The House of Mirth, but in its ability to reproduce itself, in its ability to assimilate everything else into its domain. As a controlling logic, a mode of human conduct and human association, the marketplace is everywhere and nowhere, ubiquitous and invisible. Under its shadow even the most private affairs take on the essence of business transactions, for the realm of human relations is fully contained within an all-encompassing business ethic. Some characters—Trenor and Rosedale, for instance—obviously speak the voice of the marketplace, but even those who hold themselves aloof (as Lawrence Selden does) turn out to be more susceptible than they think.
Backlash
Authors: Anderson Terry H
Published: October 2023

“The Reagan Revolution,” declared U.S. News & World Report after the Republican nominee’s victory in the 1980 election. As the tall, handsome Californian rode into Washington, he and his supporters aimed to end the pessimism of the late 1970s and bring about a rebirth, sunshine, what Reagan called “Morning in America.” The campaign had been focused on the stagflation economy, which in 1980 suffered over 7 percent unemployment, 12 percent inflation, and a prime interest rate of 15 percent. Reagan promised to “move boldly, decisively, and quickly to control the runaway growth of Federal spending, to remove the tax disincentives that are throttling the economy, and to reform the regulatory web that is smothering it.
Determining What to Monitor
Authors: Donabedian Avedis
Published: October 2023

Quite often, and increasingly so, certain monitoring activities are required by governmental agencies that provide care, directly or indirectly; pay for it; and assume responsibility for its quality. When private insurance is available, the insurers themselves may require certain kinds of monitoring to control the cost of care and possibly also to supervise its quality. It is obvious that any monitoring system will find it necessary to comply with such requirements. But, in my opinion, the more important and meaningful activities are those that the providers of care establish and carry out themselves as part of their own responsibility to provide good care.
The Effectiveness of Quality Monitoring
Authors: Donabedian Avedis
Published: October 2023

This is true of every one of the monitoring and remedial methods I have described. There is no one method (so far as I know) that in and of itself is uniformly effective or ineffective. Therefore, it seems to me that the secret of success is neither entirely in the method itself, nor entirely in the circumstances within which the method is implemented. The secret, rather, is perhaps in the interaction between the circumstances and the method; it is in the fit between the two.
Dream of The Good Life (I): The Puritan Enterprise
Authors: Cullen Jim
Published: October 2023

Few in American history have been as consistently disliked as the Puritans. To be sure, they have always had relatively rare, if prominent, champions (usually direct heirs). and they have often received grudging respect for their tenacity. But that’s about as far as it goes. Some figures, like the Founding Fathers, quickly ascended into our pantheon of heroes; others, like leading Confederates of the Civil War, have had fluctuating reputations; still others, like the presidents of the late nineteenth century, rapidly fell into deserved obscurity. But the Puritans have had a consistently bad reputation that stands out like a scarlet letter in collective national memory.

There are a number of reasons for this. First, and most generally, the Puritans are widely regarded as very unpleasant people. Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible, which used the Salem witch trials of the seventeenth century as a metaphor for the McCarthyite witch hunts of the twentieth century, remains a fixture of high school literature classes, providing millions of American schoolchildren their most vivid image of Puritanism.
The Long Nineteenth Century (1775—1922)
Authors: Wachtel Andrew Baruch
Published: October 2023

In 1775 the Balkan Peninsula was ruled by three empires. The Ottomans still controlled the lion’s share, though they had permanently lost Transylvania, Croatia, and Vojvodina to the Austrian Habsburgs by 1774. The Adriatic coast north of Albania was, for the most part, Venetian territory. Exceptions were the small merchant republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik), whose precarious liberty was sustained by artful diplomacy, and Montenegro, where proud clans eked out a semi-independent existence on mountainous territory too poor to be worth subduing. By 1923, these three empires were a memory, and the political map of the Balkans had been transformed by the appearance of new states named for the peoples who dominated them: Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Turkey, and the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Although nation builders throughout the region proudly pointed to classical and medieval ancestors for the nascent Balkan states, the models on which they were based had actually been imported recently from Western Europe.

Particularly important was the concept of the nation, defined primarily by shared linguistic and secondarily by cultural, historical, and/or religious features, and now perceived as the proper unit around which states should be organized. This view of the necessary congruence between state and nation did not fit comfortably with the political traditions of the region or with the reality of highly diverse communities.
The Politics Of Public Housing
Authors: Williams Rhonda Y
Published: October 2023

Black women have traditionally represented the canvas on which many debates about poverty and welfare have been drawn. For a quarter century after the publication of the notorious Moynihan report, poor black women were tarred with the same brush: “ghetto moms” or “welfare queens” living off the state, with little ambition or hope of an independent future. At the same time, the history of the civil rights movement has all too often succumbed to an idolatry that stresses the centrality of prominent leaders while overlooking those who fought daily for their survival in an often hostile urban landscape. In this collective biography, Rhonda Y. Williams takes us behind, and beyond, politically expedient labels to provide an incisive and intimate portrait of poor black women in urban America. Drawing on dozens of interviews, Williams challenges the notion that low-income housing was a resounding failure that doomed three consecutive generations of post-war Americans to entrenched poverty. Instead, she recovers a history of grass-roots activism, of political awakening, and of class mobility, all facilitated by the creation of affordable public housing. The stereotyping of black women, especially mothers, has obscured a complicated and nuanced reality too often warped by the political agendas of both the left and the right, and has prevented an accurate understanding of the successes and failures of government anti-poverty policy. At long last giving human form to a community of women who have too often been treated as faceless pawns in policy debates, Rhonda Y. Williams offers an unusually balanced and personal account of the urban war on poverty from the perspective of those who fought, and lived, it daily.
“Sunlight at Early Dawn” : Economic Struggles, Public Housing, and Welfare Rights
Authors: Williams Rhonda Y
Published: October 2023

On a rainy day in 1966, Daisy Snipes and thirty-four other women rode a bus and cars to Annapolis, Maryland. Outside the Maryland State House, these members of Baltimore’s ﬁrst welfare rights group assembled and sang civil rights songs. Inside the capitol, representatives of Mother Rescuers from Poverty, whom Maryland’s legislative council had refused a hearing, walked unannounced into the council’s meeting, demanded higher grants, and charged that the welfare system “keeps us down” and that welfare mothers are “treated like dirt.”
What Is Dysthymia?
Authors: Thase Michael E , Lang Susan S
Published: October 2023

When was the last time you felt vibrant and energized by a job well done, shared laughter and warmth with a loved one, hummed in the shower, and, although it may sound corny, felt that there was a skip in your step? Do you still feel that your life is purposeful, that you feel pretty much in control, and that you actively love—and feel loved by— your friends and family with trusting, positive relationships? That’s how you can—and should—feel.