History Readings

California faces the risk not just of devastating earthquakes but also of a catastrophic storm that could tear at the coasts, inundate the Central Valley and cause four to five times as much economic damage as a large quake, scientists and emergency planners warn.

such a storm could cause up to $300 billion in damage. The scientists’ models estimate that almost one-fourth of the houses in California could experience some flood damage from one.

150 years ago, over a few weeks in the winter of 1861-62, enough rain fell to inundate a stretch of the Central Valley 300 miles long and 20 miles wide, from north of Sacramento south to Bakersfield, near the eastern desert. The storms lasted 45 days, creating lakes in parts of the Mojave Desert and, according to a survey account, “turning the Sacramento Valley into an inland sea, forcing the state capital to be moved from Sacramento to San Francisco for a time, and requiring Gov. Leland Stanford to take a rowboat to his inauguration.”

In America, people in math, computer science and other sciences generally chose those fields because that is what they want to do. They have a genuine interest, to the point of passion, and will often spend crazy hours working in their labs. Chinese and other international students often spend crazy hours, too, but not as often for the same reasons. A lot of times it’s because of a language barrier

My point (and by now you may have despaired of my ever having one) is that my undergraduate education gave me the gift of professors willing to respond to my interests, enough time not to interfere with my relationship with the library, and classmates I argued with for the pure intellectual exercise. When my youngest child is ready for college, I will look for a school that will give that to her. If it is an Ivy League school, that’s fine. Dr. Chua is raising her children to fit into the Ivy League mold. Me, I’m raising my children to be themselves and to mold the world to fit.

Civility is a tree with deep roots, and without the roots, it can’t last. So what are those roots? They are failure, sin, weakness and ignorance.

every sensible person in public life also feels redeemed by others. You may write a mediocre column or make a mediocre speech or propose a mediocre piece of legislation, but others argue with you, correct you and introduce elements you never thought of. Each of these efforts may also be flawed, but together, if the system is working well, they move things gradually forward. Each individual step may be imbalanced, but in s

Civility is the natural state for people who know how limited their own individual powers are and know, too, that they need the conversation. They are useless without the conversation.

The expression “blood libel,” used by Sarah Palin in her denunciation of pundits and journalists, has its origin in a charge against Jews that took hold in the Middle Ages in a period of rising anti-Semitism.

the blood libel claim persisted like a virus for centuries and incited countless rounds of brutality against Jews in Europe. It is still invoked in anti-Semitic propaganda in Europe and the Arab world.

What if the Confederacy had won recognition from Britain in 1862 and survived the war? His rather frightening answer was that the three great centers of slavery in the Americas — the American South, Cuba and Brazil — plus the smaller plantation economy of Dutch Suriname, would not have abolished slavery when they did.

In all likelihood, without a Union victory, slavery would have remained a central institution underpinning global economic growth until possibly the present day.

there is no doubt that the federal government effectively protected transatlantic slave traders in the half-century before 1861 and that the outbreak of the Civil War just as effectively removed that protection.

the odds are that the current tough-it-out strategy won’t work even in the narrow sense of avoiding default and devaluation — and the fact that it won’t work will become obvious sooner rather than later. At that point, Europe’s stronger nations will have to make a choice. It has been 60 years since the Schuman declaration started Europe on the road to greater unity. Until now the journey along that road, however slow, has always been in the right direction. But that will no longer be true if the euro project fails. A failed euro wouldn’t send Europe back to the days of minefields and barbed wire — but it would represent a possibly irreversible blow to hopes of true European federation. So will Europe’s strong nations let that happen? Or will they accept the responsibility, and possibly the cost, of being their neighbors’ keepers?

to denounce Wikipedia is like denouncing the Enlightenment. Nay more: Wikipedia is the Enlightenment realized, for better or worse.

The Internet has concentrated once widely dispersed aspects of a human life into one and the same little machine: work, friendship, commerce, creativity, eros. As someone sharply put it a few years ago in an article in Slate or something like that: our work machines and our porn machines are now the same machines. This is, in short, an exceptional moment in history, next to which 19th-century anxieties about the railroad or the automated loom seem frivolous. Looms and cotton gins and similar apparatuses each only did one thing; the Internet does everything. 

Sometimes as I’m walking down the street hitting ‘refresh’, I am made abruptly aware of the intrusion of physical reality, of midsized physical objects in motion, and I wish my body were better protected from them. I wish they would go away. They belong to a sputtering, wheezing world of rusty old buggies and abandoned factories. They have no place in 2011. Of course, their world is not the world, and it never was all that was meant by ‘reality’. Theirs is only the human social world, the world we’ve built up by art and artifice, the world of nature transformed for our vain and largely illusory purposes. If then there is a certain respect in which it makes sense to say that the Internet does not change everything, it is that human social reality was always virtual anyway. I do not mean this in some obfuscating Baudrillardian sense, but rather as a corollary to a thoroughgoing naturalism: human institutions only exist because they appear to humans to exist; nature is entirely indifferent to them. And tools and vehicles only are what they are because people make the uses of them that they do.

it would seem, nobody would use France as a model for restructuring their economy, but the country does seem to emerge from each crisis more or less unscathed, and remains highly prosperous, with an admirable quality of life. Why is this? What are they doing right? Are they just lucky? Or (more likely) am I just poorly informed?

http://pretavoyager.blogspot.com/2011/01/unglamorous-paris-working-in-france.html

Six months ago, police in California pulled over a truck that turned out to contain a rifle, a handgun, a shotgun and body armor. Police learned from the driver — sometime after he opened fire on them — that he was heading for San Francisco, where he planned to kill people at the Tides Foundation. You’ve probably never heard of the Tides Foundation — unless you watch Glenn Beck, who had mentioned it more than two dozen times in the preceding six months, depicting it as part of a communist plot to “infiltrate” our society and seize control of big business.

The point is that Americans who wildly depict other Americans as dark conspirators, as the enemy, are in fact increasing the chances, however marginally, that those Americans will be attacked.

calls to violence, explicit or implicit, can have effect. But the more incendiary theme in current discourse is the consignment of Americans to the category of alien, of insidious other. Once Glenn Beck had sufficiently demonized people at the Tides Foundation, actually advocating the violence wasn’t necessary.

I think the essence of the progressive/liberal hubris is that we think we are smarter than everyone else.

I think the essence of the progressive/liberal hubris is that we think we are smarter than everyone else.

I think the essence of the progressive/liberal hubris is that we think we are smarter than everyone else.

During its early years of reconstruction, the Federal Republic labored under a constant suspicion that its democratic institutions rested upon dangerously thin supports. A cottage industry of liberal historians (many of them refugees from the Third Reich) produced innumerable volumes that set out to show how Germany’s intellectual tradition diverged from the democratic West. Allied programs for de-Nazification added further credence to the notion that the future of democracy for Germany required a break from its undemocratic past. An historical consensus began to emerge that traced the Central European catastrophe back to something deep and intractable in German culture: the peculiarity of a “Germanic ideology” or a “German idea of freedom.” 

the idea of a zero-hour also left Habermas and his generation with a major dilemma. If the German political and philosophical tradition was corrupt to its core, then how was the fledgling West German democracy to survive, and upon what ideological foundations? 

earnest young intellectuals on the left found themselves in a more serious quandary. Rejecting West Germany’s official policy of uncritical alliance with the United States, they also stood apart from the postwar consensus that celebrated Anglo-American style bourgeois capitalism as the only valid model for the future. Were there in fact no native resources in the canons of German philosophy to which the younger generation might appeal?

Chinese parents spend approximately 10 times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children.

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist;

if done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America. Once a child starts to excel at something—whether it's math, piano, pitching or ballet—he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun.

Mr. Wallerstein, who can’t afford to pay down interest and thus watches the outstanding loan balance grow, is in roughly the same financial hell as people who bought more home than they could afford during the real estate boom. But creditors can’t foreclose on him because he didn’t spend the money on a house. He spent it on a law degree. And from every angle, this now looks like a catastrophic investment.

Mr. Wallerstein, who can’t afford to pay down interest and thus watches the outstanding loan balance grow, is in roughly the same financial hell as people who bought more home than they could afford during the real estate boom. But creditors can’t foreclose on him because he didn’t spend the money on a house. He spent it on a law degree. And from every angle, this now looks like a catastrophic investment.

Number-fudging games are endemic, professors and deans say, because the fortunes of law schools rise and fall on rankings, with reputations and huge sums of money hanging in the balance. You may think of law schools as training grounds for new lawyers, but that is just part of it. They are also cash cows.

What’s different about this moment is the emergence of a political culture — on blogs and Twitter and cable television — that so loudly and readily reinforces the dark visions of political extremists, often for profit or political gain.

the problem would seem to rest with the political leaders who pander to the margins of the margins, employing whatever words seem likely to win them contributions or TV time, with little regard for the consequences.

Popular spokespeople like Ms. Palin routinely drop words like “tyranny” and “socialism” when describing the president and his allies, as if blind to the idea that Americans legitimately faced with either enemy would almost certainly take up arms.

What makes people so brutal? Are they mentally ill? Are they the products of dysfunctional families or cultures? Or, more disturbingly, is anyone capable of taking part in collective ruthlessness given the right--or rather, the wrong--circumstances?

scientists have wanted to know how large numbers of apparently civilized and decent people can perpetrate appalling acts.