bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
New World Disorder:Black Hawk Downand the Eclipse of U.S. Military Humanitarianism in Africa
Authors: Dawson Ashley
Published: February 2012

This article argues that Ridley Scott's filmBlack Hawk Down(2001) may be seen with the benefit of historical hindsight as a portrait of the fear of imperial overreach and failure as written through the psyche of elite U.S. soldiers. InBlack Hawk Down, Mogadishu and its denizens are made to stand in for the worst fears of the American military and the civilian policymaking establishment: the city, and, by extension, urban Africa, is represented as a feral zone in which the U.S. military's unmatched firepower and technology are overwhelmed in densely populated slums. The Mog, as the film's Special Forces troops call the city, is a ramshackle megacity whose residents are armed to the teeth with the military detritus of the Cold War. Mogadishu thus embodies the new Heart of Darkness, a stateless urban world of vicious Hobbesian war of all against all. This view of Africa as the vanguard of anarchy is shared by a significant segment of the elite in the global North, who see the criminalization of the state in Africa as a direct threat to U.S. interests. If, as these analysts hold, it is from such feral zones that future threats to American society are likely to originate, then potent new weapons systems must be developed to deal with this racialized new world disorder. This article unpacks the ahistorical character of such selfserving representations of urban Africa, underlining the extent to which policies pursued during the Cold War and neoliberal era by powers such as the U.S. have helped to create the conditions thatBlack Hawk Downrepresents in such spectacular excess.
South Asia—Perennial Backwater or Object of Biased Assessment: A Discussion Based on Current Archaeological, Anthropological, and Genetic Evidence
Authors: Singh Varun
Published: February 2012

The evolution of humans from primates is well attested in Africa, considered to be the only place where the ancestors of modern humans could have evolved. The most ancestral human form, Homo erectus , is also thought to have migrated out of Africa. Recent genetic research has added support to an "Out of Africa" migration of modern man. However, the latest findings of population genetics have, by challenging the route of exodus, placed Asia and especially South Asia in a particularly prominent position. This new idea that humans emerging out of Africa undertook a long journey along the coasts of Asia toward Australia has also received recent support from archaeology. The long-standing belief that modern humans reached Europe by first journeying through the Levant, was based on the discovery of modern looking skeletons in southern France. This discovery of the "Cro-Magnons" in France spurred an intense search for more evidence of human presence in Europe. The wealth of data thus accumulated in Africa and Europe has formed the basis for all the discussion on human evolution and migration. Asia by contrast has suffered neglect both in terms of lack of interest and exploration of the same magnitude accorded Africa and Europe. What evidence exists has only attracted passing notice, the bulk of the data eluding the attention of western scholars. This article attempts to address this imbalance by bringing together all current information relating to the fields of anthropology, archaeology, and genetics. The area covered is by size enormous, but the focus is on the strength of evidence for colonization of South Asia from outside as opposed to contributions made by the indigenous people.
"Because of Their Praiseworthy Modesty, They Consult Too Late": Regime of Hope and Cancer of the Womb, 1800-1910
Authors: Löwy Ilana
Published: February 2012

The birth of the "do not delay" principle in cancer treatment has often been linked with developments in late nineteenth century: the rise of histology and cellular theory of malignancy that favored the definition of cancer as a local pathology, then the development of radical surgical techniques that transformed malignant tumors into a potentially curable condition. This text seeks to nuance this view. It points out important continuities in the understanding of the natural history of uterine cancers. At its center, the wish, already present in early nineteenth century, is to detect "early," that is, small and localized malignant lesions, then to extirpate or destroy these lesions before they become fully blown cancer. The long history of this particular regime of hope helps demonstrate why it is so difficult today to promote more nuanced views of the efficacy of early detection of malignant tumors.
Tell-Tale Heart: Organ Donation and Transplanted Subjectivities
Authors: Stabile Susan M.
Published: February 2012

After a fatal cardiac arrest in June 2009, my five-year-old niece was revived and put on life-support until her “new heart” arrived (at the awed relief of my family and the unbearable loss of another’s) on the morning of August 6th. I will explore what I call the “transplanted subjectivities” formed through the anonymous gestures of organ donation, as the transplanted organ upsets the boundaries between separate bodies and intimate, incorporated, though anonymous identities. Illuminating overlapping social, medical, psychological, and literary discourses of transplantation, I will examine the unanswerable autobiographical questions of incorporating an unknown other into one’s self.
Examining Hebrew-Amharic bilingual children's literature in Israel: Language, themes, and power
Authors: Baratz Lea , Zamir Sara
Published: February 2012

This article examines the emerging Israeli phenomenon of bilingual literature for children with a particular focus on Hebrew-Amharic children's literature and its representation of themes in a cultural, aesthetic, and linguistic context.
Folk literature and the preservation of culture: New approaches to African storytelling
Authors: Yenika-Agbaw Vivian
Published: February 2012

This author examines three touchstone books for young people as well as sample story videos from YouTube in terms of how they present African folklore and culture in authentic and innovative ways.
Striving to survive: Comic strips in Iran
Authors: Tarhandeh Sahar
Published: February 2012

Sahar Tarhandeh provides a brief history of comics in Iran. She shows us how factors such as the political climate, publishing costs, and diverse opinions regarding comics as legitimate literature come into play as comic strips in Iran strive to survive.
The graphic novel in India: East transforms West
Authors: Debroy Dipavali
Published: February 2012

Dipavali Debroy outlines the debut of comics and graphic novels in India. In the process we see how East and West converge as graphic novels have transformed to a truly Indian product. She notes too that when publishers abroad create graphic novels with Indian themes, these novels may lack authenticity and accurate details. She calls for graphic novels infused with Indian themes and innovative Indian art styles.
The National Right to Life Committee: Its Founding, Its History, and the Emergence of the Pro-Life Movement Prior to Roe V. Wade
Authors: Karrer Robert N.
Published: February 2012

During the mid-1960s a few Catholic journals and individuals advised that a more active role should be taken in defeating abortion reform. In 1967 the National Conference of Catholic Bishops selected James Thomas McHugh, administrator of the United States Catholic Conference’s Family Life Bureau, to guide its National Right to Life Committee (NRLC). Several pro-life organizations, including Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life, emerged and affiliated with the NRLC national office. To appeal to a more broad-based, nonsectarian movement, key Minnesota leaders proposed an organizational model that would separate the NRLC from its founder. In early 1973 McHugh and his executive assistant, Michael Taylor, proposed a different plan, facilitating the NRLC’s move to independence.
Acting Out Justice in J. J. Steinfeld’s “Courtroom Dramas”
Authors: Singer Sandra
Published: February 2012

The article provides an interpretation of “Courtroom Dramas,” a short story from J. J. Steinfeld’s fiction collection Would You Hide Me? (Gaspereau, 2003). First, the paper examines Steinfeld’s articulation of traumatic loss, and interprets the trial in “Courtroom Dramas” as a means for a grandson to mourn his deceased grandmother and (through memory of her) others unknown to him in the Holocaust. Here the fictional account of loss interacts productively with various theoretical models prevalent in the field of trauma studies. Second, historical justice issues embedded in this Holocaust story are revealed. Steinfeld’s fiction is situated, finally, within a body of auto-ethnographic writing on the Nazi genocide, work foregrounding trans-generational memory.

Cet article offre une interprétation de Courtroom Dramas, une nouvelle du recueil de J. J. Steinfield, Would You Hire Me? (Me cacheriez-vous ?) (Gaspereau, 2003). Il porte d’abord sur la manière dont Steinfeld exprime une perte dramatique et présente une interprétation du procès dans Courtroom Dramas comme un moyen pour le petit-fils de faire le deuil sa grand-mère décédée et (en se souvenant d’elle) de celui d’autres victimes de l’holocauste qu’il n’a pas connues. Une interaction productive se fait ici jour entre l’exposé de la perte dans une œuvre de fiction et divers modèles théoriques prévalant dans le domaine des études de traumatismes. En second lieu, l’article révèle des questions de justice historique enchâssées dans cette histoire de l’holo-causte. Enfin, il situe la nouvelle de Steinfeld dans l’ensemble des écrits auto-ethnographiques sur le génocide nazi, un travail qui met en avant la mémoire transgénérationnelle.
Peter Pan and the Contemporary Adolescent Novel
Authors: Blackburn William
Published: February 2012

Many contemporary adolescent novels deal with the passage from innocence to maturity. J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan is relevant to the study and teaching of such novels because it too deals with the loss that maturity brings, but, unlike many contemporary novels, it also offers a consolation for that loss. The presence or absence of such consolation is one criterion by which contemporary adolescent fiction may usefully be judged.
On the Theoretical Motivation for Positing Etiological Functions
Authors: Brunnander Björn
Published: February 2012

It is a plain fact that biology makes use of terms and expressions commonly spoken of as teleological. Biologists frequently speak of the function of biological items. They may also say that traits are ‘supposed to’ perform some of their effects, claim that traits are ‘for’ specific effects, or that organisms have particular traits ‘in order to’ engage in specific interactions. There is general agreement that there must be something useful about this linguistic practice but it is controversial whether it is entirely appropriate, and if so why it is.

Many theorists have defended the use of seemingly teleological terms by appeal to an etiological notion of function (Wright, 1973; Millikan, 1984, 2002; Neander, 1991; Griffiths, 1993; Godfrey-Smith, 1994; and Buller, 1999). According to the etiological notion, attributing a function to a trait is a matter of pointing to effects that account for why the trait has been selected for.
Catullus 44: The Invulnerability of Not Caring to Be Included
Authors: Hansen Wells S.
Published: February 2012

This paper argues that the address to the fundus in Catullus 44 reveals a poetic persona that rejects some values shared by other members of Rome's social elite. It reviews Catullus' self-presentation elsewhere, concluding that Catullus' pretensions of poverty privilege poetry over wealth, and then claims that Catullus' language in this poem specifically implies that the poet's detractors, not the poet, care about the name of Catullus' suburban neighborhood. The pragmatic function of this poem is thus to distance Catullus from such concerns and to underscore the importance of poetry over social status.
The Literary Compass: An Outlook on the Poetic Functions of Hydrography
Authors: Wolf Burkhardt
Published: February 2012

For centuries, perhaps since the emergence of poetry itself, Western culture has engaged in the project of "writing the sea," or hydrography, and within this project the compass has played a fundamental role. The essay serves as a brief introduction into the cultural history of the compass and shows how, ever since its first use, the compass has guided specific techniques of writing and notation and has been both poetically and epistemically productive. It argues this claim through a historical argument reaching from Dante's reception of the Odyssey and Ripa's Iconologia to Bacon, who considered the compass one of his age's emblems, and even the technological thinking of Heisenberg and Heidegger.
Amateur Knowledge: Public Art and Citizen Science
Authors: Rogers Hannah
Published: February 2012

The science studies literatures on amateurs and citizen science have remained largely unconnected despite similarities between the two categories. The essay connects amateur knowledge and citizen science through examples from public art. Through an analysis of the use of the term "amateur" by contemporary artists working to engage the public in critiques of science, connections in the ideals of democratic knowledge making by amateurs and citizen scientists are further explored.
Fleeting Substantiality: The Samoan Giant in US Popular Discourse
Authors: Henderson April K.
Published: February 2012

In this article I draw examples from the broader terrain of academic and popular literature, news media, television, and film to explore questions regarding representations of Samoans, and especially Samoan men, in the United States. The mediated accessibility of Samoans, via televised sports and entertainment, combines with their relative geographic and demographic inaccessibility to produce popular images of a population that the vast majority of Americans know very little about. Such representations are gendered in particular ways, such that the archetypal Samoan body in US popular discourse is now masculine, rather than feminine. I discuss how popular representations of Samoan men may be similar to representations of black men—the latter so central to discourses of race in the United States—as well as how are they different, particularly in light of the discursively slippery histories of representing Pacific peoples as both noble and ignoble “savages.” The main narrative component of discourses about Samoan men, body size, is critically engaged; additionally, the article argues that the added element of (indigenous) culture—thought to be outside or anterior to Western modernity—grant to Samoans an exoticness not normally granted to black Americans. This essay attempts to expose, engage, and examine these active processes of representation and myth creation—what visual theorist Clyde Taylor might term mythogenesis—to better understand the discursive terrain that Samoans negotiate, often ambivalently in the United States.
Case Management Intervention in Cervical Cancer Prevention: The Boston REACH Coalition Women’s Health Demonstration Project
Authors: Clark Cheryl R. , Baril Nashira , Hall Angela , Kunicki Marycarmen , Johnson Natacha , Soukup Jane , Lipsitz Stuart , Bigby JudyAnn
Published: February 2012

Background: The Boston REACH Coalition developed a case management intervention for Black women in primary care settings to identify and reduce medical and social obstacles to cervical cancer screening and following up abnormal results.
Methods: The 5-year intervention was evaluated among 732 Black women aged 18 to 75 who were at high risk for inadequate Pap smear screening and follow-up. Case managers provided social services referrals to address patient-identified social concerns (e.g., transportation, housing), as well as navigation to prompt screening and follow-up of abnormal tests. The three study aims were to (1) identify the social factors associated with Pap smear screening at baseline before intervention, (2) evaluate the correlation between exposure to case management intervention and achieving recommended Pap screening intervals, and (3) evaluate the correlation between exposure to case management intervention and having timely follow-up of abnormal Pap smear tests.
Results: We found that a lack of a regular clinical provider, concerns communicating with providers, poor self-rated health, and having less than a high school education were important correlates of recent Pap smear screening before the case management intervention. During the case management intervention, we found a significant increase in achieving recommended Pap smear screening intervals among women with a recent Pap smear at study entry (increasing from 52% in the first year to 80% after 4 or more years; p < .01), but not among women who entered the study without a recent Pap smear (increasing from 31% in the first year to 44% after 4 or more years; p = .39). During case management intervention, having social support for childcare was associated with regular screening among women without a recent Pap smear (odds ratio [OR], 3.52; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.28–9.69). Insurance status was the key factor in timely clinically indicated follow-up of abnormal results (uninsured OR, 0.27; 95% CI, 0.08–0.86), rather than case management intervention.
Conclusions: Exposure to case management was associated with regular Pap smear screening among women who recently engaged in screening. Future research should focus on systems changes to address social determinants of health, including strategies to facilitate screening for Black women without social support for childcare. To improve follow-up of abnormal results, financial access to care should be addressed.
Epidemiological Study of Greek University Students' Mental Health
Authors: Kounenou Kalliope , Koutra Aikaterini , Katsiadrami Aristea , Diacogiannis Georgios
Published: February 2012

In the present study, 805 Greek students participated by filling in self-report questionnaires studying depression (Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale), general health status (General Health Questionnaire), general psychopathology (Symptom Checklist-90-R), and personal demographic features. Some of the more prevalent findings indicate high depression rates and poor mental health. Significant differences in students' mental health were found according to gender, age, parents' educational level, personal work, permanent residence, preference of the school attended, and hospitalization owing to severe health problems.
An Examination of Individual Level Factors in Stress and Coping Processes: Perspectives of Chinese International Students in the United States
Authors: Yan Kun , Berliner David C.
Published: February 2012

No empirical research has focused solely upon understanding the stress and coping processes of Chinese international students in the United States. This qualitative inquiry examines the individual-level variables that affect the stress-coping process of Chinese international students and how they conceptualize and adapt to their stress at an American university. Results indicate individual variables, such as age, gender, field of study, length of stay, acculturation style, and coping strategies, show significant influences on stress levels among students. These results can be used to help Chinese international students adapt to the American educational environment and improve the services and programs American universities deliver to their foreign students.
No Time for Nostalgia
Authors: Schudson Michael
Published: February 2012

In 1985, when Robert Bellah and his colleagues in Habits of the Heart lamented the hyper-individualism of American society, and when Robert Putnam a decade later struck a similar note in Bowling Alone, the left, such as it had become, without Marx, without socialism, willing to countenance the market in its place but unable to think through what that place might be-this chastened, cautious, and exhausted left took solace in jeremiads that, between the lines, told us there wasn't much we could do; the best days lay behind us. But they don't.
Robert Heilbroner 1919-2005
Authors: Levinson Mark
Published: February 2012

Bob Heilbroner was a man of prodigious energy. He wrote hundreds of articles and more than twenty books that sold in excess of ten million copies. His first book, The Worldly Philosophers, sold nearly four million copies and is the second best-selling economics textbook of all time, after Paul Samuelson's Economics.
Revisiting The Vital Center
Authors: Mattson Kevin
Published: February 2012

Arthur Schlesinger's The Vital Center was a defense of liberalism that threw out ideas about optimism and progress. Schlesinger had learned from the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and his pessimism about human nature and sin. Just look at the "Soviet experience" and "the rise of fascism," Schlesinger told his readers in 1949, and it's clear that humans are "imperfect" and that "the corruptions of power could unleash great evil in the world." Considering that I had been reading Christopher Lasch, it was ironic to hear Schlesinger speak of "limits" throughout the book. Also strange was Schlesinger's belief that liberal democracy required certain virtues from its citizens. OK, Schlesinger may not have used the term virtue, but he certainly embraced such characteristics as "intricacy," "ambiguity," "a sense of humility," and Max Weber's ethic of responsibility-all as an alternative to the mindless certitude and "fanaticism" expected from the subjects of totalitarian political rule. Schlesinger believed citizens of a liberal democracy needed to face the "anxiety" of modernity-a heroic challenge of its own sort. This was no empty "proceduralism" nor was it the liberalism devoid of values that communitarians and "populists" like Lasch derided.
When the Killers Go Home: Local Justice in Rwanda
Authors: Clark Phil
Published: February 2012

The international community ignored the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, when nearly one million Tutsi and moderate Hutu were macheted to death, many by their own friends and neighbors, and it was almost entirely absent on the most momentous day in Rwanda since the genocide. Two Western media agencies, BBC Radio and the Canadian television network CTV, together provided a total of three and a half minutes' coverage when, on May 5, 2003, more than twenty thousand confessed genocide perpetrators were provisionally released into their hometowns, after spending nearly a decade in prison. I had expected to fight my way through hordes of journalists to talk to the detainees before they boarded buses, returning to the same communities where they committed their crimes. Instead, I walked unimpeded into the Kinyinya "solidarity camp" on the outskirts of Kigali, one of eighteen civic education centers around Rwanda, where, for three months between leaving prison and being released into the community, around a thousand confessed génocidaires received instruction from government officials on how to be good citizens in the post-genocide society.
Overworked, Time Poor, and Abandoned by Uncle Sam: Why Don't American Parents Protest?
Authors: Gornick Janet C.
Published: February 2012

The story of the overworked American parent is by now well-known. Every day, millions of American parents—single and partnered, low-income and affluent—scramble to coordinate the demands of employment with their children's need for care and supervision. In the majority of families in the United States, all the adults are in the workforce, more often than not working full time. It is not surprising that the stressed-out working parent is now a staple in multiple venues, from social science research to newspaper opinion columns to TV-land. As Kathleen Gerson pointed out in these pages last year ("The Morality of Time: Women and the Expanding Work Week," Fall 2004), the common wisdom in the United States generally lays the responsibility for the work—family time bind on individuals and lets American institutional realities off the hook. Conservatives typically focus on mothers, protesting that many (middle-class and well-off) women are choosing paid work over family, indulging themselves while leaving their children and husbands unattended. (Poor single mothers, of course, have long been exempted from this criticism, as they are expected to work for pay.) And many progressives, Gerson argues, have not helped matters, too often attributing Americans' notoriously long work hours to their ever-expanding desire for consumption or their preference for the effects-oriented workplace over the strains and uncertainties of life at home. But, in fact, the American institutional landscape deserves much of the blame. Many workplaces are still designed for workers who have no competing responsibilities, and the paucity of public policies that support working families can hardly be overstated. As Marcia Meyers and I argue in our book—Families That Work—the American state provides much less to working parents than do many other countries, especially the high-income countries of northern and western Europe.
The Passion of Christopher Hitchens
Authors: Kazin Michael
Published: February 2012

Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, an unsettling matter has roiled certain precincts of the left: Christopher Hitchens's zealous support of the Bush administration's foreign policy, in particular its war in Iraq. How could the once fearless radical polemicist have become a cheerleader for the neoconservative project to remake the world? Why must he revile former comrades as either traitors or slackers in the struggle against terrorists? Why, this June, did he join David Horowitz to conduct a ten-day tour of London, featuring private visits to the House of Lords and the estate of Winston Churchill? Some believe Hitchens's apostasy began in 1989 when an Iranian fatwa—which still stands—demanded the murder of his close friend the novelist Salman Rushdie. A few connect his militant patriotism to his applying for American citizenship or even the discovery that he had Jewish ancestors. Others prefer to fault his personality instead of his politics. Hasn't Hitchens always been an arrogant individualist, eager to bash the illusions of the left? Perhaps all that good whiskey and champagne finally curdled his synapses?
The Last Bicycle Tire Plant: Mexican Factory Workers' Dream Dies on Altar of Free Trade
Authors: Lafer Gordon
Published: February 2012

When Americans think about free trade and Mexico, we usually think of one thing: the giant sucking sound of U.S. jobs being lost to cheaper labor in the south. We lose, they gain. Our family-wage jobs become their $2 per hour step up from rural poverty; that's the shorthand summary of what the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) looks like from our side of the border. If that story was true at one point, however, it is no longer. Barely ten years since NAFTA was signed, many Mexicans find themselves in a position surprisingly similar to that of American workers: apparently too expensive for international investors, they're watching their jobs leave the country by the tens of thousands.
Gregory Wilpert Replies
Authors: Wilpert Gregory
Published: February 2012

With regard to human rights abuses, Casey mentions violent attacks against opposition demonstrations. Although it is true that people were killed during demonstrations between April 2002 and March 2004 (hardly before or since that period), there are several facts one should be aware of when drawing conclusions about the Chávez government with regard to this violence. First, the violence came from both sides of Venezuela's political divide and affected both Chávez supporters and opponents equally. Chávez's security forces, however, were almost never responsible for these deaths. Rather, in all except for one case the deaths were caused either by unidentified shooters (such as during the April 2002 coup), civilians from both sides, or by city police under the control of a city mayor who was with the opposition.
Reading Lolita at Guantánamo: Or, This Page Cannot be Displayed
Authors: Koppelman Andrew
Published: February 2012

In January 2005, a federal judge threw out the Bush administration's most prominent prosecution against obscenity, in an opinion that cast doubt on the constitutionality of every obscenity prosecution in the country. The Court of Appeals reversed that decision in December, but it did not question the judge's conclusion that the U.S. Supreme Court had undercut the foundations of obscenity law. The Court may soon have to confront, for the first time in decades, the question of whether it makes any sense to say that obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment. The answer to that question sheds light on an apparently unrelated issue: the peculiar self-deceptions that underlie the practice of the "war on terror."
China On the Capitalist Road
Authors: Bensman David
Published: February 2012

In 2005, China experienced more than seventy five thousand public protests in rural villages and urban factories. These bursts of discontent appear to have made a deep impression on China's party leaders. As in nineteenth-century Europe, the specter of revolution calls forth reform. But the capitalist road has lots of twists and turns. A recent trip to Beijing presented a myriad of images.
On Second Thought . . .
Authors: Meyerson Harold
Published: February 2012

Harold Meyerson reviews Peter Beinart's The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals— Can Win the War on Terror and Make American Great Again .
Notes from a Swiss Prison
Authors: Silone Ignazio , Pugliese Stanislao G.
Published: February 2012

Ignazio Silone, born Secondo Tranquilli in the Abruzzi region of Italy on May 1, 1900, was a founding member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). He changed his name while in a Spanish prison, under arrest for his political activities. Charged with important tasks by the PCI, he traveled to Moscow for a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Communist International in May 1927. There, Joseph Stalin insisted that the EC condemn Leon Trotsky for treason based on a document that Stalin refused to make available to the members of the committee. When Silone naively asked to read the incriminating document, Stalin protested. Silone refused to condemn Trotsky without having seen the evidence, and Stalin insisted that if the motion to condemn was not unanimous, it would be withdrawn. A day later, Silone was astonished to read in the newspapers that the EC of the Comintern had "unanimously" condemned Trotsky. So began a long and painful process of disillusionment that was to end with Silone's expulsion from the Communist Party in 1931.
Corruption and Reconstruction in Liberia
Authors: Jahr Nicholas
Published: February 2012

The train tracks are visible again. You couldn't even tell they were there before, so completely had the bush overrun them. But in a few weeks, workers hacked their way up and down the line, clearing the track from Sanniquellie in Liberia's north to Ganta, twenty-five miles south. Soon, trains may again ferry iron ore to the port of Buchanan on the coast. Something remarkable is happening in Liberia, and the tracks are only one of the more visible signs. While Baghdad burns and Iraq keeps turning corners, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has become the first woman to be elected head of state in Africa, and, at this writing, she's promised to turn the lights on in Monrovia within her first six months.
Günter Grass and the Secret
Authors: Reese Dagmar
Published: February 2012

There were a lot of secrets in postwar Germany. There still are. For some it was a matter of incriminating knowledge of crimes and fear of prosecution. But many people who witnessed Nazism kept silent because there were no words for what they had seen. What they saw was as far removed from everyday normalcy as the earth is from the moon. Hannah Arendt described the experience of the concentration camps as "life on the moon." But the horror of the war could also remain lodged in the synapses. Later generations did not always ask questions, and among them were many who didn't want to know what truly had transpired. Best to leave the burden of the past and memory to those who passed through its inferno. Many of us, but not all, are within the folds of that secret.
Immigration Nation: A Guide for the Perplexed
Authors: Gerstle Gary
Published: February 2012

In absolute terms, the number of immigrants residing in the United States—approximately thirty-five million—is at an all—time high. In relative terms, the density of the foreign-born population is approaching the peaks reached in the two previous waves of immigration, the 1830s to the 1850s and the 1880s to the 1920s. Moreover, the current wave, which began in the late 1960s, has spread far beyond the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast, the three areas of the country in which most immigrants of earlier times had concentrated. Florida, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Arizona, and Colorado now have large immigrant populations. And in these states and, indeed throughout the country, immigrants have distributed themselves to second-tier cities and even small towns to a far greater degree than ever before. For this reason, immigration, in demographic terms, is arguably more of a national phenomenon today than at any other point in U.S. history.
How to Tax the Rich: And Live Happily Ever After
Authors: Blackburn Robin
Published: February 2012

Sharpening inequality, rocketing "financial partnership" income, and obscene levels of executive "compensation" make all the more unacceptable the accompanying massacre of job-related entitlements to health care and pensions. Mounting foreclosures, bankruptcies, and threats to employment itself have led to a deepening and widespread sense of insecurity. Many of these insecurities affect the middle class as much as the poor. One response has been outbreaks of economic populism. Unfortunately, some populists aim at the wrong target and fail to press the most important measures of redress. For example, some attack Hispanics rather than a tax system that the corporations and the rich evade almost at will. A system that fails to tax those most able to pay creates a spending problem.
The Russian Conundrum: Growing Economy, Failing Society
Authors: Varese Federico
Published: February 2012

The Tver region, which lies two hundred kilometers to the north of Moscow invthe direction of St. Petersburg, was the capital of a powerful medieval state. In 1246, Alexander Nevsky entrusted it to his brother Yaroslav Yaroslavich, and very soon this dynasty transformed an inhospitable and uncultivated land into one of Russia's wealthiest and most populous states. The ensuing two-hundred-year battle for supremacy between Tver and Moscow is a much-visited historical subject. The Volga runs through the city of Tver and continues southward to Yaroslav, Nizhniy Novgorod, Saratov, Volgograd (former Stalingrad), and Astrachan, where it enters the Caspian Sea. One small town in the region, Kostinovo, has found its way into the papers because it now has just one inhabitant, Antonina Makarova, age seventy-eight. Her nearest neighbor, Maria Belkova, lives in the next town, which has a population of two. As reported in the St. Petersburg Times of October 2006 by Kim Murphy, the number of inhabitants in the region has decreased by about 250,000 since 1989, and deaths exceed births by two to one. Kostinovo is one of the 1,400 towns in the Tver region that have been officially declared "depopulated" (nezhiloe).
Who Named the Neocons?
Authors: Ross Benjamin
Published: February 2012

The word neoconservative has (Internet search tools now reveal) a long prehistory of use in academic and quasi-academic writing to describe any new variant of conservatism. I found it used in 1883, in a periodical that featured excerpts from Karl Marx's new book Capital.
The Last Page
Authors: Levinson Mark
Published: February 2012

This is the story of two economists—John Kenneth Galbraith, who died last year at age ninety-seven, and Paul Krugman, who at fifty-four is in his prime as an economist and a columnist for the New York Times.
"We, the Jury . . ."
Authors: de Tocqueville Alexis
Published: February 2012

My subject having led me to discuss the administration of justice in the United States, I shall not leave it without speaking of the jury. . . . To regard the jury simply as a judicial institution would be taking a very narrow view of the matter, for great though its influence on the outcome of lawsuits is, its influence on the fate of society itself is much greater still. The jury is therefore above all a political institution, and it is from that point of view that it must always be judged. . . .
1968: Lessons Learned
Authors: Gornick Vivian
Published: February 2012

At an SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) conference held in the spring of 1967, Abbie Hoffman, Paul Krassner, and the San Francisco hippie group "the Diggers" burst into the middle of Tom Hayden's keynote speech, screaming that the people in the room didn't have the balls to make a revolution, they'd piss in their pants when the violence erupted. For SDS, the arrival of the counterculture wildmen was a disaster; Todd Gitlin later wrote that in its wake the New Left failed to "outgrow the student movement." For Abbie Hoffman, the conference had been "monumental," an event he gladly added to his résumé of political action.
1968: Lessons Learned
Authors: Kazin Michael
Published: February 2012

It's tempting to view 1968 in the United States and Western Europe as a repetition of 1848—and, contrary to Marx's axiom, one fully as tragic the second time around. In both years, radical movements mainly of the young made daring, if ill-prepared, assaults on the forces of order. All were crushed and defeated, and the defeats ushered in a long period of left retrenchment and conservative triumph. That temptation should be resisted.
Reviving James Michener: The Relevance of South Pacific
Authors: Mills Nicolaus
Published: February 2012

Fifty-nine years after its Broadway debut, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's South Pacific is once again drawing applause. At this year's Tony Award ceremony, it topped all musicals, winning seven awards. But the most serious praise for New York City's Lincoln Center revival stems from the way it deals with race. The praise is well deserved for a play that in 1949 was far ahead of its time, but critics have failed to give sufficient credit to the person most responsible for the intelligence behind South Pacific—James Michener, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning 1947 Tales of the South Pacific provided Rodgers and Hammerstein with their story.
A $22,000 Question
Authors: Metzgar Jack
Published: February 2012

Jack Metzgar reviews Steven Greenhouse's The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker and David Kusnet's Love the Work, Hate the Job: Why America's Biggest Workers are Unhappier than Ever .
Farewell to the Hutongs: Urban Development in Beijing
Authors: Stone Amy
Published: February 2012

In the best 60 Minutes tradition, a China Central Television (CCTV) producer sent me out last summer to the planned "Jade River" real estate redevelopment for some investigative reporting on the fate of Beijing's historic hutongs or alleyways. I was armed with a concealed camera inside a made-in-China purse. The producer also equipped me with the cell phone and e-mail persona of "Emily Tinari," a rich American, charmed by the traditional hutongs of old Beijing, lusting to own a courtyard house of her own.
The Last Page
Authors: Cornell Cassandra
Published: February 2012

"The service was not so good," an acquaintance told me of the highly rated restaurant for which she had made reservations six months in advance. A waitress myself, I asked what she meant. Pausing, she came up with only one example: "They had to cross their arms to set the dishes down in the right places." Listening to her talk about food service was like hearing her review a play. She thought she was paying waitstaff respect by appreciating the dignity of their art. A waiter should be polite and attractive, efficiently providing the right things at the right times with the perfect words to make you feel that you are eating the best food in the world. It is a peculiar role that we servers play.
Banned in Red Scare Boston: The Forgotten Story of Charlie and the "M.T.A."
Authors: Dreier Peter , Vrabel Jim
Published: February 2012

On a clear, chilly day in November 2004, then-Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney stood inside a large white tent set up on the brick plaza outside Boston City Hall. Romney wasn't there to deliver a speech or cut a ribbon. He was there to sing a song—something he did with gusto as he joined the Kingston Trio in a rousing rendition of "M.T.A.," the well-known ballad about a "man named Charlie" doomed to "ride forever 'neath the streets of Boston" and become "the man who never returned." The purpose of this unusual concert was to launch the "Charlie Card," an electronic fare card that has now replaced tokens on the Boston subway system. "I've always wanted to do that, since about the fifth grade," said Romney, after singing the song that has become not only part of American folklore, but a proud part of Boston history.
Tricky Dick's Legacy
Authors: Freeman Joshua
Published: February 2012

Joshua Freeman reviews Rick Perlstein's Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America .
A Man for Many Seasons
Authors: Wellington Darryl Lorenzo
Published: February 2012

Manning Marable's Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention hit the book stands last spring with considerable buzz, given the allure that accompanied Malcolm X's life story, as well as the drama of Marable's personal tragedy. Marable died of complications resulting from pneumonia at age sixty a few days before the publication of his magnum opus. His sudden demise heightened the impression that his Malcolm—the product of ten years of work—would be definitive. The man euphemistically known as "the Brother X" has become iconic. He has been the subject of a major Hollywood biopic. But his legacy remains contested. Critics and admirers alike pick and choose from among the images of Malcolm X. There is the majestic freedom fighter, admired by Spike Lee and Barack Obama. There is the Brother X associated with parochial-minded anti-Americanism; the race-baiting Malcolm X recently denounced by Stanley Crouch as "a maskmaker from his days as a hustler to the moment at which he was shot to death"; Malcolm the global humanitarian, the symbol of world brotherhood; Malcolm the sectarian, the divisive influence. There is the religious Malcolm, potentially the new face of Black Islamic America.
Off the Presses
Authors: Ventura Elbert
Published: February 2012

Theodore Roszak, in The Making of a Counter Culture, identified the central battle of the sixties as that between youth culture and the technocracy. Integral to the struggle for liberation was the ouster of the expert, whose regime was predicated on a tautology: "The technocracy is legitimized because it enjoys the approval of experts; the experts are legitimized because there could be no technocracy without them." So did the counterculture expose the "myth of objective consciousness," Roszak wrote, and offer a way out of the consensus cul-de-sac of that terrible decade.
An Exploration of Optimal Stabilization Policy
Authors: Mankiw N. Gregory , Weinzierl Matthew
Published: February 2012

This paper examines the optimal response of monetary and fiscal policy to a decline in aggregate demand. The theoretical framework is a two-period general equilibrium model in which prices are sticky in the short run and flexible in the long run. Policy is evaluated by how well it raises the welfare of the representative household. Although the model has Keynesian features, its policy prescriptions differ significantly from those of textbook Keynesian analysis. Moreover, the model suggests that the commonly used “bang for the buck” calculations are potentially misleading guides for the welfare effects of alternative fiscal policies.
On Alienation in Hanoch Levin's Theatre of Protest
Authors: Milman Yoseph
Published: February 2012

The subject of this paper is alienation as a poetic issue and its expression in Hanoch Levin's "theatre of protest." The first part of the article is devoted to the definition of the concepts "theatre of protest"—drama which has a subversive ideological message conveyed through poetic innovation—and "alienation"—the feeling of dis-empathy felt by the audience, and directed at a) the world presented on the stage, b) the "implied playwright," and c) the playwright himself. In the second part of the article several aspects of alienation (thematic, stylistic, rhetorical) will be examined in Hanoch Levin's "plays of protest" ( Execution, Everybody Wants to Live ). An attempt will be made to show how such plays undermine the basic assumptions of the traditional Aristotelian poetics of drama and demonstrate their "revolutionary" nature, in both the ideological and aesthetic sense of the term (Adorno, Marcuse, Sartre).
The Basic Meaning of the Term ערפל'Darkness'
Authors: Cohen Chaim
Published: February 2012

The fifteen occurrences of ערפל in the Bible may be semantically divided according to the following four usages: a) a general usage of 'darkness' (without any specific connection to clouds); b) a specialized usage (sometimes cosmological) referring to God's heavenly presence or abode, conceived in the form of a cloud (without any specific connection to darkness); c) a combination of the first two usages according to which the cloud in usage b is enveloped in darkness; d) a technical weather usage referring to a phenomenon which is apparent in the sky, involving thick clouds and inhibiting sight over a considerable distance, i.e. darkness in the sky or, in modern terminology, "fog." The fourth usage (only in Job 22:13-14) is the key for understanding the semantic connection between the first three usages as being derived from the basic meaning 'darkness'. Both biblical and Akkadian evidence is brought in support of this semantic development. Etymologically, the key evidence is the occurrence of this substantive several times in Ugaritic according to the form ģrpl , meaning 'dense fog', and the existence of the Akkadian verb erëpu 'to be dusky, dark'. A new etymological understanding is suggested here involving two distinct primary verbal roots: * ģrb/p 'to be dusky, dark' and ' rb/p 'to enter'; one primary noun *' erp/betu 'cloud' and its denominative verb *' rp/b 'to drip', which appears also in metathesis as * r'p .
More on Sa'adia Gaon's Perspective on the Grammatical Root
Authors: Kaplan Roger Jay
Published: February 2012

The concept of the grammatical root was an important tool for medieval lexicographers. Yet, Sa'adia Gaon, who was the first to differentiate between formative letters and radicals in Hebrew morphology, did not use grammatical roots in his linguistic works. Though he saw separate functions for each consonant in a word, there is no evidence that Sa'adia accepted or applied the concept of consonantal roots in his grammatical works. Through an analysis of data including individual entries in hâ-'Egrôn , verb paradigms and linguistic terminology, the author shows that Sa'adia used basic forms instead to derive verbs and nouns.