Reviews, essays, videos, and more from around the web.

My Paper Chase: Harold Evans and a Golden Age of Journalism (FT)

* Related Title: Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press by Eric Boehlert

The History of Christianity: The Greatest Story, or the Trickiest? (Economist)

* Related Title: The Bible: A Biography by Karen Armstrong

How Brandeis Became a Giant of the Supreme Court (NY Times)

* Related Title: The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin

Irving Kristol’s Legacy and the Meaning of Neoconservatism (Bloggingheads TV)

* Related Title: Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power by Fred Kaplan

The Greatest Show on Earth: Richard Dawkins on Evolution (FT)

* Related Title: Monkey Girl by Edward Humes

Climate Change

“We understand the gravity of the climate threat. And so all of us will face doubts and difficulties in our own capitals as we try to reach a lasting solution to the climate challenge.”

- President Obama, addressing world leaders at the the U.N. Tuesday morning. Some 100 heads of state gathered there for an unprecedented daylong conference on combating climate change with the aim of jump-starting talks on a global emissions deal. (New York Times)

*Related Title: The Global Deal: Climate Change and the Creation of a New Era of Progress and Prosperity, by Nicholas Stern

The Healthcare Hold-Up in Congress

“I don’t pretend that it’s the last word. I’m eager to work with other senators to make this an even better bill.”

- Max Baucus, Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee Chairman, who promised further changes to his health reform bill as the panel began its formal consideration of the legislation Tuesday morning. (Wall Street Journal)

*Related Title: Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform, by Howard Dean, with Igor Volsky

The Troop Situation in Afghanistan

“We have to make sure we have the right strategy. Things have changed on the ground fairly considerably.”

- A government official quoted by the Wall Street Journal, which is reporting that the Pentagon has told its top commander in Afghanistan not to ask for extra troops until the Obama administration completes a strategy review. (Reuters)

*Related Title: The Inheritance: The World Obama Inherits and the Challenges to American Power, by David E. Sanger

Net Neutrality

“[W]hile there are some who see every policy decision as either pro-business or pro-consumer, I reject that approach; it’s not the right way to see technology’s role in America.”

- Julius Genachowski, FCC Chairman, who wants rules to prevent providers blocking or slowing down bandwidth-heavy usage such as streaming video. (BBC)

*Related Title: Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press, by Eric Boehlert

FBI Terrorism Investigation

“The explosives element, the training and the backpacks — all are part of the core al-Qaeda bomb-making curriculum as we’ve seen in two specific incidents in the United Kingdom.”

- Bruce R. Hoffman, a counterterrorism analyst at Georgetown University. A 24-year-old Afghan man at the center of an FBI investigation into a possible U.S. terrorism cell was ordered held without bond in Colorado Monday as authorities raced to learn more about an alleged plot using hydrogen peroxide explosives. (Washington Post)

Related Title: The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright

In Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth, David C. Korten offers a big-picture story of where we went wrong in the design of our economic institutions and what we can do about it. He argues that the problems with our economic and financial system go way deeper than the current crisis, and that efforts so far to “fix” them are so much tinkering at the margins. The larger issue, Korten argues, is that Wall Street has perfected the art of creating “wealth” without producing anything of real value. He calls this “phantom wealth.”

For Korten, hope lies not with Wall Street (one of the sections of the book is titled “The Case for Eliminating Wall Street”), but with Main Street, which creates real wealth from real resources to meet real needs. He outlines an agenda to create a new “real-wealth” economy—locally based, community oriented, and devoted to creating a better life for all, not simply increasing profits.

Citing the Happy Planet Index, a set of measures devised by NEF, a think tank, which “reveals the ecological efficiency with which human well-being is delivered,” Korten notes that the shift from a phantom wealth economy to a real wealth economy will necessarily entail increasing some things and decreasing others. Here are two lists from the book that detail exactly what we want more and less of.

What We Want to Increase:

• the percentage of food grown locally
• attendance at farmers’ markets
• school attendance and graduation rates
• voter participation rates
• the number of pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly streets
• the acreage of open space near urban villages
• youth involvement in community service
• the number of neighbors with whom people interact regularly
• the percentage of locally owned businesses
• the size of wild salmon runs

What We Want to Decrease:

• divorce rates
• the number of single parents
• the extent of soil erosion
• incarceration rates
• infant and child mortality rates
• rates of hospitalization for children with asthma
• the total area of impervious surfaces
• childhood obesity rates

If you’re really up on American political history, you probably know that in his infamous 1979 “malaise” speech, President Jimmy Carter didn’t once utter the word “malaise.” And you probably know that the televised July 15  address, more properly dubbed the “Crisis of Confidence” speech, instantly and irrevocably crystallized Carter’s image in the eyes of the American people as a pessimistic, can’t-do president, hopelessly outmatched by events–which in 1979 included an energy crisis featuring soaring gas prices, endless lines and sporadic violence at the pump, runaway inflation, economic stagnation, and a theocratic revolution in Iran. Carter made the elemental mistake, so the story goes, of blaming the American people for the country’s troubles, conveniently absolving himself from responsibility and self-righteously lambasting Americans’ materialism, their consumerism, their loss of nerve; and from the instant the speech was over so, effectively, was Carter’s presidency.

But it’s not so neat and tidy. As Kevin Mattson convincingly shows in What the Heck are You Up To, Mr. President? the immediate response to Carter’s speech was in fact–a double digit jump in the polls! (Admittedly, Carter was starting from a low baseline: in the summer of 79 he was more unpopular than Nixon had been at the height of Watergate.) Americans, it turned out, appreciated a bit of straightforward honesty, however harsh, from their president. And by way, read the text or watch the video of the speech and you’ll see that Carter was every bit as hard on himself as on the American people.

The problem for Carter was that within a few days he undermined what good his speech did by firing his entire cabinet, which the nation largely read as a sign that Carter had lost control — certainly of events and possibly of his own mind — and his numbers sank again. The year that followed brought an ultimately unsuccessful but damaging insurgent campaign for the Democratic nomination from Edward Kennedy; the Iranian hostage crisis; and the rise of Ronald Reagan, whose communicative gifts and sunny optimism spoke to the national yearning for renewed self-belief and a new tomorrow. Crucially, Reagan’s campaign did a great job of turning Carter’s bracing honesty against him, encouraging a rereading of Carter’s speech as a profoundly un-American exercise in defeatism.

Here’s an excerpt from What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President? Learn more about the book here.

“What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?”: Jimmy Carter, America’s “Malaise,” and the Speech That Should Have Changed the Country

By Kevin Mattson

Introduction

“What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?”

July 4, Independence Day, 1979: Sheets of rain fell on Washington, D.C., and suspense mounted. Would the nation’s biggest fireworks show proceed or be drowned? National Park Service officials huddled in rickety wood structures roped with plastic and decided around 3 p.m. to make an announcement: Please be patient. Then at 5 p.m., they announced an official delay. Four hours later, they canceled the show altogether.

Close by, a different celebration got underway: the annual smoke-in of the Youth International Party (Yippies), an organization founded twelve years earlier by counterculture celebrities Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. There was no Vietnam War to protest in 1979, of course, but the right to get high seemed as urgent as stopping a war. In Lafayette Park, across from the White House, scraggly young adults toked joints, swigged beer and Jack Daniel’s, and set off firecrackers. The rain turned the tangy smell of pot slightly mellower, but when the high wore off, the crowd went berserk. The mob scrambled over a large black fence onto the White House lawn. Cops pursued, dodging beer bottles flung at them. Nine arrests followed, one just a few feet away from the White House.

Perhaps it was fortunate fewer people were on the Mall to be disappointed by canceled fireworks or freaked out by police-hippie melees. Most gas stations in D.C. were shut down, not for the Fourth of July holiday but as a result of the decision by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to cut exports to the United States. This was becoming a summer when people coasted or pushed their cars to stations often to find no gas. Stations with gas reported mile-long lines and three-hour waits. Most D.C. residents simply stayed home on July 4. Those who did search for gas raged. “The greatest country in the world,” one person on a gas line told an inquiring journalist, “is stifled by a few sheiks.” Read More

Obama’s Sunday Show Healthcare Push

“And that’s been a case where I have been humbled, and I just keep on trying harder. Because I — I really think it’s the right thing to do for the country.”

- President Obama, who gave five back-to-back television interviews on healthcare broadcast on Sunday with CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS and Univision, all taped on Friday in the White House. (New York Times)

*Related Title: Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform, by Howard Dean, with Igor Volsky and Faiz Shakir

Values Voters Favor Huckabee

“I think [Huckabee] was surprised and encouraged by it. He’s probably doing a lot of soul searching over whether or not he’s going to run.”

- Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, a sponsor of the Values Voters Summit, on Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee being favored as the 2012 presidential nominee among social conservatives, according to a straw poll at the Values Voters Summit held in Washington, D.C on September 18-20. (Wall Street Journal)

*Related Title: Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party, by Max Blumenthal

General McChrystal’s Afghanistan Assessment

“Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.”

- General Stanley McChrystal, the top military commander in Afghanistan, in his strategic assessment of the war. As opposition for the war grows among Democrats, McChrystal warns that unless more troops are provided, the war will be lost. (New York Times)

*Related Title: The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power, by David E. Sanger

UN Summit on Climate Change

“It’s politically very tough for people, because short-term, obviously, people have got to take measures that are difficult. In the medium and long-term, there are real benefits from doing this.”

- Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is heading up a climate initiative and hopes to break deadlock in global climate talks ahead of the U.N. climate summit. (AP)

*Related Title: The Global Deal: Climate Change and the Creation of a New Era of Progress and Prosperity, by Nicholas Stern

FCC’s Net Neutrality Proposal

“The Internet is an extraordinary platform for innovation, job creation, investment, and opportunity….It is vital that we safeguard the free and open Internet.”

- FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, who announced today the creation of formal net neutrality rules prohibiting internet providers from selectively blocking or slowing Web content and applications. (PC World)

*Related Title: Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press, by Eric Boehlert

With the eight-year anniversary of the U.S. invasion approaching, it can be hard to remember that less than a decade ago Afghanistan was barely a blip in the American public radar – a pariah state politically and basically inaccessible to all but the most intrepid journalists.

One of those journalists was Dexter Filkins, who was reporting from Kabul for the Los Angeles Times as early as 1998 (he’s now back in Afghanistan as a New York Times reporter) when the Taliban’s rule was condemned but not seriously challenged and militant Islam had yet to become a global obsession.

In his acclaimed book The Forever War, which recounts his experiences in Afghanistan before and after September 11, 2001, and later in Iraq, Filkins recalls his encounters with the Taliban in typically vivid fashion:

Man, they were scary. You’d see them rolling up in one of the Hi-Luxes, all jacked up, white turbans gleaming; they were the baddest asses in town and they knew it, too. One of them would be sitting across from you in a restaurant, maybe picking at a kebab, looking at you from across the centuries, kohl under his eyes, and you knew he’d just as soon kill you as look at you. Dumb as a brick, but that hardly mattered. Great cultures are like that. Always have been. The Greeks, the Romans, the British: they didn’t care what other people thought. Didn’t care about reasons. Just up and did it. The Taliban: their strength was their ignorance. They didn’t even know they were supposed to care.

They pulled me out of a taxi once. I was in Herat. I’d been trying to take photographs of women from the back seat of the taxi. Floating blue ghosts. We’d stopped and I’d popped off a couple of shots and my driver, and Afghan, saw the Talibs and froze. I was banging on the front seat to go, just go, but he froze. The Talibs pulled me out of the taxi and one of them raised his gun to my head so I pulled out a business card, embossed with gothic letters, The Los Angeles Times, very impressive, a get-out-of-jail-free card. The Talib grasped it, looked at it and threw it in the street. I might as well have handed him a starfish. My interpreter, Ashraf, a Pashtun like the Talibs, thank God, walked around the taxi to the man with the upraised AK and began to murmur something in Pashto. I didn’t know what he was saying, but as he spoke, he reached out and grasped the Talib’s beard and began to stroke it gently, running it through his hands, like he was putting a cat to sleep. Slowly the Talib relaxed his arms and put down his gun and told us we could go. It was a like a magic trick.

Related PBC Title

As Michael Pollan writes in his introduction to Wendell Berry’s latest book Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food, “Americans today are having a national conversation about food and agriculture that it would have been impossible to imagine even a few short years ago.” From First Lady Michelle Obama’s organic vegetable garden on the South Lawn of the White House to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s “sustainability” meetings—Wendell Berry’s ideas have taken hold in Washington.

Yesterday First Lady Michelle Obama celebrated the opening of a new farmer’s market near the White House as part of her effort to encourage Americans to eat healthier, saying, “For those of us who are battling the time crunch and those for us whom access to fresh food is an issue in our neighborhoods, farmers’ markets are a really important, valuable resource that we have to support.”

In addition, this week the USDA launched the “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” initiative to connect consumers with local producers as well as create new economic opportunities. Check out the video that the USDA has created to engage Americans in the national conversation to support local agriculture below.

Agriculture Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan recently said, “Americans are more interested in food and agriculture than at any other time since most families left the farm.” Wendell Berry must be proud.

Ahmadinejad Rails Against Israel and the West

“It is very important that the world community stands up against this tide of abuse. This outburst is not worthy of the leader of Iran.”

- British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, on President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Qods Day remarks against Israel and the West. Ahmadinejad questioned whether the Holocaust occurred and called it a pretext for occupying Arab land. Qods (Jerusalem) Day is an annual anti-Israel rally in Iran during which the government shows its support for Palestine. (Reuters)

*Related Title: Demagogue: The Fight to Save Democracy from Its Worst Enemies, by Michael Signer

Obama’s Missile Defense Plan

“That was their real grievance — that there was this attack capacity and the Americans are lying. But now, it is much harder or even impossible for the Russian military to present this…as an imminent and very serious threat.”

- Pavel Y. Felgenhauer, a military analyst, on U.S. plans replacing a Bush administration proposal for an antiballistic missile shield in Eastern Europe, a plan that Russia had deemed a threat.  (New York Times)

*Related Title: The Limits of Power, by Andrew J. Bacevich

Obama Reaches Out to Young Adults on Healthcare

“When you’re young, I know this isn’t always an issue that you have at the top of your mind. You think you’re invincible. That’s how I thought.”

- President Barack Obama, at a speech on Thursday at the University of Maryland, where he made his case and aimed to rally young adults, who are among the least likely to purchase health insurance, to back the cause for healthcare reform. (Washington Post)

*Related Title: Youth to Power: How Today’s Young Voters Are Building Tomorrow’s Progressive Majority, by Michael Connery

Pelosi Troubled Over Anti-Government Rhetoric

“Our country is great because people can say what they think and they believe. But I also think that they have to take responsibility for any incitement that they may cause.”

- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat from California, on the anti-government rhetoric over President Obama’s healthcare reform. She added that the anti-Obama rhetoric reminds her of the violence over gay rights in San Francisco in the 1970s, in which Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor Frank Moscone were murdered. (AP)

*Related Title: The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right, by David Neiwert

Suicide Bomb in Pakistan

“When the clouds of dust cleared, I saw the dead bodies and the pieces of bodies all around, and everywhere there was blood and wounded people. They were crying.”

- Wagar Ali, who was among the wounded and told AP Television News about a suicide blast that killed 29 people and wounded 55 others in Kohat, Pakistan on Friday. This latest attack underscores the threat to security in Pakistan’s northwestern region, home to the Taliban and al-Qaeda.  (AP)

*Related Title: The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power, by David E. Sanger

Say You’re One of Them

By Uwem Akpan

An Ex-mas Feast

Now that my eldest sister, Maisha, was twelve, none of us knew how to relate to her anymore. She had never forgiven our parents for not being rich enough to send her to school. She had been behaving like a cat that was going feral: she came home less and less frequently, staying only to change her clothes and give me some money to pass on to our parents. When home, she avoided them as best she could, as if their presence reminded her of too many things in our lives that needed money. Though she would snap at Baba occasionally, she never said anything to Mama. Sometimes Mama went out of her way to provoke her. “Malaya! Whore! You don’t even have breasts yet!” she’d say. Maisha would ignore her.

Maisha shared her thoughts with Naema, our ten-year-old sister, more than she did with the rest of us combined, mostly talking about the dos and don’ts of a street girl. Maisha let Naema try on her high heels, showed her how to doll up her face, how to use toothpaste and a brush. She told her to run away from any man who beat her, no matter how much money he offered her, and that she would treat Naema like Mama if she grew up to have too many children. She told Naema that it was better to starve to death than go out with any man without a condom.
When she was at work, though, she ignored Naema, perhaps because Naema reminded her of home or because she didn’t want Naema to see that her big sister wasn’t as cool and chic as she made herself out to be. She tolerated me more outside than inside. I could chat her up on the pavement no matter what rags I was wearing. An eight-year-old boy wouldn’t get in the way when she was waiting for a customer. We knew how to pretend we were strangers—just a street kid and a prostitute talking.

Yet our machokosh family was lucky. Unlike most, our street family had stayed together—at least until that Ex-mas season.

The sun had gone down on Ex-mas eve ning. Bad weather had stormed the seasons out of order, and Nairobi sat in a low flood, the light December rain droning on our tarpaulin roof. I was sitting on the floor of our shack, which stood on a cement slab at the end of an alley, leaning against the back of an old brick shop. Occasional winds swelled the brown polythene walls. The floor was nested with cushions that I had scavenged from a dump on Biashara Street. At night, we rolled up the edge of the tarpaulin to let in the glow of the shop’s security lights. A board, which served as our door, lay by the shop wall.

A clap of thunder woke Mama. She got up sluggishly, pulling her hands away from Maisha’s trunk, which she had held on to while she slept. It was navy blue, with brass linings and rollers, and it took up a good part of our living space. Panicking, Mama groped her way from wall to wall, frisking my two-year-old twin brother and sister, Otieno and Atieno, and Baba; all three were sleeping, tangled together like puppies. She was looking for Baby. Mama’s white T-shirt, which she had been given three months back, when she delivered Baby, had a pair of milk stains on the front. Then she must have remembered that he was with Maisha and Naema. She relaxed and stretched in a yawn, hitting a rafter of cork. One of the stones that weighted our roof fell down outside.

Read More

Check out this Publishers Weekly interview with Uwem Akpan, author of Say You’re One of Them.  (Learn more and/or buy Say You’re One of Them here.)