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Before climate change occupied our collective consciousness as the biggest threat to human existence, there was nuclear apocalypse.

This entwined history of militarization and ecological threat casts a shadow over how Americans respond to today’s environmental challenges. Anthropologist Joseph Masco looks at history to understand the persistence of a national security framework for approaching ecological questions even today.

As President Ronald Reagan was escalating confrontation with the Soviets in the 1980s, scientists were leading public debates on the possibility of a “nuclear winter.” They were actively demanding nuclear arsenals be reduced for the sake of global environmental security, often at the cost of their own reputations

The banquet hall was painted black from ceiling to floor. By the pale flicker of grave lamps, the invited senators were able to make out a row of tombstones set before the dining couches—each inscribed with one of their names. Slave boys dressed as phantoms brought in courses on gleaming black dishes. They were piled with food, but not the lavish delicacies of an emperor’s table. Rather, Domitian served his guests the plain offerings traditionally given to the dead. The senators began to wonder if soon they would be dead themselves.

After the dinner ended, the guests spent the whole night expecting summons for an execution to appear at any moment. Finally, in the morning, Domitian sent messengers to inform them that the gravestones (now revealed to be made of solid silver), the costly dishware, and the slave boys were being given to them as gifts.

At least on the surface, it was all a harmless prank. The fact was, Domitian could easily have had his guests killed. Anyone could fall from imperial grace; Domitian had even executed his nephew and exiled his niece. Even after Domitian revealed that the gravestones were solid-silver treasures, their unspoken threat lingered in the air.

President Donald Trump has blamed his recent predecessors for the current tensions with China, but many of the dynamics in today’s trade war have been at play for centuries.

America’s relationship with the country goes back to its founding—and it has always been one centered on trade.

Nothing matched the American thirst for tea. Today, with the trade deficit recently estimated at $54 billion, Americans are still buying more from China than they’re selling. “Now, it’s Nike sneakers and iPhones,” says Haddad.

Enter any online forum dedicated to local politics, especially one in a rural area, and one of the hot topics is likely to be potholes and bad roads. Yet, as the environmental studies scholar Christopher W. Wells writes, when “good roads” first became a political issue, in the years after the Civil War, rural people were decidedly not the ones advocating for them.

In fact, in the early years after the Civil War, as freight and passenger railroads spread across the country, long-distance travel by road actually became less common than it had been.

The interest in “good roads” came mostly from the cities. Railroad executives wanted better rural roads to more efficiently move agricultural commodities to their stations.

As the media struggles to make sense of President Trump’s interest in buying Greenland, some say that his motives are transparent: Greenland possesses vast untapped natural resources.

Of course, resource wealth does not always lead to well-being. In fact, in some cases the opposite seems to be true. The idea of a “resource curse” gained momentum in the early 2000s. It proposes a correlation between resource endowment, particularly oil, and the propensity for armed conflict, corruption, and poor development outcomes.

resources provide financial incentives for rebels to continue conflict, and governments to engage in misrule, with little of a country’s resource wealth translating into public welfare. Civil wars in resource-rich African countries like Sierra Leone, Liberia, Chad, and the Democratic Republic of Congo during the post-Cold War period are examples of this dynamic.

Lessig has been an outspoken critic of the Electoral College, campaign financing, and gerrymandering, and is a frequent commentator on these issues.

In his book, Lessig proposes some solutions to these problems, including penalties on states that suppress voters, incentives to end gerrymandering, and “civic juries,” which would be a system to have representative bodies make decisions on behalf of constituents.

I don’t think there was any “golden age.” At any time we could have written a book about how institutions have produced unrepresentativeness.

China’s “One Belt One Road” (OBOR) initiative—yi dai yi lu in Mandarin Chinese—aims to connect seventy-one countries by land and sea. Highways and maritime routes will complement the “networks of connectivity” in trade, investment, finance, tourism, and even education between China and the world. OBOR is meant to be a form of diplomacy, development, and trade incentive all rolled into one. The initiative is constantly evolving in its scope; in fact, the Chinese government recently changed OBOR to “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) in English.

Summers approaches the BRI initiative as a creatively repurposed version of this past. Despite the international media’s portrayal of the proposal as China’s bid for global hegemony, a significant dimension of BRI is domestic. With excess capacity at home, new avenues for sequestering Chinese capital need to be sought abroad. For Yunnan province in southwestern China, this has meant developing cooperation with its immediate neighbors. For example, Summer expects Chinese trade and investment in the Association of South East Asian Nations, including Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar, to exceed its trade with the E.U. some time in the 2020s. In the northwest province of Xinjiang, greater economic development is also expected to mitigate extremism among China’s restive Uighur Muslim minority. Linking land-locked interior cities like Chongqing by rail with Central Asia has begun to address regional imbalances within China.

Performing the Hajj pilgrimage is compulsory for every Muslim who is physically able and can afford the trip. It consists of five days of ritual worship, practical formalities underscored by layers of meaning and symbolism. The symbolic themes of traveling toward the Beloved and of journeying between life and death are made real in the various and specific proceedings. Many of the rituals of Hajj, taught to Muslims by the Prophet Muhammad, are drawn from the life of the Prophet Abraham and his family (known to Muslims as the Prophet Ibrahim).

The Hajj pilgrimage contains symbols of Abraham’s actions, including throwing stones at the spots where the devil taunted Abraham, the sacrifice of a sheep, and worship around the Kaaba. Enduring the sometimes-difficult journey to Saudi Arabia, and then the journey between various points around Makkah during the five days of Hajj, is also reminiscent of Abraham’s wandering nature

This strong woman, a slave and a woman of color, practically a single mother, had the strength to survive. Her memory is kept alive every day because her running between the hills of Safa and Marwa is a crucial part of the Hajj rites. Pilgrims re-enact Haajar’s search for help by walking between the two hills seven times while absorbed in prayer. Enter the holy mosque at any time of the year and you will see thousands of pilgrims walking in Haajar’s footsteps, because the walk between Safa and Marwa is also an obligatory part of the other Muslim pilgrimage (known as Umrah, which can be performed at any time of the year).

The word “socialism” is all over the media following the recent surprise primary victory in New York of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who is a member of the Democratic Socialist party. There have been mixed reactions to the resurgence of the word, and presumably the ideas it signifies, in mainstream American discourse.

First some background. The first socialist in the U.S. Congress was Victor L. Berger, who was elected in 1910 to represent Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The second was Meyer London of New York City, elected in 1915. Eugene V. Debs of the Socialist Party of America ran for President in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920. In the 1912 election, his best showing, he got 6% of the vote. His 1920 run was from prison, where he was serving a sentence for sedition; this sentence would be commuted by Warren G. Harding in 1921.

Pre-Russian Revolution, socialism in the United States wasn’t a dirty word in many quarters. There was a countervailing anti-socialism force, true, but it wasn’t as strong as it would become. And it did become strong: from the 1920s to the 1960s, the specter of communism abroad was used to attack dissenters at home. Socialists of all stripes, as well as union members, civil rights campaigners, even centrist liberals, were tarred as the “red menace.”

In 1778, the Continental Congress decreed that it was “the duty of all persons in the service of the United States … to give the earliest information to Congress or any proper authority of any misconduct, frauds or misdemeanors by any officers or persons in the service of these states.”

“the country’s treatment of whistleblowers has been a conflicted one.”

the whistleblower is labeled a traitor by those in power,

There has never existed a political system similar to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

In the fervor of a 1978 social revolution against the Shah and his neocolonial relationship with the United States and Europe, a group of Shi’i clerics won the upper hand and created the world’s only current theocracy.

Most American political reporting on the Islamic Republic, therefore, simplifies Iranian politics to a struggle between “moderates” or “reformists” and “hardliners.”

As climate change looms larger and larger, it seems increasingly necessary to imagine a world beyond fossil fuels.

he scholar Frederick Buell, writing in the Journal of American Studies, offers a brief but sweeping story of human relationships with energy, the conclusion of which is that almost everything about our culture today is built on oil.

Much later, the coal-powered steam engine co-evolved with industrial capitalism, producing what Buell calls the first “truly exuberant” energy system.

Edmund Burke and the Birth of Traditional Conservatism

Edmund Burke (1729-1797) is the philosophical fountainhead of modern conservatism. But he didn’t start out that way.

Social movement scholars have known for decades that most people, even if they agree with an idea, don’t take action to support it. For most people upset by a policy decision or a disturbing news event, the default is not to protest in the streets, but rather to watch others as they do. Getting to the point where someone acts as part of a group is a milestone in itself.

Decades of research show that people will be more willing to engage in activism that is easy, and less costly – emotionally, physically, or financially. For example, more than a million people used social media to “check in” at the Standing Rock Reservation, center of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Far fewer people – just a few thousand – have traveled to the North Dakota camps to brave the arriving winter weather and risk arrest.

Once people are primed to act, it’s important not to discourage them from taking that step, however small. Preliminary findings from my team’s current research suggest that people just beginning to explore activism can be disheartened by bring criticized for doing something wrong.

it is natural enough to look at Taiwan’s example and wonder why we didn’t do what they did, or, more pertinently, could we have done what they did?

we keep seeing the culturally embedded assumption that East Asian-style state social control just won’t fly in the good old, individualist, government-wary, freedom-loving United States.

The New York Times: People in “places like Singapore … are more willing to accept government orders.” Fortune: “There seems to be more of a willingness to place the community and society needs over individual liberty.” Even WIRED: “These countries all have social structures and traditions that might make this kind of surveillance and control a little easier than in the don’t-tread-on-me United States.”

How will online misinformation (“fake news”) affect America’s 2020 elections? It’s the kind of question that might send voters scurrying to the nearest stack of political science journals. But you’d be better off looking north—to Canada, and its impending federal elections, which will be held on October 21, 2019.

In part that’s because Canada has taken steps to address the potential for misinformation in this election cycle, developing what Politico recently characterized as “the most detailed plan anywhere in the Western world to combat foreign meddling in its upcoming election.” The government’s plan includes transparency guidelines for political advertising online, the establishment of a cybersecurity task force dedicated to monitoring for potential election threats, and the allocation of $7 million Canadian dollars to digital and civic literacy initiatives.

if all that fails, the country also has a non-partisan panel that’s empowered to alert the public in the event of significant foreign interference in the election.

Nineteenth-century European and American writers didn’t just describe African and Asian people as fat but insisted that they revered fatness. They expressed particular horror at the supposed desire of “uncivilized” men for heavy women. Many popular descriptions of African societies focused on the practice of demanding that young women eat heavily.

Forth writes that Europeans were arriving at generalizations about whole populations based on their experiences with a small elite group. If they acknowledged that common people were rarely fat, they often ascribed this to poverty and assumed that obesity was a widespread cultural ideal. For example, missionaries in India dwelled on the big-bellied god Ganesha as a transparent representation of ordinary people’s desires regarding their own body shapes.

Finck went on to write a diet book aimed at white American women, helping to popularize the association of heaviness with unacceptable savagery that continues today.

“The plague” conjures up images of the Black Death of Europe in the fourteenth century. This apocalyptic pestilence became known as the “black death” because infected people often developed buboes, swollen lymph nodes in the groin and neck, that turned black. Europe’s population was halved in four years. But that doesn’t cover the half of it. The pandemic also swept through Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Some estimates of mortality go as high as two hundred million.

The third outbreak in China and India in the 1890s was the last major plague pandemic, claiming twelve million lives, mostly in India. The disease, which develops quickly and can kill within days, was fatal in the majority of cases.

Butler notes that the plague is still alive and well amongst certain wild mammals.

From the 19th century onward, China’s elites argued that the country’s traditions and faiths were a major reason for its decline. Reformers in 1898 called for temples to be converted into schools. While the Nationalist Party under Chiang Kai-shek approved of four religions — Buddhism, Taoism (sometimes called “Daoism”), Christianity and Islam — it largely considered traditional Chinese beliefs to be superstitions and advocated the destruction of temples.

Scholars estimate that by the middle of the 20th century, half of the temples that existed in China at the end of the 19th century had been destroyed. An 1851 survey of the old city of Beijing listed 866 temples; today, I count just 18. At the end of the 19th century, most villages had at least one temple and many had half a dozen; vast sections of the Chinese countryside now have no temples at all.

When the Communists took power in 1949, they, like the Nationalists, officially recognized four religions — but then promptly began persecuting them. Traditional faiths came under especially harsh treatment, with the government banning bedrock traditional practices, from worshiping ancestors and local deities to following the advice of geomancy masters and spirit mediums.