bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The superstring cosmological constant and the Schottky form in genus 5
Authors: Grushevsky Samuel , Manni Riccardo Salvati
Published: February 2012

Combining certain identities for modular forms due to Igusa with Schottky-Jung relations, we study the cosmological constant for the recently proposed ansatz for the chiral superstring measure in genus 5. The vanishing of this cosmological constant turns out to be equivalent to the long-conjectured vanishing of a certain explicit modular form of genus 5 on the moduli of curves ${\cal M}_5$, and we disprove this conjecture, thus showing that the cosmological constant for the proposed ansatz does not vanish identically. We exhibit an easy modification of the genus 5 ansatz satisfying factorization constraints and yielding a vanishing cosmological constant. We also give an expression for the cosmological constant for the proposed ansatz that should hold for any genus if certain generalized Schottky-Jung identities hold.
Nondispersive radial solutions to energy supercritical non-linear wave equations, with applications
Authors: Kenig Carlos E. , Merle Frank
Published: February 2012

In this paper we establish optimal pointwise decay estimates for non-dispersive (compact) radial solutions to non-linear wave equations in 3 dimensions, in the energy supercritical range. As an application, we show for the full energy supercritical range, in the defocusing case, that if the scale invariant Sobolev norm of a radial solution remains bounded in its maximal interval of existence, then the solution must exist for all times and scatter.
Holomorphic mappings between hyperquadrics with small signature difference
Authors: Baouendi M. Salah , Ebenfelt Peter , Huang Xiaojun
Published: February 2012

In this paper, we study holomorphic mappings sending a hyperquadric of
signature $\ell$ in ${\Bbb C}^n$ into a hyperquadric of signature $\ell'$
in ${\Bbb C}^N$. We show (Theorem 1.1) that if the signature difference
$\ell'-\ell$ is not too large, then the mapping can be normalized by
automorphisms of the target hyperquadric to a particularly simple form
and, in particular, the image of the mapping is contained in a complex
plane of a dimension that depends only on $\ell$ and $\ell'$, and not on
the target dimension $N$.\ We also prove a Hopf Lemma type result (Theorem
1.3) for such mappings.
A Stroll with Lucilius: Horace, Satires 1.9 Reconsidered
Authors: Ferriss-Hill Jennifer L.
Published: February 2012

This article argues that the "bore" who pursues Horace in Satires 1.9 should be read as Lucilius, the inventor of Roman verse Satire. This reconsideration of the interlocutor allows certain previously puzzling aspects of the poem, in particular Horace's failure to escape from his companion, to be understood in programmatic terms. The poem literally enacts the complex and timeless dance between successor and model: as long as he is writing satire, Horace cannot be free of Lucilius' presence, and yet to succeed as a satirist he must struggle for a certain measure of independence from his predecessor.
Polyphemus and Odysseus in the Nursery: Mother’s Milk in the Cyclopeia
Authors: Clayton Barbara
Published: February 2012

This paper establishes a nursing motif in the Cyclopeia . Polyphemus, identified as a symbolic maternal breast, represents a maternal principle ultimately aligned with the golden-age aspect of the Cyclopean world. This golden age is examined from the perspective of an “Adamic” language where word and thing match exactly. When Odysseus blinds Polyphemus, maternity is defeated, paternity triumphs, and golden-age language is no longer possible. Because paternity is by nature open to question, it is a potential generator of fiction(s). Thus paternity’s victory in the Cyclopeia signals the beginning of Odyssean mêtis , namely the possibility of deception through language.
Agrarian Populism in Colonial and Postcolonial Malawi
Authors: Green Erik
Published: February 2012

This article analyses continuity and change of the agrarian doctrine in colonial and postcolonial Malawi. It engages in a classic debate about images and polices concerning African farming. The article argues that the agrarian doctrine must be related to the broader notion of agrarian populism, more specifically to Chayanov's notion of the logic of the peasant family farm. Employing this broader approach allows a striking continuity of the agrarian doctrine to be revealed. Calls for changes of local institutions did not signify attempts to promote rural transformation, but contained strategies to increase the economic independence of the precapitalist family farm.
Modern Media and Culture in Senegal: Speaking Truth to Power
Authors: Gueye Marame
Published: February 2012

In a You Tube video, a young man performs a satirical poem about Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade. The author brilliantly sums up Wade's tenure in one minute. He compares the president to “a rat's hole” and makes fun of his physical features while emphasizing many ways in which Wade has failed the nation. Some viewers thought the performance was disrespectful of the president, and others feared for the author's safety. This article argues that although the World Wide Web gives voice to African youth, it can be a dangerous space, especially for artists. The viewers' negative comments and their concern for the author's life is a modern response to his art and a consequence of its presentation on the Internet. If viewed through the lenses of traditional Wolof oral forms, however, the poem's harsh rhetoric takes on less controversial meanings that the viewers did not seem to understand.
Provenance and Technology of Lithic Artifacts from the Teouma Lapita Site, Vanuatu
Authors: Reepmeyer Christian , Spriggs Matthew , Bedford Stuart , Ambrose Wallace
Published: February 2012

Fifty-six obsidian artifacts and 141 non-obsidian artifacts were excavated in three field seasons at Teouma, Efate Island, central Vanuatu. Using LA-ICP-MS the majority of the obsidian artifacts were provenienced to the obsidian subsource of Kutau/Bao on West New Britain in the Bismarck Archipelago, Papua New Guinea. This study is the first geochemical analysis of a significant assemblage of West New Britain obsidian south of the Solomon Islands. Moreover, this finding represents only the second sizable assemblage of West New Britain obsidian in Remote Oceania beyond the Reefs–Santa Cruz Lapita sites and further establishes Vanuatu as a key area in understanding the initial Lapita settlement of Remote Oceania. Six obsidian artifacts were sourced to the Banks Islands, northern Vanuatu, supporting the hypothesis that sources there were known and utilized from the initial colonization of the Vanuatu Archipelago. A single artifact from the West New Britain subsource of Mopir was found. This is the only Lapita-period Mopir obsidian artifact found so far outside the Bismarck Archipelago. The geochemical analysis was accompanied by a quantitative attribute analysis investigating the reduction technology of the flaked assemblage.
Political Change in the DPRK
Authors: Haggard Stephan , Pinkston Daniel
Published: February 2012

Asia Policy 's editor, Andrew Marble, discusses political change in North Korea with Stephan Haggard, Krause distinguished professor at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California–San Diego, and Daniel Pinkston, senior analyst and deputy project director for North East Asia at the International Crisis Group in Seoul.
Human Resources and China's Long Economic Boom
Authors: Rawski Thomas G.
Published: February 2012

This article depicts how China's economic boom rests on a historical accumulation of skills and capabilities that extends far beyond the typical complement of human assets available to low-income nations.
A Physician and a Man of Science: Patients, Physicians, and Diseases in Marcello Malpighi's Medical Practice
Authors: Bresadola Marco
Published: February 2012

Marcello Malpighi (1628-94), the celebrated Italian anatomist, was also a very successful physician and, as his correspondence indicates, medical consultant by post. This article focuses on the professional and social network that developed around Malpighi's medical activity. The network played a major role in promoting Malpighi's professional career and in disseminating his scientific ideas. Malpighi's medical practice was indeed fully integrated within his views of the structure and functioning of the human body in health and disease. A fresh look into Malpighi's medical practice allows us to get new insights into early modern relations among medicine, the new science, and the identity of physicians.
Queer Epistemologies: Theorizing the Self from a Writerly Place Called Home
Authors: Johnson E. Patrick
Published: February 2012

Drawing on the insights of performance studies, this essay theorizes writing as autobiographical performance. Methodologically, the essay employs the act of writing itself to engage the politics of representation and the ways that class, race, sexuality, and gender may be meaningfully explored through the self-refl exive act of performative writing.
"Víboras de papel" en la dramaturgia calderoniana
Authors: Hildner David J.
Published: February 2012

Una de las huellas distintivas de la "filosofía natural" renacentista y barroca es su fascinación con las sustancias "de doble filo", es decir, con las que se producen, en distintos momentos o circunstancias, tanto efectos benéficos como maléficos. Además, se ve un fuerte intéres en los objetos que producen sus efectos por medios extraordinarios o aparentemente sobrenaturales. En este estudio se examinan dos comedias calderonianas, una grave ( El mayor monstruo los celos ) y otra leve ( No hay burlas con el amor ) donde aparecen mensajes escritos que, según el discurso de varios personajes, poseen la capacidad asombrosa de "envenenar" al leerse y de surtir el mismo efecto venenoso cuando quedan partidos o rasgados.
Working in a Tradition
Authors: Gleason Philip
Published: February 2012

Distinguished historian Philip Gleason reflects on his work in American Catholic history, including influential mentors, research directions, publications, and other important aspects of his career.
Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden : Engendering Abjection's Sublime
Authors: Jenkins Ruth Y.
Published: February 2012

This essay examines the continued appeal of Burnett's novel despite its apparently conservative, gendered values. Read in the context of the late-Victorian zeitgeist and through Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, however, The Secret Garden reveals challenges to the culture's dominant values of competition and provides readers with an alternative model of social interaction. With this psychosocial model, Burnett also demonstrates the value of acknowledging, rather than denying, that which has been rejected by culture.
"Chairman Mao's Child": Sparkling Red Star and the Construction of Children in the Chinese Cultural Revolution
Authors: Xu Xu
Published: February 2012

This essay studies the interrelationship between the constructions of both a national identity and an ideal childhood during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, 1966–1976. By exploring a Chinese children's film, Sparking Red Star , the author argues that the construction of an idealized proletarian childhood—as opposed to Romantic conceptions—contributed to the fashioning of a new socialist national identity. Drawing on Judith Butler's concept of performativity and Michel Foucault's theorization of disciplinary power, the author suggests that a pedagogical emphasis on the child's service to the nation-state simultaneously involves both the citation of the phantasmatic ideal of a model (adult) revolutionary subject and the child's own necessary deviation from this ideal. Thus both the citation and its failure work to anchor the child subject to a model of citizenship in the New China.
The Structure of Open-Mindedness
Authors: Baehr Jason
Published: February 2012

Open-mindedness enjoys widespread recognition as an intellectual virtue. This is evident, among other ways, in its appearance on nearly every list of intellectual virtues in the virtue epistemology literature. Despite its popularity, however, it is far from clear what exactly openmindedness amounts to: that is, what sort of intellectual orientation or activity is essential to it. In fact, there are ways of thinking about open-mindedness that cast serious doubt on its status as an intellectual virtue.

Consider the following description, from Robert Roberts and Jay Wood (2007), of a ‘bright college freshman, taking an introductory course in philosophy.’
We Must Call the Classics before a Court of Shipwrecked Men
Authors: Connor W. Robert
Published: February 2012

What if we put to our texts the injunction of the Spanish intellectual Jose Ortega y Gasset—"We must call the classics before a court of shipwrecked men to answer certain peremptory questions with reference to real life"? The answer that emerges from an investigation of several literary works depicting a shipwrecked person who has access to one or more texts—Shakespeare's Tempest , Defoe's Robinson Crusoe , Stevenson's Treasure Island , and, at one point, Dante's Inferno —points to the transformative power of such texts. Ortega's own work lead to an exploration of authenticity and vocation in Vergil's Aeneid .
The ABC Technique for Reinforcing Declensional Endings
Authors: Melchior Aislinn A.
Published: February 2012

Because English marks grammatical relationships primarily through word order, declensions can be confounding to some students. Below I outline a technique I have developed for first-semester Latin. It is easily incorporated into most curricula, takes little time, and can be adapted to various teaching styles. Most importantly, it helps find those students who need additional assistance (even if they've not yet realized it).By stripping vocabulary from the sentences, students are forced to focus on form rather than word meaning. When used to supplement other pedagogical approaches, this technique can reveal that declensions have a purpose which transcends torment.
Hinc Omnis Pendet? : Old Comedy and Roman Satire
Authors: Sommerstein Alan
Published: February 2012

This article reconsiders the relationship between Horace’s iter Brundisinum ( Sat. 1.5), Lucilius’ iter Siculum (book 3), and Aristophanes’ Frogs . It argues that both Horace’s poem and Lucilius’ are more extensively indebted to Frogs than had previously been recognized; that Horace’s claim ( Sat . 1.4.1–7) that Lucilius was “totally dependent” on Old Comedy has a superficial plausibility if one considers only Lucilius’ first three books, though hardly applicable to his whole corpus; and that Horace chose to link Lucilian satura with Old Comedy, rather than with Archilochus and the iambographers, because in his Epodes he was presenting himself as Archilochus’ heir.
Evaluation of Community–Academic Partnership Functioning: Center for the Elimination of Hepatitis B Health Disparities
Authors: VanDevanter Nancy , Kwon Simona , Sim Shao-Chee , Chun Kay , Trinh-Shevrin Chau
Published: February 2012

Background: Process evaluation of community–academic partnership function and fidelity to principles of community-based participatory research (CBPR) is essential to achievement of intermediate and long term partnership goals.
Objectives: This article describes the evaluation of B Free CEED, a community–academic partnership created to address hepatitis health disparities in Asian American and Pacific Islander (API) communities.
Methods: A mixed methods approach with an online survey and qualitative key informant interviews was conducted with all partnership members at baseline and follow-up, 18 months later.
Results: Survey findings showed stability over time, with some consistent differences in community and academic perspectives. Academic members were somewhat more satisfied with the partnership functioning. Key informant interviews provided contextual data key to further defining partnership functioning.
Conclusions: Conducting ongoing partnership evaluations is necessary to reassess and align processes and protocols to enhance partnership functioning and strengthen group cohesion.
In Search of a "Good College": Decisions and Determinations Behind Asian American Students' College Choice
Authors: Kim Jessica K. , Gasman Marybeth
Published: February 2012

Through in-depth interviews, 14 Asian American college students at an elite, private Northeastern US university were asked to describe their experiences and relationships with family, friends, teachers, and counselors during their college-choice process. The results suggest that students considered their social networks, especially family and peers, to be most important in making decisions about where to apply and attend. The type of support students received from high school guidance counselors mainly depended on the kind of secondary school they attended. Students also relied on external sources of information provided by various media outlets. Implications of the findings for conceptualizing access and choice in higher education for Asian American students are discussed and recommendations for future research and practice are offered.
The Long-Term Effects of College Diversity Experiences: Well-Being and Social Concerns 13 Years After Graduation
Authors: Bowman Nicholas A. , Brandenberger Jay W. , Hill Patrick L. , Lapsley Daniel K.
Published: February 2012

Many college administrators and researchers assert that diversity interactions are critical for preparing young adults for a diverse society, but very little research has examined the long-term impact of these experiences. This study examines a longitudinal sample of college students ( n = 416) who were followed into their mid-30s. Structural equation modeling analyses indicate that college engagement with racial/cultural diversity has a positive, indirect effect on personal growth, purpose in life, recognition of racism, and volunteer work 13 years after graduation.
Achievement Goals and Coping Strategies: Identifying the Traditional/Nontraditional Students Who Use Them
Authors: Johnson Marcus Lee , Nussbaum E. Michael
Published: February 2012

We surveyed 178 undergraduates to investigate whether differences exist between traditional and nontraditional students' goal orientations and/or coping strategies and to investigate relationships between goal orientations and coping strategies. Using the variables age, marital status, parental status, and whether time was ever taken off from school, a cluster analysis was used to identify traditional and nontraditional students. Results from a MANOVA indicated that the traditional student cluster scored significantly higher on emotion-oriented coping than did the nontraditional cluster. The implications derived from the results and additional relationships are discussed, along with avenues for future research.
The Student Personnel Point of View as a Catalyst for Dialogue: 75 Years and Beyond
Authors: Roberts Dennis C.
Published: February 2012

The Student Personnel Point of View (American Council on Education, 1937) has been a catalyst for dialogue on the purposes of student personnel and student affairs work for 75 years. Through analysis of the writings of Esther Lloyd-Jones and E. G. Williamson, two of the most prolific scholars of the early years of student personnel work, the author draws attention to the agreements and creative tensions that could provide a foundation for enhancing student learning across the globe in the 21st century. These reflections are intended to urge the reader's consideration of the role student affairs plays and contribute to the ongoing dialog.
Alf Landon and Social Security Reform
Authors: Mills Nicolaus
Published: February 2012

In the current debate over Social Security reform, the name of Alf Landon, the 1936 Republican candidate for president, rarely comes up. But it should. Landon made what he called "the bungling and waste" of Social Security the key to his presidential campaign, and his opposition to Social Security, along with the arguments President Franklin Roosevelt voiced in defending Social Security against Landon, offers a history lesson that deserves our attention.
The Last Page
Authors: Kohák Erazim
Published: February 2012

Running as a social democrat for the Senate in the Czech Republic is not for the timid. In my district, four voters out of five stoutly affirm social democratic values and virulently reject social democratic candidates. After forty years of waking up to radios blaring Kupredu levá!—roughly, "Lead with the left!"—only the right is respectable, and they want to be right.
On Susan Sontag
Authors: Berman Paul
Published: February 2012

Susan Sontag, who died in December at age seventy-one, was a brave intellectual; but her bravery was not just intellectual. In 1989, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sentenced Salman Rushdie and his publishers to death, a great many people all over the world, on the left and on the right, fell over themselves trying to explain that Rushdie must have done something truly unforgivable in his Satanic Verses, and that perhaps he was merely an opportunist, a man trying to sell books in the most sensationalist of ways-as Jimmy Carter managed to suggest. In that year, Susan happened to be the president of the American branch of PEN and, in that capacity, testified to the U.S. Senate. And it fell to Susan, not to any of the political leaders, to explain that Khomeini's fatwa against Rushdie had already threatened an American publisher with death, and that freedom of literature might well be a national interest of the United States.
Tropes of Wrath: Virtue, Markets, and the Family
Authors: Morone James
Published: February 2012

The left lost the culture war on a sunny winter day in 1994-at least that's as good a day as any to mark the defeat. Donna Shalala, the secretary of Health and Human Services, met the press to explain the Clinton administration's progressive centerpiece, an ambitious universal health insurance plan. First question: "I have good health insurance, why should I pay more for someone else?" Oh, explained Shalala with the Democrats' cheerful B-School logic, thanks to our new efficiencies there is already (almost) enough money in the system to cover everyone. The administration offered the nation economic self-interest, technical wonkery, and a smidgen from the pork barrel. They did not serve the free lunch with moral arguments or family values.
Story of a Diaspora
Authors: Schweber Matthew S.
Published: February 2012

If the injunction against representing God began with Moses' receipt of the Ten Commandments, the one against representing evil had to await Hitler's monstrosity. Of those who favor the latter, Elie Wiesel and Theodor Adorno stand among the most scrupulous and authoritative: theirs, respectively, "The truth of Auschwitz remains hidden in the ashes. Only those who lived it in their flesh and their minds can possibly transform their experience into knowledge. . . . No one who has not experienced the event will ever be able to understand it"; and "After the Holocaust to write a poem is barbaric. . . . Through aesthetic principles or stylization. . . [Auschwitz] is transfigured and stripped of some of its horrors. . ."
The Last Page
Authors: Berman Marshall
Published: February 2012

Arthur Miller's death this spring brought back his great moment half a century ago, when he defied the foul fiend. At his House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearing in June 1956, he tried to explain himself; all they wanted was names. He got mad and said No! He would gladly accuse himself, but he refused to name anyone else. He knew they would convict him of contempt of Congress. But "I will protect my sense of myself." It was an eccentric position then...
Fascism and Counterrevolution
Authors: Robin Corey
Published: February 2012

Ever since William Wordsworth celebrated revolution as a gift of youth and Edmund Burke condemned it as the scourge of age, we've looked upon rebellion and reaction as a clash of generations. The biographies of movement and counter-movement seem to tell the whole story. Both the St. Petersburg uprising of 1905 and the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 were led by twenty-six-year-olds against regimes donning the mantle of eternity. Malcolm X was killed at forty, Che Guevara at thirty-nine, while Klemens von Metternich—another internationalist with continental vision—didn't get going until his late thirties. Thomas Jefferson was thirty-three when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, Frantz Fanon thirty-six when he wrote The Wretched of the Earth. Burke, by contrast, was sixty-one when he wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France. And when tennis champ Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in three straight sets at Houston, she was twenty-nine, while he was, well, old enough to be her father.
Letter from Umbria
Authors: Barkan Joanne
Published: February 2012

Venetians have been saying for thirty years that their city is nothing more than a museum. The flow of commuters demonstrates this. Before the 1970s, Venetian workers commuted daily across the lagoon to Mestre and Porto Marghera on the mainland, where they had industrial jobs, mostly in chemical plants. By the mid-1970s, they could no longer afford city rents; then heavy industry began to decline. Now Venetian workers live on the mainland and commute back to Venice every day for jobs in the tourist industry. Umbria has its own version of this transformation. A harsh system of sharecropping, mezzadria, still dominated the economy in the early post–Second World War period. In the 1950s and 1960s, the children of sharecroppers left the region en masse to escape poverty—just as the children of peasants fled the South in the same period. In Umbria many of the old case coloniche—the buildings where landowners housed their sharecroppers along with a few animals—have been sold and remodeled into spiffy weekend retreats for city dwellers and foreigners. Elderly former sharecroppers and some of their middle-aged children now work as decently paid caretakers and gardeners for the weekenders. It beats sharecropping by a lot. In the "art towns" that attract tourists, specialty-food boutiques selling Umbrian olive oil and wines line the streets between architectural monuments.
Venezuela under Chávez: Some Truths Are Not All That Complicated
Authors: Casey Leo
Published: February 2012

The reality of Venezuela under the rule of Hugo Chávez Frias, Gregory Wilpert tells us, is a "complicated truth" ("Venezuela's Other Path," Spring 2005). Whereas many observers see in Chávez another Fidel Castro, an authoritarian caudillo pushing his nation toward a dictatorial regime, Wilpert finds such portraits stereotypical, based more on the propensity of both men to deliver marathon speeches than on actual developments in Venezuela. He accepts that Chávez is a charismatic figure who has encouraged a cult of personality, but believes that Chávez's initiatives have broken through Venezuela's "ossified democracy," bringing into the political process those who had been excluded, awakening an "apathetic citizenry" and "energizing civil society." There is much in Chávez's rule to celebrate, according to this view.
Ernie Pyle and War Reportage
Authors: Mills Nicolaus
Published: February 2012

Sixty years ago, with victory over Japan in sight, Ernie Pyle, America's greatest World War II correspondent, was killed by a sniper while covering the war in the Pacific. For a nation still reeling from President Roosevelt's death, the loss of Pyle six days later came as a terrible shock.
James B. Rule Responds
Authors: Rule James B.
Published: February 2012

James Rule responds to Michael Walzer, regarding Rule's piece on Iraq.
A Nice WPA Job
Authors: Westbrook Robert
Published: February 2012

Robert Westbrook reviews Elizabeth Borgwardt's A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights .
God's Casino: The Texas of George W. Bush
Authors: Pask Kevin
Published: February 2012

It is no longer possible to dismiss American religiosity as an odd residuum of hillbilly culture. It is now a vivid and organizing force in a mobile America defined by McMansions and office parks. Indeed, the alliance of advanced capitalism and religious fundamentalism is the most remarkable feature of the landscape of American power today. The superchurch and the televangelist are at least as integral to the current culture of American capitalism as Silicon Valley and Las Vegas. More clearly than ever, America has rejected the European understanding of Protestantism as the carrier of rationalization and secularization—as in Max Weber's austere Calvinist capitalist. How are we to understand the transubstantiation of the flinty Yankee, once the incarnation of American capitalism, into the casino capitalist or the indebted but born-again shopper? The rise of the Sunbelt is of course a key component, but, within that larger transformation, the specific weight of Texas power is crucial.
Citizens in Conversation
Authors: Casey Leo
Published: February 2012

"Don't talk to strangers." These four simple words contain one of the first pieces of worldly wisdom American parents teach their children. The words may help protect children from physical danger, Danielle Allen writes in her book of the same name, but the political message they convey ill serves education for democratic citizenship. The capacity to "talk to strangers," to hold a dialogue, to reason, and to deliberate with one's fellow citizens in a context of civic trust, Allen tells us, lies at the heart of democracy. And she makes this argument in an extraordinary philosophical text that is itself a conversation among different intellectual traditions and different approaches to race in America—traditions and approaches that rarely engage with each other. Allen is distinctive among contemporary political philosophers in her focus on the actual practice of the democratic politics she advocates.
Stuck in Traffic: Free-Market Theory Meets the Highway Lobby
Authors: Ross Benjamin
Published: February 2012

As a right-wing economist might have warned if she had not specialized in transportation, what is distributed without charge has been consumed to excess. Lavish federal and state subsidies for highway building have stimulated suburbs to spread ever farther, and driving has ballooned. The mileage that the average American drives in a year has risen steadily, growing 11% in the nine years from 1993 to 2002. Roads fill up with cars and trucks faster than new ones can be built. Major metropolitan areas suffer ever-more-severe highway congestion, with traffic in suburbs often even worse than downtown. What to do about traffic is a political issue of growing importance. The cost of road-building is increasing, and a growing body of research shows that sprawl development stimulated by new highways quickly makes new roads just as congested as the old ones. Should congestion be relieved by continuing to add more road capacity? Or should investment be shifted toward mass transit?
John Steinbeck's Hurricane Katrina Lesson
Authors: Mills Nicolaus
Published: February 2012

Seventy years ago this October, before he was famous as a novelist, John Steinbeck published a seven-part series in the San Francisco News on the Dust Bowl families pouring into California to start new lives. Today, the 1936 series is read primarily by scholars tracing its influence on Steinbeck's masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath . But with a fresh hurricane season upon us and the New Orleans victims of Hurricane Katrina constituting a diaspora comparable to the estimated 250,000 "Okies" who fled drought-ridden Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Colorado during the Great Depression, Steinbeck's reportage has new relevance.
Editor's Page
Authors: Cohen Mitchell
Published: February 2012

How to think straight about America's imbalanced politics? It's not so easy nowadays. David Plotke's smart article in this issue ought to initiate considerable debate about how we went from the New Deal to Bush's bum deal. Bush has not pulled the country radically to the right, Plotke thinks. Those who claim he has or that he owes his job to ruse must have been sleepwalking through the last decades as the public moved rightward. The president's plunge in the polls is due to his performance more than reproof of conservatism.
Show Business and 'Lawfare' in Rwanda: Twelve Years after the Genocide
Authors: Morrill Constance
Published: February 2012

Twelve years ago this summer, over a period of a hundred days, between five hundred thousand and eight hundred thousand Rwandans—mostly Tutsi—were slaughtered with a brutality that shocked the world into paralysis. Although Tutsis were the main targets of this genocidal killing, Hutus who opposed the extermination campaign were also massacred. The killers ranged from the Presidential Guard to many members of the former army to the interahamwe militias, propelled by extremist elements within the then-ruling regime: friends and neighbors of the people they murdered. All had fallen prey to the genocidal political ideology of Hutu Power, which reached the population via the airwaves with anti-Tutsi refrains of "The graves are not yet full!", and "Remember to kill the little rats as well as the big rats," and "Leave none to tell the story!"
The London Review of Hezbollah
Authors: Goodheart Eugene
Published: February 2012

Critics, mostly though not exclusively European, who hammer away at Israeli misbehavior often show no concern about the dangers that beset Israel. Their one-sided animus verges on scandal. Criticism of Israeli behavior may be justified, but it loses credit when it is not balanced by an unequivocal repudiation of the rhetoric and actions of Islamic fundamentalists: Holocaust denial, fantasies of genocidal anti-Semitism, the elimination of the state of Israel, suicide bombings, and indiscriminate killing of civilians.
Due Process and Empire's Law: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld
Authors: Kohn Margaret
Published: February 2012

The left desperately needed some good news last summer, so it was ready to claim a major victory when the Supreme Court unexpectedly struck down the military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay. Commentators enthusiastically called Hamdan v. Rumsfeld a "stinging rebuke" to George W. Bush and "a clear affirmation of the rule of law." After wading through the complicated legal issues, most news reports concluded that the Supreme Court had decided that the Bush tribunals were kangaroo courts that violated the Geneva Conventions.
Squeezing Public Education: History and Ideology Gang Up on New Orleans
Authors: Adamo Ralph
Published: February 2012

When hurricane Katrina (or, more accurately, the failure of the levees) washed away the New Orleans Public Schools (NOPS) at the end of August 2005, there was relief in many quarters. Within days of the storm, the acting public school superintendent, Ora Watson, declared that the "fiscal crisis of the New Orleans Public Schools" was now over. In hastily assembled meetings, members of the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE), state and local politicians, and leaders of the state's education bureaucracy convened to examine the situation. Representatives of the charter school movement, as well as providers of ancillary education services and materials, also convened. The chance to recreate public education in New Orleans from the ground up was an irresistible consequence of Katrina, as well as a dream come true. Before the first waves of refugees began returning to the drowned city, these newly energized social engineers had decided that no public school would reopen (though public schools did open relatively quickly in the neighboring parishes of Jefferson and St. Bernard); that all 7,500 employees of the system (the majority of them teachers) would be terminated; and that whatever schools did open would be charter schools, operating under the aegis of either BESE or NOPS, depending on the type or timing of the charter application.
Gandhi's Burden—and Ours: Thoughts after Satyagraha at the Metropolitan Opera
Authors: Cohen Mitchell
Published: February 2012

Preliminary Theme: You could feel the frost as soon as I posed the question. The week before I went to see Philip Glass's opera Satyagraha, which is subtitled M.K. Gandhi in South Africa, I attended a screening of a documentary entitled Fidel, subtitled The Untold Story. It was sponsored by the Havana Film Festival, something of a New York cultural transgression of the U.S. embargo of Cuba. The embargo is foolish, but while Americans really do need to think afresh about how we relate to those south of us, indeed to all poor countries, it is hard to imagine that this film by Estela Bravo, which won awards when it came out in 2001, could foster anything of the sort.
The Last Page
Authors: Phillips Maxine
Published: February 2012

The big question used to be, when did you leave the Communist Party? And the answer was always, too late, because the questioner had either left before you or had never joined. In this campaign season, the question is, why didn't you leave your church and disavow your pastor earlier? For a while, it was posed only to Barack Obama, not to other candidates who, over the years, had attended churches or accepted endorsements from pastors who were antigay, did not believe in equal rights for women, or subscribed to theories of Armageddon that required Jews to disappear from the face of the earth. These other candidates carried the protective armor of whiteness, which Obama lacked, so their protestations that their faith was personal and that they shouldn't be held responsible for the statements of others were taken at face value. Only Mormon Mitt Romney took almost as much heat. Some on the left treated Hillary Clinton's membership in a conservative prayer group as if she were in a bizarre cult, while the rest of the country, where prayer groups are common, could have cared less. Relentless exposure of the anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, and anti-Islamic beliefs of two of John McCain's supporters finally forced McCain to reject their endorsement weeks after Obama had to distance himself from his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright.
Behind the Masks
Authors: Wellington Darryl Lorenzo
Published: February 2012

Darryl Lorenzo Wellington reviews John Edgar Wideman's Fanon: A Novel.
1968: Lessons Learned
Authors: Cohen Mitchell
Published: February 2012

Did the protests and protesters of 1968, all together, make up the Weltseele on pavements? Those Old Regimes fell in the early nineteenth century only to be resurrected, re-overthrown and re-resurrected, re-invented and . . . and . . . and . . . . A lot happened before a stable, Western constitutional order emerged after 1945. Look only at the Big Historical Picture, you'll miss contingencies. Nineteen-sixty-eight challenged the post-1945 order. Many people were surprised because what had seemed sound rattled. There was much original in the 1960s, but not this surprise. People (especially intellectuals) often mystify what is in front of them, imagining the past leads inevitably to it or that it opens an inevitable future. Recall the "end of history" riffs in the decade or so before 1968. Some reveled in what was perceived to be the end to challenges to the One Big Idea (liberalism). Others despaired. We were reduced to (circle one or more): lonely crowds, organizational men, one-dimensionality, or structures. There was truth in all this, but only some.
In Defense of The Wire
Authors: Chaddha Anmol , Wilson William Julius , Venkatesh Sudhir A.
Published: February 2012

Although we agree that The Wire does not take on every issue relevant to life in the inner city, John Atlas and Peter Dreier do not sufficiently acknowledge its remarkable contributions. Quite simply, The Wire—even with its too-modest viewership—has done more to enhance both the popular and the scholarly understanding of the challenges of urban life and the problems of urban inequality than any other program in the media or academic publication we can think of.
Green Giant
Authors: Block Fred
Published: February 2012

Michael J. Graetz's The End of Energy is a welldocumented lamentation over the forty-year failure of the U.S. political system to develop effective energy policies. Graetz, a professor of law at Columbia University, documents the key energy initiatives of successive administrations that have steadily increased our dependence on Middle Eastern oil for transportation and environmentally dangerous supplies of domestic coal for electricity. He starts with Richard Nixon's "new economic policy" in August 1971, a sharp policy turn that included wage and price controls and ended the dollar's convertibility to gold, and he carries the story through to the congressional gridlock over cap-and-trade legislation in 2010 that would have capped the total amount of greenhouse gases to be produced and required polluters to acquire permits for their emissions.
Eyes on the Curriculum: How One Charter School Resisted Test-Driven Pressures
Authors: Skilton-sylvester Paul
Published: February 2012

Who would believe that Albert Shanker, the late, controversial president of the American Federation of Teachers, was one of the original backers of the charter school concept, publicizing the name and idea in his weekly "Where We Stand" column of July 10, 1988? Charter schools, unions, and public schooling were not always enemies. But, more than two decades later, the teams have changed, and the debate over charter schools has become so polarized as not to be productive. Critics on the left tend to lump all charter schools together and include them with the vouchermovement as a threat to public schools (even though charter schools are public schools—albeit ones that function with considerable autonomy from districts). The Right, for its part, uses charter schools to beat up unions and demonize teachers.
Out of Control: Reagan, Labor, and the Fate of the Nation
Authors: Cowie Jefferson
Published: February 2012

Joseph McCartin’s book will long stand as the most judicious, painstakingly researched, and thorough study of what is undeniably one of the most important events in labor history of the last four decades, the PATCO strike. But the book’s strength is also its weakness. The author may strip his subject of hyperbole, do a great job of conveying the everyday grind of controllers’ lives, and capture the impending standoff with the federal government, but he also tends to leave the story in isolation. How we, as a nation, get from this single labor conflict to the transformation in all of labor relations and the larger political economy that Greenspan celebrates remains foggy. PATCO was more than just another strike: it was the game changer of the second half of the twentieth century. Yet it appears here as a quarrel gone bad—what appears to be, culturally speaking, a nineteenth-century-style union accidentally ushering in the New Gilded Age.
Politics Lost
Authors: Schmitt John
Published: February 2012

One of the more controversial arguments of The Precariat is that this new class is entirely distinct from the traditional working class. The idea of the proletariat, Guy Standing says, suggests “workers in long-term, stable, fixed-hour jobs with established routes of advancement, subject to unionization and collective agreements, with job titles their fathers and mothers would have understood, facing local employers whose names and features [are] familiar.” These characteristics are almost completely absent from the employment experience of the precariat, and their absence so alters the work experience that these workers constitute a class of their own.
Frontline Caregivers: Still Struggling
Authors: Boris Eileen , Klein Jennifer
Published: February 2012

Faced with cuts in programs and stripped of their bargaining rights, home care workers are trying to maintain the activist vigor of their scrappy past, which won union recognition and contracts from reluctant state authorities. FloraJohnson and her sister workers took heart from the Occupy Wall Street protests that swept Chicago this last fall. “We’re tired of these big banks and the rich people getting rich and poor people getting poorer. But we’re sending a message.” Her union members are even willing to go to jail for the cause. After all, their houses are not only homes but also their workplaces; without homes, there can be no home care workers and thus no fight for better work. This merger of home and work turns the foreclosure threat faced by other poor people into a particularly acute crisis.

As a nation, we seem to believe that only through cheap labor can we “afford” to provide long-term care. We think about the needs of recipients but not about those who do the work. The Great Recession and Republican ascendancy are shaking the very programs that made home-based services possible. Can we let these forces make life more precarious for all of us? A majority of Americans will at some point depend on a care worker, often one who has long labored in poverty and struggled to balance her own and others’ social needs. The absence of public support and labor standards may hasten the day when no one will be available to care.
Incommensurate Equivalences: Genre, Representation, and Equity in Clara Howard and Jane Talbot
Authors: Burleigh Erica
Published: February 2012

This essay argues that Charles Brockden Brown's last two complete novels, Clara Howard and Jane Talbot , exploit the generic expectations produced by sentimental novels in order to explore ways of understanding intention, obligation, representation, promises, and consent. Keeping Brown's early legal training in mind, this essay traces the novels' interest in alternatives to contractual models of relationship, one of which is the concept of equity. In this reading, Clara Howard proposes taking literally the idea of a married couple having "one will," collapsing two people into one so that the two act with a single intent so that there can be no contractual relationship between them at all. Jane Talbot , in contrast, imagines proliferating identities within individuals so that they can be simultaneously interior to a contract and part of the exterior authority that enforces it. Brown identifies obvious limitations to an equitable model of social relations. His explorations remain valuable, however, because they indicate an early resistance to and dissent from the contractarian models that would come to dominate the nineteenth century.
American Slavery, American Freedom, American Catholicism
Authors: Farrelly Maura Jane
Published: February 2012

Scholars who focus on American Catholic history have not fully examined the relationship between slavery and Catholic identity in the United States. They have acknowledged that the Church tolerated—and even supported—the institution of slavery. Scholars have also explored the Catholic Church’s active opposition to the forces of abolitionism. They have not, however, considered the role that slavery may have played in shaping a distinctly “American” variety of Catholicism that was comfortable with the individualism and republicanism that defined American identity at the time of the Founding. This essay, therefore, explores the relationship between American slavery and American Catholicism.
What Explains the German Labor Market Miracle in the Great Recession?
Authors: Burda Michael C. , Hunt Jennifer
Published: February 2012

Germany experienced an even deeper fall in GDP in the Great Recession than the United States, with little employment loss. Employers’ reticence to hire in the preceding expansion, associated in part with a lack of confidence it would last, contributed to an employment shortfall equivalent to 40 percent of the missing employment decline in the recession. Another 20 percent may be explained by wage moderation. A third important element was the widespread adoption of working time accounts, which permit employers to avoid overtime pay if hours per worker average to standard hours over a window of time. We find that this provided disincentives for employers to lay off workers in the downturn. Although the overall cuts in hours per worker were consistent with the severity of the Great Recession, reduction of working time account balances substituted for traditional government-sponsored short-time work.