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We argue that writing contemporary history is different from the role historians might play as public intellectuals who draw on their expertise to comment on recent events in the media. Instead, the writing of recent history shifts the boundaries of what might be considered a legitimate topic of historical study. The very definition of “history” has hinged on the sense of a break between past and present that allows for critical perspective. The historians’ traditional task has been to bring a “dead,” absent past back into the present. However, those doing recent history recognize that their subject matter is not fully past, or as Renee Romano puts it in our edited collection about recent history, it’s “not dead yet.”

studying the recent past presents real methodological challenges. It untethers the academic historian from the aspects of our practice that give us all, regardless of field or political bent, a sense of common enterprise: objectivity, perspective, a defined archive, and a secondary literature that is there to be argued with, corrected and leaned upon.

There's a great Louis C.K. routine in which he describes getting flustered by his daughter's incessant question—"why?—to everything he says. "You don't even know who the fuck you are at the end of the conversation," he joked. That's basically what psychologists at the University of Illinois discovered in their research on political convictions. They found that if you just ask a highly partisan person "why" three times, hoping to clarify their stances, they tend to drift into politically moderate territory. "We used the ground zero mosque as a particularly polarizing issue," says University of Illinois professor Jesse Preston. "People feel strongly about it generally one way or the other." But they felt much less strongly about the proposed mosque near grounds zero when asked why they held such strong beliefs three times.

We observed that liberals and conservatives became more moderate in their attitudes. After this very brief task that just put them in this abstract mindset, they were more willing to consider the point of view of the opposition." [University of Illinois at Urbana Champaig

the goal is to improve cognitive skills. LearningRx is one of a growing number of such commercial services — some online, others offered by psychologists. Unlike traditional tutoring services that seek to help students master a subject, brain training purports to enhance comprehension and the ability to analyze and mentally manipulate concepts, images, sounds and instructions. In a word, it seeks to make students smarter.

“The average gain on I.Q. is 15 points after 24 weeks of training, and 20 points in less than 32 weeks.”

, “Our users have reported profound benefits that include: clearer and quicker thinking; faster problem-solving skills; increased alertness and awareness; better concentration at work or while driving; sharper memory for names, numbers and directions.”

You should write because when you know that you’re going to write, it changes the way you live

the difference between you and a zoologist or you and a botanist is that the botanist, when she looks at a flower, has a question in mind. She’s trying to generate questions. For her the flower is the locus of many mental threads, some nascent, some spanning her career. Her field notebook is not some convenient way to store lifeless data to be presented in lifeless papers so that other scientists can replicate some dull experiment; it’s the site of a collision between a mind and a world.

When I have a piece of writing in mind, what I have, in fact, is a mental bucket: an attractor for and generator of thought. It’s like a thematic gravity well, a magnet for what would otherwise be a mess of iron filings. I’ll read books differently and listen differently in conversations. In particular I’ll remember everything better; everything will mean more to me

In 2008, Nate Silver correctly predicted the results of all 35 Senate races and the presidential results in 49 out of 50 states. Since then, his website, fivethirtyeight.com (now central to The New York Times’s political coverage), has become an essential source of rigorous, objective analysis of voter surveys to predict the Electoral College outcome of presidential campaigns. 

Political junkies, activists, strategists, and journalists will gain a deeper and more sobering sense of Silver’s methods in The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t (Penguin Press). A brilliant analysis of forecasting in finance, geology, politics, sports, weather, and other domains, Silver’s book is also an original fusion of cognitive psychology and modern statistical theory.

Its most important message is that the first step toward improving our predictions is learning how to live with uncertainty.

a steady push toward viewing on phones and tablets is shrinking the spirit of films. In the past, he said — citing “A Man for All Seasons,” “8 ½,” and “The Searchers” — there was a grandeur to films that delivered long-form storytelling on very large screens.

the prospect that a film will embed itself into the cultural and historical consciousness of the American public in the way of “Gone With the Wind” or the “Godfather” series seems greatly diminished in an era when content is consumed in thinner slices, and the films that play broadly often lack depth.

After six weeks in theaters “The Master,” a 70-millimeter character study much praised by critics, has been seen by about 1.9 million viewers. That is significantly smaller than the audience for a single hit episode of a cable show like “Mad Men” or “The Walking Dead.”

the longstanding bipartisan consensus on investing in science. With support from Congress, Mr. Clinton put research funding on a growth path, including a doubling over five years (completed under President George W. Bush) of the budget for the National Institutes of Health.

the $3.8 billion taxpayers invested in the Human Genome Project between 1988 and 2003 helped create and drive $796 billion in economic activity by industries that now depend on the advances achieved in genetics,

President Obama is proposing that the United States boost its overall national research and development investments — including private enterprise and academia as well as government — to 3 percent of gross domestic product — a number that would still lag behind Israel, Sweden, Japan and South Korea, in that order.

“Arabic is a language of memorization,” he said. “You just have to drill the words into your head, which unfortunately takes a lot of time.” He thought, “How can I maximize the number of words I learn in the minimum amount of time?”

Siebert started studying the science of memory and second-language acquisition and found two concepts that went hand in hand to make learning easier: selective learning and spaced repetition. With selective learning, you spend more time on the things you don’t know, rather than on the things you already do

Siebert designed his software to use spaced repetition. If you get cup right, the program will make the interval between seeing the word cup longer and longer, but it will cycle cup back in just when you’re about to forget it. If you’ve forgotten cup entirely, the cycle starts again. This system moves the words from your brain’s short-term memory into long-term memory and maximizes the number of words you can learn effectively in a period. You don’t have to cram

blue was the only color with enough strength of character to remain blue “in all its tones.”

Scientists, too, have lately been bullish on blue, captivated by its optical purity, complexity and metaphorical fluency.

Still other researchers are tracing the history of blue pigments in human culture, and the role those pigments have played in shaping our notions of virtue, authority, divinity and social class. “Blue pigments played an outstanding role in human development,” said Heinz Berke, an emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of Zurich. For some cultures, he said, they were as valuable as gold.

to argue that the female body has the means to "shut that whole thing down," or that the torture of women is somehow divinely sanctioned takes more than just an accident of biology. It takes the ability to speak about things of which you are ignorant as though you are informed. It takes unacknowledged blindness. It takes an appetite for cruelty. 

Why aren't the students who use these services crafting their own essays to begin with?

Here is where the real problem lies. The idea of paying someone else to do your work for you has become increasingly commonplace in our broader culture, even in the realm of writing. It is well known that many actors, athletes, politicians, and businesspeople have contracted with uncredited ghostwriters to produce their memoirs for them. There is no law against it.

At the same time, higher education has been transformed into an industry, another sphere of economic activity where goods and services are bought and sold. By this logic, a student who pays a fair market price for it has earned whatever grade it brings. In fact, many institutions of higher education market not the challenges provided by their course of study, but the ease with which busy students can complete it in the midst of other daily responsibilities.

The wealthy, says Smith, spend their days establishing an “economy of greatness,” one founded on “luxury and caprice” and fueled by “the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires.” Any broader benefit that accrues from their striving is not the consequence of foresight or benevolence, but “in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity.” They don’t do good, they are led to it.

Smith described this state of affairs as “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty,” and he knew that it made for the revolutionary implication of his work. It shifted the way we thought about the relationship between government action and economic growth, making less means more the rebuttable presumption of policy proposals.

What it did not do, however, was void any proposal outright, much less prove that all government activity was counterproductive. Smith held that the sovereign had a role supporting education, building infrastructure and public institutions, and providing security from foreign and domestic threats — initiatives that should be paid for, in part, by a progressive tax code and duties on luxury goods. He even believed the government had a “duty” to protect citizens from “oppression,” the inevitable tendency of the strong to take advantage of the ignorance and necessity of the weak.

in the current fiscal environment, promising an ambitious effort to reduce poverty or counter global warming might imply big new spending, which is practically and politically anathema.

the reason talking directly about serious American problems is risky is that most voters don’t like it. Mark Rice, who teaches American studies at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, N.Y., said students often arrived at his classes steeped in the notion that the United States excelled at everything

“Sure, we’re No. 1 in gross domestic product and military expenditures,” Mr. Rice says. “But on a lot of measures of quality of life, the U.S. ranking is far lower.

Of their serious presidential candidates, and even of their presidents, Americans demand constant reassurance that their country, their achievements and their values are extraordinary.

It is permissible, in the political major leagues, for candidates to talk about big national problems — but only if they promise solutions in the next sentence: Unemployment is too high, so I will create millions of jobs

It is impermissible to dwell on chronic, painful problems, or on statistics that challenge the notion that the United States leads the world

IN 1884 Roger Casement, an ascetic young Ulsterman, joined an expedition up the Congo river led by Henry Morton Stanley, a Welsh-born American explorer, believing that commerce, Christianity and colonialism would emancipate the dark continent.

When reports reached London that the rubber boom had prompted a similar reign of terror against the indigenous population in Putumayo, in the Peruvian Amazon, the British foreign secretary sent Casement to investigate, with the words: “You're a specialist in atrocities. You can't say no.

Only a few years after his lauded success in Peru he was hanged in Pentonville prison as a traitor. Having transferred his thirst for justice to the fight for Irish independence, he sought German military support for the cause during the first world war

The court decided that, although the doctor was innocent, circumcising an infant for non-medical reasons violates Germany's constitutional protection of every person's bodily integrity—and should thus be a crime.

As it happens, the movement against circumcision is spreading, from California, where “intactivists” have tried to ban it, to Israel, where some parents now opt for brit shalom (the “covenant of peace”) as a ritual alternative

Dieter Graumann, president of Germany's Central Council of Jews, asserted that the verdict, if it is upheld, would make Jewish life in Germany, just as it is blooming again, practically impossible