Blog Title: Explananda

Recently read: The Iron Cage

Rashid Khalidi. The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood

The story of Palestinian dispossession and statelessness begins in the transfer of Palestine from the Ottoman Empire to the British in the aftermath of World War I. The terms of the League of Nations mandate under which the British assumed responsibility for the territory encouraged the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” but in the same breath warned that “nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”

How exactly these aspirations came to find expression in the space of a single sentence, let alone a single document purporting to articulate a workable plan for the territory, is not clear. In 1922 the Jewish population of Palestine was a little under 10% of the total. Even in the 1930s, after the waves of immigration to Palestine that followed Hitler’s rise, and the shutting of other borders around the world to Jews (including, to their eternal discredit, those of the U.S. and Canada), the Jewish share of the population remained about a third of the total. This move to establish a national home for a single minority was hardly welcome to what the terms of the Mandate delicately refer to as the “non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” And indeed, it was clear to less myopic Zionists that, given the natural resistance of the then current inhabitants of Palestine, the establishment of such a national home would eventually require the mass “transfer”—ethnic cleansing—of a significant portion of that population. This is exactly what later happened when war broke out in response to the founding of Israel after WW II.

The stage was set for tragedy early, then, with a mix of desperate Jewish refugees fleeing antisemitic persecution in Europe, in search of a national home for which there was now some plausible basis in international law; British colonialism, with all its stupidity, mismanagement, double dealing, and arrogance; and the growing nationalism of the Palestinian people out of the old political order of the Ottoman Empire.

Rashid Khalidi’s superb Iron Cage examines this tragedy, with a special focus on the many causes of enduring Palestinian statelessness, past and present. It is a remarkable work, characterized by moral sophistication and a refusal to settle for simplistic narratives. Khalidi is acutely aware that the Palestinians faced considerable odds from the start in their own struggle for national rights. The influence of the British, the Arab nations, and then later the U.S., as a staunch and deeply biased supporter of Israel, has deeply disadvantaged the Palestinians in their struggle for recognition as a people deserving a national home of their own. It is impossible to understand the Palestinian predicament without grasping the larger forces acting against them throughout their troubled history.

But Khalidi is also motivated by a respect for Palestinian agency, which means an insistence on treating the Palestinians as always more than passive victims of events that befall them. Although facing very long odds, Khalidi argues cogently, Palestinian leadership during the Mandate period failed, among other things, to develop the state or para-state capacities which would have served it well in the coming confrontation with Israel. Many of the failings of the Palestinian Authority after Oslo were continuous with this original failure to prepare in a serious way for the eventual responsibilities of statehood. Subsequent Palestinian responses to Israel were often incoherent on the uses and limitations of political violence, and deeply ambivalent about the shape of a final settlement that might be both plausible and acceptable. A discussion of the successes and failures of Arafat, and the dismal mess made of things by the Oslo Accords rounds out Khalidi’s remarkably balanced treatment of this subject.

A final word about the author might be in order. For those who have short memories, Rashid Khalidi was recently the target of some vicious rhetoric during John McCain’s recent Presidential bid. Having finally gotten around to reading Khalidi’s book, I now think that McCain couldn’t have chosen a less appropriate target in his attempt to smear Obama by association.

Broadway

I was in the mood for a stroll yesterday morning, so I took the subway to the North end of Manhattan and then walked from the point at which Broadway enters Manhattan from the Bronx down its entire length to where it stops not far from the Southernmost tip of the island.

It’s a nice walk. Google Earth tells me that it’s about 13.5 miles, or 21.5 kilometres. But most of the walking is flat, or on a gentle grade, and there’s a lot to look at. I took a leisurely pace, and stopped a number of times, and the whole walk took me less than 5 hours.

Great waves of money have washed over Manhattan in the last decade or so, destroying a lot of its social and economic diversity. So a walk down Broadway doesn’t offer the same crosscut of Manhattan society that it once did. Still, there’s plenty of variety on that one road.

Broadway begins in Manhattan on a very modest note, in a sort of ugly industrial squalor. To get there, you take the 1 train to 215th St in Manhattan, and then walk a few blocks North. Then you turn around and begin walking South, through Inwood, under the George Washington Bridge, through Washington Heights, getting glimpses of the Hudson River at each of the side streets for a time, then past Harlem, and Columbia, the Upper West Side, drawing away from the West side of the island as you move South, past Lincoln Center, through Columbus Circle, where Broadway finally, briefly touches Central Park, and then on into the canyon of buildings that leads up to Times Square, with its crowds of tourists, and cops, and street preachers, and then past Herald Square and Korea Way on 32nd st., and then past Union Square, and the Strand Bookstore, and Houston, finally leaving the numbered streets behind, and then past Canal and Chinatown, and City Hall, though the financial district and right to the end, by a statue of a Bull, symbol of a prosperous stock market, which faces up Broadway, and which seems to be surrounded by tourists at any hour of the day snapping shots of it, as if worshiping the symbol of a departed god.

No small part of Manhattan’s appeal is the modesty of its geographical size relative to its ambitions and its accomplishments. This makes for an incredible density of visual and architectural experience and historical reference, but on a scale that is walkable, and so both human and accessible. It’s an amazing city, and one way into it, into its life and its energy and its accomplishment, is to take an afternoon, and walk one of its most famous streets, from one end to the other.

Recently read: The Science of Orgasm

Barry R. Komisaruk, Carlos Beyer-Flores, and Beverly Whipple. The Science of Orgasm

This fascinating book has everything you ever wanted to know about orgasms, and possibly even more. The authors are, respectively, a neuroscientist, an endocrinologist, and a sexuality researcher. The team approach has resulted in an unusually comprehensive look at the subject. The authors detail not only the mechanics of organism (from the point of view of physiology, neurology, and endocrinology), but also at the effects of disease, aging, medication (especially anti-depressants and anti-psychotics), and illicit drugs on orgasm. And the recent publication date, 2006, means that we’re treated to a pretty current look at what science has to tell us about this process, at once so very, very, very, very familiar, and yet still so mysterious.

Also mysterious is who exactly this book is aimed at. For reasons I no longer remember, I was under the impression when I got it out of the library that it might be aimed at a popular audience. But although the chapters vary a lot in terms of how demanding they are, more than a few of them are awfully tough on a lay reader. This is especially so in discussions of the nervous system. Take this paragraph, chosen almost at random:

Dopaminergic axons that project to the paraventricular nuclei originate from a small group of neurons, termed the A-14 dopaminergic group, which constitute the incertohypothalamic pathway. In rats, the axons originate in a forebrain area, the subthalamus, and project to the hypothalamus. In the paraventricular nucleus, D2 receptors are located on oxytocin-synthesizing neurons . . .

I found these passages a bit more accessible than I might otherwise have because by happy coincidence I only recently finished reading Eric Kandel’s memoir, which spends a lot of time discussing neuroscience. That said, I’m not going to pretend I understood everything in this book, and until you present your credentials, I’m not going to pretend that I think you’ll do much better.

Even if dense scientific prose isn’t for you, parts of this book make for more accessible reading. I imagine too that the book will be of considerable use as a reference for both laypeople and health practitioners looking to understand orgasms, and a host of related issues.

Best vocal release/Best tribute album

I forgot to mention that All About Jazz (New York edition) chose Yoon’s album Imagination as one of the top five vocal releases of 2008 and one of the top five tribute albums of 2008.

If you haven’t bought a copy yet, I suppose it was probably because you couldn’t stop wondering, “Am I really worthy? Do I deserve something this good in my life?” But those aren’t really the right questions. The question is whether you can buy it, and the answer to this question is probably: yes. The physical CD can be purchased here, but the impatient can buy a (DRM-free) digital download of the entire album right here.

(UPDATE: Oh, forgot: Jazz.com listed Imagination as one of the top 50 jazz albums of 2008.)

Oh, and if you’re into solo ukulele (and really, who isn’t?), Yeah Yeah Records is offering free downloads of a great solo uke EP for a limited time.

Retraction: who/that edition

More than a year ago, I wrote:

You would never write this, would you, dear reader?

Socrates was a philosopher that believed . . .

No, of course you wouldn’t. You would write,

Socrates was a philosopher who believed . . .

In such cases you use “who” or “whom” for people and “that” for objects, right?

Almost every day since then I have encountered some counterexample to my claim. I hear it in spoken English in every register. I come across it on blogs, in newspapers, books, and even in the titles of books. It’s clearly standard English to use “that” for people as well as “who” or “whom.”

So, I was wrong. I hereby retract my previous post.

Recently read: The Principles of Uncertainty

Maira Kalman. The Principles of Uncertainty

The first thing I noticed about this book when I picked it up was its weight. It’s much heavier than is normal for a book of its size, a solidly put together book with nice, thick pages. The Principles of Uncertainty takes us through a year of the author’s musings, free associations, memories and travels, from May 2006 to April 2007. There are a few pictures, and an accompanying text, but the main attractions are the illustrations, which are gorgeous and wonderful to look at. The accompanying text is occasionally effective, but I often found it a bit too cutesy for my taste. On the whole, though, this book was a real pleasure to read, and will, I expect, be a pleasure to dip back into from time to time.

Theater of War in theater

The Brecht documentary I mentioned a while back is now playing at the Film Forum. If you happen to be in NYC, you should check it out. More information below the fold:

In the summer of 2006, Meryl Streep took a time out from making movies, and she took on the role of a lifetime: the lead in Bertolt Brecht’s classic anti-war play “Mother Courage and Her Children.” And for the first time she allowed a camera crew to document her rehearsal process. Theater of War not only takes us back-stage with one of the greatest actresses of our time, it also takes us back in time, uncovering the story of Brecht’s flight from the Nazis, his years in exile, and his eventual return to Germany where he first staged Mother Courage. Along the way, Tony Kushner and others explore the terrifying theme of Brecht’s masterpiece: why does history repeat itself in an endless cycle of violence and warfare?

You can watch the trailer here:
http://www.filmforum.org/films/theatertrailer.html

More info on Film Forum’s website, here:
http://www.filmforum.org/films/theater.html

Wednesday, December 24 – Tuesday, January 6 - Two Weeks
Showtimes: 1:15, 3:15, 6:00, 8:10, 10:10
Location: 209 W Houston St, New York, NY 10014 (Btwn 6th & 7th Aves)
Box Office: (212) 727-8110

Director John Walter will be doing Q&As after the 8:10pm screenings on Friday and Saturday this week, Dec. 26-27.

“Freak show”

Yesterday, in my brief write-up of Oliver Sacks’ book An Anthropologist on Mars, I wrote that Sacks is clearly interested in putting on more than a “freak show.” On a hunch, I just looked over at Sacks’ Wikipedia page, and sure enough, exactly this criticism turns out to have been made of Sacks.

Wikipedia also points to a paper by Thomas Couser called “The Case of Oliver Sacks: The ethics of neuroanthropology,” which is available here (pdf). It’s a sensitive and nuanced look at these criticisms and possible responses to them.

In Anthropologist, the only moment of discomfort I registered was in Sacks’ discussion of the private “sexy” drawings of the autistic artist, Stephen Wiltshire. These are private drawings that Wiltshire made, and which were discovered by his friend and mentor by accident. So they, and their existence, were clearly private. And Wiltshire is not just named in Sacks’ account, he has appeared on television on more than one occasion in connection with his artistic activities. Moreover, the inclusion of this information seemed to me unnecessary to the case (Sacks had a full enough sketch already of Wiltshire’s relations with the opposite sex), and so struck me as gratuitous as well as invasive.

In the rest of the book, however, I was struck by a real respect on Sacks’ part for his subjects, and in particular by his willingness to reconsider the conventional boundaries between pathology and the normal. That’s a reconsideration that seems to me of obvious relevance to the question of respect that Sacks’ critics raise.

Recently read: An Anthropologist on Mars

Oliver Sacks. An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

Some of the greatest insights into the normal functioning of the human mind have come from the investigation of strange and unusual breakdowns and disruptions in normal functioning. Take, for example, the phenomenon of blindsight. Someone afflicted by blindsight will experience herself as blind, and claim not to be able to see anything in front of her, but if forced to guess about the identity of an object in her visual field, will be able to more or less accurately identify it. (People with blindsight don’t always get it right. But they get it right more than could be explained by chance.) Blindsight hints at features of visual processing that might have taken much longer to unravel if we confined our attention to normal cases of visual perception. It suggests, among other things, that visual processing takes place along multiple paths; that those paths are not just distinct, but separable; that some of them are not available to conscious reflection.

Oliver Sacks has done more than anyone else to bring discussion of odd neurological edge cases into public awareness. It’s easy to imagine a parallel universe with an equally successful but much crappier version of Sacks. The cases he discusses are so strange, and so intrinsically interesting, that a much lesser writer could make them good enough to do quite well for himself. Luckily, we live in a universe in which our Sacks is interested in more than putting on a freak show. His case studies are historically and philosophically informed meditations that circle around a problem, often not content to simply slap labels or jump to quick conclusions.

And so in An Anthropologist on Mars Sacks uses disorders of various kinds to explore themes of much more general interest. In his first essay, for example, Sacks uses the case of a painter suddenly struck with complete colourblindness to explore the complex relationship between different aspects of visual perception, as well as the possibilities for regeneration and renewal in a person when a faculty absolutely central to self-identity is suddenly and irreversibly crippled.

Sacks tells us in the preface that his essays in the collection are unified by a theme:

These are tales of survival, survival under altered, sometimes radically altered, conditions—survival made possible by the wonderful (but sometimes dangerous) powers of reconstruction and adaptation we have. In earlier books I wrote of the ‘preservation’ of self, and (more rarely) of the ‘loss’ of self, in neurological disorders. I have to [sic?] come to think these terms too simple—and that there is neither loss nor preservation of identity in such situations, but, rather, its adaption, even its transmutation, given a radically altered brain and ‘reality.’

This seems to me a much better description of some of the cases discussed in the book than others. It fits very well Sacks’ discussion of the painter mentioned above, or his discussion of Temple Grandin, an autistic professor of Animal Science (whose book is on my reading list). But it was hard for me to see how an essay (”The Last Hippie”) about a brain damaged man with a severe memory disorder fit this theme.

This collection of essays is a bit dated - it was published in 1995. But it’s been on the shelf for ages, and I’ve only now gotten around to it. I’m looking forward to Sacks’ Musicophilia.

Recently read: No one belongs here more than you

Miranda July. No one belongs here more than you

The phrase “no one belongs here more than you” is just hyperbolic enough that it’s hard to imagine it being said sincerely to anyone who actually belongs. It’s a fitting title for this collection of short stories about socially isolated, often sexually dysfunctional, depressed, obsessive compulsive misfits. Running through all the pieces, whether they’re narrated in the first or the third person, is the same creepy sensibility and manner of expression. I don’t know if that means that July isn’t terribly good as a writer at going beyond a single voice, or whether it means that she’s able to brilliantly explore a sensibility through a series of different characters. In any case, this book was as difficult to put down as it was disturbing.

Recently read: A Small Corner of Hell

Anna Politkovskaya. A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya

This is one of the saddest books I’ve ever read. When she was assassinated in 2006, all I knew about Politkovskaya was that she was a journalist who covered the recent conflicts in Chechnya. Now that I’ve read A Small Corner of Hell, I can see why she was assassinated, and also why Putin couldn’t even bother to conceal his pleasure that she was no longer around to investigate his savage, inhuman little wars in Chechnya.

Politkovskaya has a keen sense of how the wretched conflicts Chechnya started, and how, once started, they became self-perpetuating with a host of cynical, exploitative generals, warlords, and politicians all profiting from it. In her book you get a decent analysis of how all these pieces fit together. But what you also get are closely rendered portraits of particular people caught in injustices so vicious they stagger the imagination. In the end, I think what makes her book so remarkable is this extraordinary range: from the larger structural view of the conflict right down to particular individuals caught in that nightmarish mess.

Recently read: The Now Habit

Neil FioreThe Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play

The entire self-help genre is plagued by some pretty cheesy writing, but if you look past that this isn’t a bad book at all. Indeed, I wish I’d read it a long time ago, especially when I was working on, and putting off working on, my dissertation.

Fiore thinks that human beings are creative and productive in nature. But when they are beset by anxiety, or self-doubt, or resentment, they begin to procrastinate. This procrastination often leads to more work and more pain than it otherwise would, but procrastination is nevertheless a strategy that makes a certain amount of sense as a response to that anxiety and self-doubt. Unfortunately, once a pattern of procrastination has set in, it can easily become entrenched. If procrastination has left me with little time to complete a task, I’ll end up working very hard on it at the last minute and/or canceling periods of rest that might refresh me and that are an important part of restoring creativity and drive. Sapped of creativity and drive, I am then led to further procrastinate, resenting my situation, and anxious about its outcome.

Fiore has a lot of suggestions about overcoming this problem. One interesting one is simply to put a bunch of fun, relaxing things in your schedule. Watch the schedule fill up with those fun things. Commit to them. Now look at how little time you have. The chronic procrastinator, accustomed to wiping the slate clear to complete a long overdue task, may well overestimate how much time she has to get things done because she’s not mentally used to accounting for time off. But we need those breaks to restore us, so that we can work well and productively again. Other suggestions include tips on how to approach work that go a bit beyond the whole “break it down” routine you’ve probably heard before.

Anyway, if you’re a chronic procrastinator you might well find this book worthwhile.

Recently read: Emotional Awareness

The Dalai Lama and Paul Ekman. Emotional Awareness: Overcoming the Obstacles to Psychological Balance and Compassion

This book presents a series of dialogues between the well-known psychologist and researcher of facial expressions, Paul Ekman, and the Dalai Lama. I’m not sure how deeply they really manage to get into their topic, or whether this book was very helpful in allowing me to “overcome obstacles to psychological balance and compassion,” but the discussions are interesting nonetheless. It’s clear that a lot of care has gone into this book, as it contains not only dialogues but well-written guest-authored sidebars throughout containing further explanations about particular issues.

Recently read: In Search of Memory

Eric R. Kandel. In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind

Eric Kandel’s family was forced to flee Austria in 1938 when Hitler’s Germany absorbed the country (with the enthusiastic consent of many Austrians). He wound up in Brooklyn, in my current neighbourhood. Indeed, for a few weeks he attended PS. 217, the school across the street from my apartment building, and less than 30 metres from the chair I was sitting in when I came across this fact (accounting for vertical displacement, since we’re on the sixth floor).

From Brooklyn, he went to Harvard and studied German literature. While there, he became entranced with psychoanalysis —all the rage in the 1950s — and determined to enter medical school in order to pursue a career as a psychoanalyst. But an interest in basic research in neurology gradually took over, and he ended up studying the biological bases of the very same phenomena that drew him originally to psychoanalysis: memory, consciousness, pathologies of the mind, and the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious.

For much of his career, Kandel’s approach has been what he terms “reductionist.” In order to study a phenomenon like memory, he chose a very simple organism with large neurons and simple, discernible patterns of learning and memory. Kandel’s star organism was Aplysia, a sort of very large sea snail. Kandel’s choice was disapproved of by some researchers who worried that a snail was too far removed from a human to shed any light on the formation of memories in the latter. But the choice turned out to be inspired. For it turns out that nature is, in some ways, deeply conservative. A successful technique once hit on is often elaborated upon without being completely abandoned. We are, in some limited but crucial respects, not so far from snails. And so Aplysia ended up teaching Kandel, and the rest of us, quite a bit about the biological roots of memory in humans as well as snails. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000 for his work.

This is the fascinating and circuitous route traced by Kandel’s memoir, In Search of Memory: from Austria to Brooklyn to Harvard to psychoanalysis to neurobiology to snails and then back to humans and on to the Nobel Prize. It’s a wonderful read, filled with lucid and engaging accounts of the development of modern brain science. As is fitting for the memoir of a life consumed by a passion for science, much of the book is taken up with accounts of Kandel’s work. But there are moments of humanity sprinkled throughout, and Kandel is a fine writer when he tackles non-scientific issues. Of particular interest are his reflections on Vienna, the city he was forced to leave, the terrible toll that German and Austrian Nazis inflicted on the Jewish community of Austria and thereby on their own culture, and the conflicted, uncertain, and incomplete attempts by Austrians since then to come to terms with their treatment of Austria’s Jewish population. Highly recommended.

Recently read: In Praise of Slowness

Carl Honoré In Praise of Slowness: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed

Honoré doesn’t actually write in praise of slowness. “Slow” and its cognates are used by Honoré and many of the people he interviews to refer to doing things at the right speed. Take food, for example, where the slow movement—according to Honoré there actually is such a thing—is supposed to have gotten its start. Obviously a proponent of slow cooking is not going to insist that you sear a steak over several hours. This is something that needs to be done quickly to be done at all. But not everything needs to be seared; some of the best food takes a lot of time; and many people have gotten too rushed to slow down and take that time. So the slow movement is so-called, not because it wants people to mindlessly reduce the speed at which they do things, but because when people with hectic lives apply a corrective to their behaviour, it’s usually by slowing down things that they’re doing too quickly.

But slowness is more than that, apparently. At times, what Honoré seems to be describing is deliberateness, or thoughtfulness, or what a lot of people refer to nowadays as mindfulness. Or something. Since people doing things mindfully tend to really think about the consequences of their behaviour, then, slowness also comes to encompass a lot of other things like, for example, organic food. But it’s even more than that!

In this book, Fast and Slow do more than just describe a rate of change. They are shorthand for ways of being, or philosophies of life. Fast is busy, controlling, aggressive, hurried, analytical [! . . . ?!? . . . $%^&*#!!!], stressed, superficial, impatient, active, quantity-over-quality. Slow is the opposite: calm, careful, receptive, still, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective, quality-over-quantity.

Honoré explores this theme, such as it is, through subjects like food, medicine, work, sex, raising children, and so on.

I got this book out of the library because I thought it looked like an interesting meditation on how we spend our time, and how we might reorganize it to spend it more thoughtfully. It’s not. It’s a thinly researched, cliche-ridden, flight-magazine-article of a book. The author jumps around disjointedly from one topic to another in a way that becomes mindnumbingly formulaic by about the second chapter. Here’s the formula:

Nowadays, we engage in/take/consume/prepare/etc., [insert topic] with breathtaking speed! I found a statistic in a book once that seems to support this. In Japan, we find this trend even more pronounced. In the past, it was common to engage in/take/consume/prepare/etc., [insert topic] a bit more slowly. So-and-so once remarked that [insert little quotation and/or dubious or thinly researched factoid]. To be sure, in the past not everyone took such a leisurely approach [insert another factoid or quotation intended to immunize against counterexamples]. Still, it was indeed common to engage in/take/consume/prepare/etc., [insert topic] at less than a dizzying pace. Nowadays, more and more people are choosing to engage in/take/consume/prepare/etc., [insert topic] a bit more slowly. [omit evidence for this claim.] Indeed, increasingly people are turning to alternatives. [flimsy evidence for this claim.] To see whether this was worth the trouble, I enrolled in 3 days of a 10 day program touting the efficacy of X. It seemed to work! To get a better sense of what this was all about, I spoke to Y, who has recently rearranged her life around this new approach. She tells me her friends and family tell her that it seemed to work! That’s why increasingly people are choosing to engage in/take/consume/prepare/etc., [insert topic] a bit more slowly.

The basic problem with this book is that the author is trying to tackle a sociologically interesting subject, or set of subjects, but is simply unwilling to, well, slow down and take the time to research them properly and then write fluently about them. This is unfortunate. Every once in a while the author is willing to complicate his theme in a way that suggests the possibility of a more interesting approach, or stumbles briefly onto an especially interesting path. These moments led me to think that there was a better book somewhere in here struggling to get out. But it didn’t, and so this book is not recommended.

Recently read

Michael Pollan. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

The Omnivore’s Dilemma is an ethically and scientifically informed meditation on food, the modern food chain, and the ways in which the latter has distorted our relationship with the former. Pollan provides a fascinating overview of the highly dysfunctional system of agricultural subsidies that spur the overproduction of corn and a few other staples, and traces the effects of the corn glut through the rest of the food economy. He then explores alternatives to the modern agricultural system, beginning with mainstream organic farming, and moving on to much more radical departures from the mainstream. I thought that the passages on the killing and eating of animals were especially thoughtful.

E.R. Chamberlin. The Bad Popes

I’m not in a position to judge the reliability of the book, but I can say that it has a few entertaining moments, if Popes behaving badly is your thing. In style and tone, this book reminded me a bit, for better or worse, of John Julius Norwich’s books.

Douglas A. Blackmon. Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

If the North won the American Civil War, the South surely won the reconstruction. In the years following the Civil War, African Americans did not find themselves suddenly free to enjoy the fruits of the victory over their slave holders. Rather, whites developed a system that permitted them to hold blacks down with the threat of terrible violence, and which allowed them to make use of their forced labour under conditions that were, very often, worse than those endured by many slaves under the old regime of slavery.

Here’s how the system worked, as explained in considerable detail by Douglas A. Blackmon in his Slavery By Another Name: blacks would be arrested on bogus or trumped up charges. These often included “vagrancy,” an all-purpose charge to which any unemployed black man (in an era of massive unemployment) was vulnerable. Sometimes the charge was even forgotten by the time the victim had been brought to court. It hardly mattered. A sheriff or local judge could always be found to find the victim guilty, regardless of the merits of the case — especially because he could expect to profit himself from the proceedings. The victim was then assessed a fine, along with fees associated with the costs of the proceedings. Unable to pay, the victim would be coerced into signing an agreement to work off the sum in the service of a white who would pay in his stead. Entirely deprived of rights, blacks could then be locked up, beaten, tortured, fed next to nothing, traded, sold, and worked under conditions that accounted for the extremely high mortality rates among prisoners.

Every aspect of this twisted system is sickening. Arrest rates rose and fell according to the labour required in an area. The constant threat of arrest served as a reliable way of keeping blacks who weren’t prisoners in line. Any African American not directly under the protection of a white was vulnerable to arrest on trumped up charges. This power also helped perpetuate the widespread rape of African American women by white men. This is the bleak picture of American American life in this period that emerges from Blackmon’s account. If there is one figure that captures all this in a book filled with anecdotes, figures and arguments, it is surely this: that between the years 1877 and 1966 in the state of Georgia, only one white man was found guilty of murdering a black man.

The system also helped wealthier whites to crush attempts to unionize their industries. It’s hardly surprising that these attempts failed when management could always resort of cut-rate prisoner labour in the face of a threat to strike.

Blackmon makes a very strong case that this era of American history is best described as the Era of Neoslavery. It wasn’t until the second World War had begun that the Federal Government moved to begin enforcing laws in the South that it had long chosen to ignore.

This is a superb book, as angry as it is methodical. It’s essential reading for anyone who wants to understand U.S. history. But because Blackmon does such a good job reflecting on the consequences of that history, it’s also essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the present.

Susan Blackmore. Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction

The title says it all. It was indeed very short, and the length of the text made it impossible for the author to do anything more than introduce a few topics in the study of consciousness. But as introductions go, this one struck me as pretty good: clear, readable, and interesting. Lots of good stuff on everything from the latest in philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and more.

Oh, Canada!

It doesn’t get a lot of attention in the US, but boy oh boy is there an awesome political drama going on in Canada right now. Here’s the latest. I’m pestering relatives and friends for help keeping up with this. If you want the basic story line, you’ve basically got a villain brought down by his own arrogance and overreaching (Harper) and a fractious, bumbling opposition apparently able to sock it to him. So far! But stay tuned. Will the new Liberal-NDP coalition fall apart? Will the Liberals, on the verge of a leadership race, break down in fresh in-fighting? What will the about-to-depart-but-suddenly-probably-PM Dion do next? Wither Rae? Ignatieff?

It’s a potential constitutional crisis wrapped in a lot of petty squabbling with the rich sauce of Schadenfreude poured all over the top. Oh, Canada! Sometimes I miss you so.

Cool it?

Josh Marshall tells those of us wringing our hands over some of his (potential) appointees to cool it. Appointees implement policies; they don’t set them.

Maybe Josh can forgive us for taking Obama at his word:

One of the great economic minds of our times, Larry [Summers] has the global reputation for being able to get to the heart of the most complex and novel policy challenges. With respect to both, our current financial crisis and other pressing economic issues of our time, his thinking, writing, and speaking have set the terms of the debate. I am glad he will be by my side, playing the critical role of coordinating my administration’s economic policy in the White House and I will rely heavily on his advice as to navigate the unchartered waters of this crisis.

Obama tells us that Larry Summers, who argued that regulating financial derivatives markets would “cast[ ] a shadow of regulatory uncertainty over an otherwise thriving market,” will be a guiding force. Why shouldn’t we believe that?

Friedman

I let my subscription to the New Yorker lapse a little while back, but my friend and occasional commenter here, Alif Sikkiin, lent me a recent edition with a profile of Thomas Friedman by Ian Parker. Alif and I had pretty much the same reaction to the piece: that Parker cuts him down a bit, but ends up according Friedman far more respect than he deserves.

I just wanted to make a quick note on this bit of the piece (on p. 62):

Friedman understood the political and cultural context of Iraq well, but the prospect of war required him to make a choice—yes or no—and this did not come naturally. He knew that the judgment, once made, would become separated from its analytical roots. (In the event, that process was assisted by a clumsy comment Friedman made to Charlie Rose in May, 2003: he said, approvingly, that the American presence in Iraq was akin to saying “Suck on this” to Islamic terrorists.)

Apart from this talk of “analytical roots,” which gives the wholly misleading impression that Friedman has ideas, this seems to me an implausible reading of Friedman’s comments on Charlie Rose’s show. Go watch the video. Friedman is speaking passionately, but he’s also being very deliberate, and you can see that he’s choosing his words carefully. It would be bad enough if he had expressed the view that Parker attributes to him, since that view approves of actions that hurt innocents in order to annoy and depress adversaries (much in the way that terrorists do). But I don’t think that’s what Friedman is actually saying. Rather, the target of the “Suck on this” seems to be the broader Middle East, and an entire culture he finds fault with. It wasn’t terrorists that Friedman wanted the Iraq war to send a message to, it was everybody in the region.

Whatever. The final word on Friedman is always going to be Matt Taibbi’s review of “The Earth is Flat,” which has to be one of the best reviews ever written.*

* This review—same publication, different author—is another old favourite.

The Health Care Industry’s Insufficient Offer

Ezra Klein is right, the news this morning out of the insurance industry’s bunker is a big deal. They have offered a deal. They will agree to offer insurance to everyone, in exchange for a mandate forcing all to obtain coverage. Ezra explains the logic of current arrangements:

The individual health insurance market, fundamentally, is incoherent: Insurers try to deny coverage to those who want it and to sell to those who don’t. That’s because the most profitable customer for an insurer is one that never gets sick, and the least profitable is one who falls very ill. But that’s not how you want your health insurance market to work. We want sick people to get care. That’s the point.

But perhaps they see the writing on the wall, and know that at some point, they will face legislation enjoining them to adopt “guarantee issue.” Hell, even the vast majority of Republicans voted for a recent bill prohibiting insurance companies from “discriminating” against customers whose genetic tests indicate future health problems. But in order to cover the costs of insuring those who have been traditionally denied coverage precisely because covering them would be expensive, the insurers say they’ll need healthy people to buy insurance. That way when the risky get sick, the premiums of the healthy can be used to pay for their treatment. As Donald G. Hamm Jr., president of Assurant Health, puts it,

In the individual market, people can choose whether or not to apply for coverage,” Mr. Hamm said in an interview. “If they know they can obtain coverage at any time, many will wait until they get sick to apply for it. That increases the price for everyone.

But Ezra is on to Mr. Hamm:

The question is not whether they’ll offer to sell coverage at all, but at what price? Selling insurance products that no one can afford may mean you’re not technically denying people access to insurance, but it doesn’t guarantee accessibility, which is a necessary precondition for a universal system. For that, you need “community rating,” which would force insurers to offer coverage at the same price to everyone, spreading risk equally and ensuring that coverage is no less affordable for the sick than the well.

Actually, even community rating is insufficient. Community rated plans are designed to lower the insurance costs faced by high risk individuals by requiring that any particular health plan’s premium be priced to reflect the population’s average anticipated individual health care costs. While such regulations are well-meaning— high risk individuals will not be charged more than low risk individuals for the same level of coverage—adverse selection can remain a problem. Unless there are also government restrictions on the levels of coverage in the available plans, especially on whether there is a robust minimum that every plan must provide, low-risk individuals may choose bare bones plans that would benefit medium- and high-risk persons little. When this happens, plans providing a robust level of health care will attract only those individuals with higher risks, and this will drive up premiums and drive away healthier buyers interested in cheaper plans. So even if everyone is charged the same price for a community rated plan, the plans providing robust coverage will be avoided by the healthy, thus making them more expensive for those who will actually want them. This leads to premiums that still significantly reflect health status even when community rating regulations are in effect. Here’s one recent NBER working paper on the issue.

So what we need is a mandate, community rating, and legislation establishing a robust minimum that each health care plan must satisfy. Only then will low-risk individuals actually subsidize the care that high-risk individuals need.

Unfortunately, the problem is not solved even then, since general health costs are growing unsustainably. But that is a problem we can discuss another day.