History Readings

Some 63 percent of respondents said government was doing too much — up from 61 percent in 2010 and 52 percent in 2008 — while 50 percent said government should not favor any particular set of values, up from 44 percent in 2010 and 41 percent in 2008.

The collective intelligence of the Internet’s two billion users, and the digital fingerprints that so many users leave on Web sites, combine to make it more and more likely that every embarrassing video, every intimate photo, and every indelicate e-mail is attributed to its source, whether that source wants it to be or not. This intelligence makes the public sphere more public than ever before and sometimes forces personal lives into public view.

the positive effects can be numerous: criminality can be ferreted out, falsehoods can be disproved and individuals can become Internet icons.

“Humans want nothing more than to connect, and the companies that are connecting us electronically want to know who’s saying what, where,” said Susan Crawford, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. “As a result, we’re more known than ever before.”

A recent Harris poll found that 34 percent of Americans have nothing saved for retirement — not even a hundred bucks. In this lost decade, that percentage is sure to go up. At retirement the lucky few with a 401(k) typically have $98,000. As an annuity that’s about $600 a month — not exactly an upper-middle-class lifestyle.

The most paralyzing half-truth in this country is that people hate taxes. People are willing to pay taxes that they spend on themselves. Two-thirds of those surveyed in a CBS/New York Times poll in January were willing to pay more taxes to save Social Security at its modest level.

To “save” it, most of us don’t need to pay. We could lift the cap on high earners, the 6 percent of workers who make over $106,800 a year. If earnings above the cap were subject to the payroll tax with no increase in benefits to high earners, there would be no deficit in the Social Security trust fund in 2037, as projected.

China’s ambitious rail rollout is helping integrate the economy of this sprawling, populous nation — though on a much faster construction timetable and at significantly higher travel speeds than anything envisioned by the Eisenhower administration.

China’s manufacturing might and global export machine are likely to grow more powerful as 200-mile-an-hour trains link cities and provinces that were previously as much as 24 hours by road or rail from the entrepreneurial seacoast.

high-speed trains were making it more convenient to base businesses here in Hunan Province. Populous Hunan has long provided labor to the factories of the east, but its mountains have tended to isolate it from the economic mainstream.

Today 91 percent of the delegates to the Swiss Parliament take the tram to work

Mr. Fellmann calculated that a person using a car took up 115 cubic meters (roughly 4,000 cubic feet) of urban space in Zurich while a pedestrian took three. “So it’s not really fair to everyone else if you take the car,”

European cities also realized they could not meet increasingly strict World Health Organization guidelines for fine-particulate air pollution if cars continued to reign. Many American cities are likewise in “nonattainment” of their Clean Air Act requirements, but that fact “is just accepted here,”

He’s out of his mind, obviously, but here’s the thing: He is the only television personality  I know of who uses his national platform to talk regularly and often about American history. And he makes me think, well, this is one of the ways in which conservatives are cleverer and more cunning than liberals.

Liberals very rarely talk about history, as my Democracy journal colleague Elbert Venture wrote recently in a fine essay. To them, history is settled, and there’s no more point arguing about it than there is in arguing about the physical properties of trees. It’s a factual given. Except that it’s not. The standard, non-crazy history we’ve all been taught is being contested every day by Beck and others

The right understands that building its individualistic utopia of the future hinges in no small part on destroying the story about our history in which collective action resulted in any success. History must therefore be rewritten, and it must be rewritten in accessible form —on cable television and radio.

women who qualify in the view of one type of manager are automatically disqualified by the view of another. “Men can think of reasons against having women on boards and in executive committees,” Mr. Wippermann told the German weekly Die Zeit. “But none in favor.”

Still, “there is a lack of women who want to work full time,” she said. “We can’t tell women how to lead their lives. We don’t want a system like in the old East Germany.”

“Without these talent sources, Germany can’t survive as a leading knowledge economy. “We have to break open all our historic taboos,” he said. “Because if we don’t, we will lose competitiveness.”

she is right that teaching is a humane art built upon loving relationships between teachers and students. If you orient the system exclusively around a series of multiple choice accountability assessments, you distort it.

The places where the corrosive testing incentives have had their worst effect are not in the schools associated with the reformers. They are in the schools the reformers haven’t touched. These are the mediocre schools without strong leaders and without vibrant missions. In those places, of course, the teaching-to-the-test ethos prevails. There is no other.

the untrumpeted and undeveloped secret of the reform movement is the content — the willingness to develop character curriculum or Core Knowledge curriculum, the willingness to infuse the school with spiritual fervor.

as we develop the ability to tailor treatments to individuals, we should expect that someone who can pay for the best treatments for their particular DNA sequences to achieve far better health-care outcomes than someone who can't afford the best treatments and has to settle for general therapies rather than individualized medicine.

we're going to increasingly know who is or isn't likely to respond to treatment, and we may often know this in advance. For instance, genomics is already having a significant impact on breast-cancer treatment: by analysing the DNA of both the patient and the cancer cells, doctors can now identify 25% of cases which won't respond to standard chemotherapy. That's great; it saves money and needless suffering. But to the extent that a result like this is based on a patient's genetic profile, the cost effects can be predicted in advance and passed through to insurance premiums.

individualised medicine breaks down some of the egalitarian presumptions that lie behind health insurance. Part of the logic behind insurance is that it's a risk pool; none of us knows when we're gonna go, so we agree to split the costs. But genetic profiling may increasingly give each of us our own set of pre-existing conditions, good or bad. And that may test people's willingness to chip in for the health costs of their fellow-citizens. When "it coulda been me" turns into "nope, it couldn't", we may start seeing...hm, I was about to say "a breakdown in social solidarity", but then I remembered we're talking about America here. How about "even less willingness to do anything for people who aren't as lucky as you are."

what our state lines might look like if we drew them based on who actually talks with each other, at least according to cell phone data gathered by MIT

Today, though, many unemployment offices have closed. Jobless benefits are often handled by phone or online rather than in person. An unemployment call center near Mr. Oursler, for instance, now sits behind two sets of locked doors and frosted windows.

To the extent that frustrations are being channeled at all, they are being channeled largely through the Tea Party. But the Tea Party is mostly against devoting government resources to helping the unemployed.

Why populist anger over the poor economy is leaning right, rather than left, this time around is a bit of a mystery. Perhaps it is because Democrats, traditional friends of labor, control the White House and the Senate.

In truth, though, none of these elections had all that much to do with the orthodoxies of liberalism or conservatism; they were, rather, the manifestations of long-building frustration with the status quo, and with whatever party happened to embody it at the moment.

One of the first things that struck me about Mr. Christie’s strategy when I spent time with him last winter was the royal blue banner that seemed to hover behind him wherever he spoke. “Christie Reform Agenda,” it said. “Rethink, Reform, Rebuild New Jersey.”

By constantly harping on this theme of reform, Mr. Christie has been able, to a large extent, to reshuffle traditional alliances in the legislature. The dynamic is no longer simply about Democrats on one side and Republicans on the other, but rather about forcing lawmakers of both parties to choose between Mr. Christie’s agenda and the large public unions he viciously excoriates.

The definitive book about financial crises has become “This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly,” published in 2009 with exquisite timing, by Carmen M. Reinhart, now of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and Kenneth S. Rogoff, of Harvard.

Surveying hundreds of years of crises around the world, Ms. Reinhart and Mr. Rogoff conclude that debt is the primary cause and that the aftermath is “deep and prolonged,” with “profound declines in output and employment.” On average, a modern financial crisis has caused the unemployment rate to rise for more than four years and by 7 percentage points. (We’re now at almost four years and 5 percentage points.) The recovery takes many years more.

“When the world is bound together this tightly,” argued Seidman, “everyone’s values and behavior matter more than ever, because they impact so many more people than ever. ...We’ve gone from connected to interconnected to ethically interdependent.”

As it becomes harder to shield yourself from the other guy’s irresponsible behavior, added Seidman, both he and you had better behave more responsibly — or you both will suffer the consequences, whether you did anything wrong or not.

Natural resources create corruption, as groups compete for who controls the tap. That is exactly what happened in Greece when it got access to huge Euro-loans and subsidies. The natural entrepreneurship of Greeks was channeled in the wrong direction — in a competition for government funds and contracts.

To understand the Pakistani obsession with India, to get a sense of its special edge—its hysteria—it is necessary to understand the rejection of India, its culture and past, that lies at the heart of the idea of Pakistan.

in the early 1990s, a reversal began to occur in the fortunes of the two countries. The advantage that Pakistan had seemed to enjoy in the years after independence evaporated, as it became clear that the quest to rid itself of its Indian identity had come at a price: the emergence of a new and dangerous brand of Islam.

In the absence of a true national identity, Pakistan defined itself by its opposition to India. It turned its back on all that had been common between Muslims and non-Muslims in the era before partition. Everything came under suspicion, from dress to customs to festivals, marriage rituals and literature. The new country set itself the task of erasing its association with the subcontinent, an association that many came to view as a contamination.

it also shows that kids just aren’t curious. They aren’t reading about these things and therefore they don’t have the knowledge. They don’t work hard enough. Kids know the lyrics to their favorite song but can’t for some reason remember who the vice president is. Schools didn’t cause the problem, but I think America should be raising standards, and the education system is not doing what it should to counteract it.

Apparently, there was something in the popular state of mind by the winter of 1944-45, some sense of being alone in the world, some intuitive understanding of what their own country had done, that led the Germans to fulfill the regime’s ultimate goal — producing a society capable of withstanding the shock of war far more effectively than the one that had collapsed so ignominiously in 1918. This was a country that would fight to the bitter end.

Which leads directly to the second mystery. Why was the end, when it came, so definitive, without any underground resistance to speak of?

The story of the denazification of Germany after 1945 comes in two versions. The one we know best allows us to congratulate ourselves on a job well done. We turned the most powerful and frightening dictatorship in Europe into a stable, peaceable and functioning democracy for the first time in its history. This is the story we grew up with during the cold war, one that justified the partition and occupation of the country over many decades.

there is also a much less self-­congratulatory version of denazification. It dwells on the darker side by exposing once taboo subjects like the expulsion of millions of Germans from Eastern Europe and the apparently countless rapes carried out by the Red Army.

there were then — and remain to this day — two mysteries in the conduct of the German people at the war’s end, mysteries that go to the heart of Taylor’s book. One was the question of why they continued to fight so resolutely, for so long, against obviously overwhelming odds, even after it must have been clear that the war was lost. Taylor stresses two completely counterproductive messages sent by the Allies: the policy of unconditional surrender, and especially the draconian Morgenthau Plan advanced by the American Treasury secretary, which called for the destruction of Germany’s industrial base and the pastoralization of the country. He also highlights the Germans’ sheer terror at the approaching Red Army, a terror that had been fanned, as he notes, by Goebbels’s publicizing of an early Soviet atrocity in an East Prussian village. Finally, there was straightforward Nazi coercion as the regime rounded on its own people, killing more and more of them.

A growing number of scholars believe that the ecological transformation set off by Columbus's voyages was one of the establishing events of the modern world. Why did Europe rise to predominance? Why did China, once the richest, most advanced society on earth, fall to its knees? Why did chattel slavery take hold in the Americas? Why was it the United Kingdom that launched the Industrial Revolution? All of these questions are tied in crucial ways to the Columbian Exchange.

the common nightcrawler and the red marsh worm, creatures that did not exist in North America before 1492.

Intoxicating and addictive, tobacco became the subject of the first truly global commodity craze.

While virtually anyone who wants to do so can train his or her brain to the habits of long-form reading, in any given culture, few people will want to. And that's to be expected. Serious "deep attention" reading has always been and will always be a minority pursuit, a fact that has been obscured in the past half-century

From 1945 to 2000, or thereabouts, far more people than ever before in human history were expected to read, understand, appreciate, and even enjoy books. In 2005, Wendy Griswold, Terry McDonnell, and Nathan Wright, sociologists from Northwestern University, published a paper concluding that while there was a period in which extraordinarily many Americans practiced long-form reading, whether they liked it or not, that period was indeed extraordinary and not sustainable in the long run. "We are now seeing such reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class."

much of the anxiety about American reading habits, and those in other developed nations to a lesser degree, arises from frustration at not being able to sustain a permanent expansion of "the reading class" beyond what may be its natural limits.