History Readings

It's great to be Turkey just now. The economy, barely scathed by the global recession, grew 11.7 percent in the first quarter of this year, and 10.3 percent in the second.  Like the Ottoman Empire reborn, Turkey has sponsored a visa-free zone with Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, and is moving toward creating a free trade zone as well. And Turkey is a force not just in its neighborhood but, increasingly, in the world.

diplomatically, Turkey matters more than the others do. Among them, only Turkey is overwhelmingly Muslim and located in the Middle East, within hailing distance of practically every crisis zone on the planet. And thus the question of what kind of force Turkey will be matters more as well.

It's a caricature to say that Turkey has chosen the Middle East, or Islam, over the West. Turkey's aspiration for full membership in the club of the West, including the European Union, is still a driving force. But Turkey aspires to many things, and some may contradict each other. The country wants to be a regional power in a region deeply suspicious of the West, of Israel, and of the United States; a Sunni power acting as a broker for Sunnis in Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere; a charter member of the new nexus of emerging powers around the world; and a dependable ally of the West. When Turkey is forced to choose among these roles, the neighborhood tends to win out, and that's when you get votes against sanctions on Iran.

From the time of Kemal Ataturk, Turkey has been committed to its "European vocation." But Ataturk was a modernizer, not a liberal; one of his slogans was "For the people, despite the people." And if Kemalist secularism was not a formula for European-style liberal individualism, it's scarcely clear that the AKP's market-oriented moderate Islamic restoration is, either

Turkey is a success story that the West has every reason to welcome. The image of moderation and tolerant cosmopolitanism that it offers to Middle Eastern audiences contributes not only to Turkish soft power but to global peace and security, at least in the long run.

The first- and second-generation Turks may have been content to save enough money for a house in eastern Anatolia where they could spend their old age. But the third generation of Turks, who came of age in 1980s and 1990s and only knew Germany as a home, began demanding more from the state. When all they seemed to receive in return were welfare payments, discontent rose both among immigrants and among German citizens. Germans resented what they saw as a permanent dependent class; Turks pointed to systemic discrimination and cultural exclusion.

A 2005 law accepted that immigrants were not always short-term residents, but put most of the onus of integration on the incoming foreigner rather than on German institutions. Deportation rules were tightened, and the children of foreign parents who had been working legally in Germany were encouraged for the first time to apply for German citizenship.

maverick former central banker named Thilo Sarrazin. His new book, Germany Is Abolishing Itself, argues that the strong Turkish and Arab birth rates will lead to the dumbing down of Germany. His message has struck a chord among a middle class fearful of declining educational standards and among unskilled workers who are nervous about lower-paid immigrant competition. The political class had mostly shied away from addressing these concerns; the subject has been a taboo in Germany's largely conformist media. Since the World War II, xenophobic rhetoric has been barred, both by law and custom. Yet on the German street, resentment about foreigners smoldered,

The hard problem facing America is how to dislodge the politics of selfishness.

There's a new book out by Princeton philosopher Anthony Appiah, The Honor Code, in which he argues that immoral cultural habits change only when they become dishonorable. He uses the examples of dueling, the Atlantic slave trade, and binding the feet of Chinese women. He describes how reformers eventually convinced the public that those practices were dishonorable and should be ridiculed. At that point, even massive economic self-interest--such as that held by slave traders--could not block transition to what we would all consider more humane and moral social norms.

Everyone knows that our political system is leading us over a cliff. This is the challenge of the current pathetic state of things in America. The opportunity is to reclaim a vision of responsible leadership, and to find a vocabulary of honor and shame to discredit the current political game.

octogenarian William Hanchett, professor of history emeritus at the University of California/ San Diego, “challenges historians to either refute the Tripp thesis or to rewrite Lincoln’s biography. Hanchett believes that Tripp is correct at least in the broad outline of his work and finds it frustrating that most historians, rather than confronting this pioneering study, choose to ignore it,” as the Lincoln Herald’s editors put it in introducing Hanchett’s revealing, carefully footnoted essay on Lincoln’s same-sex affinities.

Hanchett in particular breaks new ground when he deconstructs what we know of the much-ignored secret Memo books kept by Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon as he spent a quarter century intensively researching his massive “Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life,” published in 1889. The UC/ San Diego scholar details how he believes that the otherwise thorough Tripp missed the evidence there that backs up Hanchett’s view that “Lincoln’s secret” was homosexuality.

In the last year, the Iraqi government and the U.S. Department of Defense have released new casualty figures. The U.S. figure for Iraqi civilians and security forces killed was 77,000 for the period from early 2004 to mid-2008. The Iraqi government figures were 85,694

It appears that there were some 100,000-120,000 Iraqi deaths during the war, with a quarter or more of them hostiles (terrorists and others opposing the new Iraqi government or foreign troops.) The fact that over 90 percent of the dead were adult males is also an indication of warfare,

“You have to come in accepting that there will always be poor people in society and there will always be wealthy people in society, and neither of the two reached that status by their own efforts.”

the “income defense industry.” The term referred to the accountants, lawyers and financial advisers employed by the wealthy — and the merely affluent — to manage their financial affairs. Mr. Winters argued that this group was hurting the non-elite by minimizing tax collection. He estimated that $70 billion was lost yearly just from offshore accounts.

two professions — finance and business services — accounted for almost all of the increase in income inequality.

The revelation that Rich Iott, the Republican candidate for the 9th Congressional District seat in Ohio and a Tea Party favorite, has been in the habit of dressing up as a Waffen-SS soldier, is just one more sign of the heroic ignorance that characterizes large sectors of American politicians, the media that covers them, and the public that votes for them.  Such monumental ignorance, of truly Wagnerian dimensions, is the product of a failed educational system, which has relegated the study of history to a marginal spot in the curriculum and has completely forgotten the dictum that those who do not know the past are doomed to repeat its errors, even if at times such repetitions turn out to be nothing more than farce.

Both Reagan (implicitly) and Iott make the same argument, namely, that while the Nazi regime was bad, its soldiers fought heroically for what they believed was a good cause, such as protecting their nation and their families from the really bad guys, whose uniforms no one seems interested in wearing at such infantile reenactments, namely, the troops of the Red Army:  precisely those who in fact defeated Nazi Germany at an extraordinarily high price of blood after a murderous occupation of their country.

In Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, anti-Catholic sentiment, combined with the country’s anti-immigrant mood, fueled the Bible Riots of 1844, in which houses were torched, two Catholic churches were destroyed and at least 20 people were killed.

recognizing that deep religious discord has been part of America’s social DNA is a healthy and necessary step.

“This exhibition is about Hitler and the Germans — meaning the social and political and individual processes by which much of the German people became enablers, colluders, co-criminals in the Holocaust,”

“That this was so is now a mainstream view, rejected only by a small minority of very elderly and deluded people, or the German extreme right-wing fringe. But it took us a while to get there.”

Increasingly on the Internet, websites are personalizing themselves to suit our interests. We all see this happening at Amazon, where if you order a book, Amazon will send you the next book. We see it happening in Netflix, but it's also happening in a bunch of places where it's much less visible. For example, on Google, most people assume that if you search for BP, you'll get one set of results that are the consensus set of results in Google. Actually, that isn't true anymore. Since Dec. 4, 2009, Google has been personalized for everyone. So when I had two friends this spring Google "BP," one of them got a set of links that was about investment opportunities in BP. The other one got information about the oil spill. Presumably that was based on the kinds of searches that they had done in the past. If you have Google doing that, and you have Yahoo doing that, and you have Facebook doing that, and you have all of the top sites on the Web customizing themselves to you, then your information environment starts to look very different from anyone else's. And that's what I'm calling the "filter bubble": that personal ecosystem of information that's been catered by these algorithms to who they think you are.

What it's looking like increasingly is that the Web is connecting us back to ourselves. There's a looping going on where if you have an interest, you're going to learn a lot about that interest. But you're not going to learn about the very next thing over. And you certainly won't learn about the opposite view. If you have a political position, you're not going to learn about the other one. If you Google some sites about the link between vaccines and autism, you can very quickly find that Google is repeating back to you your view about whether that link exists and not what scientists know, which is that there isn't a link between vaccines and autism. It's a feedback loop that's invisible. You can't witness it happening because it's baked into the fabric of the information environment.

The Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, likes to tell people this statistic: From the beginning of civilization to 2003, if you took all of human intellectual output, every single conversation that ever happened, it's about two exabytes of data, about a billion gigabytes. And now two exabytes of data is created every five days

what’s important here is that Zuckerberg’s genius could be embraced by half-a-billion people within six years of its first being launched, without (and here is the critical bit) asking permission of anyone. The real story is not the invention. It is the platform that makes the invention sing.

Because the platform of the Internet is open and free, or in the language of the day, because it is a “neutral network,” a billion Mark Zuckerbergs have the opportunity to invent for the platform. And though there are crucial partners who are essential to bring the product to market, the cost of proving viability on this platform has dropped dramatically. You don’t even have to possess Zuckerberg’s technical genius to develop your own idea for the Internet today.

That we all agreed about the moral ugliness of the bailouts should have led us to implementing new and powerful regulatory mechanisms.  The financial overhaul bill that passed congress in July certainly fell well short of what would be necessary to head-off the next crisis.  Clearly, political deal-making and the influence of Wall Street over our politicians is part of the explanation for this failure; but the failure also expressed continuing disagreement about the nature of the free market.  In pondering this issue I want to, again, draw on the resources of Georg W.F. Hegel

the primary topic of his practical philosophy was analyzing the exact point where modern individualism and the essential institutions of modern life meet. 

The “Phenomenology” is a philosophical portrait gallery that presents depictions, one after another, of different, fundamental ways in which individuals and societies have understood themselves.  Each self-understanding has two parts: an account of how a particular kind of self understands itself and, then, an account of the world that the self considers its natural counterpart.  Hegel narrates how each formation of self and world collapses because of a mismatch between self-conception and how that self conceives of the larger world.  Hegel thinks we can see how history has been driven by misshapen forms of life in which the self-understanding of agents and the worldly practices they participate in fail to correspond. 

recognition of universal values was at the heart of big issues facing China’s development, from urbanisation to the provision of public services and the ownership of state assets. “Universal values tell us that government serves the people, that assets belong to the public and that urbanisation is for the sake of people’s happiness,” he said. Supporters of the “China model”, he added, believe the opposite: that people should obey the government, the state should control assets and the interests of individuals are subordinate to those of local development.

conservatives feared that embracing universal values would mean acknowledging the superiority of the West’s political systems.

In a veiled demonstration that China has its own values, the authorities in Beijing this week staged the capital’s first large-scale celebrations of Confucius’s birthday (his 2,561st) since Communist Party rule began. Conservatives like to contrast what they see as a Confucian stress on social harmony and moral rectitude with the West’s emphasis on individual rights.

“After the original code is no longer executed, we can expect that something will blow up soon,” Langner says somewhat dramatically. “Something big.”

some 200 years ago, dog breeding was initiated in England, generating the highly inbred and distinctive lines we encounter today.

Breeding programs can only yield as much variation as is harbored in the gene pool, and the dog gene pool proved to be a gold mine.

organisms with higher mutation rates are said to be more evolvable than organisms with lower mutation rates.

fewer literary authors will be able to support themselves as e-books win acceptance, publishers and agents say. "In terms of making a living as a writer, you better have another source of income,"

"We aren't seeing a generation of readers coming along that supports writers today the way that young people supported J. D. Salinger and Philip Roth when they were starting out,

From an e-book sale, an author makes a little more than half what he or she makes from a hardcover sale.

People know we're living in a time of growing income inequality, Krugman told me, but "the ordinary person is not really aware of how big it is."

But surely most survey-takers, when presented with two extreme options and one that lies in the middle, will instinctively gravitate, like Goldilocks, toward the middle option. More surprising to me was that second place went to Utopia (43 percent). Only 10 percent voted for the pie chart depicting the country the respondents actually live in.

Norton and Ariely also asked respondents what they thought the ideal distribution of wealth should be, and found, again, little difference among income groups, or between Bush voters and Kerry voters. Most favored a wealth distribution resembling that in … Sweden!