Raymond Arsenault's THE SOUND OF FREEDOM reviewed in the New York Times

‘Voice of the Century’ Broke Racial Barriers

By DWIGHT GARNER
April 2, 2009; New York Times

In the early 1930s, years before the concert at the Lincoln Memorial that made her an international symbol of the American civil rights movement, Marian Anderson, the great Philadelphia-born contralto, was probably better known overseas than she was in the United States.

Anderson’s concerts, which combined opera arias and German lieder with black spirituals, won over not just crowds and critics but also Europe’s classical music luminaries. After she performed at the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius’s country house in 1933, singing his compositions in his native language, he called out for “not coffee, but champagne.”

When Anderson (1897-1993) was smuggled in to sing at the 1935 Salzburg Festival after non-Aryans were banned by the Nazis, Arturo Toscanini was in the audience. “Yours is a voice such as one hears once in a hundred years,” he told her. His words stuck. For the rest of her life Anderson would be referred to as “the voice of the century.”

In his new book, “The Sound of Freedom,” Raymond Arsenault delivers not a proper biography of Anderson — there have already been a couple of those, in addition to her 1956 autobiography — but a tightly focused look at the political and cultural events that led up to and came after her famous 1939 concert. It’s a story that’s well worth retelling.

For the full review, click here.

James Galbraith, author of THE PREDATOR STATE, featured in the New York Times

Ivory Tower Unswayed by Crashing Economy
By PATRICIA COHEN
New York Times, March 4, 2009

For years economists who have challenged free market theory have been the Rodney Dangerfields of the profession. Often ignored or belittled because they questioned the orthodoxy, they say, they have been shut out of many economics departments and the most prestigious economics journals. They got no respect.

That was before last fall’s crash took the economics establishment by surprise. Since then the former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has admitted that he was shocked to discover a flaw in the free market model and has even begun talking about temporarily nationalizing some banks. A Newsweek cover last month declared, “We Are All Socialists Now.” And at the latest annual meeting of the American Economic Association, Janet Yellen, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said, “The new enthusiasm for fiscal stimulus, and particularly government spending, represents a huge evolution in mainstream thinking.”

Yet prominent economics professors say their academic discipline isn’t shifting nearly as much as some people might think. Free market theory, mathematical models and hostility to government regulation still reign in most economics departments at colleges and universities around the country. True, some new approaches have been explored in recent years, particularly by behavioral economists who argue that human psychology is a crucial element in economic decision making. But the belief that people make rational economic decisions and the market automatically adjusts to respond to them still prevails.

The financial crash happened very quickly while “things in academia change very, very slowly,” said David Card, a leading labor economist at the University of California, Berkeley. During the 1960s, he recalled, nearly all economists believed in what was known as the Phillips curve, which posited that unemployment and inflation were like the two ends of a seesaw: as one went up, the other went down. Then in the 1970s stagflation — high unemployment and high inflation — hit. But it took 10 years before academia let go of the Phillips curve.

James K. Galbraith, an economist at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, who has frequently been at odds with free marketers, said, “I don’t detect any change at all.” Academic economists are “like an ostrich with its head in the sand.”

“It’s business as usual,” he said. “I’m not conscious that there is a fundamental re-examination going on in journals.”

For the full article, click here.

Anthony Kronman, author of EDUCATION'S END, quoted in the New York Times

In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth

By PATRICIA COHEN
New York Times, February 24, 2009

... Anthony T. Kronman, a professor of law at Yale and the author of “Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life,” goes further. Summing up the benefits of exploring what’s called “a life worth living” in a consumable sound bite is not easy, Mr. Kronman said. But “the need for my older view of the humanities is, if anything, more urgent today,” he added, referring to the widespread indictment of greed, irresponsibility and fraud that led to the financial meltdown.

In his view this is the time to re-examine “what we care about and what we value,” a problem the humanities “are extremely well-equipped to address.”

For the full article, please click here.

Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE selected as New York Times "Book of the Times"

New York Times Book of the Times
New York Times, February 4, 2009

Sometimes One Man Can Live Two Lives
By Janet Maslin

“Passing Strange” tells an astounding true story that would beggar most novelists’ imaginations. It exposes the bizarre secret life of a well-known historical figure, but that secret is its least sensational aspect. The secret was hidden in plain sight until Martha A. Sandweiss, the deductive historian who pieced together this narrative, happened to notice it. Her great accomplishment is to have explored not only how the 19th-century explorer and scientist Clarence King reinvented himself but also why that reinvention was so singularly American. Best of all are Ms. Sandweiss’s insights into what King’s deception and its consequences really mean.

Clarence King has often been written about by historians, but mostly in academic books about the mapping and geological exploration of the American West. He also turns up in biographies and literary histories, since he moved in glittering circles and was once widely held in high regard. He was called “the best and the brightest man of his generation” by one close friend, Secretary of State John Hay.

Hay went even further: “This polished trifler, this exquisite wit, who diffused over every conversation in which he was engaged an iridescent mist of epigram and persiflage, was one of the greatest savants of his time.” Another admirer put it this way: “The trouble with King is that his description of the sunset spoils the original.”

King was a blond blueblood from Newport who distinguished himself at an early age. He traveled West in the 1860s, found work with the California State Geological Survey, helped to map the Sierras and became geologist in charge of the United States Geological Exploration of the 40th Parallel in 1867, when he was 25. He then became a familiar luminary in both New York and Washington. But his early years of roaming were just a prelude to what seems to have been a permanently rootless state.

Or so it seemed to his friends, who became used to his unexpected absences and thought of him as a perennial bachelor. Their impressions of him went no further. What they did not know was that when King was not living in various clubs and hotels, he was married and the father of five children. He was deeply devoted to his wife, Ada, a black woman 19 years his junior. This blue-eyed man, descended from signers of the Magna Carta, had successfully cultivated the impression that he was black too.

To read the rest of the article, click here.

Marlene Zuk, author of RIDDLED WITH LIFE, essay in New York Times

The Evolutionary Search for Our Perfect Past
By MARLENE ZUK
New York Times, January 19, 2009

Remember when life was simpler, and diets weren’t full of processed food and chemicals? No, not the 1950s. Increasingly, we are developing nostalgia for a much earlier epoch: the Pleistocene, when humans lived in small hunter-gatherer groups and didn’t worry about high cholesterol.

Although the box-office lure of skimpy fur garments cannot be underestimated, movies like “10,000 B.C.” are popular because they appeal to our sense that life used to be more in sync with the environment. A recent cartoon shows one of those evolutionary progressions — ape to man walking upright to man slouched over a computer — with the caption “Somewhere, something has gone terribly wrong.”

Maybe our woes arise because our Stone Age genes are thrust into Space Age life. That beer gut? It comes from eating too many processed carbohydrates; our bodies evolved to eat only unrefined foods, mainly meat, and we get out of kilter veering from our ancestral diet.

Food allergies and digestive woes? We, like other mammals, aren’t meant to consume dairy products after weaning. When politicians fall from grace after committing adultery, some commentator will always point out that such behavior has evolutionary roots: weren’t the best procreators alpha males with roving eyes?

In short, we have what the anthropologist Leslie Aiello called “paleofantasies.” She was referring to stories about human evolution based on limited fossil evidence, but the term applies just as well to nostalgia for the very old days as a touchstone for the way life is supposed to be and why it sometimes feels so out of balance.

As an evolutionary biologist, I was filled with enthusiasm at first over the idea of a modern mismatch between everyday life and our evolutionary past. But a closer look reveals that not all evolutionary ideas are created equal; even for Darwinians, the devil is in the details. The notion that there was a time of perfect adaptation, from which we’ve now deviated, is a caricature of the way evolution works.

First, when exactly was this age of harmony, and what was it like? Scavenging, or eating the carcasses of dead animals left by (or stolen from) predators like lions, was probably replaced by active hunting and accumulation of wild plants about 55,000 years ago, and agriculture seems to have begun a mere 10,000 years ago. We did a lot of different things during each of these times.

How much of the diet during our idyllic hunter-gatherer past was meat, and what kind of plants and animals were used, varied widely in time and space. Inuits had different diets from Australian aboriginals or Neotropical forest dwellers. And we know little about the details of early family structure and other aspects of behavior. So the argument that we are “meant” to eat a certain proportion of meat, say, is highly questionable. Which of our human ancestors are we using as models?

But the difficulty with using our hunter-gatherer selves as icons of well-being goes much deeper. It is not as if we finally achieved harmony with our environment during the Pleistocene, heaved a sigh of relief and stopped.

Instead, evolution lurches along, with successive generations sometimes unchanged, sometimes better suited to their surroundings in some ways but not others. At any one point, adaptations take place: individuals who can endure heat or cold or famine leave more offspring than their less hardy counterparts. But there is no one point when one can say, “Voilà! Finished.”

Did our cave-dwelling forebears feel nostalgia for the days before they were bipedal? Were hunter-gatherers convinced that swiping a gazelle from a lion was superior to that newfangled business of running it down yourself? And why stop there? Why not long to be aquatic, since life arose in the sea? For that matter, it might be nice to be unicellular: after all, cancer arises because our differentiated tissues run amok. Single cells don’t get cancer.

You might argue that hunter-gatherers were better adapted to their environment simply because they spent many thousands of years at it — much longer than we’ve spent sitting in front of a computer or eating Mars bars. That’s true for some attributes, but not all. Evolution isn’t the creaky old process we used to think it was. Increasingly, scientists are discovering that the rate of evolution can be fast (sometimes blindingly so) or slow, or anything in between.

Marlene Zuk is a biology professor at the University of California, Riverside, and author of “Riddled with Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex and the Parasites that Make Us Who We Are.”

For the full article, click here.

Richard Thompson Ford's THE RACE CARD a NY TIMES Notable Book of 2008

100 Notable Books of 2008
The New York Times, November 26, 2008

The New York Times selected Richard Thompson Ford's The Race Card, in which "Ford vivisects every sacred cow in 'post-racist' America", as one of their 100 Notable Books of 2008.

To see the full list, click here.

James Galbraith discusses THE PREDATOR STATE with The New York Times Magazine

The Populist
Deborah Solomon
The New York Times Magazine, October 31

The progressive economist talks about why economics is useless, why Henry Paulson’s bailout fell short and how the Bush administration replaced free markets with a “predator state.”

To read the interview, click here.

Deborah Cramer's SMITHSONIAN OCEAN: OUR WATER, OUR WORLD in the New York Times

Diving Into a New World
Edward Rothstein
New York Times, September 26

The Sant Ocean Hall at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, which opens on Saturday, isn’t just about 71 percent of the Earth’s surface. It is the largest renovation in the museum’s century-long history and a transformation of its largest exhibition space, making it as much about the museum’s future as about the ocean’s.

Yes, of course, water takes center stage. When you enter the new hall off the Beaux Arts rotunda, the dimmed, atmospheric lighting is meant to suggest the sea; an illuminated blue panel coaxes: “Dive in. Discover it with us.” And well above floor level are eight giant video screens showing schools of fish and sea creatures near Belize, the Galápagos Islands and other aquatic utopias pulsing with oceanic life. It is as if the entire 23,000-square-foot exhibition space were submerged in a giant natural aquarium...

There is room for improvement, of course. In some galleries explanations could be clearer. And the museum could have been more imaginative in some expositions, the way Deborah Cramer so often is in her inspiring companion volume to the hall, “Smithsonian Ocean: Our Water, Our World.”

But so much can be learned here, and the new model of the museum is so well integrated with the valuable parts of the old that the Ocean Hall makes the sea change in museum life look promising.

For the full article, click here.