bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Surviving the Storm: Trauma and Recovery in Children's Books about Natural Disasters
Authors: Connolly Paula T.
Published: February 2012

This article examines literature for children and young adults that depicts the devastation of natural disasters, particularly the 2005 hurricane Katrina which hit the eastern United States and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Especially for audiences of young children, representations of death and massive destruction can be a controversial enterprise. Focusing on three types of narratives—animal picture books, eye witness accounts, and young adult fiction—this study explores how children's and young adult literature navigates such difficult issues by retelling stories of large-scale disasters as scenarios of trauma and recovery.
Belief in Tom's Midnight Garden
Authors: Wolf Virginia L.
Published: February 2012

This paper explores narrative technique, rather than historical or scientific explanation, as the source of credibility in Tom's Midnight Garden . It concludes that Philippa Pearce uses her protagonist's point of view, plot structure, and an evocative style to still readers' questions about and to assure their participation in mysteries that she never explains away.
Winnie Foster and Peter Pan: Facing the Dilemma of Growth
Authors: Lynch Catherine M.
Published: February 2012

Both Peter Pan and Tuck Everlasting explore two alternative solutions to a conflict central to childhood experience: to grow up to adult responsibilities or not to grow up at all. By introducing readers to the Tuck family who magically cannot die in a world where everyone else does, Natalie Babbitt's novel deepens the Peter Pan "myth" by dramatizing the fact that the choice of embracing adulthood includes, of necessity, choosing death.
Beyond Explanation, and Beyond Inexplicability, in Beyond Silence
: Abstract
Authors: Nodelman Perry
Published: February 2012

If stories become complete and satisfying by explaining the events they describe, Beyond Silence is an odd story. Not only does it insist some of the events it describes are inexplicable; it seems to have many loose ends. The paper shows how it is complete and how Cameron uses these apparent loose ends to achieve completeness.
The Irish Fairy Legends and the Brothers Grimm
Authors: Kamenetsky Christa
Published: February 2012

The paper investigates the question why the Brothers Grimm translated Croker's Fairy Legends of the South of Ireland into German, and why Croker, in his turn, translated Wilhelm Grimm's long introduction to the work into English. On the basis of the correspondence between Croker and the Brothers Grimm, and within the context of prevailing romantic theories pertaining to folktale collections, the paper attempts to re-establish the value of the Fairy Legends as a milestone in the history of folklore research and children's literature.
Dr. Seuss's Attack on Imagination: I Wish That I Had Duck Feet and the Cautionary Tale
Authors: Steig Michael
Published: February 2012

The apparently innocuous I Wish That I Had Duck Feet is a beguiling post-Freudian cautionary tale which combines humor with phallic and aggressive images to warn of the dangers of personal fantasy. Its author's and illustrator's use of their own imaginations to deliver an attack on daydreaming underlines a paradox of imaginative didactic literature, from the early cautionary tale to Struwwelpeter and beyond.
“Be Afraid or Fried”: Cults and Young Adult Apocalyptic Narratives
Authors: Stewart Susan Louise
Published: February 2012

Historically, religion has played an important role in children’s literature. Fear has also had its place, particularly considering its significance in encouraging seventeenth-century readers to follow a righteous path. However, in more recent decades, several developments have contributed to a troubling formula in terms of mothers, fathers, family, and religious fear. Using Linda Crew’s Brides of Eden: A True Story Imagined and Jane Yolen and Bruce Coville’s Armageddon Summer , this essay considers the roles of power and religious fear in YA novels featuring apocalyptic or doomsday cults and examines the biblically inspired discourse of “be afraid or fried.”
Coloniality and the Trappings of Modernity in Viridiana and The Hand in the Trap
Authors: Martin-Márquez Susan
Published: February 2012

The transatlantic co-productions Viridiana and The Hand in the Trap , which swept the top awards at Cannes in 1961, are remarkably similar in their juxtaposition of Catholic repression and modern mores. Yet the films differ dramatically in their treatment of colonial legacies—legacies that shaped the divergent reception of their directors, Luis Buñuel and Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, among Eurocentric arbiters of cultural modernity.
Landscapes of Expression: Affective Encounters in South Indian Cinema
Authors: Pandian Anand
Published: February 2012

Focusing on material environments of affective encounter, this essay examines the expression of feelings such as joy, longing, and sadness in South Indian popular cinema. Relying on ethnographic fieldwork with Tamil filmmakers in Chennai, Switzerland, and Dubai, the essay explores worldly accidents of circumstance through which cinema gains affective life.
Robert Bresson's Modernist Canvas: The Gesture toward Painting in Au hasard Balthazar
Authors: Watkins Raymond
Published: February 2012

This article explores Robert Bresson's use of painting and development of a painterly style in his film Au hasard Balthazar (1966), focusing on the concern with figuration, reflexivity, the dynamic between stasis and movement, and the manipulation of actors, to whom Bresson referred as "models." Comparisons are made to the style and approach of Jackson Pollock, Jean-Antoine Watteau, Francis Bacon, Paul Cézanne, and the children's cartoon series by François Craenhals, Les aventures de Pom et Teddy (1953).
A Note on ἅρπη in Nicander's Theriaca 567
Authors: Swift Nicholas
Published: February 2012

This note challenges the interpretation in the Greek-English Lexicon of the word ἅρπη, "sickle," in line 567 of Nicander's Theriaca , arguing that it refers to the jaw of the hippopotamus rather than its tooth. A survey of usage from the Archaic through the Hellenistic period suggests an association in Greek literature between jaws and sickles that is also found in the languages and archaeological records of other discrete cultures.
Two Puzzles Involving Socrates
Authors: Mavrogordatos George Th.
Published: February 2012

Two well-known but puzzling facts from the life of Socrates bring into question either what we know about him or what we know about Athenian democracy—or perhaps both. These facts are (a) his term as member of the Council ( Boule ) in 406/5 and (b) his military service as a hoplite. The first puzzle can be solved only in the context of the extraordinary crisis of manpower in Athens in 406. The second can be solved only if we assume that, despite his poverty, Socrates retained his inherited membership in the third-census class of zeugitai .
William Gibson's Paternity Test
Authors: Malewitz Raymond
Published: February 2012

Contemporary culture views DNA through a strange temporal logic: on the one hand, technologies of DNA identification and sequencing testify to fundamental transformations in the way we understand biology, anthropology, law, and medicine—we live in "the DNA age"; and on the other, these technologies have revealed as much about the past as they have about the present or future, gesturing backwards to scenes of conception, crime, and evolutionary branching. The essay shows how this double temporal logic operates within William Gibson's electronic poem Agrippa . It concludes that the poem's stanzas form a metaphorical DNA fingerprint that reveals Gibson's life to be, paradoxically, a novel repetition of his father's and grandfather's lives.
Sex and Sentiment in Cuban Tourism
Authors: Babb Florence E.
Published: February 2012

Helen I. Safa est une pionnière des études sur la complexité des intersections de genre, race, de nation en Amérique Latine et dans la Caraïbe. Son investigation comparative conduit à la publication de son éminent ouvrage, The Myth of the Male Breadwinner: Women and Industrialization in the Caribbean (1995), dans lequel elle analyse le genre, la famille et l'emploi au niveau de trois sociétés caribéennes. Au cours de multiples décennies, Safa a servi de source d'inspiration à des chercheurs de la Caraïbe et des Amériques; sa recherche est un exemple d'une anthropologie engagée dans la région. Cet article présente une étude que j'ai réalisée à Cuba, au Pérou, au Nicaragua et au sud du Mexique, basé sur les recherches de Safa et d'autres chercheurs qui ont apporté des idées critiques et discuté sur le sujet de genre dans le cadre des études latino-américaines et caribéennes. Dans cet article qui est aussi le résultat d'une vaste investigation réalisée sur le tourisme dans quatre pays, je présente une analyse et une réflexion des dynamiques contemporaines du tourisme sexuel et romantique à Cuba. Certaines données suggèrent que cette constante du tourisme augmente à cause de l'identité politique globale de Cuba; où les femmes prennent part à des échanges intimes et commerciaux représente un élément d'appui de l'économie du marché qui les exclut en général.
The Role of Parental Involvement in the Autonomy Development of Traditional-Age College Students
Authors: Cullaty Brian
Published: February 2012

Increased parental involvement in higher education has led to a rise in the number of parent interactions with university faculty and staff. The purpose of this study was to explore how parental involvement influences the process of college student autonomy development and to examine the implications of this process for college administrators. Data were collected from 18 participants through three semistructured interviews and two journal entries. The results suggest the importance of parents maintaining supportive involvement instead of intervening, establishing adult-to-adult relationships with college-age children, relinquishing unnecessary control, and fostering responsibility.
Becoming More Open to Social Identity-Based Difference: Understanding the Meaning College Students Make of this Movement
Authors: Bergerson Amy Aldous , Huftalin Deneece
Published: February 2012

This qualitative study explores college students' perceived shift to becoming more open to social identity-based difference. Using phenomenological methods, the study highlights the voices of three college students to illuminate findings that describe personal and institutional factors that support such a shift, the impact of the shift on individual students, and participants' descriptions of the shift as continuous and recursive. Implications for ways that policy, practice, and research can support a shift towards openness to diversity are discussed.
Legal Principles and Torture
Authors: Koh Harold Hongju
Published: February 2012

I appear today solely to comment upon Mr. Gonzales's positions regarding three issues on which I have both legal expertise and government experience: the illegality of torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment; the scope of the president's constitutional powers to authorize torture and cruel treatment by U.S. officials; and the applicability of the Geneva Conventions on the Laws of War to alleged combatants held in U.S. custody.
How I Nearly Became a Terrorist
Authors: Cohen Derek
Published: February 2012

My political radicalism was a by-product of growing up in South Africa—of the liberalism of my mother and the communist leanings of my father. South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s was a strange and terrible place. Young white people like me lived in a world of privilege, wealth, and advantage. The extent of our advantage was most evident in the disadvantage of the non-white South African people (Black Africans, Coloureds, and Indians), who vastly outnumbered and surrounded us in every aspect of our daily lives. Our homes had servants who lived in servant quarters in the backyards. Some homes had one servant, some had three and four. Few white homes had none. Servants prepared our food, made our beds each morning, polished our shoes each day, and tended our parents' gardens. In affluent homes, they served us our meals, and we could, as teenagers returned from school, call to one or another of the servants to bring our lunch or a cup of tea.
Profit Laundering and Tax Evasion: The Dirty Little Secret of Financial Globalization
Authors: Komisar Lucy
Published: February 2012

The debate about cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy is a false one. The issue is not whether transnational corporations and the very rich benefit from tax cuts, but that many of them walk away from all taxes. A General Accounting Office report found that between 1996 and 2000, 61 percent of all U.S. companies paid zero federal taxes. They accomplish this primarily through "profit laundering," a phrase that ought to be on the lips of every social critic.
Defending Sweatshops: Too Much Logic, Too Little Evidence
Authors: Rothstein Richard
Published: February 2012

Nicholas Kristof is a great humanitarian journalist. In his New York Times columns, Kristof exposes third world famine, sex trafficking, genital mutilation, and genocide. He chides readers for championing human dignity in the abstract, but doing little to advance it in the concrete. He shames us by noting our attention to high-profile tragedies while we ignore more routine and systematic disasters. He doesn't merely report; he promotes Web sites where readers can contribute money, time, or political pressure to combat the suffering and exploitation he has documented.
Discourse and Democracy
Authors: Scheuer Jeffrey
Published: February 2012

There are many approaches to democratic politics, but in the end only a few known recipes for success. One is to mobilize the base to increase voter turnout. Another is to reduce the opposition's turnout (the darker art of vote suppression: see, Florida 2000, Ohio 2004). And a third, the focus of much political energy, is to try to win over the uncommitted middle. Other than stealing votes, there's not much else to the game.
Masses at The Gates
Authors: Kornblum William
Published: February 2012

Central Park is in full bloom as I write this; the orange Gates that lit up the park in the gloom of February are a faint after-image. The grand achievement of Christo and Jeanne Claude is overshadowed by the changing seasons and the press of daily life in this impossibly busy city. But think back to the Gates for a moment: was there ever in our New York experience a public art event so successful on so many levels? Was there ever one that so captured the imagination of people who don’t ordinarily flock to see conceptual art? And yet only a few months after the Gates were taken down, in a move that surprised the public for its stealth, the Bloomberg administration opened another chapter of the park numbers game by signaling that it would limit gatherings on the Great Lawn to fifty thousand people or less. If it remains in effect, this policy will bar not only large concerts, but also political rallies such as the one the mayor and the Police Department refused to permit during the 2004 Republican National Convention. As a sociologist who studies the life of urban public spaces, I am worried about the privatization of public spaces; and like many New Yorkers, I fear the loss of Central Park as a gathering place for rallies and demonstrations. Because I had an insiders’ view of the Gates installation, I want to use it to reflect on some critical issues of art, community, and public space.
Corporate Bondage
Authors: Schrecker Ellen
Published: February 2012

In the 1970s, I hung out with some molecular biologists at Harvard. Like the rest of our group of graduate students and young faculty members, they worked hard, worried about tenure and promotion, and partied a lot. But they were also busy setting up private companies. Little did we know that they were riding the crest of the corporate tsunami that has overwhelmed or, as Jennifer Washburn argues, deformed the nation's campuses. By infusing academic research with bottom-line concerns, these entrepreneurial ventures have, she claims, helped to transform American universities into commercial rather than educational institutions. Of course, American universities have always catered to outside interests. Public service was, after all, one of the principal justifications for establishing the country's state university system. Farmers, businesses, and state and local agencies all profited from academic research, but higher education's main client, at least since the Second World War, has been the federal government, the Defense Department in particular. As a result, national security considerations have often determined the kind of work that would get done on campus. Although Washington remains a major player, it now operates within an academic climate that has become increasingly permeated by corporate values.
The Last Page
Authors: Walzer Michael
Published: February 2012

Notes from Down Under, after a month in Melbourne: The kangaroo isn't as peculiar as the platypus or as funny-looking as the emu, but it is still a powerful argument against intelligent design. Of course, there is a counter-argument, according to which the kangaroo proves that the Designer isn't only omnipotent and omniscient, but also whimsical and witty. Although a herd of kangaroos is called a "mob," they really aren't moblike; they are sociable creatures, bouncing along in what look like communities. Like other Australians, they are matey.
Torment and Justice in Cambodia
Authors: Stansell Christine
Published: February 2012

"Something terrible happened here. And I don't know what it is," Bill Herod remembers thinking in his first days in Phnom Penh in 1980. He was with Church World Service, one of a group of aid workers allowed into the country after the Vietnamese overthrew the Khmer Rouge in January 1979 and put an end to the three-and-a-half-year-long nightmare of the Cambodian people. In 1980, Herod had just come from Vietnam. He had seen plenty of devastation, but this was something different, a higher order of magnitude.
George Bush's Philosophers
Authors: Ross Benjamin
Published: February 2012

The politics of George W. Bush, unlike earlier American conservatisms, is animated by ideas and not merely by interests. That is, at least, what Bush's friends assert, and what his foes usually concede. But is it so? The ideas in question are well known, so much so that I need not enumerate them here. I will rather examine, as a whole, a school of thought and two groups of thinkers who adhere to it. The school is called neoconservative, its ideas match current policies, and its adherents often implement those policies. The question at hand is this: What is the direction of causation? Are the policies consequences of the ideas? Or were the ideas fabricated to justify the policies? The question is answerable only in the mean—any assemblage of humankind will include some knaves, some sincere fools, and various mixtures of wisdom with knavery and foolishness—but it is still worth asking. My method will be to look at historical origins. I will compare two groups that came together in the neoconservative movement of the late 1990s: the Straussians and the Shachtmanites. The thinkers they followed were obscure during their common lifetime, but the importance of both has grown in retrospect. Leo Strauss (1899–1973) taught philosophy at the University of Chicago. Max Shachtman (1904–1972) led a grouplet that evolved from Trotskyism to right-wing social democracy. Both left legacies of oral teaching and discipleship that far outweigh their writings.
Self-Determination and Realpolitik: Reflections on Kurds and Palestinians
Authors: Avineri Shlomo
Published: February 2012

During the siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s, the embattled Bosnian Muslim president, Alija Izetbegovic, visited Washington. He was looking for assistance. At that time, a UN-mandated arms embargo on all belligerents in the former Yugoslavia assured Serbian military dominance against outgunned Bosnians. Izetbegovic heard words of sympathy from official Washington, yet was offered no concrete help against Serb aggression. Dispirited, he met with a number of scholars and journalists at a Washington think tank. After describing the plight of his people and emphasizing that the Bosnian Muslims had met all European Union requirements for recognition of their independence, he first sighed and then burst out with a cri de coeur that was a searing commentary on many elegant theories of international relations.
The Politics of Immigration and Membership
Authors: Urbinati Nadia
Published: February 2012

"We are like travelers navigating an unknown terrain with the help of old maps, drawn at a different time and in response to different needs," Seyla Benhabib writes in her new book, The Rights of Others. Transnational migrations and global interdependence are the unknown terrain, state sovereignty and patrolled frontiers the old maps. Contemporary migrations are not an isolated phenomenon explicable in terms of a free choice that immigrants make when they leave their countries of origin and host states make when they receive them. These are epochal transformations that are literally changing the face of entire continents, the social conventions of millions of people. The friction between this new terrain and the old conceptual maps has potentially explosive effects when a continent such as Europe, which aspires to become the beacon of cosmopolitan morality, patrols its borders to defend its civilization or manufacture its Europeanness. Europe's new enemies, the only enemies against which she is willing to mobilize her troops, are neither bellicose states nor expansionist empires, but boat people, disperati, who seek to escape poverty and hunger, even though no international code accords them the status of refugees. The problem is that liberal democratic states do not regard economic destitution as a form of persecution, while their minimalist definition of democracy is blind to de facto undemocratic regimes. So transnational migration produces blatant contradictions between universal human rights and the extant set of naturalization, immigration, refugee, and asylum policies.
'Life, Liberty and a Little Bit of Cash'
Authors: Butler Sean
Published: February 2012

The Alaska Permanent Fund invests at least a quarter of the state's mineral revenues annually. Depending on the success of those investments, a dividend is paid to each Alaskan—one citizen, one share. The dividend peaked recently at nearly $2,000—that's $8,000 extra a year in the pockets of a family of four. Thanks in part to these payouts, Alaska has the smallest gap between the rich and poor in the United States. (Although everyone gets a dividend, the rich lose more of it to taxes than do the poor.) To speak of a basic income in an age of curtailed public expenditures, thinks McGill University professor and BI—supporter Myron J. Frankman, "seems like dreaming in Technicolor." Yet change often comes faster than we imagine. "No one reading the press or the journals of 1929," writes Carleton University professor Manfred Bienefeld, "could have imagined the arrival of the New Deal in 1933 in the United States." In the end, opposition to basic income stems more from a paucity of imagination than of means. In the referendum that gave birth to the Alaska Permanent Fund, about a third of Alaskans voted against it; if the vote were held again today, almost no one would oppose it. Whether we decide that a basic income is the right thing to do, the best thing to do, or the only thing to do, it seems likely that the freewheeling imagination that inspires Jay Hammond and Eduardo Suplicy will eventually work its way into the rest of us.
The Old Folks at Home: Sex, Viagra, and Taxes
Authors: Hausknecht Murray
Published: February 2012

Just about the time George W. Bush began to campaign for the privatization of Social Security, Medicare officials announced that the new drug benefit would pay for pills like Viagra and Levitra. Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, the New York Times reported, immediately declared that he would introduce a bill prohibiting Medicare from paying for such "lifestyle drugs."
On Judicial Review: Laurence H. Tribe, Jeremy Waldron, and Mark Tushnet Debate
Authors: Tribe Laurence H. , Waldron Jeremy
Published: February 2012

The Spring 2005 issue of Dissent featured a forceful article by Mark Tushnet, "Democracy versus Judicial Review," which proposed an End Judicial Review Amendment (EJRA) to the U.S. Constitution. It would read, "Except as authorized by Congress, no court of the United States or any individual state shall have thepower to review the constitutionality of statues enacted by Congress or by state legislatures." Two leading legal philosophers argue with Tushnet and he replies.
Labor Divided
Authors: McNeill Jim
Published: February 2012

In October 1973, delegates from the 113 affiliated unions of the AFL-CIO made their way to Miami Beach for the federation's quadrennial convention. Like a strange flock of migratory birds, the glaziers, the engravers, the boilermakers, and all the subspecies of American labor returned to the Florida shores they'd grown to know so well in the Age of Meany. But that fall, as the delegates headed south, their travels were disturbed by a blistering op-ed in the Washington Post entitled, "Labor's Battle with Itself." The piece had been written by Jerry Wurf, the much-aggrieved president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. During the 1950s and 1960s, AFSCME had helped shore up the house of labor by organizing hundreds of thousands of public employees, a group other unions had long neglected. But after seeing Wurf's union grow from a small band of Wisconsin state workers into one of the AFL-CIO's largest affiliates, the rest of labor honored the achievement by shamelessly invading AFSCME's public-sector turf and stealing thousands of government workers.
Rereading Keynes: Economic Possibilities of Our Grandparents
Authors: Widerquist Karl
Published: February 2012

John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the twentieth century, published his forecast, "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren," in 1930, when the world was in the grip of the Great Depression. He posited that the depression would not signal the end of the industrial revolution as some feared at the time, but would prove to be a minor dip in the trend of gradual but substantial increases in productivity, wealth, and average living standards. He guessed that average living standards in Europe and the United States were four times greater in 1930 than they had been two hundred and fifty years earlier and that they would be four to eight times greater a hundred years hence. Despite depression, war, and the failure of much of the world to catch up, he was right: average real income in the United States is more than five times greater today than in 1930 and twenty times greater than three centuries ago. However, the central claim of Keynes's essay failed to come true, even though it rested on logic as simple as one plus one equals two: The little work that needed to be done would be spread out among the population in portions of perhaps fifteen hours per week, because "everybody needs to do some work if he is to be contented."
White-Collar Blues
Authors: Wiener Jon
Published: February 2012

Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream is about her experience of white-collar unemployment—at a time when 20 percent of the unemployed are white-collar professionals—1.6 million people. This is another first-person story about Barbara going underground into the world of work and taking notes. For this project, Ehrenreich made some rules for herself: she needed a new identity, so that potential employers wouldn't be able to Google her. (When I searched for "Barbara Ehrenreich" I got 2,750,000 results.) So she changed legally back to her birth name, Barbara Alexander, and got a Social Security card that matched. Then she had to come up with a plausible set of skills. Because she's a writer and public speaker, she decided to market herself in the field of "public relations"—she calls it "journalism's evil twin." Her rules decreed that she would "do everything possible to land a job," that she would "go anywhere for a job or even an interview," and that she would "take the first job I was offered that met my requirements as to income and benefits." She planned to devote ten months and five thousand dollars for travel and expenses to the job search. The plan was that, once she got a job, she would work at it for a while before quitting and writing about it.
High-Stakes Testing and Dropout Rates
Authors: Shriberg David , Shriberg Amy Burke
Published: February 2012

Dropout rates and high-stakes testing receive their share of media attention, but the likely connection between the two is rarely discussed outside of education circles. Yet much recent research and anecdotal evidence suggest at least a correlation between high-stakes testing of the sort mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and dropout rates. Students, especially those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, appear to be dropping out of school earlier and in much greater numbers than previously believed, and high-stakes testing may be a leading cause. Moreover, schools overestimate graduation rates, and NCLB actually provides incentives for schools to encourage students, particularly students expected to perform poorly, either to drop out or transfer before taking their proficiency exams.
No Refuge Here: Iraqis Flee, but Where?
Authors: Huff-Hannon Joseph
Published: February 2012

Many fine journalists have by now covered the story of those Iraqis who trusted the United States, and whose simple requests for security within Iraq or sanctuary without have been answered with silence. It is an important story, but one that needs to be viewed within a larger context—as one small part of what Refugee International calls the fastest growing refugee crisis in the world and the largest movement of people in the Middle East since the war of 1948 that led to the scattering of the Palestinian diaspora. Iraqi asylum seekers in countries that report those numbers to the UN last year outnumbered those from any other country of the world. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) more than two million Iraqis have fled their country since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. The vast majority of them now live in Jordan, Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon.
France's 35-Hour Workweek: Myths and Realities
Authors: Askenazy Philippe , Holoch George
Published: February 2012

Many Americans were perplexed when a French Socialist government introduced a thirty-five-hour workweek nearly a decade ago. It seemed anomalous, especially given the constraints imposed by globalization. How could the French accept a uniformly imposed reduction of the workweek, even if its aim was to reduce unemployment by creating jobs, and even if "the French work so little," as popular myth has it? Nicolas Sarkozy was elected president last spring with a clear program: "Work more to earn more." But what is myth and what is reality in the story of this controversial legislation? Research now allows us to provide a preliminary evaluation of its shorter-term results.
New York Calling
Authors: Berman Marshall
Published: February 2012

When I was a child, about sixty years ago, the city's publicly owned radio station, WNYC, had a wonderful announcement that it would transmit every hour on the hour: "This is Station WNYC, New York City, where seven million people"—at some point in the early 1960s it became eight million—"live in peace and harmony, and enjoy the benefits of democracy." I was thrilled by this language; I can see now that it formed my first idea of New York. My parents were too poor to have gone to college, but their talk was rich in ideas. We spent many weekends exploring New York's grand material structures—the Harbor (still thriving all through my childhood), the Statue of Liberty, great buildings, Times Square, Penn and Grand Central Stations, Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge. We learned to love them, but also to see their human costs. From the deck of a ferry or a skyscraper, we would exclaim, "Wow!" Then my mother would say something like, "Isn't it beautiful? And don't forget, you can get here on the subway." And my father would say something like, "And don't forget who built this." Who? I would ask. Before long I knew the answer: "People we never heard of, who worked themselves to death." It was only later on that I realized they meant people like them, who worked themselves to death. But they were proud of the city that anonymous, exploited people like them had built. The bad deals they had got in their lives were mitigated by their pride in being part of "the greatest city in the world." The message on the air was a melody they could dance to. The New York they hoped to pass on to us was a real community, a place where the sadness of individual lives—and there was plenty—could be overcome by the glory and harmony of the whole.
Of Croissants and Couscous: National Identity After the French Elections
Authors: Green Nancy L.
Published: February 2012

The French have a curious custom. Whenever the Cabinet changes, the names of the ministries change as well. This is theoretically linked to deep thoughts about theories of state and which functions are best connected to which rubrics, but for the average citizen, it looks like corporate reorganization and usually makes little difference. Most civil servants stay in the same office as the nameplates on the doors change. However, the May 2007 government shuffle by the new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, created a storm for several reasons. He seriously snubbed friends on the right by not including them in the inner circle while at the same time irritating the left by hiring away some high profile Socialists, notably Bernard Kouchner, who protested in a front-page advertisement in Le Monde that he remained a socialist at heart. Kouchner, the humanitarian interventionist organizer, was given the Foreign Affairs Ministry, but he lost control over visas and asylum. They are now jointly administered by a new and highly contested ministry with a long name: Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity, and Codevelopment.
Reviving the "L" Word
Authors: Mattson Kevin
Published: February 2012

Few of us will forget November 2004. I remember driving myself to the point of pneumonia, having spent the previous two months making "persuasion" calls to my fellow Ohioans during the evenings and doing weekend "lit drops" in tiny rural towns, consistently chased away from houses by snarling dogs. Then the results came in. Most liberals and leftists turned morose; some thought the country had lost its mind. Friends told me they planned to move to Canada (they never did). The journalist Marc Cooper argued that it became easy for a progressive in 2004 to "fancy" oneself "a member of a persecuted minority, bravely shielding the flickering flame of enlightenment from the increasing Christo-Republican darkness."
Media, Democracy, and the Left: Seeing the Bigger Picture
Authors: Scheuer Jeffrey
Published: February 2012

If you had attended the most recent National Conference for Media Reform, held in Memphis, Tennessee, this past January and sponsored by Free Press ( www.freepress.net ), you might think that the media reform movement is on a roll. There was a palpable sense of momentum in Memphis, as more than 3,000 attendees—a substantial increase over previous conferences in Madison, Wisconsin, and St. Louis, Missouri—filled the convention center to hear speakers such as Jesse Jackson, Bill Moyers, David Brancaccio, FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Van Jones, Geena Davis, and Jane Fonda preach eloquently to the choir.
The Breakthrough: Feminism and Literary Criticism
Authors: Walzer Judith B.
Published: February 2012

How do we know when something starts or when a new phenomenon becomes a major trend? We don't have a "big bang" theory for the "second wave" of the women's movement. The common wisdom has been that it began when women who were active in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s took a good, long look at their radical male comrades and began to question their own subservience. "We do everything they do," they thought, "organizing, writing leaflets, marching, demonstrating—and then they think we should do the laundry? What's that about?" They wondered why they weren't running the show. But the roots of the movement go back even earlier. Again, popular opinion tells us that there was a buildup for some time, at least since the time of the Second World War, when women had to pitch in and were needed for essential work in the "outside" world.
Ghana: Soft Control of the Press: A Dubious Normalcy
Authors: Fair Jo Ellen
Published: February 2012

January is harmattan season in Accra, Ghana. Yellow dust billows off the Sahara, but this year from the east, the failed Kenyan elections blew their own hot storm. Ghana, fifty years independent and proud, confidently embraced democracy fifteen years ago. Now President John Kufuor, who chairs the African Union Assembly, was called to Nairobi to shore up democracy there. The Ghanaian media smile on every international display of the nation's leadership capacity, as if the rise of Kofi Annan had sealed the matter for all time, but as Kufuor headed to Kenya, the local press debated a question that seems inevitable in this breathless age: "Could a Kenya happen here?"
1968: Lessons Learned
Authors: Blackburn Robin
Published: February 2012

These last forty years, as each decade grinds to a close, there arrives the anniversary of 1968, with its invitation to nostalgia, the reconsideration of dashed hopes, or a pondering of the paradoxes of frustrated rebellion. Already in 1978 Régis Debray argued that the revolutionaries of '68 were as deluded and disoriented as Columbus arriving in the New World. They thought they were headed for the China of the "cultural revolution" when really they had landed on the beaches of "New Age" California. In the 1990s Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello put a different twist on this idea. The former soixante huitards, they argue in The New Culture of Capitalism, helped to break the dead hand of corporate bureaucracy and unleash a more entrepreneurial capitalism.
Memory as Homeland
Authors: Marcus David
Published: February 2012

Perhaps the most idiosyncratic characteristic of twentieth-century despotism was its obsession with historical revision. When considered against history's many brutal tyrants, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, and Stalin stand out as pathological rewriters of personal and state history. If, as Stalin said, a totalitarian regime imposed ideological consent through the engineering of human souls, then much of this effort was spent creating and enforcing elaborate counter-histories. "Day by day and almost minute by minute," George Orwell wrote in 1984, "the past was brought up to date."
The Supreme Court: Missing in Action
Authors: Fontana David
Published: February 2012

Since September 11, 2001, we have been fighting the so-called "war on terror" without the active participation of all three branches of government. For the first several years, a very aggressive president acted alone, without Congress or the Supreme Court. Since the Democrats regained control of Congress in 2006, the president has been acting sometimes with and sometimes against Congress. But at no time has the Supreme Court been an active participant in constitutional debates about the post-9/11 world. On the major constitutional issues of the recent past—Iraq, torture, wiretapping without warrants, the Patriot Act, and Guantánamo—the Court has decided cases related to just one of these.
See You in Six Years
Authors: Mills Nicolaus
Published: February 2012

At 8:45 in the morning on a hot August Thursday, I reported for jury duty in New York last summer. A week earlier Mayor Michael Bloomberg had made headlines by reporting for jury duty flanked by his aides. The mayor served two days before being sent home. I went three days before I was sent home.
Daniel A. Bell Replies
Authors: Bell Daniel A.
Published: February 2012

I am grateful for Sin-Yee Chan's powerful comment on my paper. I agree with much of what she says but I will focus here on points of clarification and disagreement. I do not mean to argue that domestic workers should "discount their rights and leave their well-being to the goodwill of their employers." I agree that the basic interests of domestic workers need to be protected by law and I specifically argue for laws that mete out "severe punishment for employers who physically or sexually abuse domestic workers." I also agree that the status quo does not adequately protect the basic interests of domestic workers.
The Problem with Film Criticism
Authors: Taylor Charles
Published: February 2012

The debate about the state of film criticism has settled—or calcified—into two camps: traditional print critics claim the Internet has replaced expertise with amateurs, fanboys, and obscurantists. Web enthusiasts counter that we're in a new golden age of film criticism and accuse the traditionalists of jealousy, resentment, and Ludditism. In other words: idealization of the past versus idealization of the present; resolution via what Pauline Kael once referred to as "saphead objectivity."
What Marx Forgot
Authors: Berman Sheri
Published: February 2012

Eric Hobsbawm is one of the great historians of the past century. His books and essays are beautifully written, full of stimulating insights, and able to capture the big patterns and tragic flow of events. Many of his works are justly considered classics, particularly his tetralogy on the "long" nineteenth and "short" twentieth centuries (The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire, and The Age of Extremes). Hobsbawm is also one of the premier Marxist intellectuals of the past century—something that has been a source of disappointment and even anger to many. Hobsbawm's long-standing membership in the British Communist Party and his belated, tepid criticism of the Soviet Union have marred his reputation and called his judgment into question. Yet these two aspects of Hobsbawm's mind are harder to separate than non-Marxist fans of his histories would like, because it is Marxist methods and arguments that provide the armature upon which the clarity, consistency, and force of his writings are constructed.
In Chile, Explaining Massive Protests Entails Remembering the Past
Authors: Randall Ian Anthony
Published: February 2012

Let's start with the numbers. On May 28, an estimated twenty thousand people flooded into downtown Santiago and marched on the presidential palace to protest the HidroAysén project, a plan to build a series of hydroelectric dams on two of Chilean Patagonia's most iconic rivers. The peaceful protest was a welcome relief to organizers after a fortythousand- person march in Santiago a week earlier led to fifty-three arrests and outbreaks of violence. The images of demonstrators launching Molotov cocktails and destroying private property had been broadcast alongside footage of riot police confronting marchers. Since May, protesters and police have clashed in at least twenty-seven cities. At this writing in early summer, there are few signs that the nationwide movement is waning, as protests continue to attract thousands of Chileans to the streets. Meanwhile, the administration of President Sebastián Piñera has voiced support for the estimated $10 billion project, a private venture headed by two private-sector partners, a European conglomerate and a Chilean electricity giant. Though HidroAysén was temporarily stalled by a Court of Appeals ruling, the Chilean Supreme Court recently found in favor of HidroAysén, and the project continues to move forward. Perhaps the most telling and relevant statistics of all: 74 percent of Chilean citizens oppose HidroAysén, yet 72 percent believe that the project will be completed anyway, according to a May 2011 survey.
In Search of Equality in School Finance Reform
Authors: Walters Pamela Barnhouse , Robinson Jean C. , Lamber Julia C.
Published: February 2012

If any reform promised to bring about equality of educational opportunity, it was arguably school finance reform. By eliminating the large differences in per-pupil spending among school districts in the same state, it would have leveled the playing field between high-spending versus low-spending districts. Yet, after four decades of effort, fewer than half the states have made serious attempts to equalize school financing (almost always in response to decisions from state supreme courts ordering them to do so). Further, even in the states that have attempted to do so, the reforms have met considerable political and popular resistance. In most states in which the courts have ordered an overhaul of public school financing, the legislatures have at best tinkered around the edges of an equalizing reform. Some have ignored the rulings outright. As a result, there continue to be large differences in funding between highspending and low-spending districts in just about every state School finance
Hugo Chávez as Postmodern Perón
Authors: Sunkara Bhaskar
Published: February 2012

What benefits has Hugo Chávez’s populist administration brought to the Venezuelan people? In a controversial 2008 Foreign Affairs article, “An Empty Revolution,” Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodríguez argues that the regime has not improved the quality of life in the country in any substantial way, it hasn’t actually given greater priority to welfare than past governments had done, and its claims of poverty reduction are overstated. Human development indicators have improved in some regards, he writes, but this has always been the case during commodity booms. Rodríguez even disputes the most frequently lauded achievement of the Bolivarian Revolution, the Barrio Adentro health services program that aims to provide cradle-to-grave medical services in poor communities. In rebuttal, Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research criticizes Rodríguez’s use of statistics and points to massive decreases in extreme poverty, gains in literacy, declining unemployment, and a general reorientation of state priorities toward public welfare under Chávez.
Views from the Black of the Math Classroom
Authors: Spencer Joi A.
Published: February 2012

Which kind of mathematical work makes sense today? This question is broader than, “Which math skills will graduates need to be successful in today’s economy?” Rather it deals with mathematical ideas and problems a student ought to be able to navigate to be a full, functioning, and active global citizen. Undoubtedly, students today ought to have an understanding of energy sources and costs, infrastructure, wealth distribution, financial markets, and environmental issues such as global warming, over-fishing, and deforestation. They should be able to use mathematics to make thoughtful, informed decisions involving these problems. As well, at a time when we are inundated with vast amounts of information, students today ought to be able to understand and make judgments about statistical data. They should be able to ask questions about these data and to discern which are important. They should be able to make the connection between their personal finances and financial decisions, and those of their governments and other significant institutions. Furthermore, as members of a democracy, they should be able to use mathematics to push for more just and inclusive societies. Our current system emphasizes computational skill almost exclusively. Yet computational skill alone is not enough. Students must be able to define and solve problems, identify and represent mathematical relationships, reason logically, justify their solutions, and persist even in the face of complexity. Likewise, the work of mathematics teachers must center on the development of instructional practices that lead students to these kinds of understandings. Test preparation is not mathematics instruction for the twenty-first century.